I fully support protesting against Akon. Do I support throwing stones? No, that’s just stupid. But when people are frustrated and disgruntled it happens, and it’s not the fault of “Buddhists” or those who oppose Akon. That’s just human nature.

If those people (thugs as some would call it) who threw stones had brought stones with the explicit intention of throwing those (Intentional Stoners) then of course it is wrong. But I doubt it. People get frustrated and sometimes emotions get high. By now Maharaja People should have Stone proof buildings anyway so I doubt any one really got hurt other than the customary injuries for the cameramen.

But like any other issue where the “nationalist” or “Buddhist” people gets involved the pro western Colombian media are harping all over it, and are projecting a violent image of the Sinhala people. By western standards our protests are pretty peaceful, calm and civil.

Akon

But people need to understand that there’s Nationalism and Buddhism. Thanks to our constitution Buddhism and Nationalism are blurred together in this country. So it’s not easy to distinguish between the two. Because easiest and the cheapest way to attack Sri Lanka is to attack Buddhism because for some apparent reason Sinhala people can’t seem to unite in their opposition.

Whoever the people who conduct these protests are, the real issue here is Akon coming to Sri Lanka. Given the recent information about the event there are serious questions to be asked on why Akon is in Sri Lanka in the first place.

What we have to understand is that there is a collective movement to undermine the Buddhists in this country.  Take a look at this article, see how the author is slyly trying to drag the Buddhists in to the story by talking about a soaked posters. Also remember it was the Colombian crowd who started talking about a Facebook group against Akon in the blogosphere last week which later spread to the media. Sounds like a convenient way to gear up protests. And there are more and more people who are quick to blame the Buddhists for “throwing stones”

Akon as we know had some woman in bikinis dance next to a Buddha statute in a defamatory way. There is nothing wrong with it, as long as he’s living in US. But he’s one “popular” artist who would capture the attention and inflame the some sections in society here against him. So serious questions should be asked about why Akon of all people was invited to a concert in Sri Lanka. They would have invited anyone else. But no one else would have being this controversial.

So the conclusion is obvious. He was invited here for this very purpose of making the majority in this country look bad. (Notice the cute way MTV was able to capture all the juicy stuff about protesters throwing stones).

So why, the Nationalists or the Religionists are playing in to their hands? Should they stop protesting? Should they just allow Akon to come to SL and let some Colombians dance the night off, and celebrate how peaceful and “Buddhists” we are.

No. They should not. Everyone in Sri Lanka should protest Akon because we should not be taking this lying down. We should protest simply for the reason that it makes us feel good, knowing full well that the Colombians will circulate these images around the world to increase their ever dwindling NGO donations. We should let the whole world see us and make them know that we’re done with being pacifists.

The stupid conception of pacifism given to us by Lord Buddha has not done much for the society in general. It may well be good for individual salvation, but it just plain stupid for a nation. This was a fact that our past leaders like King Dutugamunu the Great acknowledged. But even he couldn’t implement total war. After the war was over he pardoned his enemy, let illegal colonists live inside his kingdom and made generations of people follow in his path of appeasement. (Something Tamil Nationalists are well aware of)

So why should we collectively support tarnishing our own image. Because it doesn’t matter. Sri Lanka has being leaning away from the Western world for some time now. Most of our aid comes from China and India, most of our tourist come from the middle east and China. The west has being economically trying to tighten the noose around Mahinda for some time now. As a nation we should not try to listen, care or give a rat’s ass about their conception of Human rights and media freedom.

We as a people don’t need to care what our image looks like in the west. If protesting against Akon is the only way we can let our voice be heard against western imperialism, let it be. We should not take this collective effort to undermine us lying down.

But this kind of random protest again Maharaja isn’t going to work. Unfortunately the masses don’t give a shit about Akon or his videos. People have bigger things to worry about. This also suggests why Akon was invited because he’s big enough to attract some noise, but not big enough to attract a mass protest.

Whatever it is people should throw more stones at Sirasa and Maharaja and convince them to drop their anti-national policies. If stones don’t work I’m sure there are other ways. Remember SRK?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 4:23 PM and is filed under Politics, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.