Lankan minister and eminent writer/teacher Rajiva Wijesinha gave a  thumbs-up to “Language of Empire” in March on Lanka Web.

I couldn’t be more pleased. The minister, a part of the Rajapaksha government, was sent the book by someone who wanted to inform him about the depth of propaganda in the Western media.

Wijesinha, like many others, had been wondering about the manipulation of the international “human rights” agenda (the game of who gets to call what a genocide).

This manipulation has been termed Human Rights Imperialism by Jean Bricmont.

In this case,  the manipulators are the Tamil Tigers and Eelam separatists and their new-found supporters in the West, including Ron Paul’s legal advisor, one Bruce Fein.

The evident purpose of the manipulation is the continuance and augmentation of a covert war on the island….and on India….in an area of great strategic importance to Western interests

….that is not too far from Tamil Nadu with its huge concentration of foreign and domestic corporate interests and its nuclear reactors – one at Chennai and the other at Kudankulam, bordering the ocean, just opposite Sri Lanka. Kudankulam has been the site of intense anti-nuclear activism, which seems to have a covert political agenda and is apparently financed from abroad.

Of-course, India’s nuclear policy itself  seems to have come with foreign strings attached, so there is nothing to choose between the two sides.

Rajiv Malhotra’s “Breaking India” describes this long-term policy and its role in creating, sustaining, and manipulating Dravidian identity politics in Tamil Nadu as part of the creation of a larger Afro-Dravidian identity that has global consequences that play into Western geopolitical goals.

The manipulation of Nicholas Berg’s killing makes for interesting reading from this angle and throws a good deal of light on, among other things, the images of the alleged torture and assassination of Tiger leader Prabhakaran’s son, Balachandra, which became a cause celebre in the strange, seemingly “fanned” anti-Lanka rioting in Tamil Nadu, in March-April.

Wijesinha writes (“Dealing With Allegations of War Crimes,” March 10, 2013, LankaWeb):

“Some weeks back I was sent, by a friend in England, a book entitled The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media. It was by someone called Lila Rajiva, but doubtless that was not the only reason to assume it would interest me.

I took some time to start on the book but, once I did so, it had to be finished. Published in 2005, it is a graphic and convincing account of the manner in which the Americans ignored all moral restraint in the war against terrorism they were engaged in.

Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq

That part was convincing, and simply fleshed out what one knows anyway, that countries in pursuing their own interests will stop at nothing. What was more startling was the suggestion that the wholesale prevalence of this absolutist mindset also represented a takeover of the ruling political dispensation by a culture of chicanery that strikes at the heart of supposedly predominant American values.

At the core of this transformation is the corporate supremacy represented most obviously by Rumsfeld and Cheney, and the takeover of much supposedly military activity by private contractors and special agents, who move with seamless dexterity from one world to another. Exemplifying this, and indicative of what C S Lewis would have described as a Hideous Strength which finds its own partisans dispensable, is the strange story of Nicholas Berg, the shadowy contractor whose beheading served to deflect the story of torture at Abu Ghraib, and in some minds excuse the institutionalized torture that was taking place there.

Weapons of mass destruction

The book should be essential reading for those concerned not just with human rights, but with human civilization….”

Read the rest at Lanka Web.