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Viewpoint by Jonathan Power
LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – By 1914 Europeans ruled 84 percent of the globe. How did they do it? Eleven hundred years ago Europe was a backwater. There were no grand cities, apart from Muslim Cordoba in Spain, and the remnants of Rome and Athens. The Middle East, India and China were further ahead. It was the Arabs who kept alive the teachings of the Ancient Greek' knowledge of science, medicine, architecture and philosophy.
By Kalinga Seneviratne
This article is the 27th in a series of joint productions of Lotus News Features and IDN-InDepthNews, flagship of the International Press Syndicate. Click here for previous series.
NALANDA, India (IDN) – It is believed that more than 2500 years ago Gauthama Buddha chose to preach in Pali rather than Sanskrit because the latter was the language of the elite while Pali was spoken by the masses. Today nobody speaks Pali in India, but, the Buddhist scriptures that were originally written in Pali are still used to educate monks as well as in Buddhist chantings.
Viewpoint by Jonathan Power
LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – Many know about Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat in Budapest, who led his embassy in a successful attempt to issue “protective passports” to at least 6,000 Hungarian Jews so they could escape the Nazi occupiers and travel to Sweden. He also helped forestall a planned massacre. He became the second person to be given honorary U.S. citizenship.
Many also know about the magnificent effort by the occupied Danes to use small boats to enable around 7,000 Jews to cross the water that separates Denmark and Sweden to get them to neutral Sweden.
And about the German businessman, Oskar Schindler, who later became the star of Stephen Spielberg’s masterpiece film Schindler’s List that showed how he used his business in Poland as a means of sheltering a thousand Jews.
By Dr. Palitha Kohona
The author is former Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations, and former Foreign Secretary. The following is Part 3 of the text of his keynote address delivered at Sri Lanka's University of Peradeniya, Kandy, on 26 November 2018. – Click here for Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
Many reasons can be given for the failure of the uprising. First and foremost were the immense power and enormous resources of the rising British Empire at the time. A small nation, and its chiefs, though demonstrating exceptional valour and purpose, had little chance of defeating Britain which was also basking in the glow of having recently defeated Napoleon and the French empire and was exuding supreme confidence.
By Dr. Palitha Kohona
The author is former Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations, and former Foreign Secretary. The following is Part 3 of the text of his keynote address delivered at Sri Lanka's University of Peradeniya, Kandy, on 26 November 2018. – Click here for Part 1 and Part 2
COLOMBO (IDN-INPS) – As to whether Kandy could have managed to hold the British at bay for much longer or extract much more from the British in the negotiations at that point in history is highly debatable. My view is that for a leadership which was not much familiar with the momentous events shaping the future of the world and Britain emerging the undisputed super power of the world, the chiefs did remarkably well.
By Dr. Palitha Kohona
The author is former Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations, and former Foreign Secretary. The following is Part 2 of the text of his keynote address delivered at Sri Lanka's University of Peradeniya, Kandy, on 26 November 2018. – Click here for Part 1.
COLOMBO (IDN-INPS) – The first major British invasion of Kandy suffered the same fate as those of the Portuguese and the Dutch. The King commanded the loyalty of the chiefs, the people and the monks and the invaders were just massacred at Le Wella (Bloody Beach) but the world’s only superpower at the time did not take this defeat lying down.
By Dr. Palitha Kohona
The author is former Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations, and former Foreign Secretary. The following is Part 1 of the text of his keynote address delivered at Sri Lanka's University of Peradeniya, Kandy, on 26 November 2018.
COLOMBO (IDN-INPS) – We look back on a heroic struggle that our ancestors waged 200 years ago against the mightiest empire that the world had known up to that time, to regain their freedom and that of a nation that had remained unbowed for over 2300 years.
Unfortunately, it was a heroic but unequal struggle with a much more powerful and vengeful colonial power, which had also through unscrupulous manipulation succeeded in splitting the Kandyan people in to factions suspicious of each other and diluted the centuries old bonds that bound the nation together.
Viewpoint by Jonathan Power*
LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – “We need jaw jaw not war war,” said Winston Churchill rather hypocritically. Still, he would be glad to see that the number of wars around the world has fallen dramatically since the end of the Second World War, despite the wars in Korea, Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Pakistan versus India, Central America, Cyprus, ex-Yugoslavia, Syria and now Yemen.
Compared with centuries past this has been a remarkable era, yet one not often acknowledged.
Interstate wars, apart from India versus Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Yemen, have vanished off the map. The wars that remain are civil wars. The democracies do not go to war with each other, as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher long ago observed.
Viewpoint by Michele Nobile*
This is the fourth of a four-part series. Click here for Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
ROME (IDN) – Since 2004-2005, the CCP has set itself the task of "building a harmonious society". The internal harmony of China presupposes the discipline of farmers and the working class within the paternalistic dictatorship of the single party. No longer totalitarian as in the time of Mao – and how could it be otherwise when becoming rich is the glory of "socialism", transnational societies are courted, Confucius is a model of wisdom and capitalists are no longer demons to beat?
Viewpoint by Michele Nobile*
This is the third of a four-part series. Click here for Part 1 and Part 2.
ROME (IDN) – One of the collective ideological hallucinations of the 20h century was Mao Zedong Thought. A remarkable thought in terms of metaphors and similitudes but even more so in terms of incoherence: as with Stalin, the most different lines can be extracted from the texts and the practice of Mao depending on convenience.
It is true that the Red Army was mostly peasant; but it is also true that from the "Great Leap Forward" in the second half of the 1950s – which resulted in the greatest famine of the twentieth century (about 30 million deaths between 1958 and 1961) – up to the phase of the "Third Front" of industrial development in China's interior, and passing through the Cultural Revolution and most of the 1970s, the peasant masses trapped by the hukou system were uninterruptedly squeezed like a lemon to finance industrial development, especially heavy and military industry.
