Putting Putin, Warne and Bush together - a truth-salad
There is an explanation being proffered by the special committee which picked the World cricket XI for leaving out Muttiah Muralitharan from the team. Richie Benaud has said "Shane Warne performed well soon after he came back into the game. It was bad luck for the other spinner.''

Venture no further on the low-down on team selection matters. Benaud's words are unashamed, as they are self-explanatory. All that a white man has to do to get into the world cricket XI is to show up!

It is a question of entitlement. Shane Warne is entitled to play for the world XI. Therefore, all he has to do is to satisfy the minimum requirement, which is to show-up and be counted. He is not required to perform better than the other guy. Benaud makes no bones about it. Notice that he never says "Warne performed better than the Sri Lankan.'' He says "Shane Warne performed and proved himself after he got in to the team - - the other spinner is just unlucky.''

Dr Nalin De Silva writing for the Island gives an interesting analysis on how the ICC gets about these matters. It may also be stated incidentally that the Sri Lankan who has been left out of the so-called World X1 is Mutthaih Muralitharan, the most successful bowler in the history of the game. We have the world's all time great -- who took 520+ wickets much faster in his career than the man who was included, (in a very much fewer number of Test Matches than Warne) being left out of the team, in place of an Australian who had just one thing to do: show-up.

The Sri Lankan performed wonderfully well that season too, but should it count for anything, because the man who is entitled is Shane Warne?
Nalin Silva writes that the ICC has a way of doing these things.
It does. So it seems does the whole Western Anglo Saxon Protestant culture.

About the same time that Muttiah Muralitharan was left out of the World cricket X1 (surely not the end of the world) the Russian President Vladimir Putin was complaining that the United States wants him to negotiate with the Chechen rebels. He said wryly 'why does the US not call Osama Bin Laden to the White house and sit down and talk to him over coffee?''

The question is why he said this wryly. He should have said so angrily. So much for the questions, then, the answer of course is the sense of entitlement. As it is with the relatively insignificant issue of Muralitharan's exclusion from the World XI, the Americans suffer from a sense of entitlement. They alone are entitled to the right to life. They alone must live in this world -- if the Russians are fated to die at the hands of Chechen terrorists and Sri Lankans at the hands of various other terrorists, so be it. The right to life ergo, happens to be an American entitlement.

But we need to parse words. Some would explain this behaviour by saying that the Europeans are somehow worse than the Americans. They say for instance that it was left to the Americans to issue a terse statement against the Tigers when there was an attempt recently on the life of Douglas Devananda. The Europeans pussyfooted on the matter, and even the Sri Lankan government pussyfooted on the matter while the Americans singularly called the Tiger bluff. Now, my friend Taraki writing in the Daily Mirror chides Sri Lankans (nationalists!) for not being grateful to the Americans because Coffer Black visited Colombo and rapped the Tigers on their knuckles.

But when the Sri Lankan Central Bank was blown up, much the same way the Twin Towers were demolished in New York, it was the same Americans who issued next morning, a statement saying the Sri Lankan government should negotiate immediately with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. If the Sri Lankan leaders felt the next day much the same way Putin is feeling now when the Americans ask him to negotiate with the Chechen rebels, perhaps the Liberation Tigers would have been happy. These days they are sad the Americans are not so forthright with the Sri Lankan government!

How sad.
The grossest insult, then, is none of the above. Here we are living in the 21st century, having to put pen to paper to explain American double standards, and Nalin De Silva having to explain the double standards of the ICC, and Gamini Weerakoon having to explain the double standards of Chris Patten waltzing into Kilinochchi to say 'Hello' to Prabhakaran on his birthday, when we could have excepted that such naked displays of hegemony should be so obvious to everyone that nobody should ideally have to write about them.

It figures then that Nalin de Silva is right when he says that the West has a way of imposing its hegemony while making it appear proper in the eyes of the world. His example is of smuggling Shane Warne into the World team, keeping Muralitharan out of it, and then including Vaas as a sort of token of appeasement to the Sri Lankan camp.

With a bow to those who think that it is somehow a dive from the sublime to the ridiculous to go from world affairs to cricket, it's germane to point out that the Warne affair is but the other side of the same coin that obtains in international affairs in general.

Ideally Vladimir Putin should not have to say that there is a double-standard in the USA's calling for Russia to negotiate with the Chechen rebels, because the double standard is so patently obvious. Ideally Gamini Weerakoon should not have to say that Patten should not waltz in here for Prabhakaran's birthday because the double standard in Patten's action is so obvious.

But the West had worked its sense of entitlement into the psyche of us third worlders through the media and their handmaidens in the community of Non Governmental Organisations, that here we are in the curious position having to write about what's flagrant and indisputable. For what it's worth then, let's begin to de-couch this from its gossamer veneer - and to make it curiouser and curiouser let's begin to name names. The long and the short of it is that by and large the White Protestant culture (Anglo Saxon and all those obligatory flourishes aside) is quite blatant about its inability to be fair and even-handed.

But their most useful weapon is the "discourse." As long a there is as discourse and debate about Coffer Black or American or European hegemony in general, by some osmosis the idea can be entered into the "discourse'' that there is some debate going on about the fact that the Americans have a right to fight Osama Bin Laden, while the Russians have to somehow negotiate with the Chechens.

By some osmosis the idea is entered into our heads that there is a debate in Sri Lanka about Patten saying "hi" to Prabhakaran on his birthday. The very idea that there is a debate on these issues, makes the flagrant commonplace. Start talking about the issue - and it is as if the sore thumb can be tucked-in and made to disappear.

So let's not kid ourselves; the Americans may be on "your side'' one day and with the "other side'' the next -- but the fact is that the Americans and essentially those who maintain Western White Anglo Saxon hegemony over the developing world are laughable in their lack of a moral base. Their hypocrisy is hilarious. Bush is a clown when he says Putin should negotiate with the Chechens who are killing school-children while he says he will "smoke the Al Quaeda out of their rabbit holes.'' So let's see the clowns for what they are -- laugh at their duplicity and expose them mercilessly until its taken for granted -- as it should be -- that the hegemony of "Western civilization'' (also called American/Western fundamentalism) is the ultimate global curse and affliction. And then, should I end by saying Amen?

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