George Bernard Shaw said: “Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.” (Remember Lasantha?). One is also reminded of words of the 19th-century poet Heinrich Heine, who said, “Whenever books are burnt, men also, in the end are burnt.”
The first recorded victim of censorship was Socrates who, in 399 BC, was forced to drink poison for “denying the gods and introducing new divinities”. In China, in 213 BC, Emperor Shih Huang-Ti had all writing not pertaining to agriculture or medicine burnt. His target: The thoughts of Confucius. Present day China is no better.
In the last century, the Communists most systematically censored books and hounded their authors. Writers in every communist country, from East Germany to Vietnam, were forced into concentration camps. Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky, Milan Kundera, Czeslaw Milosz and Alexander Solzhenitsyn were just a few.
Hitler’s Nazi Germany burnt the books of Jewish writers and liberals, exterminating thousands in their notorious gas chambers and forcing others to flee.
In Sri Lanka, more than 14 journalists, the majority of them Tamils, have been killed in the past three years. Many more journalists have been abducted, beaten and intimidated to keep them from writing the truth.
In today’s day and age it is no longer possible to stop the message or the truth getting out by killing or imprisoning the messenger.
If this sorry state of affaires continues, this country will be known the world over as “The Autocratic, Dictatorial Banana Republic of Sri Lanka.” |
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