Party News (1966)

Party News from the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism V the Rest

About 40 people attended a lively meeting at our Head Office on September 19. The meeting, to which our political opponents were invited, was part of our Seven Days for Socialism campaign. On the platform were George Kiloh, national chairman of the Young Liberals, Chris Parkinson, Tory councillor for Streatham South, and our comrade Baldwin. The Labour Party speaker failed to attend and the Communist Party, which had also been invited, did not send anybody.

The meeting opened with each speaker briefly outlining his party's case. Comrade Baldwin explained that all his opponents (including the absent Labourite) were “tarred with the same brush” because they all stood for capitalism. Only the Socialist Party stood for Socialism. Councillor Parkinson admitted that his party was an avowedly capitalist party but declared that Tory policy was to move everyone up the social ladder by a general improvement in living standards The Young Liberal declared that capitalism was “unjust and immoral” and that Socialism was state capitalism. He went on, however, to outline YL plans, such as “joint-management” and “worker’ control in the nationalised concerns,” which, he claimed, would be a first step in producing industrial efficiency.

Southend

Southend Group maintained vigorous and lively activity through the summer with regular group meetings and canvassing. Members of London and Mid-Herts branches helped to run outdoor meetings on the seafront from time to time. It is intended to make these meetings weekly next year.

Sales of the Socialist Standard locally, through canvassing, have been good — 22 dozen of the August issue were sold. Further canvassing and other literature sales are planned for the autumn. Sympathisers should get on our mailing lists for details of indoor meetings and the like. Details from Secretary, Southend Group (write or call), 19 Kingswood Chase, Leigh-on-Sea.

Brighton

A brief report on the work of the Literature Sales Committee’s work at the Labour Party Conference. Five members covered the conference throughout the week. Three hundred and seventy-eight copies of the October Socialise Standard were sold, in addition to pamphlets. An excellent effort. It is hoped that even more comrades will be available for such sales in future, as the more sellers, the more sales.

Black Muslims

On September 7 Michael X, a leader of the Black Muslims in Britain, spoke “In Favour of the Separation of the Races” at our Paddington branch. He claimed that “the black man’s greatest problem was the white man”. White men had shipped black men to the West Indies; they had deprived them of their names, their language, their religion and their culture. Christianity was a slave religion. That was why people like him returned to Islam, the religion of their forefathers. He was president of an organisation that admitted no whites. This was because if they did the whites would help the organisation to death; the “white liberals” would do all the work so that black people would never learn to act for themselves. Black people from the West Indies were basically agricultural; they were unused to the disciplines of industrial society. They had to learn these “to catch up with the whites". But they could only do this, Michael X said, through “separate development”; by keeping away from, and not trusting, white people and by learning on their own.

In discussion it was pointed out that Socialists did not see themselves as white people or black people or as British or any other nationality, they knew they were members of a world-wide working class without any country. They knew that the only solutions to our troubles as workers was, whatever our skin pigmentation or what not, through the establishment of a world Socialist community. Members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain had come from all kinds of religious backgrounds—Christian, Jewish, even Muslim, had seen through all this mumbo-jumbo. When the Black Muslims had "caught up", what then? They would only be ordinary wage slaves like the rest of us. Was this all they wanted? 

In reply Michael X said that Socialism was a "white man's theory".

World View: The Blind Lead the Blind (1995)

From the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 16 October, the largest single gathering of black people in history took place in Washington DC. Over 400,000 mainly black males had travelled the length and breadth of the United States to throng the Mall from the Washington Memorial to Capitol Hill at the bequest of Louis Farrakhan, leader of the black separatist organisation The Nation of Islam.

The event had been widely publicised as the “Million Man March" and billed as a "Holy Day of Atonement, Reconciliation and Restoration”. In brief, African-American males—for women, Latinos and Asians had not been invited—were being called upon to apologise to their wives (68 percent of whom are single parents) for the errors of their ways, to reconcile themselves to the "fact" that black males alone are responsible for the drugs and crime that plagues their communities, and to renew their covenant with God and one another.

In his two-and-a-half-hour long speech to the crowd. Farrakhan urged those present to recognise "wrongs done" and to “make amends", to apologise for offending "against the creator", to take "personal responsibility" for their “own circumstances" and to "go home and join some church, mosque or synagogue".

Nowhere did Farrakhan make the link between drug abuse, crime, poverty and capitalism. If anything, his plea for self-atonement and for black men to admit they are their own worst enemies only confounded elsewhere the arguments of white supremacists that black men are sub-human.

Furthermore, his speech suggested that the social ills he elaborated on afflicted only black people, when, in fact, poverty and its manifestations respect no colour in the US, as many white families can be found living a slum existence at the bottom of the social ladder.

Manning Marable, writing about the "Million Man March” for the Guardian, said as much when he pointed out that "the single most important reality of American society in the 90s is the polarisation of classes, the unprecedented rise in income and profits among a small minority of American households, and the expansion of social misery, falling incomes and inequality for the majority” (16 October).

Had Farrakhan made a similar observation, and revealed that between 1980 and 1992, for instance, the real average income for the lowest 25 percent of US families fell from $12,359 to $11.530, and that during the same period the real average income for the 25 percent at the top of the social ladder rose from $78,884 to $91,369, then he would have made a statement that might have convinced a wider audience.

Farrakhan, however, was not out to confront the capitalist system. His Nation of Islam organisation actually advocates a form of “petty capitalism”. What he did do was help re-emphasise some of the prejudices that have helped keep capitalism in the ascendancy. Farrakhan, for example, is a fervent opponent of gay and lesbian rights and condemns demands by black women’s groups for full equality, social empowerment and reproductive rights. A few days prior to his "Holy Day" he even told one TV interviewer that jews were “bloodsuckers" who had exploited blacks and that Judaism was a “gutter religion”.

The "real evil" he sees as "white supremacy”, and it is as a buffer to this that he founded the Nation of Islam, a 1.5 million strong organisation that preaches a gospel of separatism and racial pride. Its ideological essence argues Marable is “black nationalism, the rejection of white institutions and multiracial alliances".

While it is perhaps true that the black American underclass “represents . . . one of the most thoroughly atomised societies that has existed”, as Francis Fukuyama states in his recent work Trust The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, such an obscene grievance will never be challenged by inward-looking solutions such as self-atonement and the establishment of a “nation within a nation", "a domestic colony within the capitalist US" (to borrow Marable's words).

The task for black males in the US is no more to enlist in some black separatist group than it is for black women to "stay at home and pray with the children", as Farrakhan suggested.

Impoverished and oppressed

The fact of the matter is that there are as many impoverished and oppressed white Americans as their black counterparts. And there is more that unites the two as exploited workers, existing as a single class, with the same basic needs and desires, than can ever divide them along racial or cultural lines.

Furthermore, contrary to Farrakhan's ideas, it is a basic socialist principle that human behaviour is determined by the social system people are conditioned to live in. Crime and drug abuse is the individual's response to a life of alienation and inequality and will only disappear when the present social system is overthrown, not when black males join "churches, mosques and synagogues".

That black people are twice as likely as white people to be unemployed in the US, and three times as likely to be on welfare, says far less than Marable’s revelation that in 1993, the top one percent of all income earners in the US had a greater combined net wealth than the bottom 95 percent (New Statesman and Society, 27 October). The latter is indeed a greater indictment on the capitalist system than the former.

John Bissett

Black Power in the United States (1968)

From the February 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

The American black power movement is a child of frustration. Thousands of civil rights supporters, having long since absorbed the few sops that capitalism can afford to give them, are running squarely into a sociological brick-wall—a wall they have termed the “white power structure.” Their response, the concept of black power, indicates that they have learned many lessons.

They have learned, for example, that “integration” as such is an empty issue when the integrated population still remains without any basic economic control over their own lives. They have learned that white liberals can do almost nothing for them. And they have learned that the Federal Government is not their friend; in the last analysis, it can never be anything but their implacable enemy. Anti-poverty and civil rights legislation masked for a time the nature of government, but last summer the mask was dropped. The spectacle of thousands of American troops, tanks, trucks, and jeeps being called out to crush rebellions on the part of other Americans, finally and fully revealed what governments exist for: to maintain the power of the ruling class by violent force. And they can never, of their own free will, enact any reform that will interfere with this function.

The black power movement itself is not a monolithic entity. The phrase “black power” means different things to the different groups which espouse it. Moderately interpreted, it means nothing more formidable than the idea that black people must be their own source of liberation; and to achieve liberation, they must cease to rely merely on street marches, and begin to make more extensive use of massive economic boycotts, large-scale rent strikes, black co-operative stores, and black political parties. Behind these proposals is often the feeling that American black people are not “Americans”, in the same sense as white Americans, because they are denied the rights and opportunities which normally attend American citizenship. Radical black power advocates assert instead that they are members of an exploited colonial nation, and, their colonial status cannot be changed until they acquire all the ingredients of nationhood: a separate territory, a separate economic unit, and a separate government and culture.

As victims of colonialism, they feel a special kinship with its other victims throughout the world: the Algerians, the Latin Americans, and the Vietnamese. And they are willing, like these other victims, to adopt violent insurrection as a method of separating themselves from their exploiters. American black nationalists, in short, appear to want a kind of North American Israel, a distinct rallying-point that will increase their ethnic dignity.

It is difficult for the Marxian socialist to explain his position to a black nationalist. The socialist rejects capitalist, imperialist, and colonialist ideology, and sympathizes deeply with all of capitalism's victims. It is his outrage at being victimised, in most cases, that originally led him to become a socialist. He recognises, too, that certain sections of the working class take more punishment than other sections, and at the present time the black worker in America generally suffers more than his white counterpart. This is an obvious fact to anyone who has lived in the U.S. with his eyes open. Yet the socialist, because of what he knows about capitalism, must reject the black power concept as a hopelessly inadequate solution.

The exploitation of black workers is not due primarily to their skin colour, but to their position as wage workers. A prejudiced white is able to discriminate against them because they have no share in the ownership of the means for producing goods. Their real oppression does not consist of taunts like “nigger” and “jigaboo”; if it did, then white people should long ago have been reduced to the same social level by the choice epithets that blacks have invented for them. The facts are that black people, as wage workers, are propertyless, and like other wage workers, they must sell their labour-power for whatever price it will bring. They must sell it even if they have to polish shoes, wash dishes, and pick up cigarette butts after the people who call them niggers and jigaboos. The alternative is to roam the streets of some vast concentration camp like Harlem, still propertyless, and therefore without the power to oppose the constant harassment of the police. The mere fact that someone disliked the colour of a black man's skin would be only a matter of annoyance and pity except for the weapons which the capitalist system places in the hands of his enemies—the threat to lower his wages, take away his job, insult him in the streets, and put him in jail. If capitalism were abolished, these weapons could not exist; nor, ultimately, would the urge to use them.

Private ownership of the means for producing goods divides capitalism into two basic classes: those who live on profit, and those who must sell their ability to work for a wage. This class division cuts across all the others. If the entire working class had precisely the same skin colour in a capitalist system, they would still suffer from the same problems: poverty, unemployment, wage slavery, discrimination, poor housing, inferior education, and conscription. These problems are generated by the system of wage labour and the sale of commodities for profit. Though in some countries they may fall more heavily on a particular ethnic group, they cannot be solved for any part of the working class until they are solved for the working class as a whole.

The black power concept, then, has several serious weaknesses:

As a nationalist ideology, it is anachronistic; it does not fit economic conditions in the U.S. Nationalism is basically a capitalist idea, since its political expression is in terms of territory rather than class. Nationalism may be useful in underdeveloped areas which must industrialise on a capitalist basis quickly; but in the U.S. any form of nationalism can only serve to distract workers from recognising their common plight as members of an exploited class. Because their exploitation is due to their membership in a subject class, they must free themselves as a class, not as a nationality. To adopt the black nationalist plan and divide the U.S. into competing nations would also weaken the productive power which capitalism in the U.S. has already built. Socialism, on the other hand, requires economic strength and unity in order to make its benefits available to all.

As an insurrectionist slogan, black power is suicidal. Only 15 per cent of the population in the U.S. are black. One needs no great mathematical skill to figure out who would be victorious in a racial war, not to mention the fact that a bottle full of gasoline is a rather inadequate defense against fleets of helicopters and tanks, armed with napalm, poison gas, and fragmentation bombs.

As a revolutionary theory, black power is divisive and self-crippling. Attacks on the “white power structure” mean little unless one understands that the source of its power is not the skin colour of the bureaucrats, but the enormous property values which employ them. We have already mentioned that any part of the working class cannot alone solve problems which stem from their position as wage workers; they must act together with the majority of their class. The concept of black power implies that black workers have basic interests which conflict with those of white workers. Both black power and white prejudice divide the working class against itself, thereby weakening the class and diminishing the power of each of its members. Black power is not a cure for exploitation, but a symptom of the disease.

Nevertheless, it is possible that black power may also be a healthy sign in the American, working class movement. The young insurrectionists of Detroit, Newark, Boston, Cincinnati, do belong to the urban working class, and this is the first time since the 1930s that masses of American workers have broken with “their” government and openly defied it to put them down. Some black power leaders also feel the need for greater support among white workers, and stress their goals of better schools and housing will benefit more white than blacks.

Class consciousness takes a long time to develop. One of the signs of its development is a wholesale rejection on the part of workers that a treadmill is their only possible alternative in life. The black powerists, the hippies, and the peace movement suggest that large things are happening in America which the socialist need not regret.

Stan Blake

World View: Workers have no country (1995)

From the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 30 October 1995 the Quebec Sovereignty Referendum failed by the slimmest of margins— 50.6 percent NO, 49.4 percent YES. Nothing has been resolved, the sovereigntists say that they'll keep trying, and the federalists hardly got a resounding show of support. The issue remains, and it's an issue that spans the globe. Everywhere, it seems, people want 'their own’ sovereign country.

There are two ways to look at Quebec sovereignty.The first is an emotional, irrational approach that considers ideas of power as opposed to the reality of power, and uses claims (long proved false) of how the economy functions.

The other is to consider what will really change if Quebec, some day, decides in favour of sovereignty.

Both sides, YES and NO, chose the emotional and irrational approach.

The Yes side argues that Quebecois will be inherently better off in a nation governed by Quebecois. They have not shown any real benefits to the Quebecois working class. Nor has the history of "independence” around the world been supportive of the Yes claim.

The No side predicts the most dire results for Quebec, ignoring the fact that Canada would suffer if it did not trade with Quebec. The No side lined up an impressive list of company owners, directors and such. Some sovereigntists responded, without justification, that if the rich oppose “independence" then "independence" must be good for those who aren’t rich.

The necessities of life

Most sane people are more worried about the necessities of life: putting food on the table, a roof over their head, and other such mundane—and ultimately far more important—considerations, than the name of the state they happen to live in.

History has shown, without doubt, that the Yes or No choice is a choice of which politicians get to sit next to the steering wheel as the ship of state careers back and forth in the winds of economic reality.

“Independence" is a word used to stir up emotions. An "independent" Quebec will be no more independent than it is today. It will still have to conform to global economic pressures which govern how much food will be on the table of the average person. The current economic system doesn’t play favourites based upon national, ethnic, or cultural sovereignty.

Capital investment and migration is based upon the likelihood of making better profits, not upon which of the largely irrelevant politicians form the government.

Nationalist, quasi-racist"issues" such as Quebec "independence" are not the issues that will solve the problems that working class people in Quebec, Canada, and the rest of the world face every day. The fundamental differences are far greater between rich Canadians and working class Canadians, than between working class Canadians and working class Quebecois or working class Peruvians, or any member of the working class anywhere.

Different languages, skin tones, sexes, and customs pale next to the economic differences in a single country or ethnic grouping. The working class will never be served by nationalism or its bed-mate, racism. Since the referendum failed, several prominent sovereigntists including the, now resigned, Premier of Quebec, have blamed the “ethnics” for the defeat of the referendum. Their racist undercurrent for the white descendants of the original French conquerors of Quebec has come out.

It is no surprise that the “International Socialists" (same as SWP in the UK) supported Quebec "independence" just as they support most such inherently racist "independence” movements, while claiming to oppose racism.

If Quebecois, in the future, decide to separate, they should not expect it to improve their lives. Capitalist economics has a very forceful way of ensuring that the world remains class-divided, and that the working class is at the bottom of that division.

Quebecois, and the rest of the world's working class don’t need a change in politicians. we need an end to class division. 

Steve Szalai (Socialist Party of Canada)

The Review Column: Poor People's March (1968)

The Review Column from the August 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Poor People’s March

Typical of so much of the work of the protest movements in America, the Poor People’s March and the setting up of Resurrection City in Washington was a brilliant piece of advertising.

There is no doubt that America has a vast population of desperately poor and that the colour of a person’s skin often determines how desperate his poverty.

Thus a Negro is much more likely to be unemployed, to have his children in their beds bitten by rats, than is a white man. A Puerto Rican is more likely to suffer from malnutrition, to be unemployed, than is a white American.

These are the conditions the marchers were protesting against and as far as that goes there can only be sympathy for them. It would be a sorry day if slum dwellers and the unemployed accepted their lot without protest.

But how constructive are the demonstrations? Apart from sects like Black Power, most of the Negro movement in America supports one of the two big parties, usually the Democrats. That is why many Negroes were crushed by the assassination of Robert Kennedy; they were convinced that with him as President a lot of their problems would be solved.

Many of them—like the Rev. Ralph Abernathy—are Christians who, whatever efforts they devote to improving this life, are convinced that the real reward for all good men will come in the hereafter. 

What this means is that much of the Negro movement accepts the capitalist system which produces their problems along with the religious delusions which are aimed at anaesthetising them to its effects.

The permanent and effective solution to poverty and to racism is to be found in a new society. That requires a more fundamental questioning of the politics and morals of capitalism than the Poverty Marchers are prepared to undertake.

Trudeau: Canada’s Kennedy

The election of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, the new Canadian Prime Minister, shows that the Kennedy myth extends beyond the borders of the Untied States.

Trudeau got a lot of publicity, and support, with his image of the young, modern, unstuffy leader. He wears informal clothes, has his hair cut in the right style, drives a fast sports car. Even a Kennedy was never as way, way out as this.

The new Canadian Premier also impressed people with his uncompromising stand against the Quebec separatists—a stand which, because of the separatists’ tendency to violent demonstrations, put him in some physical danger.

In fact, Trudeau’s stand was not so much courageous as unavoidable. He simply could not run away from the separatists; to have done so could very well have cost him the overwhelming victory which he eventually won.

Now he has to live up to his image. A start has been made with a young Government and with promises to cut through a lot of the procedure which previous governments have followed.

The problem of Quebec nationalism is only one which Trudeau will face. The Canadian workers who voted for him will now be waiting for him to solve the country’s economic ills and to bring in the golden age of prosperity which his election image promised.

But Trudeau, like all other capitalist politicians, has not revealed the magical powers which would be needed to tame capitalism. Since he is only human it can confidently be said that he will fail like the rest—for example like Kennedy with whom he is compared.

Thus another political reputation will be damaged, another shining image tarnished, another working class hope disappointed. Such disillusionment are so common for the working class that it is fair to wonder, when will they ever learn?

Rail Go Slow

Strikes and go-slows are an established part of British Rail life—a comment on the wages, conditions and prospects of a job on the railways.

Commuters who as a result every so often wait for trains which do not arrive, or who when they are lucky travel to work in carriages packed to suffocation, cannot be expected to welcome militant action by the railwaymen. But if they have time and patience, they should consider one or two facts.

The railwaymen are only struggling to improve conditions of employment which are abysmally low. As the recent go slow showed, the railways need an enormous amount of overtime for their efficient running—and the workers also depend on the overtime to make up their wages.

The commuters are also engaged in this struggle, although many of them may not do so in an organised way and would not dream of coming out on strike. This does not alter the fact that, as both commuters and railwaymen are after the same thing, their interests must be the same.

The chaos caused by the work to rule also showed up who are the productive people in society. No comparable confusion would be caused by the capitalist class ceasing to fulfil their function as parasites and exploiters. Society can do without them but it cannot do without productive work.

This point has been made before, when railwaymen or dockers or factory workers have downed tools. It was shown up recently in New York, when the dustmen went on strike.

Outraged commuters are fond of adopting a moral attitude. So what about the morals of a situation in which the people who are important to society can barely get a living?

Sri Lanka divided (1986)

From the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Until quite recently the island of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) was known in Britain, if at all, only for its tea and, perhaps, for its natural beauty. That was all until about two years ago when Sri Lanka began to claim the attention of the media because of a series of brutal killings and bombings by Tamil separatists and an equally barbaric response by government security forces.

Sri Lanka has a total population of 16 million people. The majority are Sinhalese (predominantly Buddhist), but there is a significant minority of Hindu Tamils who make up 12.7 per cent of the population living mostly in the north and east of the island. The Tamils were brought to Ceylon (as it was called before independence from British colonial rule) from Tamil Nadu, in the southern part of India, as immigrant labour to work the tea plantations.

In 1956 the first Prime Minister of the newly independent state, Bandaranaike, responded to pressure from the pro-Sinhalese Buddhist clergy, who had supported his political campaign, and made Sinhala the official language at the expense of Tamil. This move, symbolic of the exclusion of the Tamils from mainstream Sinhalese society, sowed the seeds of contemporary Tamil separatism. A year later, in an attempt to defuse Tamil anger, Bandaranaike signed a pact with Tamil leaders granting a number of concessions. This aroused opposition from the majority Sinhalese community who, provoked by Jayewardene (now President), protested that Bandaranaike was being too soft on the Tamils.

Even at that point it was beginning to be clear that the "Tamil problem" was an issue that could be exploited by political leaders for their own opportunistic ends. Now, because of the increasing levels of violence being used by the Tamil separatists, Jayewardene is having to offer greater concessions than those offered by Bandaranaike. And now it is the opposition led by Bandaranaike's widow that is stirring up nationalist Sinhalese opinion against him for not being tough enough towards the Tamils.

Jayewardene, leader of the right-wing United Party, came to power in 1977; he altered the constitution, elevating himself from Prime Minister to President and remained in office by calling a referendum not an election. So until 1989 when a general election is due, Jayewardene will not have to put his career on the line.

Within the government itself there are some, notably Finance Minister de Mel, who favour a more conciliatory approach to the Tamils. But again political opportunism is the motive rather than any genuine belief in the Tamil cause. The Sri Lankan economy is in a state of collapse; a quarter of the total budget is being spent on the war (about $1 million a day); tourism, an important industry for the island, has been badly affected by the violence. None of this is likely to do much to enhance the Finance Minister's career prospects. On the other hand the National Security minister. Athulathmudali, advocates a much harder line against Tamil violence. But then he would, since he derives most of his political support from the expanding security forces who, like de Mel, also favour the "military solution" to the Tamil problem.

Meanwhile, as politicians of both main political parties adopt the pose that they think will win them the most support at the polls, people from both groups are being brutally murdered and maimed. Over the last two years the Tamils have increased the level of violence which is often directed at Sinhalese workers and peasants. In retaliation there have been allegations of brutal reprisals against the Tamil community by the security forces. Most of the violence has taken place in the north and east of the island. The Jaffna peninsula in the north, where the Tamils constitute a majority of the population, is effectively controlled by Tamil guerillas and the army is engaged in an attempt to regain control of the area. In the eastern province there is an almost equal ethnic mix of Sinhalese and Tamil. Because it is the Tamils' aim to have a separate state in the northern and eastern provinces, they are trying to drive the Sinhalese out of the area through violence and threats. Meanwhile, they claim that the government has been forcibly resettling Sinhalese peasants in Tamil areas. Neither side wants to forfeit this area of Trincomalee since it contains a harbour, a vital strategic asset. The government could not, therefore, consider giving it up in any future autonomous Tamil province and the Tamils say that their state could not be viable without it.

If the leaders of the main political parties are trying to make political capital out of the ethnic divide, then so too are the Tamil separatist leaders. Part of the aim of the violence has been to persuade the international capitalist class that the war in Sri Lanka is getting worse so that they will cut back aid and investment. Jayewardene, in the meantime, is trying to persuade the same financial interests that there are good prospects for peace as a result of negotiations with Tamil leaders in Delhi and the offer of some devolution of power. However, he treads a thin line. If he appears to be conceding too much then he will be accused of selling out the Sinhalese community. If he doesn't concede enough, the violence will continue with the risk of further economic disruption.

That the Tamils have been treated as second class citizens and denied equal political and economic rights seems undeniable. But what is equally true is that unscrupulous politicians from all sides have used the potential for conflict that was always latent among the island's population for their own political ends. Competition between the two ethnic groups has been encouraged; cultural and linguistic difference has been exaggerated; and religion too has been used to fan the embers of hatred between the two communities. To advance the careers of a handful of members of the ruling class, workers and peasants have been set against each other, fighting over an island that does not belong to either the Tamil people or the Sinhalese, spilling each other's blood and killing each other's children in a conflict in which they have no interest.

Janie Percy-Smith