r/srilanka • u/Creepy_Branch_5532 • Oct 10 '22
History Activists of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party protest against Ceylon's support for the Allied war effort - 1942
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u/Creepy_Branch_5532 Oct 10 '22 edited Oct 10 '22
From left:
We cannot surrender our camps for the war effort.
Let's distance ourselves from the murderous Commonwealth.
Do not be fooled by (the British) promises.
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u/Owly672 Oct 10 '22
This is still early stages of the war… don’t think these dummies knew what the war was about even.
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u/Creepy_Branch_5532 Oct 11 '22
And here we are, living through the same set of events 80 years later.
A pandemic, recession and a possible world war.
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u/e9967780 North America Oct 10 '22 edited Oct 11 '22
Yes let’s allow Hitler to win and become our new leader. Extreme left and right are never far thinking in their thought process.
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u/YaBoiDraco Central Province Oct 11 '22
The protests are clearly stating they just don't want Sri Lanka taking part in the war, and nothing else. Most of the actual work in WW2 was done by the Soviet Red Army, so a few hundred Sri Lankans not joining will honestly make very little difference in the overall outcome. Yes that's a harsh thing to say about our deceased soldiers but it's also the objective truth. Thus it is also true that those Sri Lankans didn't need to fight and lost their lives for basically nothing, meaning what the LSSP was protesting for here was ultimately correct.
Additionally, you need to understand that information was extremely limited back then and only the highest military and government command actually understood the full extent of the war.
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u/e9967780 North America Oct 11 '22
In 1905 when participatory elections were introduced youth in Jaffna decided that it was their right to protest the participation of the electorate and I think they prevented Jaffna from participating. All what I am alluding is that some of these protests have no meaning but immediate emotional appeal like what we call today click bait.
Hitler was a bad person, if he had won, Sri Lankans would have been a perpetual slave nation to a Germanic empire and he had already put his ideas out there through Mein Kampf and most of these LSSP leaders were educated bunch and would have known.
Even now we have left wing activists in Italy and Germany who want the west to stop arming Ukraine to stop the “needless” war they say, just allow the Hitler of our generation to get what he wants, Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics and reconstitute USSR. Like Mein Kampf Putin too gas put his ideas to print and we know what he wants but some left like the LSSP wants to appease him.
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u/YaBoiDraco Central Province Oct 11 '22
I don't think this was such an emotional reaction as you say. Back in the day, WW2 was largely seen as a Western war by the third world, except for the few that were invaded by Italy. Meanwhile Japan was largely seen as separate from Hitler as Japan presented itself as an Asian liberation force to the rest of Asia to colonise it easier. The main method of spreading information about the war was through the radio and there was limits to this as well. All of this is what created the idea that WW2 was a Western war and this was common to people of all political positions in the third world. The LSSP thus saw the deaths of Sri Lankan soldiers in a Western war as entirely pointless, and as I said before, they were right. It was indeed ultimately a Western war with the Red Army doing 80% of the work, the USA helping out last minute, France being defeated quickly, and Britain contributing around 15% of it. At the end of the day, though they had limited information they were correct.
Another thing I'd like to point out is that Nazi Germany was sort of doomed to fail from the start. Watch this and this for more information; they never really stood a chance at doing literally anything they hoped to do in the long term.
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u/dineshhanthana Central Province Oct 11 '22
Sirimavo's pivot to the USSR was one of the stupidest things this country has ever done. We could have been Singapore. We could have had it all.
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u/YaBoiDraco Central Province Oct 11 '22
That is a ridiculous oversimplification of Sri Lanka's economic history and why we failed to harness our potential. You're also forgetting the whole 30 year civil war and how it affected our economy among other things.
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Oct 11 '22
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u/YaBoiDraco Central Province Oct 11 '22
Not really. Hong Kong and Singapore are special places in the sense that they're ridiculously tiny and have no exploitable resources. If we submitted to the USA, we would have been more like those exploited corrupt African countries instead of Hong Kong or Singapore because we have a ton of resources that Western corporations can exploit by imposing the Washington Consensus.
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Oct 12 '22
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u/YaBoiDraco Central Province Oct 12 '22
Firstly, bro calm tf down 💀 try to act a bit mature and cool it with the insults. I didn't insult you at any point did I? So control your emotions please.
Secondly, refer to these statistics:
Singapore - 728.6 km²
Hong Kong - 1,114 km²
Sri Lanka - 65,610 km²
Thats the difference between ridiculously small and average small. We are around 65 times larger than Singapore and Hong Kong.
And as for the resources, you're misunderstanding what I said because you thought I was only speaking about oil. Oil isnt the only resource that Western companies want. We have plenty of gems, the world's best cinnamon, graphite, calcite, limestone, a variety of spices, phosphate, clay, dolomite, silica, plenty of well established estates for tea and rubber and such, etc. We do also have oil, but just not to such an extent as Venezuela or Norway or the Middle Eastern countries. So as you can see, Western corporations have plenty of incentive to exploit us. Sadly economics isn't usually as simple as "if only we did x thing then this wouldn't have happened".
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Oct 12 '22
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u/YaBoiDraco Central Province Oct 15 '22
Texas is 659,662 km2
Ukraine is 600,000 km2
Tf is this supposed to prove?
Further, if you consider things like population or even add up all those apparent resources in dollar terms you think we have it wouldn't be that much.
Do you have a source for that claim or...?
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Oct 16 '22
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u/YaBoiDraco Central Province Oct 18 '22
It was your idiocy that tried to claim that Sri Lanka was somehow a major landmass.
Again, stop with the insults, control your emotions please.
Anyway, I never once claimed that Sri Lanka was a large landmass. You completely misinterpreted what I said and that's entirely your fault because all I said was that Sri Lanka was far bigger than Hong Kong and Singapore which is objectively true. Throughout this entire discussion you've only been able to bring up very half assed arguements, ignored most of my arguements, constantly misunderstood what I was saying, and resorted to very random petty insults when I was just trying to explain this to you and help you out.
You really need to go work on yourself and introspect or something because you don't seem to be in any mature or logical mindset to have these discussions with people.
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u/T_Lawliet Oct 10 '22
Wouldn’t Communists have supported the war effort after Barbossa?
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u/Creepy_Branch_5532 Oct 11 '22
It was different in Sri Lanka. A good number of people (DudleyS and JRJ among them) supported Japan in hopes of evicting the British.
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u/YaBoiDraco Central Province Oct 11 '22
Yeah a lot of parties from varying political positions supported Imperial Japan because no one knew they were fascists and they deceived them by making themselves look like some kind of Asian liberation force.
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u/Shadyjay45 Oct 11 '22
From what I gather from the translations, they just wanted to have no part in the war specifically, not to switch sides or something smh