Kandy Man with long name who fought the Brits.

Key fact: in Sri Lanka heroes were allowed to get fat, another reason to like the place.

You see some pretty sick stuff when you do my job, but I just read something sicker than any Congo cannibal buffet. It’s an article by a posh little limey named Jeremey Brown condemning the Sri Lankan government for being too messy in putting down the LTTE, and demanding that we stop buying the cheap textiles the poor Sinhalese make their living churning out.

What’s sick about this is that the British establishment destroyed the Sinhalese people completely. Completely and purposely, sadistically. Stole their land, humiliated and massacred their government, made it Imperial policy to erase every shred of self-respect the Sinhalese had left.  You can talk about the Nazis all day long, but for my money nothing they did was as gross as what you find out when you actually look into the history of British-Sinhalese relations. If you can even call them “relations”; I guess a murder-rape is a relation, sort of.

(more…)

Cheech Marin moonlighting as the leader of the Tamil Tigers?

I have to say “Thank you, God of War,” because we just saw a decisive victory in a war, for once. I never thought I’d live to see the day. Most wars these days are half-assed policy tussles, “politics by other means” way, way too much. But the war between the Sinhalese and the Tamils, that was a war, dude. With one side wiped out, just like the good old days. The Sinhalese Army rolled up the Tamil Tigers, or LTTE for people who know what they’re talking about, pushing them back into their “heartland” (I love those war-correspondent words, like “heartland”) in the North of the island. For once, war maps you could make sense of! Every month, the Tamil Tigers’ range got smaller and smaller, like Grizzlies coming up against real-estate developers. It was that one-sided. And last week, the LTTE finally got erased from that last “football-field sized” patch of coastal scrub where they were doing their Alamo thing. (more…)

Velupillai Prabhakaran: LTTE’s Guerrilla Generalissimo

One thing you have to give the doomed Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka credit for: their supporters sitting in comfortable first-world cities have no shame when it comes to begging for help. Militarily the Sri Lankan Tamils are o-vuh, but when it comes to demanding favors from people who have every reason to hate their guts, these guys are world-class. For some hilarious examples of propaganda from a doomed army, check out the LTTE’s glossy but totally insane website, Tamilnet.

(more…)

(Editor’s Note: Since this article was published yesterday for subscribers, Mr. Brecher has published a big follow-up which we post below after this article.)

I’ve been saying for a long time that aircraft carriers are just history’s most expensive floating targets, and that they were doomed.

But now I can tell you exactly how they’re going to die. I’ve just read one of the most shocking stories in years. It comes from the US Naval Institute, not exactly an alarmist or anti-Navy source. And what it says is that the US carrier group is scrap metal. (more…)

Sorry about the long break. I had to deal with my real job, even picked up some extra hours. Once I would have bitched non-stop about that, but I’ve noticed that everybody’s gotten real flexible about their schedules, now that they’re lucky to have a job at all. No more Monday morning jokes. We’re as cheerful as a bunch of Mormons getting root canals. And under all the gung-ho attitude, people are just plain scared.
So naturally, everybody’s trotting out the end-of-civilization scenarios. There’s a whole bunch of guys out there (mostly guys, a few butch girls here and there) who sulk online for years waiting for somebody to bring up the Omega Man/I Am Legend scenario: what are you going to do when civilization collapses? (more…)

I come back from sick leave and there’s a whole pile of wars in my “in” box, like one of those old office cartoons. Still got to write up the dustup in Gaza, and then there’s the so-called final victory of the Sri Lankan Army over the LTTE. But for sentimental reasons I’ve got to give first mention to my boyeez, the Somali pirates. This is what democracy looks like: the Somali pirates. This is what anti-globalization looks like when you do it for real, not like deadheads following the WTO from city to city, banker groupies in black masks and red armbands. (more…)

I’ll talk about Gaza tomorrow, but I’ve got the day off and it’s not my idea of a good time. For now I’ll just say it turned out exactly like I said it would, but blecch, it’s not my idea of a good time and I’m not in the mood to gloat too much. So I’m going to purposely change the subject to this note I wrote myself on the way to work last week: “Supertrooper??? Not mil. @ all!! Column on misused mil. Lyrics” (more…)