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Sixteen years on the streets, living and working with the people of China, Jeff

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Introduction

What a pleasure to meet and have a great discussion with Indrajit “Indi” Samarajiva. He is young, dynamic and a darn good writer.

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Transcript

Jeff J. Brown: Good evening, everybody. This is Jeff J. Brown China Rising Radio Sinoland back in China. I moved two days ago. We’re here, and I’m with one of my favorite writers on the show tonight. I am so honored to have him on and that’s Indrajit Samarajiva. How are you doing, Indi?

Indrajit Samarajiva: I’m good. Thanks for having me on, Jeff.

Jeff: I don’t know how I ran into Indi, but I got one of his articles and I was hooked and I subscribed to his newsletter on his website. He is a terrific writer. And he’s going to tell us about some books that he has written and I’ll just let him give you a little bit of an introduction about who he is and what he does. He’s just one of the most inspiring writers that I’ve seen in a long time and I really want the fans of China Rising Radio Sinoland to get to know him better and start following him, too, because he’s just terrific. So thank you for being on.

Indrajit:  Thanks, Jeff.

Jeff: Question number one: Western establishment would say that you have been radicalized. The Global South would say that you are normalized. Seeing how you spent much of your developing life in the mainstream USA, when and how did you learn the ways and means of imperialism and colonialism? Was it a slow process of putting the puzzle together, or did you have an experience that caused an epiphany?

Indrajit:  So Jeff, it’s funny you should phrase it that way because so recently I found that like a few months ago, I found out that the FBI had been asking around, like family. I have in the US. And what they were asking was, have I been radicalized? So I mean, in that sense, yeah. I think with American politics, they view everything through their lens where everything is actually like, extremely far right. So if you’re anything outside of there, they consider that radical. And yeah, that’s an interesting point that you say where when I come back here my political opinions are fairly normalized, like I believe things now that like old timers here were saying like 50, 100 years ago.

Jeff: It’s funny.

Indrajit:  Yeah, like, my politics are shaped by, like what like I see in front of me. And I think everyone’s seen like, what’s happening. So you kind of respond to material conditions. Like when I grew up in America, I guess the general idea was that the ideology worked because it worked. I mean, just look like we’re the richest, we’re the best. And I grew up in the 90s in America, right? Which was kind of like peak America. And so, like, whatever they were doing obviously seemed like it was working.

And I think a lot of ideologies are justified like that just like I mean, who cares? Do you like the food? Do you like the cars? Like, shut up. And like, having material presence and abundance can almost make you, like, self-justify in terms of ideology. And I kind of went along with that as well. I mean, growing up in America, you also like, learn there’s still sort of like values that they talk about within that system, which like I believed in.

But then as I got like say, let’s say democracy, human rights, freedom, all this stuff that used to like overthrow governments and do the opposite now. But like as a kid, you grow up and you’re like, oh, that sounds nice. I believe in that. But then as an adult, as a man, you start to see that like that doesn’t really match the behavior. So it’s almost like the ideology, even the ideology I imbibed as a kid that almost has the seeds of rebellion sort of within it.

Jeff: So do you think that under your arc of awareness about Western imperialism, global capitalism, whatever you want to call it, fascism, whatever you want to call it? I think they’re all kind of the same thing, and they’re all the same Rubik’s Cube. So for you, it started when you got back to Sri Lanka and you were in a global South environment that’s when you really started to see it?

Indrajit:  Yeah. So I grew up like, yeah, I grew up I guess fairly neoliberal and I was that even when I came back to Sri Lanka. But what I did know is when I was in America and then Canada and I knew that like something felt off. So intellectually I didn’t quite get it yet, but I felt honestly depressed and I felt lonely and weird and like there’s little wrong. And so that was a big reason why I came back to Sri Lanka. And in Sri Lanka, it’s just actually much more family-oriented. It’s much more like social and like over time I started to like, feel better.

Even now, if I go back to the West for a while, I don’t like to mentally do that great. But that was like a feeling and it took me decades to sort of like put the words and the reading together to explain. Like when I talk to a lot of Americans now, they explain everything in terms of mental health. But a lot of that is like social problems that you’re feeling at an individual level and it took me a long time to like, sort of understand that, hey, it’s not like there was something wrong with me; There was something wrong with the society and the way of thinking.

I mean, I think ideology can make you sick as well. And I definitely felt that from a mental perspective. But then when I came back, like, it’s just material events, right? Like with Covid, that Covid like was an epiphany for me because it was like there’s always this idea that like, that if aliens came to Earth, everyone on Earth would unite against them. But I don’t believe that anymore. I think if aliens came to Earth now, Americans would use that as some way to attack China like, there was a common thread of just like sickness.

And in Sri Lanka especially, we could see, say, China and Russia, they were trying to give us vaccines. They were trying to give us the facilities to make vaccines. And then the West was trying to patent the vaccines and make money on them. And then I was like, who are these people? Like, this should be like a common human threat, but they’re not behaving like decent humans.

And then obviously everything that’s been happening since then has only, I guess, further, further radicalized me. But what I do feel ashamed about is when I go back and read and try and understand the things that I’m observing, the people I’m reading are from 50 years ago, 100 years ago, or 1500 years ago. And I’m like, oh, like I should have known better. I should have known. I could have known better.

Jeff: That’s really interesting. Well, a word I use a lot to describe Western civilization is psychopathy. I think it’s the most deranged civilization and I grew up. I’m a privileged white male educated middle, upper-class American. And I should be King Kong and I should have my bragging rights. But just like you, the more I just kept going around and around and around and I had some teary moments when I was trying to pick the scab and open the wound and see what the West was really like. And it was hard. I mean, it was really hard to face that and look at Western civilization like, in a mirror and say, this is ugly. This is really, really ugly.

Indrajit:  No, I can feel for you because like, for me, I grew up in that civilization. But then I had someplace I could go back to. It must be hard if that’s like, what you grow up in and like, what do you go to? It’s hard. And I see within Western civilization in a lot of ways, it’s like they’re trying to rebuild a culture. There’s a lot of stuff decided on the individual or political level, which in other places are sort of answered culturally.

Jeff: Yeah, well, that’s why we’re in China. You know, we’ve been wanting to move back for a long time. And I lived and worked here for 16 years earlier. And that was my epiphany that was what finally raked the scales off of my eyes was coming back to China for the second time. And it sometimes just takes something like that to just to trigger, to open the floodgates, so to speak. Not to mention the film of the World Trade Center number seven collapsing in freefall when I’m going, that’s not possible.

Indrajit:  Yeah, I’ve never understood that. I don’t understand what the hell happened that day, but that building seemed far away.

Jeff: Yeah, well, it was all brought down by explosives. But anyway, that’s very, very interesting. So do you have family in Sri Lanka from your parents?

Indrajit:  Yeah, most of my family is here. We have a huge family here.

Jeff: All right. And is your wife Sri Lankan?

Indrajit:  Yeah, my wife is Sri Lankan. So she’s like half-Indian Sri Lankan.

Jeff: Okay. So you got you have a lot. You have a big extended family there. That must be wonderful for your kids too.

Indrajit:  Yeah, it’s wonderful for me also. There’s nothing better than that. Like, having kids makes you see just like Western society is hostile to families like, having one person, having two people or one person raise a child is not really physically possible. You need more people. And it’s good for the other people also. I don’t know.

Jeff: This gets back to your family. Did and or does your anti-imperial writing cause you problems among your family, friends, and colleagues? If so, how?

Indrajit:  No, not at all. Not at all. I mean, like, you said, my views are more normalized here. Like, it’s not crazy radical. And, well, for one thing, I don’t really talk about politics with friends and family as much. For me, it’s work. I used to work at Ben and Jerry’s once when I got off work, the last thing I wanted to do was see ice cream. So if I’m not writing, kind of like the last thing I want to do is talk about politics. So we generally don’t even talk about that stuff. But I’m actually like pretty used to getting along with people I disagree with.

Jeff: Yeah, me too.

Indrajit:  It doesn’t like my wife’s aunt was asking me like, oh, like, how do you like have a relationship with or get along with someone that disagrees with you? And I said, like if I limited myself to people that agreed with me, I wouldn’t have any relationships. I think in the West, politics is very personal, right? It’s like a personal opinion you have and you need to have like the right opinions and within your group of friends, you all need to, like, have those right opinions.

In Sri Lanka, it’s not really like that. It’s not that. It’s not sort of like a sign of your personality or it’s not something you feel the need to agree with other people on. Like Westerners will have a really strong opinion on abortion or sort of like, should trans people be able to go to the bathroom or whatever? And that’s like dinner table conversation. It just wouldn’t be dinner table conversation here. You just talk about dinner, I guess.

Jeff: Or the weather, the food.

Indrajit:  Like politics is more sort of like so my family would be connected with, say one political party, and someone would be another political party. But we don’t like debate issues, and no one’s even trying to, like, change the other person. It’s just kind of like the family they’re from.

Jeff: I like to use the expression that I like to live in a big tent where I have friends who are Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, right-wing, left-wing, Catholic, Protestant, it just goes on and on and on. But unfortunately, I would find, I find that Americans are some of the most intolerant people about politics. I mean, I’ve lost friends because of my I really have I’ve lost friends.

Indrajit:  Yeah, of course.

Jeff: And then my wife and I, who did not get injected with the mRNA jabs, lost friends because we refused to get vaccinated. And that was in France. Now in France, they’re very indulgent about talking. You can talk about any kind of politics you want in France. And, they love debating and the repartee. But we were shocked at the attitude that even in France people burn bridges with us because we didn’t get injected.

Indrajit:  I think a lot of that is sort of personalizing the political. There’s some big political thing like, let’s say with public health, that’s a big problem, right? That’s a big public-level political issue. It’s not like down to any individual decision. So you don’t need to like to lose friends over that. I think you may need to change governments over that. But you don’t necessarily need to change friends. But honestly, what I found is the people I find the most intolerant are liberals.

Jeff: Yes, they are. They sure are.

Indrajit:  Because democrats want you to believe what they believe. Like I interact with a lot of people who I don’t agree with, but they’re not trying to like, force me to do anything, whereas Liberal is like, no, you’re wrong, you’re stupid. This is what you should believe. I read it in The Economist, and I find those people to be a bit difficult. And I tend to. I do tend to irritate those people like, sometimes I get seated next to certain people at parties. My wife has to, like, pull me back.

Jeff: Jerk your chain.

Indrajit:  Yeah, but with friends and family, I wouldn’t do that. Like, for me, the relationship is more important that there’s a very high threshold of, like, bad stuff. You’d have to believe before it stopped being like friends and family. I don’t think I’d ever stop.

Jeff: Cardboard liberals are the worst. They’re just awful.

Indrajit:  So I grew up thinking like, liberalism is correct. There is a correct idea. It’s published in the New York Times. You can check it every day. I grew up like that. So I grew up reading the New York Times since I was a kid, and I believed all that stuff. But I think especially with Palestine, it’s completely masked off, right? That was all lies and posturing. I think you can maybe pick some philosophy out of there. There might be some ideas, but they were just sort of like comfortable fascists.

Jeff: And, here in France, the big deal is Ukraine because the European Union has just got everybody whipped into a rabid anti-Islamophobic hysteria. And when we try to talk about Ukraine it’s just Putin. Putin. Putin. Putin. Putin. Putin. Putin. Putin. Putin. It’s just like what do you do? I mean, it’s just you’re so brainwashed about Putin being the next Satan.

Indrajit:  I grew up in that media atmosphere where there’s like certain enemies they talk about and they repeat the name over and over. But so one sort of epiphany for me was, I thought if they keep repeating something, why don’t I go and read about that, like read that person directly or like read about that? So if the keep people kept saying communism was bad, right? So I’m like, okay, I don’t know that much about communism.

So I went and like read Marx, which took me months. And I’m like, this isn’t like actually bad. It’s a philosophy. It’s quite interesting or let’s say Hamas. Right? That’s the new bad word of the day. If you go and read about Hamas, they’re actually quite a reasonable ethical organization. Or as you were discussing Putin if you go and read Putin’s speeches directly, he’s actually you don’t agree with him, but he’s at a level of intelligence that makes Americans look like preschool American politicians.

Jeff: And European politicians no better.

Indrajit:  Yeah. So there’s this line from Ender’s Game where Mazer Rackham says “The best teacher is your enemy. Only the enemy will teach you like anything serious”. So even if Putin is your enemy, start from there. Fine. That’s even more reason to sort of like, understand where they’re coming from. So these people are actually all rational actors. But the West is almost completely irrational. They just trot out a name and you’re supposed to hate that name. It’s like 1984 where they have just hate.

Jeff: Two minutes of hate for Goldstein.

Indrajit:  Yeah. And it just really feels like that because people are like, I hate Putin. Okay. It’s like, why? Like, have you read anything more than, like, someone saying something? Have you read anything more than hearsay about this person? I could understand that, but most people haven’t. Or like, I really think Hamas is evil. Okay. I mean, like, have you read anything from Hamas or have you read anything objective about them? And the answer is generally.

Jeff: Hezbollah.

Indrajit:  Yeah, Hezbollah. So like Hezbollah, if you read Saeed Nasrallah, he’s a great philosopher. He was a great philosopher. He’s a great thinker. Like, he’s a great political observer. I don’t know. I feel like a lot of American politics is like schoolyard bullying, right? You find some kid in the schoolyard who’s different, you make up a funny name for them. Like in China, they always insist on calling China the CCP. That’s not the correct name. So China is actually the CPC and that’s what they want to be called. But America calls them the wrong name almost as a way of teasing them. And I’m like, that’s yeah, sort of like high school politics. We’ve kind of grown up and you’re just making yourself ignorant.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think they like the CCP because you have that sibilance, you know, the CCP, sounds much more evil than the CPC.

Indrajit:  They can spit at the end basically with the P.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah.

Indrajit:  I think it’s like school where there’s like some kid and they make up a funny name for them. And you refuse to use the kid’s name. It’s just blatant.

Jeff: Bozo. Hey, Bozo. Hey, butthead. All right. Much of your writing has recently been focusing on the genocide in West Asia, Palestine specifically, which I have enjoyed immensely, and which I put Patrice Granville onto you. And he’s been republishing your stuff on the Greenville Post. I don’t know if you know that or not.

Indrajit:  I’ve heard of it. Yeah, yeah, I’ll check it out. Thank you.

Jeff: He has a huge following because I’m the editor for China. And I started reading your stuff and I founded a group called the China Writers Group and I said, you guys got to read this guy. He’s really good. And then Patrice Granville at the Greenville Post, he’s published several of yours. So well deserved. Please tell the fans out there five or so realities that are ignored and suppressed in the West about Palestine.

Indrajit:  Five is a lot. Let’s see if I can get through three. So I mean, one thing is that one reality that’s repressed is that the tail doesn’t wag the dog, that America is actually the actor in this. Or let’s say America is the director and Israel is the actor. So in my writing, there’s one thing one sort of theoretical concept I talk about called White Empire, which is the idea that America doesn’t like these countries America, the UK, and South Korea, they don’t really exist.

It’s one sort of empire, and it’s not historically limited to now that the British just handed over all their colonial possessions, and even France handed over Vietnam and so on to America, and that to us on the bottom of the boot, it’s sort of one undifferentiated White Empire. So this idea, Israel is almost there to sort of like focus the anger somewhere other than where it really belongs, which is on America.

So, one thing I’ve been writing about recently is that, okay, so let’s say that’s one point, that it’s not Israel, it’s America, and then it’s not America. It’s something called the White Empire. The second point is that a lot of people in the West I see who talk about the genocide issue. They say we condemn the genocide, but then they will also condemn Hamas and Hezbollah and the people resisting it. And there’s a quote I like about that which says “Whoever is in solidarity with our corpses but not our rockets is a hypocrite and not one of us”.

Jeff: Yeah, that’s a great quote.

Indrajit:  Yeah, that’s a good one. And I’ve seen that on Tencent, like student protests in the US also. I found it through some Twitter users Saffery. So like in my habit of taking their condemnations as reading recommendations. I’ve read about Hamas. I’ve read from Hezbollah directly, like the Ayatollah, like all these people you’re supposed to hate. They’re quite rational, they’re quite lucid, and I think they’re quite ethical.

And I think in the past year of fighting, we’ve seen that these are actually ethical fighters who target the military, whereas the other guys are actually targeting hospitals and trying to kill as many civilians as possible and trying to kill as many children as possible to kill the future. So I think you can see through their actions that Hamas and Hezbollah and Ansarullah and the Iraqi PM, whatever forces that these are not the bad guys, they’re the ones resisting a genocide.

And as Malcolm X said, like if you read the newspapers, they’ll forget the quote exactly. But he said that they’ll get you hating the people who are oppressed and loving the oppressors. So I think, like from an ethical perspective, it’s not enough to say, oh, what’s happening in Gaza is like bad. Like if you’re being serious ethically, like, then the resistance is good and the resistance has to earn that. They have to behave ethically.

But I invite you to look into that for yourself and they have behaved ethically and I think incredibly bravely. And I think that’s one thing that’s covered up. Like in the Western press, all that’s covered is I mean, they do cover the horror, right? Because they like, want us to see. They want the world to see that this is what happens when you mess with the Empire. But there have also been incredible stories of bravery and perseverance in the face of impossible odds. And like they say in the Bible, I think.

So when Jesus says, “Love each other as I love you”. He also says, like, there’s nothing greater than laying down your life for your friends or for your people, I would say, and there is honor in that. So within the resistance, they talk about an epic of history. They talk about how they’re writing an epic of history. And I think that’s buried in the Daily News. And then so let’s see, it’s America, not Israel. Hamas and Hezbollah are cool and you should read them. And what else? There is so much obscured within Palestine.

Jeff: Well, I love your riff that you run with on that, I mean, basically Israel no longer even exists.

Indrajit:  Yeah. So there’s massive wartime censorship. People should see that from all the stuff you’re not seeing. And then actually the wartime censorship is worse in the West than it is in Israel. If you can go through to the Israeli sources, there’s actually better stuff there than within, say, the Western stuff, where there’s more censorship. But yeah, one thing to point out is that Israel militarily has already lost.

So I was seeing something today from Al Jazeera where they’re saying, I think something like 50%, you’d have to check that of like the intelligence flights are now being run by the UK or by, I guess, the US. So they’re not in control of that. The air defenses the US’s had to send, I think 100 people to run some Thad battery, which is inadequate anyway. But the air defenses Israel can’t defend itself without the Western powers either.

And in terms of ground forces, they’re a joke. I wrote something recently about just if you go through and so they have maybe 400 operational Merkava tanks, and the resistance is lit up at least 100 of them. Right? So if you look at the military level, they’re losing. I would say what I say is they’re winning the genocide and losing the war. And that’s covered up in the press as it is certainly in Ukraine as well.

So in Ukraine, the story is always that like Russia is on its last legs, it’s been on its last legs for a long time. They have no productivity. They’re throwing washing machines at people. They’re incompetent like they’re. But if you look at the military numbers, even if you look within US military sources as well, they sort of acknowledge that they don’t actually have that much material and that much meant. So Israel to me, is already lost. Now the resistance is fighting America directly and the UK and Germany are just Americans. Can I say bad words on here?

Jeff: Yeah.

Indrajit:  I guess vassals would be the polite one.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Indrajit:  And I guess, you wanted five points. So okay, let’s say the fourth point is also one thing I also say is that America is also historically already defeated. This period is what I call America’s long retreat. It’s decades long. But from Vietnam, they couldn’t raise a large conscript army. They couldn’t raise an army anymore. From Afghanistan, that was sort of their last boots-on-the-ground situation. They’ve already gotten rid of their pre-positioned, or they’re getting rid of their pre-positioning fleets.

And like all of the vaunted American military is actually being depreciated. The Eisenhower, like that aircraft carrier is older than I am. They did have a strong military once, but now they’re actually technologically behind everyone. And what we’re seeing now is they’re actually retreating from the world, and they’re throwing proxies like Israel and Ukraine in front of them. But America can’t take the field anymore. And them going against China, of course, is a joke.

They’re not going to survive with that long supply lines for more than a week. America has actually historically been defeated, and it’s on the way out. And one way to see that is what are they resorting to now? They’re resorting to assassinations and basically murdering Civilians, which are generally the weapons of the weak. These are the weapons of insurgents. And these are not the acts of a strong military. I mean, they’re much more dangerous as a wounded animal. But to me, the American military is a fatally wounded animal.

Jeff: Well, I will, of course, include it on this website. And I think that’s where you can sign up. Is that where you can sign up for the newsletter?

Indrajit:  Yeah.

Jeff: Okay. Anyway. And so you can sign up for his newsletter there and he has just been smoking on what’s been going on in Palestine recently and it’s definitely worth reading his stuff on Palestine. It’s just unbelievable. Sri Lanka, that’s one of the places I’d like to visit. It’s on my bucket list. I’ve been to 85 countries, but I have not been to Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka has been in the news recently. Lots of anti-China propaganda about the Hambantota International Port. What is your take on this project the good and the bad and the ugly?

Indrajit:  So the Hambantota Port is while they were building it actually got arrested for breaking in there with a Western journalist. It was Robert something. But they were fine. They let us out, like a day later. But Hambantota port. Look, the only thing to understand is we’re talking about a physical bit of infrastructure that exists and which Sri Lanka can use. So when you talk about Western projects, there’s nothing that exists. We just get a bunch of debt.

So with the Hambantota Port, it’s not an especially great idea. It’s not in a great like it’s not in a sense a relevant part of Sri Lanka per se. It wasn’t the best investment we could have done at the time, but it exists and China has allowed us to refinance it. Whether it’s a bad idea or not, it’s actually not China’s fault, it was the idea of our president at the time who was from that area, and that’s what he wanted to do. So with China, they don’t come in like the Western countries and say, tell us what to do.

They help whomever our government is, do what our government wants to do. So that’s what happened with the Hambantota port. The Hambantota port hasn’t led to a debt crisis for Sri Lanka. It hasn’t led to any problems. I don’t think it was the best investment we could have made at the time. There’s someone named Umesh Mohammadali who’s done sort of a breakdown of the debt structure. And China was cool. They didn’t come in and break our legs.

They refinanced it. And I think they have some, like, ownership, as in, like an asset swap. I think they have some ownership of it now. I mean, I’m not an expert on that. Please just don’t take me as an authority on that. Umesh is better. Hambantota port I think it’s a non-scandal. So with the West, they have this every accusation is a confession generally. So they go around accusing China of creating debt traps, when in fact we are in Western debt traps. Our debt is generally denominated in dollars, not yuan.

Jeff: The IMF and the World Bank.

Indrajit:  Yeah. So China comes in and helps build physical infrastructure, right? The IMF will never build infrastructure. The IMF will never help you industrialize. The IMF just gives you like, another shot of debt to get you back on the debt train. China has been a friend to Sri Lanka since the 1400s. So like when Zheng He came here that’s one big difference between China and the West. When Zheng He came here with his treasure ships, the Nina Maria Santa Pinta could fit into one of those.

They came and they gave us gifts. They didn’t, like, want to take anything from us. And they came and they left they’re still in Gaul. They left these stone tablets, which are written in Tamil and Chinese and I think Arabic because they were Tamil sailors. And they took the time to, like, understand at least some of our languages, Tamil. And they took the time to give us gifts.

Whereas when the Westerners came here, they took stuff out, right? And they never really bothered to learn much about us at all. China’s, if you ask people around Africa or Asia or whatever it is like, the West is slandering them mercilessly and they find things that are still fundamentally good, right? It’s good to have a port. And then they use that to slander China. And yeah, I think it’s deeply unfair.

Jeff: Well, that’s reassuring because the propaganda is just relentless.

Indrajit:  Yeah, it’s relentless and it’s relentless.

Jeff: And they just passed this new $1.6 billion five-year. Did you read about the program?

Indrajit:  Yeah.

Jeff: Specifically, specifically to pay journalists around the world to vilify and slander China. It’s unbelievable.

Indrajit:  And then they’ll get on and say like, oh, you’re paid by China. I was like, I wish like, where can I? I’m going $5 per day at a time here. Like that’s 1.6 billion sloshing around.

Jeff: Looking at, oh yeah, this was really interesting. I was really shocked to see this. You read that not that you voted for them, but that this, I guess left-wing party won. You recently voted for. You wrote an article about the AKD party, and they won.

Indrajit:  His name is A.K.D. His name is Anura Kumara Dissanayaka. I mean the party, it goes under a coalition but the relevant party we’re really talking about is called the JVP. So they were a revolutionary party. They tried to overthrow the government in, I think, twice, like roughly in the 70s, 80s. They were brutally suppressed. They killed about, like, I don’t know, 80, 90,000 boys in the South for even, like, thinking, like wearing red. But they’ve reconstructed as a political party. And then they won the presidential election because people wanted a change.

Jeff: So A.K.D is sort of like Amlo in Mexico. They use an acronym to name him. And he won. How does he compare to previous leaders and administrations? What does it mean for Sri Lanka’s future?

Indrajit:  He’s so different. Previous leaders have been from basically the colonial era families like the rich landed essentially comprador families. The last president who was unelected, just like House of Cards his way in. His uncle was the first president. His uncle created the office of the presidency. And then his relatives were like the first prime ministers and so on. So after A.K.D. won, now there’s a parliamentary election coming in a few weeks.

So, like dozens of those old families who had been just sitting in parliament, like being corrupt and putting their kids in. They said they’re not going to run because I think Sri Lanka said, Thank God, finally fed up. One thing I’ll say is that I mean, AKD is, he’s still going through with the IMF program. He’s still working with the Americans like, he’s still working with the Indians. I mean, Indian family, but a bit middling. So he’s not a communist hard-left leader.

One thing I’ll say is he’s a very weak government right now because once the parliamentary election comes, maybe they change. But even for the parliamentary, I’m going to vote for a more left party. But it is still quite a big thing for the country, and the country is quite happy about it, actually. There was a poll that came out from IHP, which is a local polling organization, and this is sort of, and now I think 60, 70% of the people in the country feel like the country is going the right way after a long time. I think they’re decent people. I think they could be more communist, but it’s definitely better than the old guard.

Jeff: So he’s not a Thomas Sankara or a Fidel Castro?

Indrajit:  Well, I mean, you can tell by how he came to power, right? Like a Marxist-Leninist, you wouldn’t. This is not in order to win through a sort of liberal democracy or democratic electoral system, you have to do it a certain way. And if you’re going to make real changes, you kind of got to crack some heads and break some institutions. He’s still working within the institutions. He’s still part of the institutions.

Jeff: Well, maybe he can establish some kind of a socialist democracy that.

Indrajit:  You know the funny thing is that the legal name of Sri Lanka is a democratic socialist republic of Sri Lanka. Like on our passport, it says socialist like we’re supposed to be socialist. But since the 80s, it’s just been cannibalized, like there was a lot of debt flowing to the world saying like, hey, you don’t have to industrialize. Don’t worry. Don’t worry about this payment, don’t worry about this payment. And then Sri Lanka, it finally collapsed like you do have to control your own. You have to have economic independence. Political independence isn’t enough. I think that’s something that JVP and AKD understand. At least they’ve read Marx, right? Whether they listen is another thing.

Jeff: Well, they’ve got a great Ibrahim Traoré, the leader of Burkina Faso. He’s unbelievable. He’s just unbelievable.

Indrajit:  Yeah, yeah. And they tried to assassinate him, like, every week. I pray for that guy.

Jeff: Well, he’s the Thomas Sankara of the 21st century. He’s really impressive.

Indrajit:  That’s what you got to do because a lot of these I consider sort of Western liberal democracy to be a Trojan horse. Like it’s something to sort of keep you divided. It almost has racial tension built into it. It keeps you divided, debating what you need to actually take control of your economic resources and take control of your land and your people. And these, like a lot of this stuff distractions like debates, reports like blah blah, blah. And the whole time the guys are robbing you.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah. Looking at what just happened in neighboring Bangladesh, which got essentially cooed by the United States, how embedded is the CIA-MI6-NED-NGO complex in Sri Lanka?

Indrajit:  So it was really embedded. Like, I came up as friends with like a lot of those people, I think not the NED, but the Republican version one of my friends, like, still works for that. Yeah. I mean, the thing in Sri Lanka a lot, there’s a sizable English-speaking class. And we never had any sort of revolution or anything. So the Comprador colonial families are still there. So it’s relatively easy. And there’s a big diaspora as well. Especially after the tsunami in 2004, there were a lot of NGOs, like a lot of that.

So we do get a lot of that phenomenon of people who are like basically invented racism and the worst racist in the world, come and teach us about racism. And then people who haven’t really developed beyond, like stealing land and stuff come and teach us about development. So there was a lot of that. But at the same time, there’s always been a lot of resistance to that as well. And I used to be on the other side of that. I used to be like with the NGOs and the embassy parties and stuff.

So yeah, I know that side of it. But one thing I’ll tell you about that is I have physically seen how they have less power and influence than before. I mean, for one comparison. So like the US embassy, they have a cultural attaché and they’ve reached out to me as a blogger. And so I went there and I like, hung out with them and I went to their parties and stuff. And I think I didn’t realize at the time, but that’s actually how they develop sort of assets, not assets, hard assets per se. But just like influence. But that influence started to wane.

They obviously didn’t have enough money. They didn’t have enough. It wasn’t like a priority. And then on the other side, I was just going out to restaurants and I met a Chinese guy. He was connected to the Chinese embassy, but that wasn’t his job. He just wanted to, like I was doing a restaurant review at that time, a thing at the time. And he just wanted to, like, talk about restaurants. But this guy spoke Sinhala, right? So Sinhala is like the main language in Sri Lanka.

So in China, they train hundreds I don’t know, they train people to speak Sinhala and Tamil and then they send those people here. So what I noticed with the Americans is they just send whatever American you could have been posted anywhere, somewhere. And then it just comes here. With the Chinese embassy, there’s this level where they try to actually understand us. They’re not trying to change us, but they’re just trying to like, communicate with us on our level.

And they even ran a radio station where the Chinese people were doing radio in Sinhala and Tamil. It’s just a very different, very different attitude. So they don’t come in and say, like, your government should be like this, it should be like that. But they do try to help us with industrialization and they do try to help us, like with when we have issues like natural disasters, disease like.

And since the rice and rubber pact a long time ago, you can just see it’s like a fundamentally that’s a bit of an aside, but there’s a fundamentally different attitude. But that NGO thing, what I’ve seen is they’ve gotten like, weaker. So China doesn’t make a big noise about what it’s doing. But you can just see like in Sri Lanka and Africa, like you can see buildings come up that you can use, you can see infrastructure that you can use whereas we’ve been getting hot air from the West for a long time and now we can tell it as bullshit.

Jeff: Well yeah they’ll make this. And now Biden or Trump or whoever, Bush or Clinton, yeah, we’re going to do a $1.5 billion dollar program in Africa and then nothing ever. It’s just a headline and nothing.

Indrajit:  Yeah, it’s just numbered, right?

Jeff: Nothing happened.

Indrajit:  So one thing I’ve noticed about the West is they’re actually losing productive capacity. They can print money as in create digital money. But they can’t do things anymore. They can’t act. You can feel it it’s like a dying body. Even from down here in Sri Lanka, you can feel it. Like when I first came here, I came back about, I guess, 20 years ago. You could feel that America had power. They could project power. They could do things. Now you can’t. They can say things. That’s all.

Jeff: I loved one of yours I’ve actually shared it with some people. You had a wonderful quote: “The United States can print money, but it can’t print bullets.”

Indrajit:  So I was looking it up, and I think a lot of their artillery shells in the 155mm coming out of Scranton, Pennsylvania. So one factory, which I don’t know from pre-world wars. I mean America had industrial capacity once but now it doesn’t. And they’ve outsourced stuff. So if you’re shipbuilding is in Korea and Japan, it’s a bit of a problem because your supply lines are then across the Pacific Ocean.

Jeff: Yeah. The United States now represents 0.5% of global shipbuilding. Just unbelievable.

Indrajit:  Yeah, that’s a big change. They just don’t have the. So I think America treats it all as a big ideological battle. But ideology comes out of material conditions. People generally go where the lunch is, right? And now you can see that the ideology is hollow. What people want is something a system that works. They’re not looking for like a philosophical system that they can debate with each other. They want a system that is developed, that delivers a better life for them.

And all over the world, people are saying that’s not whatever America is doing, which is a very different position than what I grew up in like. So when I grew up, yeah, America would be like the place that people here would want to go to, right? So they would. So if I came back, people would be like, you know what? When I first came back, people were like, why did you come back? Because kind of the dream was because Sri Lanka has been so relentlessly underdeveloped and exploited.

The dream would be to go to these cold, inhospitable, lonely places. And then I had, like, returned to sender. But that’s changed now. And now I actually feel bad for my relatives who have gone there or so people who I know who got in England because now there’s like race riots there, and those people are calling us concerned and it’s safer home all of a sudden.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s one of the big reasons we came back to China. The security situation is the criminality and the violence and the crime here in Europe.

Indrajit:  So when I grew up in America, I remember when Columbine happened, I was in high school, when Columbine happened. And I thought that was crazy. Like, that’s not going to happen again. Now, when I look, that happens every week.

Jeff: Well, there are two a day.

Indrajit:  So how do you send your kids to school there?

Jeff: There are two mass shootings a day now.

Indrajit:  So I’m telling you I think in Australia that happened once and they just banned assault rifles. In Sri Lanka, if that happened, people would lose their minds. You wouldn’t get used to your kids getting shot in school. It’s something. And that to me I think is something that’s the rottenness of it. Like Malcolm X said, chickens coming home to roost. So, I mean, Americans are shooting kids all over the world all the time and have been for decades. So the rot comes in. And I think when I was in America like, I think I felt it right before I could articulate it. I think I felt it and I think it made me sad.

Jeff: Well, that was one of the great quotes by George Orwell and his first book, Burmese Days, where he talked about how imperialism and colonialism and all the exploitation and the violence that it perpetrates on the people there always end up coming back to the homeland. It always ends up coming back because they have to use that violence and that oppression on the people back home to keep the system going. And that’s exactly what’s happening.

Indrajit:  Yeah. Like, so given my experiences as a Sri Lankan I wanted to hate British people, right? I want to hate British people. But then I was reading Marx where he’s talking about England. I was like, oh, they exploited the shit out of their own people. Like they exploited them really badly. Like they’ve killed their own children. And if you look at America, like slavery, it’s not just something that white Americans did to black Americans. They did that to their own children.

Jeff: Oh, especially the Irish.

Indrajit:  No, I mean, like Thomas Jefferson his own children were slaves.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Indrajit:  That’s like, how do you, like, at some point, it’s like, I feel bad for you. I feel bad for your soul.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s true. Well, the Western empire has been founded on violence and drugs and rape and plunder. And as you said, it’s definitely coming back because we had to get out of France. It was just becoming unbearable.

Indrajit:  I find it. So we were in England for a while where my wife was studying. But one thing I can’t get over is the sanctimony, right? Like, these guys have done so much wrong in the world, and they also just want to lecture you that that’s what I can’t deal with.

Jeff: What about the West getting its claws into Sri Lanka for terrorism, separatism, the Tamils, and the Sinhalese? And are they still trying to stir the shit pot and cause problems in Sri Lanka?

Indrajit:  Yeah, I’m sure. I mean so the British like divide and conquer was the name of the game. So, in early Sri Lankan history, the Tamil population and the burghers who are sort of I guess mixed were given disproportionately government jobs and so on. So for like someone like my grandparents, the face of colonialism they would have seen would have the administrator, the judge, the cop, would have been sort of Tamil or Burgher.

So after colonialism that’s just whipped back where the Sinhalese should have focused, I think, throughout the colonized world. They left these booby traps right. So we ended up attacking the minorities who may have some of them, like a rich minority of them may have worked with the colonizers, but the real enemy was the colonizers. And you can see that in India, right? Where India is like constantly like mad at Pakistan and not England and they’re happy to be associated with it. So divide-and-conquer works like that.

And that’s what’s happening in the Middle East as well. The Jewish population is put there to divide and conquer the region. And, someone like Nasrallah is very clear about that. He says, no like the Jews are not the problem like the problem is Zionists. And then above that, the problem is the Americans had actually controlled them. So one thing I’ve learned now is that America’s policy is, is just to keep places messed up.

So whatever it is that keeps the places messed up that makes the resources easier to get out, they’ll do so. They’ll divide people based on race. They’ll divide people based on religion, whatever. It’s like fracking, right? Fracking is when you fracture the rock to get gas out. So that’s what they’ve done to the whole world. I mean, the LTTE was a pretty virulent, violent terrorist organization. One thing I think Tamil people were legitimately screwed and oppressed, tortured, and killed by the Sri Lankan state, which was very singular at the time.

So I’m not going to put that all on like America. There’s a lot of stuff in the Sri Lankan state and if I was a young man in Jaffna, I probably would have joined a separatist organization I can’t fault them. I can’t fault them for that. But the latest fault line they tried to introduce is anti-Muslim. So obviously America’s greatest hit is the Muslim terrorist thing. So actually, just two days ago, the United States Embassy issued a travel warning for Sri Lanka.

There’s this coastal town that bloody Israelis have like, colonized and they got a report that there was some terrorist attack on the Israelis there, even though the Israelis are there come there like military age. They come after doing their war crimes and terrorism. So they’re actually the terrorists and anybody resisting them, I support, but they’ve arrested, I think, 2 or 3 Sri Lankans for like plotting something against the Israelis, which I actually support. And I feel bad for those people.

Jeff: That was your last article. I was just shocked. But as I told you to know, they’ve taken over this town like a bunch of damn thugs and illegal activity, criminality, and everything else and paying off the local authorities and the local cops. The Israelis have done the same thing. And there’s an I forgot the name. We lived in Thailand for a year when we had to call it off because of COVID-19 and moved back to France. But people would tell us, if you go to Bangkok, don’t go to this strip, this bar strip because it is run by the Israelis and they harvest organs from there.

And I’m just we were just like, are you kidding me? And they have people working in the bars. They find someone with the right age, et cetera and they drop a Rohypnol in their drink and they wake up the next morning and they’re missing a kidney. So it’s just like everywhere they go it just turns to shit. And then you even had the quote about Caitlin Johnstone somewhere in South America, I guess, in the Andes or something. And she said they were just obnoxious pigs.

Indrajit:  They’re quiet. They’re quiet. So a friend of mine booked, Incidentally, it’s that person who works for the, like, the NED organization, the Republican version. But she booked a hotel in Arugam Bay three months in advance. But she went there and there were some Israelis staying there, and they decided they didn’t want to leave. So it’s their checkout. They don’t want to leave. So they’re just squatting there?

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. That’s what they’re doing in Palestine.

Indrajit:  Yeah. And so there’s this thing where you’re not supposed to, like, set up businesses on tourist visas and so on. And I’m not, like, such a stickler for that. But it’s just the attitude is very. There’s a movie that they’ve made called Arugam Bay, which is about how, oh, you’re tired and stressed after committing war crimes come to Arugam Bay. But the title screen of that movie, which is in the article says, like they say that Israelis feel entitled to every wave.

It’s like, you’re not like you’re not entitled to the waves. I have Israeli friends who I would actually like to see, and I would like for them to have. We’re friends with an Israeli family. As in, they’re technically Israeli, but they’re 100% pro-Palestinian. And I think like 90% of Israelis lost their minds and need reeducation camps. But what I do say is I don’t think Sri Lanka should accept Israelis at all, but I think they should be able to come on a Palestinian passport.

Jeff: Yeah, fair is fair. Tell us about the books you have written and which are available on your website.

Indrajit:  Yeah, yeah. You’re being generous man. I literally just put like a little book section there. I haven’t written any books. What I’ve done is I’ve edited a book called Reading Resistance, which I think five people have read. But that’s not my words, those are words of like. So understanding Palestine. You’ve said that I’m a good writer on Palestine, and all I do is really distill the thought of people who died to come up with those, like, ideas. And then I look up some numbers.

But so a lot of those people who have lived and died for this knowledge, I’ve just collected them into like a book with like my inane comments. So that includes people. I mean, I’ve gone through and read the Quran because it’s impossible to understand the resistance without their philosophical base, just like it’s impossible to understand Western literature without the Bible. So it has some relevant portions of the Quran.

It has some writings from Hamas, from Shinhwa, from just basically like an interview with Mashal a young Palestinian martyr named Bassel Al-Faraj who talked about resistance a lot, some stuff from Hezbollah, and some philosophical stuff from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. That’s like an edited work, and it’s published in the sense that I just put it in an eBook and put it up on a website. But I have a book of my collected works on White Empire, which has been sitting on my computer, and I just need to read it and put it up. But actually, thank you for this pressure, I will get it up next. I will get it up by the end of this year. So we’ll have two books available on my website.

Jeff: Your writing is Promethean.

Indrajit:  Yeah, I really like that. That was a good one.

Jeff: What projects do you have in the pipeline?

Indrajit:  Well, I really like that because I was like, yes, that’s exactly what it’s like I roll a rock up a hill every day.

Jeff: What projects?

Indrajit:  So I mean, one thing I think is internet writing, I realize, is more like oral culture in that it actually disappears. So I’m trying to collect stuff into book form. I do. My wife definitely says that I repeat myself. So I’ve been trying to collect stuff in book form. So I have two big ideas. One is that idea of the White Empire, and the other is an idea of corporate AI that the idea that you know, corporations are legal people, which they legally are, and that they’ve been ruling us for 400 years. So I have some writing on that that I’m collecting into a book as well. But beyond that, it’s just God what new horror does the day throw me and how do I roll it up a hill?

Jeff: Yeah. Every time we would just watch the news in France, it’s just in the evening. And this was a conservative TV station that the left-wing won. And I’m a member of the Communist Party of France. I mean, I have communist ideals but the left and the West are just absolutely pathetic, triangulated, compromised, gentrified, hollow vessels. They represent absolutely nothing, and they’re all bought off.

So, yeah, all those headlines and we were so glad to get away from them and just being in a nice Chinese culture where the people are nice and polite and helpful and honest. And if we leave a phone on the table we don’t have to worry about it getting ripped off and we don’t have to worry about our backpacks getting stolen. And it’s just so much more relaxing over here. And I’m sure that it’s probably too in Sri Lanka.

Well, listen, my friend, this has been a fun hour. Thank you for being on. I will do a transcript. In fact, my editor is Pakistani. He’s a really good editor. And so I get a transcript. I use AI to get a written transcript of our conversation. I send it to him, he cleans it up and so it will be audio, video, and writing. So if you want, maybe you want to publish it on your website as an article, you’re welcome to do that. And then fun, fun, fun. Let’s stay in touch. I will continue to promote your work. I think you’re an exciting young writer. I’m 70 years old, so I’m an old guy.

Indrajit:  I’m getting there, Jeff. I’m catching up.

Jeff: Anyway, thanks for being on. I really appreciate it.

Indrajit:  Thank you, I appreciate it.

Jeff: I will give you a Buddhist bow. I practice Buddhism and I’m not good at it. I drink wine at dinner and I eat meat.

Indrajit:  I’m also a bad Buddhist, Jeff. That’s fine.

Jeff: But I do believe in it. So anyway, take care. Thank you so much for being on.

Indrajit:  Okay, take care, Jeff. Thank you.

###

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