Looks like some things have changed off the coast of India! Just kidding, it’s all back to how it always has been (at least since the Brits left).

A few weeks back I started hearing about another war in another place that I don’t know much about—this time, Sri Lanka. The name rang true enough though, like Congo, Israel, and the ‘Stans, it sounded like an “ethnic” dispute. The news told me that the Tamil people in the north were getting attacked by the (presumably “undemocratically” elected) Sri Lanka state, the folks with megaphones on University Ave in Toronto told me the same thing. A good friend of mine, Tamil in origin I believe, also told me the same. Turns out, civilians were getting slaughtered, not much unlike those in Gaza a few weeks earlier.

I’d heard of these Tamil Tiger characters before, bad guys, to be sure, but also not exactly to be confused with the Tamil people. One is a fabricated race, another is a fabricated state-in-the-works. Apparently Toronto has a large population of Tamil people—the fabricated race—but then why all the Tiger flags and camo fatigues on University Ave? A few bad eggs, no doubt, since no sane person would support the Tamil Tigers and their imperialist/border-redrawing hopes? Wait, I thought they were the ones getting slaughtered?

Yup, but like all these ethnic disputes its blurry. Turns out that when the Brits left the region in 1948 things got ugly. In the years since the Sinhalese and Tamils have been exchanging mortars ever since. Sometimes the Tamils have the upper hand, with their tanks, planes, suicide bombs, and bad-ass navy, like in the 1990s. But, sometimes the Sinhalese, with their statedom, mortars, and badass planes have the upper hand, like now.

You could say that the civilians get caught in the cross-fire, but that’s not quite right either, for why the protests on University Ave? I think the quotable War Nerd has it right, in cases of “hate-momentum” the case-fires and peace treaties (Sri Lanka/Tamil had their’s in 2002) aren’t worth much. To wit,

“There’s another reason these treaties don’t last: hate momentum. That’s what I call it anyway. See, people have the wrong idea; they think “violence” starts when the insurgents set off their first bomb. It doesn’t work that way. That’s just when the violence first makes the press. There was ALWAYS violence in these places, lots of violence. But as long as the government is strong enough to dish it out, nobody notices. When the people getting zapped non-stop suddenly start zapping back, suddenly it’s a “man bites dog” story, a big turnaround, and every TV channel in the world is on the story.”