We repost below the World Socialist Web Site statement published on wsws.org here on June 13, 2025
Damages are seen in a building after an explosion in a residence compound after Israel attacked Iran’s capital Tehran, Friday, June 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi) [AP Photo]
On Thursday evening, under the cover of darkness, Israel launched a massive air and missile assault on Iran, striking air defenses, nuclear facilities, key military personnel and command centers.
At least 78 people were killed and over 300 injured in the largest attack on Iran since the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. Israel assassinated six nuclear scientists and 20 high-ranking military personnel, including the Chief of Staff of Iran’s military and the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The World Socialist Web Site unequivocally condemns Israel’s illegal and unprovoked assault on Iran as a brazen act of imperialist aggression. The increasingly unhinged Israeli regime—already carrying out a genocide against 2 million people in Gaza—has now deliberately provoked war with a country 10 times its size, threatening catastrophic consequences for the entire region.
Israel’s claim that it acted in “self-defense” against an alleged Iranian nuclear program is an absurd and transparent fraud. It is well known that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, acquired in violation of international law.
Prior to the assault, Iran was engaged in negotiations with the White House over its nuclear program. In the days leading up to the strike, every major imperialist government—including the United States—made statements saying they opposed an Israeli attack on Iran, calling instead for a negotiated settlement.
The United States even went so far as to announce a new round of talks with Iran on Sunday just hours before Israel, with US foreknowledge and complicity, began raining missiles down on Tehran. Within the span of 24 hours, the White House went from vocally proclaiming it opposed an Israeli attack on Iran to publicly gloating about it.
Asked by the Wall Street Journal Friday whether the US got a “heads-up” of the attacks, US President Donald Trump replied, “Heads-up? It wasn’t a heads-up. It was, we know what’s going on.”
In reality, the so-called “negotiations” were a treacherous charade, designed to provide Israel with the opportunity to kill Iran’s military leaders in their homes. Among those targeted and killed in Israel’s Thursday night attack was top Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Shamkhani.
Citing US and Israeli officials, Axios reported Friday that “Trump and his aides were only pretending to oppose an Israeli attack in public—and didn’t express opposition in private. ‘We had a clear U.S. green light,’ one claimed. The goal, they say, was to convince Iran that no attack was imminent and make sure Iranians on Israel’s target list wouldn’t move to new locations.”
The fact that Iran allowed a significant portion of its leadership to be killed—apparently while they were in civilian dwellings vulnerable to missile strikes, even as the American press openly telegraphed an Israeli attack—is a devastating exposure of the Iranian regime’s strategic bankruptcy. The regime placed immense confidence in the good faith of the Trump administration. Ignoring and forgetting all that has happened, including Trump’s authorization of the murder of General Suleimani in January 2020, the Iranian leaders were convinced that the United States would restrain Israel while negotiations were pending. They fell for a simple trick, like a child taking candy from a stranger.
But there are politics behind the Iranian regime’s astonishing naivete. Terrified of its own working class, the Iranian capitalist elite is desperately seeking an agreement with the imperialist powers, who have demonstrated their full commitment to Iran’s destruction and subjugation.
Israel’s attack on Iran has also exposed where the European imperialist powers really stand, despite their recent criticisms of aspects of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The German government announced that Netanyahu had informed Chancellor Merz of the planned assault. Both the French and German governments issued statements affirming Israel’s “right to defend itself” and condemning retaliatory strikes by Iran.
The attack on Iran is the direct outcome of the longstanding US-Israeli drive to create a “new Middle East” under imperialist domination, intensified in the wake of the events of October 7, 2023. It was made possible by the immense political, military and intelligence support Israel has received from the United States for decades, under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
The Pentagon and Israeli military have long planned and war-gamed an assault on Iran and its nuclear program—an attack that Trump has repeatedly vowed to authorize.
US imperialism has never accepted the outcome of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which overthrew the dictatorship of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a key American ally in the Middle East. Washington backed Iraq in its brutal war against Iran throughout the 1980s. Even as it turned on Iraq—waging war in 1990–91 and invading in 2003—the installation of a US-aligned regime in Tehran remained a central objective.
Today, Iran is grouped with Russia, China, and North Korea as a major obstacle to US global hegemony—one that Washington is determined to eliminate at any cost.
The ultimate aim of this assault is the imperialist domination of the Middle East—the world’s most important oil-exporting region and home to critical trade routes and strategic chokepoints, including the Persian Gulf. By subjugating Iran, a key ally of both Russia and China, the United States aims to strengthen its global position in preparation for direct confrontation with its principal strategic rivals.
History has shown that imperialist wars lead to unforeseen and catastrophic consequences. Just as the US invasion of Iraq unleashed a regional disaster, so too will Israel’s assault on Iran. The people of the Middle East will not remain passive as their countries are turned into battlegrounds for imperialist domination.
The international working class must respond by building a conscious movement against imperialist war and the capitalist system that gives rise to it.
The World Socialist Web Site calls for the defense of Iran from imperialist violence and subjugation. But this can not be waged through the support of any bourgeois government. It requires the independent mobilization of the working class of the Middle East and the whole world, in opposition to all ethnic, racial and religious divisions, on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program.
Malaka Dewapriya’s film Bahuchithawadiya(The Undecided) is an ambitious but ultimately disoriented work that attempts to offer a portrait of the youth adrift in post-civil-war urban Sri Lanka. The film takes the form of a character study, which according to Director’s own introduction, “presents a reflection of the youth of this time, who are searching for easy ways to survive due to lack of job security and are immersed in the dream of escaping this country, using social media, smartphones, and iPhones to achieve their old dream, and making all connections their victims.”
Bahuchithawadiya. Image courtesy of film’s official facebook page.
The film has garnered attention for its experimental tone and portrayal of alienation among the impoverished unemployed – jobless or precariously employed and exploited in the gig economy – youth in Colombo. However, beneath its cinematic form, the film offers a bleak, superficial depiction of social decay and a disheartening and ultimately reactionary indictment of working-class and unemployed youth—not as victims of capitalism, but as the agents of their own moral downfall.
The protagonist, Sasitha (Kalana Gunasekara), is a delivery worker in Colombo, the industrial capital of the country. He is employed under precarious conditions by a miserly boss. With no prospects for economic or social mobility, Sasitha turns his attention to seducing women online—married, unmarried, older, younger—all in the hopes of securing a visa to a European country or gaining some financial benefit. His duplicity and exploitation of these women are portrayed not as unwilling and temporary predatory responses to a brutal economic system but as intrinsic and permanent features of his character. What emerges out of him is not a layered human being, but a cypher of cynicism and indecision. Herein lies one of the film’s most serious failings: the absence of any serious attempt to explain the portrayal of Sasitha’s behavior through the social forces and material conditions in which he lives.
Dewapriya has captured certain surface features of social life. The film presents a series of acidic behaviours—adultery, betrayal, cheating, exploitation, desperation—yet none are given sustained focus or examined in depth to reveal their underlying contradictions. As a result, the viewer is left with a collection of symptoms, rather than an understanding of the social reality that gives rise to them. This is not merely an aesthetic or artistic shortcoming, but a deeply ideological one. An artist does not simply replicate life; he is not a photographer. He bears the responsibility of discovering truth. By isolating Sasitha’s personal corruption from the real world that produces it and stands in contradiction to it, Bahuchithawadiya, despite its claims to realism, ultimately proves to be profoundly evasive and dishonest.
It is not enough to show that a character, representing “contemporary youth”, is indecisive, manipulative, and amoral. One must ask: why? What has shaped this poisonous character? What forces act upon him? Who is responsible for his life? Is his behaviour inevitable? Dewapriya seems uninterested in these questions. The result is a film that verges on character assassination. Sasitha is not portrayed as a victim of the capitalist system, nor as someone with even the faintest sense of resistance to its injustices. Instead, he appears as its willing accomplice—both seeking to benefit from its corruption and attempting, paradoxically, to escape its consequences. In the final analysis, he is shown not as someone shaped by a toxic social order, but as one of its architects. “The youth”, as we have known it, has ceased to be!
The viewer is invited to conclude that the crisis of contemporary youth lies in their own character: their indecision, their dishonesty, their lack of conviction. This is an old slander, repeated countless times by the middle class and its intellectual spokespersons, who recoil in fear at the sight of the impoverished, unemployed, and restless young. That this view should find cinematic expression in a country that in 2022 witnessed one of the most significant mass uprisings of youth in recent history is both telling and damning. Ultimately, the youth does not happen to find their class enemy.
The film’s final scene shows Sasitha mechanically resuming his practice of seducing women online, without the slightest remorse—even after having been caught red-handed in his previous deceptions. This serves as a conclusive testament that the filmmaker is less concerned with exploring the real social and psychological dynamics shaping youth behavior, and more intent on confirming a middle-class ideology that views oppressed youth as inherently selfish, untrustworthy, incorrigible, and erratic.
The film’s central concept—”Bahuchithawadiya”—suggests a permanent, innate condition of moral and psychological ambiguity. This is entirely ahistorical and unscientific. The youth of Sri Lanka are indecisive not because they are naturally cynical or morally bankrupt. They are uncertain because their lives are uncertain: jobless, underpaid, precariously housed, exploited. The labor market offers no security. Political parties offer no hope. Trade unions have betrayed them. Their so-called indecision is not a failing; it is a symptom of a broader social crisis.
Indeed, the idea that Sri Lankan youth are fundamentally morally degraded is refuted by events themselves. In 2022, tens of thousands of young people took to the streets in an unprecedented mass uprising, protesting the unbearable cost of living, fuel shortages, authoritarian repression, and the corruption of the ruling political establishment. This movement did not emerge suddenly from a generation lost in nihilism, but from a population forced to resist and confront the consequences of decades of neoliberal policy and imperialist subjugation.
To assert, as the film does, that youth have no direction because, in the backdrop of a predatory economy, they are inherently flawed, is to participate in a reactionary ideological project. Dewapriya offers the youth no future and no past. They are merely floating signifiers of decay, cynicism, and amorality. They are uninfluenced by any sense of resistance, struggle, solidarity, or political awakening. Even in Colombo, the epicenter of industry and protest, Sasitha never encounters a strike, a rally, or even a conversation that hints at collective resistance. There is not even a passing allusion to conscious class war measures–austerity, privatization, debt crises, or the militarization of public life following the end of the civil war—realities that are inescapable features of everyday life in the country. The working class —despite its overwhelming presence and historical importance—is nowhere to be found. Instead, we are shown a hermetically sealed world of urban apartments and transactional relationships, in which everyone is either a victimizer or a dupe.
Sasitha flicks through television channels airing religious sermons, astrology segments, and reality shows—programs ostensibly meant to shape the youth—but never news, politics, or protest. The enemy is distant, and the struggle is futile. This is no accident, but a deliberate artistic choice—one that lays bare the filmmaker’s class perspective.
Class struggle is the highest expression of both class resistance and solidarity—one that leaves no room for pettiness, selfishness, or moral cynicism. It imparts to working-class youth a profound sense of social responsibility, discipline, and empathy forged through collective struggle. To preserve the middle-class caricature of youth as aimless, self-serving, and unreliable, it becomes essential that they not be shown to be confrontated with class struggle. This is precisely the path the filmmaker has chosen: by omitting any encounter with collective resistance, the film ensures that its protagonist remains trapped within a framework that validates bourgeois prejudices rather than illuminating social truth.
Bahuchithawadiya shares a great deal with the postmodern cinema that has emerged internationally in recent decades—films that purport to critique society by depicting its filth and moral decay, but which in reality offer no understanding of why things are the way they are, and certainly no path forward. These are not works of art that cognize life in its fullness and movement—but snapshots of despair, stripped of causality and agency.
One would compare this to a film like Dharmasena Pathiraja’s Ahas Gauwa (1974), where the main character Wije is shaped by his encounters with the working class. That film ends not with resignation, but with the protagonist joining a trade union struggle, suggesting a transformation in consciousness. Or consider Boodee Keerthisena’s Mille Soya (2004), which, while also centered on the desire to migrate, does not present its characters as predators or cowards, but as desperate and conflicted individuals shaped by historical pressures. In these works, characters evolve, struggle, and relate to the social forces around them. They are alive in history. In today’s society, gripped by deep crisis, a heightened degree of class resistance is not only inevitable but increasingly evident.
Sasitha—so too his roommate—is not shown looking for work: he submits no job applications. He engages in no political talk at all. He has no interest in news. He speaks of migrating to Europe but takes no meaningful steps to do so. The film ends as it began: in stasis. This is not an artistic exploration of paralysis, but a refusal to engage with reality. Real young people in Sri Lanka today are not simply wallowing in nihilism. They are searching for work, forming relationships, joining protests, and trying to understand their place in a collapsing world. Dewapriya‘s Sasitha is not a representation of this generation; he is a libel against it.
Commenting on the depiction of unemployed youth in Take Me Somewhere Nice (2019), written and directed by Ena Sendijarević, David Walsh observes that the filmmaker “underestimates the extent to which the younger generation globally is still at sea, looking for a new orientation, for some stable, coherent political and moral reference point. Many young people, refugees or not, from the Balkans or not, are ‘in-between’ at present, disgusted by the existing set-up and not yet having found an alternative. This ‘in-between-ness’ is bound up with the ‘on-the-eve’ quality of the present moment.”
Walsh’s comment is equally applicable to Dewapriya and his approach in his film. Bahuchithawadiya captures the uncertainty of youth but fails to grasp the transitional, searching character of that uncertainty—its link to a broader historical moment in which masses of young people are questioning the existing order and beginning to look for alternatives.
Moreover, the film is an ideological fodder to the petty-bourgeois strata from which it emerges. It confirms their defeatist view that the poor and unemployed are to blame for their own fate, that they are lazy, treacherous, corrupt, and oversexed. It paints the working class not as the agent of social transformation, but as a cesspool of moral degradation. The youth are not portrayed sympathetically. In this way, the film serves the ideological needs of those who have no intention of challenging the status quo. This is the hallmark of postmodern pessimism—a worldview that substitutes irony for resistance and pathology for class analysis.
There are moments in the film that suggest Dewapriya is not without talent. A number of his previous “radio stories” confirm that he is a promising artist. He has a feel for visual composition, a sensitivity to language, and a certain flair for portraying claustrophobic urban life. But these gifts are, at this stage, limited by a worldview shaped by the narrow horizons of a disoriented middle-class layer, a worldview that remains unable to grasp the full social and historical dynamics confronting the working class youth.
A work of art does not need to be optimistic, but it must be truthful. It must seek to reveal the underlying forces that shape human behavior. An artist should not only cognize life, but should attempt to partially lift the veil of future. When he is dissatisfied with today’s reality, he has to see it through the prism of an ideal “tomorrow” and “show man in his ideal”.
As A.K. Voronsky wrote:
“The dream, yearning and longing for man drawn up to his full height has been and continues to be the foundation of the creative work of the best artists” (Art as the Cognition of Life, and the Contemporary World, 1923)
In this sense, art becomes a means of historical cognition. Bahuchithawadiya fails in this task. It is a film that flinches from the real struggles of our time and retreats into a cold, contemptuous portrait of human failure.
In the final analysis, Bahuchithawadiya is not a film about youth, but about the inability of a certain social layer to comprehend the youth—to see in them not just a mirror of society’s decay, but the potential for its renewal. That is the tragedy of this film.
We are posting here a brief obituary of Sri Lanka’s veteran actress Malini Fonseka, written by comrade Sanjaya Jayasekera and published on his personal website and social media on 25 May 2025. This articles was also published by the daily newspaper themorning.lk Here. Nearly six-decade of the cinematic career of actress Fonseka deserves a full and extended review.
Malini Fonseka
The demise of actress Malini Fonseka on May 24, 2025, marks the end of a cinematic epoch. She is undoubtedly the “Queen of Sinhala Cinema,” as she has been often referred to by millions of her fans, aged and young. Nearly six-decade of her career was not a simple arc of celebrity, but a deep and continuous cinematic identification with the lives of ordinary people, especially women, under the weight of history, patriarchy, backwardness and class oppression. In a country where cinema often struggles between the tides of commercialism, populism, nationalism and repression, Fonseka remained a moral and aesthetic lodestar, truthfully imbuing her characters with emotion, quiet resistance, and tragic insight.
To merely describe Fonseka as a beloved actress is to evade the seriousness of her contribution. She was an artist of social consciousness—her performances bore the weight of Sri Lanka’s post-independence traumas, its unfulfilled democratic promises, and the contradictions of a backward capitalist society pressing in from every side.
In Lester James Peries’ Nidhanaya (1972), one of the greatest Sri Lankan films ever made, Fonseka plays the innocent, ill-fated woman preyed upon by a man whose wealth and obsession lead to murder. Her character is not merely a victim but a mirror held up to a crumbling feudal order. Fonseka conveys, through silence and subtle gestures, a person slowly awakening to the forces arrayed against her. Her sacrifice is not just personal—it is metaphorically the death of innocence in a society entrapped by its own past.
In Beddegama (1980), based on Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle, Fonseka as Punchi Menika inhabits a world of colonial exploitation and rural destitution. This is not melodrama but precise, economical realism. Fonseka does not “perform” poverty and female endurance—she lives it. Her face, increasingly lined by anxiety and despair, communicates the pain of a society ground down by injustice, hunger and disease, made worse by the cruelty of an indifferent state.
Equally remarkable is her performance in Dharmasena Pathiraja’s Bambaru Avith (1978). In this film, Fonseka delivers one of her most restrained yet potent performances of the role of a young lady in a coastal village caught in the maelstrom of social disintegration and the predatory arrival of urban outsiders. Fonseka’s portrayal is marked by an acute sensitivity to the class tensions simmering beneath the film’s surface. Her role is not simply a symbol of rural innocence but a deeply aware, emotionally complex figure who senses the destruction bearing down on her community. In a film that critiques both the romanticization of village life and the corrosive effects of capitalist intrusion, Fonseka embodies the silent tragedy of a society being commodified. With minimal dialogue and subtle expressions, she gracefully communicates despair, resignation, and the quiet resistance of a woman rooted in her world but unable to halt its unraveling.
Bambaru Avith: Malini Fonseka with Vijaya Kumaratunga
In Akasa Kusum (2008), directed by Prasanna Vithanage, as Sandhya Rani, a faded film star confronting the ruins of her career and personal life, Fonseka embodies the alienation and disillusionment of an artist discarded by an industry that once idolized her, and without any social insurance. The film alludes to the stardom of Fonseka herself. Vithanage’s film, while ostensibly a character study, inadvertently exposes the broader social decay under capitalism, where cultural memory is short and individuals are reduced to commodities. Fonseka’s restrained yet deeply expressive performance underscores the tragedy of a woman whose labor and talent have been exploited, then abandoned—a microcosm of the artists’ precarious existence in a profit-driven system. The film’s critique of bleak nostalgia and the fleeting nature of fame resonates with the broader crisis of art under conditions where everything, including human creativity, is subordinated to the market. While Akasa Kusum does not explicitly engage with class struggle, Fonseka’s portrayal of Sandhya’s isolation and resilience speaks to the perseverance of ordinary people amid systemic indifference.
Fonseka’s performances in a wide range of other films—including Eya Dan Loku Lamayek (1977), Siripala Saha Ranmenika (1978), Ektamge (1980) and Yasa Isuru (1982) —as well as in teledramas such as Pitagamkarayo (1997), are etched into the collective memory of Sri Lankan audiences. In each of these roles, she brought to life women shaped by their social conditions, investing them with dignity, emotional depth, and a quiet intensity that transcended the screen. Whether portraying the struggles of urban motherhood, the constraints of poverty, caste and patriarchy, or the conflicted desires of village life, the veteran actress was able to truthfully reveal the deeper realities of the society around her.
Like several other leading actors of her generation, Fonseka was a significant historical product of her time. By the 1970s, Bollywood’s musical and melodramatic cinema exerted a powerful influence over Sri Lankan audiences, who flocked to theaters largely drawn by star appeal. Sinhala cinema, still emerging as a serious artistic medium, had to contend with the commercial dominance of Indian films. Fonseka’s rise to stardom was not merely a matter of charishma; her compelling screen presence, combined with the emotional depth and authenticity she brought to nearly every role, enabled her to capture the imagination of a broad audience. In doing so, she played a crucial role in affirming the cultural legitimacy and artistic potential of Sinhala-language cinema, as part of the world cinema.
Fonseka’s popularity, unmatched for decades, was not simply built on glamour but on the deep compassion she earned. For the oppressed, she did not offer escapism; she offered recognition and fight. Her status as “queen” is a title she earned from the sincere presentation of the struggles of those who loved her.
Her art reminds us of what cinema can be: a site of conscience, a record of the oppressed, and a spark of rebellion. She belongs to that rare tradition of film actors—like Smita Patil, Giulietta Masina, and Liv Ullmann—who made of their bodies and voices a battlefield of history.
In the later years of her life, Fonseka became associated with the bourgeois nationalist establishment, serving as a Member of Parliament from 2010 to 2015 under the government of then-President Mahinda Rajapaksa. While no political concessions can be made to her alignment with Sinhala nationalist politics, her profound contributions to cinema—rooted in social realism and the depiction of the oppressed—remain of enduring artistic and historical value. Her body of work deserves to be critically appreciated, drawn inspiration from and preserved as a significant part of both Sri Lankan and world cinema.
Malini Fonseka will be remembered not merely as a great actress, but as an artist of the oppressed masses. Her characters will continue to live, as all genuine art does, not only in memory but in the continuing struggles of those they represented.
The US federal debt [Photo: Federal Reserve Economic Database]
On Saturday, May 3, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org) held the annual International Online May Day Rally. The event took place at a critical juncture in international geopolitics, which determines life-and-death questions of the working class—who, in recent weeks and months, have demonstrated growing militancy in their struggles against the capitalist establishment. WSWS posted both the video and text of the opening speech delivered by WSWS International Editorial Board chairman David North today (May 05). We are reposting the video here and we invite the workers, youth, intellectuals and all those who want to defeat austerity, fascism, dictatorship, genocide, war and social retrogression to seriously study this speech and the other speeches, and resolutely decide to join the international Trotskyist movement and build the ICFI as the only revolutionary leadership of the international working class to fight for world socialism.
Anidda, February 2, 2025, A discussion with Ashoka Handagama by Upali Amarasinghe, p19. ↩︎
‘[A]ntisemitism moved many thousands of “ordinary” Germans—and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned—to slaughter Jews. Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity.’ Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 9. ↩︎
In “My Thoughts on Handagama’s Rani,” published in Daily FT on March 281, Jagath Weerasinghe—artist, archaeologist, and cultural commentator—extends, rationalises, and legitimises the central reactionary thesis of Asoka Handagama’s recent film Rani. This is a film whose underlying narrative, presented in the guise of artistic subtlety and aesthetic ambiguity, represents a deeply ideological falsification of history. Weerasinghe’s endorsement of the director’s central proposition2—reproduced in Sinhala translation in Anidda on March 30 by Vidura Munasinghe—is emblematic of a broader trend among the middle-class intelligentsia and the pseudo-left, who serve as ideological apologists for the crimes of the capitalist state.
A scene in the film “Rani” by Asoka Handagama
The core thesis promoted by both Weerasinghe and the film is that the atrocities carried out during the 1988–90 period—enforced disappearances, state death squads, mass graves, torture camps, and extrajudicial killings, as well as the fascistic violence perpetrated by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)—were not the products of concrete political decisions, class interests, and specific agencies of state and party power. Instead, they were the result of a society in which “violence had become systemic and normalised.” Weerasinghe writes: authoritarian regimes perpetuate brutality “for political gain and self-preservation, creating an environment where violence is not only carried out by those in power but is also internalised, accepted, and even participated in by ordinary citizens. In such a climate, even those with moral integrity can find themselves complicit—whether through silence, fear, or the gradual erosion of ethical boundaries.”
This pseudo-sociological claim—that violence was embedded in the very fabric of society and was collectively enacted by the masses—leads to a profoundly reactionary conclusion: that there is a shared moral guilt for the crimes of the period, borne by everyone, without any class distinction. Rani—the eponymous protagonist, who is portrayed as initially a passive observer of the surrounding terror but who gradually becomes emotionally and psychologically implicated—and every other defenseless rural man and woman, the worker, the unemployed youth, who were terrorized for their lives both by the fascism of the JVP and by state repression, are depicted as responsible for and willing participants in the atrocities.
Was this culpability moral, political, or both? While Weerasinghe leaves no doubt that he intends to assign moral culpability to the masses—an implication clearly shared by the director—this vulgar theory leaves the spectator wondering who bears political accountability. That is precisely the issue at hand. The film and its director’s apologetics place the blame on the “ordinary” masses. Political responsibility follows moral culpability. Consequently, the oppressed are identified with the oppressor, giving rise to a vision of a society that is hopeless, anarchic, and devoid of historical or scientific grounding. This approach is crudely ahistorical, impressionistic, and unscientific—and it serves a definite class interest.
The capitalist state agents of terror, its political leadership, the military-intelligence apparatus, and the misdirected cadre of the JVP are equated, and these contradictory forces are placed on the same grounds as the poor and the working people, constituting a homogeneous society of “ordinary citizens.” They are all morally and indiscriminately dissolved into an amorphous, classless “we.” The final anecdote of the film, which Weerasinghe refers to, is founded upon this proposition and leads to the conclusion that the director wanted the viewers of his film to read into as the alternative narrative: the killing of Richard de Soysa was not necessarily ordered by President R. Premadasa, nor did it serve the interests of the latter or the ruling class. This is a liquidationist proposition that casts doubt upon many other suspected assassinations and abductions of the period, getting the political leadership of the state off the hook. In conclusion, this is where the “broader and more layered exploration of the underlying social and political realities,” which Weerasinghe claims the purported “fiction” allows its viewer to delve into, lands.
Such a political framework is not new. It has appeared time-to-time in bourgeois and petty-bourgeois historiography, where the responsibility for state crimes—pogroms, wars, genocides—is shifted onto “society” or “human nature.” One prominent historical analogue is Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), which absurdly claimed that the Holocaust was not the outcome of a historically developed political program of German imperialism and the fascist state of the Nazi Third Reich, but the result of a deep-seated, inherent antisemitism among the German people3. Thus, the “ordinary” Germans were willing accomplices in the Final Solution, the extermination of over six million Jews. Hitler was only the final executioner of this ideology. This deadly distortion of history has been widely discredited by serious historians, not only for its factual inaccuracy, but for the reactionary political implications it carries4.
Weerasinghe offers no sociological or historical research to substantiate his claims—nor does the director, who admits to conducting little serious investigation prior to the making of the film. However, similar arguments have been advanced internationally through certain psychological and sociological theories that lack rigorous empirical grounding. Chief among these are the studies of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, whose respective experiments on obedience to authority and simulated prison environments have been widely cited to suggest that ordinary individuals can become complicit in acts of cruelty under systemic pressure. Both studies have come under sustained criticism for methodological shortcomings, ethical violations, and issues of reproducibility. More importantly, when abstracted from their immediate experimental context and applied uncritically to complex social phenomena like mass political violence, these theories devolve into a kind of psychological determinism. They obscure the class forces and political programs that shape historical events and instead offer a right-wing, pseudo-scientific narrative in which atrocities are the inevitable result of human nature or diffuse social norms—thereby absolving the state and the ruling elite of political responsibility.
In the Sri Lankan context, this argument has especially reactionary consequences. It leads to the notion that the Sinhalese majority are collectively responsible for the 1983 pogrom against Tamils, and ultimately, for the genocide in Mullivaikkal in 2009. A section of the middle class of the country harbours this ideology, which was once starkly expressed by Pubudu Jayagoda, a leader of the pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), who claimed that racism is deeply ingrained in the Sinhalese “society”5, reducing complex political phenomena to abstract moral failures of entire ethnic groups of conflicting classes6. This is not only unscientific and historically false, but it plays directly into the hands of the capitalist state and chauvinist forces, who exploit communalism to divide the working class on racialist lines to prevent unified struggle.
Marxism begins not with moralism, but with the concrete analysis of social relations and historical processes. The essential questions that must be addressed in any serious assessment of the 1988–90 period are the following: What were the objective causes of the JVP-led insurrection and its fascistic methods? What class forces were involved in the repression? What was the role of imperialism, the IMF, and the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie in creating the social crisis that produced this violence? And above all, was there an alternative revolutionary leadership that could have mobilized the working class against both the JVP and the capitalist state?
The JVP uprising was not a spontaneous eruption of madness, nor was it the inevitable product of a culture of violence. It emerged from a deep social crisis rooted in the failure of the post-colonial bourgeoisie and the betrayal of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in 1964, which had entered into a class collaborationist coalition with the bourgeois Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). In the aftermath of this betrayal, tens of thousands of rural youth—disillusioned by the parliamentary left and devastated by the economic liberalization policies of the J. R. Jayewardene regime—were drawn to the radical rhetoric of the JVP.
The JVP, despite its populist posture, was never a Marxist organization. It rejected the class struggle, dismissed the internationalism of the Fourth International, and relied on petty-bourgeois nationalism and adventurist terror. In 1987–89, it launched a campaign of assassinations and fascistic violence that paralyzed the working class and the middle class. The response of the state was a campaign of ruthless repression. Death squads, torture camps such as Batalanda, and state-sponsored terror claimed the lives of an estimated 60,000 youth.
A scene of mass killings and daily-life in rural Sri Lanka in September 1989. Photo by Prasanna Hennayake
This was not a case of generalized ”ideology of violence” within society. It was class warfare, waged from above by the capitalist state to defend private property, intimidate the working class, and preserve bourgeois rule. It was facilitated by the political vacuum created by the betrayals of the old left and the inability of the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), to politically break the working class and the rural poor from the grip of the petty-bourgeois JVP and other Stalinist and Maoist organizations in time to develop an alternative mass leadership.
However, it was only the RCL, the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the world party of the working class, which alone insisted that the fascist violence of the JVP and the state terror could only be opposed by the independent political mobilization of the working class on a socialist and internationalist program. In November 1988, in order to mobilize the independent power of the working class, it called for a united front of working-class organizations to fight both state repression and JVP fascism, as an immediate practical measure. Instead of supporting this effort, the LSSP, the Communist Party (CP), Nawa Sama Samaja Party (NSSP), and Ceylon Workers’ Congress (CWC) aligned themselves with the terror of the UNP regime, which armed them against the JVP. This betrayal aided the state in unleashing mass repression on the rural poor of the South and launching its racist war against the oppressed Tamil people.
None of these dynamics are on the historical balance sheet of those who seek to “push” the contemporary youth “to the very edges of these established frameworks.”
Today, the pseudo-left has once again emerged as a shield for the ruling class, which has endorsed the JVP/NPP as its saviour. The JVP-led NPP is using its parliamentary position not to uncover or prosecute the war crimes of the past, but to bury them. Its recent tabling and debating of the Batalanda Commission report—gathering dust for over two decades—is a cynical gesture meant to divert public attention from IMF austerity measures. The NPP is objectively poised not to challenge the military, nor the UNP, nor the interests of imperialism. It fears that any real reckoning with the crimes of 1988–90 will expose not only the state, but the politics of the JVP itself.
The working class and rural poor must reject the “common guilt” thesis advanced in Rani and promoted by figures like Weerasinghe. They must demand justice based not on emotional reconciliation, but on historical truth and political accountability7.
Neither of these are possible within the capitalist state. It requires the building of a revolutionary socialist movement of the working class to finally break the grip of imperialism, overturn the legacy of terror, and unify the oppressed—Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim—on the basis of a common struggle against exploitation.
The film’s thesis, and Weerasinghe’s article by extension, constitute an aestheticized historical falsification, a rebranding of a reactionary historical revisionism in the garb of “critical reflection.” The function of art, if it is to be progressive, is not to obscure these truths but to clarify them. Rani fails in this most fundamental task. It replaces history with impressionism, class analysis with pseudo-science, and revolutionary clarity with reactionary confusion.
Anidda, February 2, 2025, A discussion with Ashoka Handagama by Upali Amarasinghe, p19. ↩︎
‘[A]ntisemitism moved many thousands of “ordinary” Germans—and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned—to slaughter Jews. Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity.’ Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 9. ↩︎
