‘Even if a coup fails, it still damages your government’: What the US can learn from Sri Lanka’s coup attempt

Indi Samarajiva: So, when I heard about it [Thursday] morning, I thought it was crazy. But also I think you could very clearly see this coming — or look, I could see this coming. I think this was really telegraphed quite far in advance.

I can show you two photographs, which are exactly the same photograph in two different situations. We had someone occupy the speaker’s chair in parliament. You had someone occupy the speaker’s chair in your Congress. It’s basically the exact same picture, except your guys are more heavily armed. Our guys were just throwing chili powder.

Exactly. So we had the exact same images, except those were our opposition MPs. Those guys were at least elected to be in parliament. So we elected our mob. You guys have a completely unruly, white supremacist, gun-wielding mob, and that’s much scarier. And of course, four people have died. [Editor’s note: As of Thursday, Jan. 8, five people have died.]

Well, I think there’s a sense of American exceptionalism. So, there’s a sense that these things can’t happen to you. Whereas all over the rest of the world, we’re kind of used to this. You guys have been inflicting all of this trauma on the world and now the chickens have, to a large degree, come home to roost. Look, when terrorists attacked on 9/11, when they attacked the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and I think the other target was either Congress or the White House, those are symbolic attacks on your centers of power. This is a symbolic attack on your center of power. So, they have attacked. They’ve breached your Congress. So, you’re under attack.

And if you keep saying, “Oh, OK, we just have to hold out for 14 days until the inauguration, or “We just have to wait for this and it’ll all go back to normal,” I think you’re not understanding where you are.

Even if a coup fails, it still damages your government. So what happened to us was the coup happened and the courts rolled it back. So, we had the elected government back and that seemed good. But that government was crippled, and then that government couldn’t respond to a terrorist threat, which is, you know, three months down the line, and then then all hell broke loose, and then it was completely unstable. And then the people who staged the coup were able to point to the chaos that they helped create and say, “Hey, you need us in.” And so that’s who’s been elected.

I think perhaps what Americans may not be understanding is that it’s not over. When you attack your center of government, when you attack Congress, even symbolically, that weakens your governance. And when governance is weak and it’s like a Pandora’s box, all sorts of other risks come out of there.

I don’t mean that the rancor is coming home to roost. I mean, that’s sort of the militarization of your society, the violence of your society. A lot of the people who would have attacked your Congress, they might have been serving in Afghanistan or Iraq, causing God knows what problems to the people there. The militarization has come to your borders. Your militarization at the edges of your society has come home to roost. And the violence of your culture, which has always been projected outward, is now falling in.

Look, I think the most valid comparison to make is that we are comparable — as in, you can learn something from someone in Sri Lanka. You can learn something from someone in Lagos, in Dhaka. So, people have been through similar experiences. And this is an exercise I think Americans don’t do enough. Because as long as you think you’re exceptional, as long as you think things can’t happen to you, then you’ll be constantly surprised and you won’t learn from other human experiences. If you can just let go of this thing that “we’re America, this can’t happen to us, this isn’t happening to us,” and you can see that it is happening to you and then you can start to learn from the world, then perhaps you can join us.