Whether I admire western technology, for whatever reason, is irrelevant to the proposition that I made. Who ever does not admire the technology that characterizes modern life from the internal combustion engine and the telephone to electronic computers and the reading of the human genome? Keppitipola (sic) Dissave’s (honorific) conclusion is a complete non sequitur. I needed an explanation as to how a few million people in those inhospitable and distant lands of Portugal, the Netherlands and England conquered and ruled enormous territories and peoples in Asia and Africa including little Sri Lanka, when larger populations from the nearby landmass had failed. I needed an answer as to how the Sinhala managed to chase away many and large invasions from nearby southern India but not the few and small number of invaders from distant Western Europe. Now if Keppitipola (sic) Dissave argues that the south Indian invaders were incapable of ‘sheer brutality’ or the Sinhala people were incapable of ‘sheer brutality’ to explain the earlier repulsions where as the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English were, I need a better demonstration than the poetry he quotes. Evidence from history neither long past nor recent is on his side.

It is evident that we cannot learn much more out of this debate than what has followed so far. Therefore, I withdraw from it.

However, let me object to the use of the term ‘brutality’ either to technology or to those who use them. Brutes neither devise technology nor use it in the way humans do to destroy brutes and men. Brutes ‘fight’ to secure food and mates. The ‘fight for territory’ is a surrogate for those. It is humans who devised gas chambers to kill millions of people, it is humans who built nuclear bombs to drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is humans who invented forms of torture against those who dissented from them whether on account of religion (Which brute burnt non-believers at the stake?) or of politics, it is humans who dropped napalm on large populations and it is humans who sent millions to death with unwise leaps forward. It is of course the same advances in technology by humans that made these horrors feasible. Yet this behaviour is ascribed to brutes. It is utterly wrong. It is entirely human! Be fair to brutes.