A natural death, reframed as conspiracy, triggered fifty-four church attacks within a month.

Evidence

When Gangodawila Soma passed away in December 2003 while in Russia, his followers and political opportunists claimed his death was part of a Christian conspiracy to undermine Buddhism. Although the autopsy proved the monk’s demise was due to a diabetic-related heart attack, they resorted to a poster campaign claiming he had been murdered. When the JHU’s Ellawala Medhanannanda Thera spoke at Gangodawila Soma Thera’s funeral, he reiterated that the monk did not die naturally, but was killed (apawath una nevei, apawath kala). Within a month of the cremation, fifty-four places of worship had been attacked, which helps to explain the higher number of attacks for 2003 and 2004. By some accounts, over 140 places of worship were forced to close down within four months of the monk’s death. — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist Ideology, 246

Categorization

• XREF: Exemplifies the reader’s question about what happens when a threat-belief meets rational correction: autopsy evidence was impotent against the manufactured conspiracy narrative; the manufactured enemy merely metastasized after the monk’s death.
• QUESTION: This is a vivid case of fact-correction failing against threat-hardened belief. Does the autopsy-falsified conspiracy actually strengthen the narrative among believers (backfire)?