A popular monk’s rhetoric redirected community violence at new targets.

Evidence

The monk, who harbored presidential ambitions, initially built a following by advising people on mundane matters but gradually took on controversial issues, including the ethnic conflict, supposedly pro-LTTE nongovernmental organizations, and unethical conversions. Gangodawila Soma repeatedly asserted that two types of terrorism confronted Sri Lanka: LTTE terrorism and missionary terrorism. In doing so, he resorted to chauvinistic rhetoric and made the missionaries look just as villainous as the LTTE. Not surprisingly, especially in the last year of his life, his fans began attacking Christian churches just as a previous generation had attacked Tamil homes and businesses. — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist Ideology, 246

Categorization

• XREF: Evidence that manufactured-enemy substitution can be elite-driven and operationalized via charisma: the monk’s framing of ‘two terrors’ maps onto the reader’s research on how new external enemies are constructed to sustain solidarity. Parallels Buchanan’s demagogue-through-othering analysis and mass-persuasion scholarship. — connects to: A monk’s sudden death triggered waves of anti-Christian attacks. — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 247; A monk’s rhetoric conflating missionaries with the LTTE redirected nationalist violence onto Christians. — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 246

Broader Connections

• A monk’s sudden death triggered waves of anti-Christian attacks. #corroborates (0.85) — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist Ideology, 247