Skarsgård’s comments about Bergman came up in the context of von Trier, “Why is one director persona non grata and another not?” And it’s also important to recognize the full context that Bergman’s Nazi sympathies in his youth are something he strongly turned against.

The director also acknowledged his support for Nazism in his own 1987 memoir, “The Magic Lantern,” where he wrote, “For many years, I was on Hitler’s side, delighted by his success and saddened by his defeats.”

This contradiction reveals a disturbing pattern of selective enforcement showing who may express solidarity and whose suffering merits acknowledgment — essential reading — ‘Sri Lanka’s Selective Solidarities’ by Thiruni Kelegama @jamhoor.org

The tactics are structurally identical: land seizure, demographic engineering, militarised control, and cultural erasure—the very practices denounced in Palestine—are actively deployed against Tamil communities in Sri Lanka’s North and East.

The tactics are structurally identical: land seizure, demographic engineering, militarised control, and cultural erasure—the very practices denounced in Palestine—are actively deployed against Tamil communities in Sri Lanka’s North and East

The plaque lists his accomplishments: from the so-called “Indian Mutiny” and the “Umbeyla Campaign” to the “Abyssinia Expedition,” the “Lushai Rising,” and assorted colonial adventures across Afghanistan, Burma, and South Africa.

Within hours, a Sinhalese mob attacked the protestors as police stood by. My uncle was beaten up and thrown into the Beira Lake.

Among them sat my uncle, V. N. Navaratnam—our “MP Periappa” from Chavakachcheri—protesting a law that erased Tamil as an official language: arguably the Original Sin of Sri Lanka’s post-independence history.

It’s a damning portrait of a corrosive political culture and a family driven by ambition. At its heart, the book reveals a compromised White House inner circle, and a Democratic Party in denial. A reckoning is overdue.

Extract from ‘No Space for Memory? Monuments, Memorials and the Residues of the War in Sri Lanka's North' by Lia Kent. Photograph by Kanapathipillai Kumanan.

As an act of solidarity with the war dead, missing and disappeared and their families to remember their losses, mothers cooked and collectively ate Mullivaikal kanji with their families and local communities even where bricks-and mortar memorials are and cemeteries are obstructed or destroyed.