Application Of Ear Drops - Mercy Services: Fill & Download for Free

The Tamil genocide didn’t just commence in 2009, it was systematic throughout Sri Lanka’s post colonial rule, under the Sinhala Buddhist dominated government. 2009 was just the peak of the genocide.Short AnswerThe Sri Lankan government, lead by the Sinhala Buddhist majority, attempted to alienate the Tamil population politically and economically. They implemented a series of anti-Tamil legislation, hoping to deteriorate the influence of Tamils on the island. They condoned and acted complicit in anti-Tamil riots and violently suppressed peaceful Tamil demonstrations. The demand for equality, neglected by the state, fuelled the ambition for a separate Tamil state. The lack of respect for peaceful protests inevitably engulfed support for an armed struggle. During the war, the SLA pioneered the use of rape, torture, kidnapping, indiscriminate firing, shelling and bombings against Tamil civilians.In total, an estimate of 150,000 - 200,000 Tamil civilians were killed by the government100,000 of which were killed between March 28th - May 18th 2009 when the government packed 300,000+ Tamils in internationally recognized “NO FIRE ZONES” and were then shelled with artillery and other heavy weaponry.40,000 of those were killed on the beaches of Mullivaikal between April 26th - May 18th 2009After the war had ended, hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians were rounded up and sent to internment camps. Many Tamils would die of malnutrition, dehydration, disease and suicide. Thousands were taken for interrogation by the army only to never be seen again, as such, making Sri Lanka 2nd in the world in disappearances. After the war, Tamils are subjected to heavy militarization, “land grabs” by the state, forced implementation of Buddhist sites, intimidation, torture and arbitrary detention. The acts of genocide committed by the government has convinced many in the international community to recognize the Tamil Genocide and advocate for an international human rights tribunal against the government, something the government is strongly against for evident reasons.*Please take time to watch Sri Lanka’s Killing FieldsLong Answer(Full analysis):Post colonial anti-Tamil legislation(1948–1977)Citizenship Act(1948)After the country’s independence, the new government, dominated by the Sinhala majority Sinhalese passed the Ceylon Citizenship Only act.The Bill intended to discriminate against Indian Tamils by denying them citizenship, hence, preventing them from votingIndian Tamils made up 11.7% of the SL population in 1948 compared to 4.1% in 2019The Act specified that anyone wishing to obtain citizenship had to prove that they were, at least, 3rd generation immigrants, which was an impossible task for the majority of Indian TamilsThose who were, at least, third-generation immigrants rarely had the necessary documentation since they rarely registered births or printed birth certificates, hence, they could not prove they were citizens and were deportedAbout 5,000 Indian Tamils qualified for citizenship while over 700,000 Indian Tamils, who made up about 11% of the population, were denied citizenship and deported. The Act successfully disenfranchised plantation Tamils, and significantly dropped the voting power of the Tamil populationAmita Shastri, political science professor at the university of San Fransisco has stated:This orientation was made evident in the citizenship and franchise laws Sri Lanka passed soon after independence to exclude the plantation Tamil workers from the political nation. The actions of the Sinhalese elite led by D.S. Senanayake were loaded with an anti‐working class and ethnically divisive content that has been neglected in previous studies. The new laws distorted the pattern of political incentives, alignments and party competition in the emerging system, and systematically skewed it to favour the most traditional segment of the Sinhalese electorate. This created an intractable dynamic of ethnic outbidding between the two major Sinhalese‐dominated parties to attract the Sinhalese voting base, at the expense of the Sri Lankan Tamil minority. This directly contributed to the latter's alienation, support for secessionism, and the outbreak of ethnic violence and civil war in the 1970s and 1980sSinhala Only Act(1956)By independence, Tamils made up over 30% of government services admissions, and it’s estimated that Tamils constituted 50% of the clerical personnel of the railway, postal and customs services, 60% of all doctors, engineers and lawyers, and 40% of other labor forcesDespite Sri Lankan Tamils only making up around 15% of the populationIn the 1956 parliamentary elections, the SLFP, led and founded by Solomon Bandaranaike, campaigned on largely nationalist policies, and made the one of their key election promises. Thus, the Sinhala Only Bill was quickly enacted after the election. The bill was passed with the SLFP and the UNP supporting it, with the leftist LSSP, Communist party of SL and Tamil parties opposing itThe policy, being severely discriminatory, placed the Tamil population at a "serious disadvantage" and prevented them from attaining high positions in politics and federal servicesSinhala academic, A. M. Navaratna Bandara, states:"The Tamil-speaking people were given no option but to learn the language of the majority if they wanted to get public service employment. [...] A large number of Tamil public servants had to accept compulsory retirement because of their inability to prove proficiency in the official language [...]" The effects of these policies were dramatic as shown by the drastic drop of Tamil representation in public sector: "In 1956, 30 percent of the Ceylon administrative service, 50 percent of the clerical service, 60 percent of engineers and doctors, and 40 percent of the armed forces were Tamil. By 1970 those numbers had plummeted to 5 percent, 5 percent, 10 percent, and 1 percent, respectively."As such, most of the government positions and services in the 1960’s were virtually unavailable to Tamils, and this situation only escalated the rise of Tamil nationalismStandardization(1971)The government, lead by PM Sirimavo Bandaranaike, implemented a policy of standardization, a modern day essence affirmative action, to assist Sinhala students to gain better post-secondary educationSinhala nationalists and politicians sought to dilate Tamil presence in education and, thus, also in the professions and civil administrationFrom 1971 to 1977 , the “standardization” policy ensured that the number of students qualifying for university entrance from each language was proportionate to the number of students who sat for university entrance examination in that language. Meaning, that Tamil speaking students had to score much higher than Sinhalese speaking students to gain admission to universitiesNot only did the chances of Tamils to gain access to higher education plummet, but so did the overall process of ethnic relationsThe benefits enjoyed by Sinhalese students also meant a significant fall in the number of Tamil students within the Sri Lankan university student populace.Sri Lankan Tamils, although making up of around 15% of the population, made up 70–80% of university students in the countryTamils constituted 35% and over 45% of students in Medical schoolsThe act significantly dropped the number of Tamils enrolled in universities on the islandUniversity admissions process in 1971 was calculated considerably based on the language of said applicant. Numbers of allocations were proportional to the number of participants who sat to the examination in that language.In 1969, the Northern province, which is 94% Tamil and makes up 7% of the general population, provided 27.5 percent of the entrants to science-based courses in Sri Lankan universitiesStandardization had reduced this to 7%.However, the hardest hit population group were the Tamils in the Western provinces,Colombo and etc, which contained 26%. In 1969, the Western Province provided 67.5 percent of it to admissions to science-based courses.Standardization reduced it to 27%Sinhala historian, C.R. de Silva states:“By 1977 the issue of university admissions had become a focal point of the conflict between the government and Tamil leaders. Tamil youth, embittered by what they considered discrimination against them, formed the Tamil United Liberation Front(TULF). Many advocated the use of violence to establish a separate Tamil state of Eelam. It was an object lesson of how inept policy measures and insensitivity to minority interests can exacerbate ethnic tensions”Many Tamil youths, disfranchised by standardization, began studying aboard, working labour jobs or joining armed guerrilla movements, like the Tamil New Tigers, renamed LTTE in 1976Anti-Tamil riots1956 Gal Oya riotsDeath toll: 150 Tamil civilians and 100+ severely woundedPerpetrators: Sinhalese mobsSri Lanka’s first ethnic/anti-Tamil riotViolence took place in Colombo and Batticaloa as well, but the worst of the violence took place in Gal Oya valley, where local majority Sinhalese colonists and employees of the Gal Oya Development Board(GODB) used government vehicles, dynamite, knives and other weapons and to massacre Tamils in the areaProperties owned by Tamils, were looted and burned down. In the following days, rumours began to spread that a Sinhalese girl had been raped and made to walk naked down the street in Batticaloa by a Tamil mobThis was later proved to be false, but the rumour had already inflamed the mobs and led to further massacres and property destructionThe police ignored the violence and remained in active , but they eventually intervened and stabilized the situation.Federal Party protestors were attacked by a Sinhalese mob that was led by NLF leader KMP RajaratneThe same mob, after listening to a speech by populist Sinhalese politicians urging them to boycott Tamil business, went on a looting spree in the city, burning and looting Tamil businesses.Over 150 Tamil owned shops were looted and many people were hospitalized for their injuries1958 pogrom158–1500 Tamil civilians and some Sinhalese civilians died in the pogrom and 1000+ were severely woundedPerpetrators: Sinhalese mobsAlthough most of the victims were Tamils, some Sinhalese civilians were killed by Sinhalese mobs who attacked said Sinhala’s who provided sanctuary to TamilsPM Bandaranaike referred to the death of DA Seneviratne, Nuwara Eliya mayor, as the cause of the riots. Hence, giving the Sinhalese the notion that Tamils were responsible for the riots.This resulted in mobs laucnching acts of violence against Tamils across countryMobs would beat Tamils, burn&loot shops, rape Tamil women, and burn housesIn Kantale, Sinhalese rioters stopped buses that were entering the city and killed anyone who was unable to recite a Buddhist verseVictims who were murdered included Sinhalese Christians.In Pandura, a rumour, spread that Tamils had preceded to torture and murder a Sinhala school teacher in Batticaloa. The rumour was later proven to be false as subsequent investigations proved that there was no female Sinhala teacher from Panadura stationed in Batticaloa, but the damage had already been done. As a result, a Sinhalese mob attempted to burn down the Hindu Kovil temple. They were unable to do so, however, they forced the priest out of the temple, tied him to a tree and then preceded to burn him aliveThis incident, one of many, was one that Prabhakaran grew up hearing as a child. When hearing this for the first time, Prabhakaran asked “ why didn’t the priest hit back”. No one really had an answer to his question, however, Prabhakaran decided that he would do what the priest couldn’t, he would “hit back”Gangs roamed Colombo, looking for people who might be Tamil. The usual way to distinguish Tamils from Sinhalese was to look for men who wore shirts outside of their pants, or men with pierced ears.As such, people who could not read a Sinhala newspaper, which includes Sinhalese that were educated in English, were beaten or killed.One trick used by the gangs was to disguise themselves as policemen. They would tell Tamils to flee to the police station for their safety. Once the Tamils had left, the empty houses were looted and burned. Across the country, arson, rape, pillage and murder spread. The state police is accused of being complicit and even organizing several riotsSinhalese that protected their Tamil neighbours by using their homes as shelters had their homes burned down "had their brains strewn about".Sinhalese laborers of the Land Develop­ment and Irrigation Department (LDID) from Padaviya formed a mob, armed with guns , and began roaming the northern border areas in trucks. Though they planned on going to Anuradhapura, they took an indirect route on the Padaviya—Kebitigollewa—Vavuniya Road to outmaneuver the army, attacking any Tamils they could find on the way.Prabhakaran’s had family members and family friends who were victims of the 1958 pogrom. Listening to their stories and looking at their wounds perpetuated his belief that an armed struggle was the only optionPrabhakaran’s statement on the riot in his 1984 interview with CNN correspondent, Anita PratapThe shocking events of the 1958 racial riots had a profound impact on me when I was a schoolboy. I heard of horrifying incidents of how our people had been mercilessly and brutally put to death by Sinhala racists. Once I met a widowed mother, a friend of my family, who related to me her agonizing personal experience of this racial holocaust. During the riots a Sinhala mob attacked her house in Colombo. The rioters set fire to the house and murdered her husband. She and her children escaped with severe burn injuries. I was deeply shocked when I saw the scars on her body. I also heard stories of how young babies were roasted alive in boiling tar. When I heard such stories of cruelty I felt a deep sense of sympathy and love for my people. A great passion overwhelmed me to redeem my people from this racist system. I strongly felt that armed struggle was the only way to confront a system which employs armed might against unarmed, innocent people1977 pogrom300 Tamil civilians and some Sinhalese civilians died in the pogrom and 1000+ were severely woundedPerpetrators: Sinhalese mobsIn 1974, the major Tamil poltical parties, who’s primary goal was to represent Tamils in the North&East, joined forces under one party, the Tamil United Liberation Front(TULF)In 1976 they adopted a resolution at their party convention in Vaddukoddai, Jaffna calling for a separate state (Tamil Eelam).The Tamil districts in the 1977 election, almost unanimously, voted for TULF which gravely enraged JR Jayawardene who was convinced that TULF had links with Tamil militant groupsIt’s to note that by 1977, Tamil militant groups began orchestrating attacks against the Sri Lankan army and police forceJayawardene tried to suppress both groupsThere isn’t a universally accepted reason for the riots, but most speculate that it began with a dispute that began when four policemen entered a carnival without tickets. Apparently the policemen were inebriated and proceeded to attack those who asked for tickets. The conflict escalated and the policemen were beaten up by the public and in retaliation the police officers opened fireOthers have the view that the carnival incident was a pretext, inquiries revealing that it was conducted in an organized manner and was hence a pre-planned attack. The riot started on August 12, 1977, within less than a month of the new government taking officeOver 75,000 Tamils were victims of racial violence and were forced to relocate to parts of the northern and Eastern provincesThe events during the pogrom radicalized Tamil youths, convincing many that the TULF's strategy of using legal and constitutional means to achieve independence would never work, and armed struggle was the only to achieve equal rights and independence.The pogrom highlighted TULF's failure to provide security for the mainland Tamil population.It was only after the pogrom that TELO and the LTTE began to openly advocate for an independent Tamil Eelam Later, a TULF activist, Uma Maheswaran, would join the LTTE and would later leave to become the leader of TELO Many TULF activists began to follow in his footsteps and join various Tamil militant groups to fight for independenceWalter Schwarz wrote in Minority Rights Group Report of 1983:The trouble (in 1977) began in Jaffna, capital of the Northern province, when Sinhala policemen, believed to have been loyal to the defeated Sri Lanka Freedom Party of Mrs. Bandaranaike, acted provocatively by bursting into a Tamil carnival. In the violent altercation that followed the police opened fire and four people were killed. A wave of rioting followed, spreading quickly to the south. Among 1,500 people arrested were several well known Sinhalese extremists, accused of instigating violence against TamilsEdmund Samarakkody in Workers Vanguard (New York) stated:The outbreak in mid-August (1977) of the anti-Tamil pogrom (the third such outbreak in two decades) has brought out the reality that the Tamil minority problem in Sri Lanka has remained unresolved now for nearly half a century, leading to the emergence of a separatist movement among the Tamils. As on previous occasions, what took place recently was not Sinhalese – Tamil riots, but an anti-Tamil pogrom. Although Sinhalese were among the casualties, the large majority of those killed, maimed and seriously wounded are Tamils. The victims of the widespread looting are largely Tamils. And among those whose shops and houses were destroyed, the Tamils are the worst sufferers. Of the nearly 75,000 refugees, the very large majority were Tamils, including Indian Tamil plantation workers.Burning of the Jaffna public library(1981)Perpetrators: UNP sponsored paramilitiasThe Jaffna public library, established in 1933The library held archival material written in palm leaf manuscripts, original copies of regionally important historic documents dating back hundreds, if not thousands, of years, political history of Sri Lanka and newspapers that were published hundreds of years ago in the Jaffna Kingdom. Thus, making it the largest historical library in the Indian subcontinent, if not all of Asia, and symbolic for the Tamil peopleThe library became the pride of the local people as even researchers from India and other countries began to use it for research and academic purposesOn May 31st, May 31, 1981, TULF held a rally where which 3 Sinhala policemen were killed by Tamil militanAs a result, police and paramilitary officers began a pogrom that lasted for 3 days. TULF’s head office was destroyed alongside Jaffna MP V. Yogeswaran’s houseFour people were pulled from their homes and killed at random. Many business establishments and a local Hindu temple were also deliberately destroyed.On the night of June 1, according to many eyewitnesses, police and government-sponsored paramilitias set fire to the Jaffna public library and completely destroyed it.Over 97,000 volumes of books along with numerous culturally important and irreplaceable manuscripts were destroyed.Scrolls of historical value and the works and manuscripts of philosophers, artists and authors, including Ananda Coomaraswamy and prominent intellectual Prof. Dr. Isaac ThambiahThe destroyed articles included memoirs and works of writers and authors who contributed greatly towards sustaining the written presence of Tamil cultureThe office of the Eelanaadu, a local newspaper, was also destroyed. Statues of Tamil cultural and religious figures were either destroyed or defaced.Nancy Murray states:several high-ranking security officers and two cabinet ministers were present in the town of Jaffna, when uniformed security men and plain clothed mobs carried out organized acts of destruction.The burning of Jaffna Public Library became an example of ethnic biblioclasm and left a deep impact on Tamil people who perceived it as an attack on their identity and as a cultural genocide as the Library served as a monument to the desire for learning and culture of the people of Jaffna. The Library, then one of Asia’s biggest, contained 95,000 volumes of works relating to Tamil culture and history, including numerous culturally important and irreplaceable manuscripts. When ethnic nationalist forces engaged in book burning in Germany in the 1930s and Bosnia in the 90s, it culminated in genocides. It was part of a long genocidal process that began with the country’s independence. The Sinhalese long sought to suppress Tamil culture because they, as a majority with a minority complex, feared being dominated by Tamils and losing their identity to the larger presence of Tamil culture in the nearby south Indian state. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, who would become the country’s prime minister in 1956, campaigned on the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist platform opposing linguistic parity for Tamil, denouncing those that favoured it as traitors to the race. Portraying the Tamil demand for linguistic parity as an existential threat to the Sinhala race, he said if Tamils were granted parity they “would come to exert their dominant power over us.”UNP politician John Kotelawala warned that parity would ensure in the years to come Sinhala children will be speaking Tamil which with its prolific literature “will gain precedence and finally kill the Sinhalese language.” J.R. Jayewardene (who would later become a prime minister) expressed fear that Sinhala spoken by only three million people would suffer or go extinct altogether if the Tamil language, with its larger share of speakers in India and influence of its literature and films in the island, were granted parity of status. Political Buddhist monks became prominent during this time and argued that linguistic parity ‘would be the death-knell of the Sinhalese’*Exert from Siva E Loganathan’s answerIronically, Mahinda Rajapaksa even referred to the incident stating:Burning the Library sacred to the people of Jaffna was similar to shooting down Lord BuddhaBlack July riots(1983)The turning point of the ethnic conflict happened on July 24, 1983Charles Anthony, aka Lt Seelan, had sacrificed himself so his comrade, nicknamed Aruna, could escape, as the two were attempting to escape the pursuing Sri Lankan armyWhen Prabhakaran received news of Lt. Seelan's death, he immediately plotted to retaliate against the Sri Lankan armyHe hatched a plan to ambush a military convoy on a narrow road in Tinneveli, Jaffna.On the night of July 23, a 15 soldiers were passing through a convey in the villageMines had been laid and the LTTE were in position when the army patrol neared the site. As the SLA soldiers drew closer, a heavy explosion sent the trucks flying into the air and the LTTE soldiers immediately opened fire, killing 13 of the 15 soldiers as they scrambled out of the truckThis is would spark the 5 day massacres of the Tamil population across the countryJR Jayewardene tried to keep the funeral for the dead soldiers from turning into a large demonstration. However, his intentions would fail. The arrival of the bodies from Jaffna to Colombo on July 24 was delayed by several hours, and the funeral had to be cancelled. In the meantime, a large group of people had gathered at the army’s cemetery.As hours passed, the crowd grew more agitated and in the future hours, large scale violence would eruptThe rioting, July 24 - 29, saw thousands Tamil businesses and homes being burned, homes while fleeing Tamils were beaten, shot, or burned alive in their houses, vehicles or on the street. Many Tamil women were raped or forced to display themselves in front of heckling Sinhalese mobsRioting had spread to the Canal Bank, Grandpass, Hattewatte, Kirilapone, Kotahena, Maradana, Modera, Mutwal, Narahenpita, and Wanathamulla. Mobs armed with crow bars and kitchen knives roamed the streets, attacking and killing Tamils.In Colombo, the riots had spread to large Tamil populated areas in Wellawatte, Dehiwala, Anderson Flats, Torrington Flats, Thimbirigasyaya, Cinnamon Gardens, Kadawatha, Kelaniya, Nugegoda and Ratmalana.Violence had spread to Gampaha and Negombo as wellIn Kalutara, the TKVS stores were burned down, one owner managed to escape, but the mob threw him back into the fireThe residence of Indian high commissioner was also burned downBy the evening, virtually, all of Colombo was on fireThe mobs possessed electoral lists which enabled them to identify Tamil homes and propertyThis indicates the prior organization and cooperation by elements of the government.In some cases, the police would re-direct Tamils fleeing to refugee camps to areas controlled by riotersJR Jayewardene would later admit in a statement,"a pattern of organization and planning has been noticed in the rioting and looting that took place."The mob attacked the industrial area of Ratmalana, which contained a number of Tamil-owned factories. Jetro Garments and Tata Garments on Galle Road were completely gutted. Other factories attacked included Ponds, S-Lon, Reeves Garments, Hydo Garments, Hyluck Garments, AGM Garments, Manhattan Garments, Ploy Peck, Berec, and Mascons Asbestos. Indian-owned factories such as Kundanmals, Oxford, and Bakson Garments were not attacked, giving credence to the suggestion that the mob was deliberately going after Sri Lankan Tamil targets. Seventeen factories were destroyed in Ratmalana. Capital Maharaja a Tamil-owned company, is one of Sri Lanka's largest conglomerates. Six of their factories in Ratmalana and their headquarters in Bankshall Street were destroyed. The mob ended the day by setting fire to Tilly's Beach Hotel in Mount Lavinia.One of the most notorious incidents of the rioting took place at the Welikada Prison on 25 July37 Tamil prisoners were killed by Sinhalese prisoners using knives and clubsThe Tamil inmates were political prisoners who were arrested under treason charges while the Sinhalese prisoners were arrested for murder, rape and robberyTamil and Sinhalese prisoners were separated to prevent a large scale riotIn one incident, survivors claimed that prison officers allowed their keys to fall into the hands of Sinhalese prisoners; but at the subsequent inquest, prison officers claimed that the keys had been stolen from them.The most infamous incident in the prison massacre happened when 2 men, one being TELO militant Kuttimani Yogachandran, announced in court that they would donate their eyes in the hope that they would be grafted on to Tamils who would see the birth of Tamil Eelam, Second hand reports from Batticaloa gaol, where the survivors of the Welikada massacre are now being kept, say that Yogachandran and another man were forced to kneel and their eyes gouged out with iron bars by prisoner guards before they were killed. Kuttimani's tongue was cut out by an attacker who drank the blood and cried: "I have drunk the blood of a Tiger."The riots left:4000 Tamils dead20,000 Tamils severely wounded30,000 Tamils and Sinhalese unemployed150,000 Tamils homeless1,000,000 Tamils displacedIt’s to note however, that they were many instances, where Sinhalese civilians were using their homes as refuge and were voluntarily risking their lives to provide protection for Tamils fleeing from state-sponsored mobsAs one Sinhalese individual recalled:"I was completely shattered for months (I was actually hospitalized of exhaustion) after running around transporting my friends and unknown Tamil-speaking families to safe places. We had nearly 15 people in our house."After the riots, the LTTE went from a group of 30 members to 2000 over night. In the preceding weeks, the LTTE saw a spike in recruitment numbersOne LTTE soldier stated:LTTE was very careful in taking people. They didn't just take a bunch of people. They had studied the people, looked at their background.. they would give a person the run-around and then only take him in. After Black July, there was a marked increase in membership among all of the Tamil militant groups in Sri LankaAn example of this would be Anton Balasingham’s political aid, alias Yogi, who was forced to watch the brutal rape of his mother during the riotsHis mother was dragged out of her house and Yogi was forced to watch as Sinhalese thugs preceded to rape and beat her. Every time Yogi looked away, the thugs would beat his mother even moreAfter the 3 hour ordeal, Yogi’s mother was dead, and the Sinhala thugs had left laughing, saying “Tamil whores deserve it”Yogi would flee Colombo to arrive in Jaffna and join the LTTE the following dayIn an interview with the Daily Telegraph on 11 July 1983, about two weeks before the riots, Jayewardene expressed the state's complicity in the violence against the Tamils stating:I am not worried about the opinion of the Jaffna (Tamil) people now. Now we cannot think of them. Not about their lives or of their opinion about us. The more you put pressure in the north, the happier the Sinhala people will be here... really, if I starve the Tamils, Sinhala people will be happy...The Daily Telegraph also reported:Motorists were dragged from their cars to be stoned and beaten with sticks. Others were cut down with knives and axes. Mobs of Sinhala youth rampaged through the streets, ransacking homes, shops and offices, looting them and setting them ablaze, as they sought out members of the Tamil ethnic minority. A mob attacked a Tamil cyclist riding near Colombo's eye hospital. The cyclist was hauled from his bike, drenched with petrol and set alight. As he ran screaming down the street, the mob set on him again and hacked him down with jungle knivesMrs Eli Skarstein, back home in Stavanger, Norway, told how she and her 15 year old daughter, Kristen witnessed one massacre. 'A mini bus full of Tamils were forced to stop in front of us in Colombo', she said. A Sinhalese mob poured petrol over the bus and set it on fire. They blocked the car door and prevented the Tamils from leaving the vehicle. 'Hundreds of spectators watched as about 20 Tamils were burnt to death.' Mrs. Skarstein added: 'We can't believe the official casualty figures. Hundreds, maybe thousands, must have been killed already. The police force (which is 95% Sinhalese) did nothing to stop the mobs. There was no mercy. Women, children and old people were slaughtered. Police did nothing to stop the genocide.'An exert from William McGowan’s book, The Tragedy of Sri Lanka, statesWhile travelling on a bus when a mob laid siege to it, passengers watched as a small boy was hacked 'to limb-less death'. The bus driver was ordered to give up a Tamil. He pointed out a woman who was desperately trying to erase the mark on her forehead—called a kumkum—as the thugs bore down on her. The woman's belly was ripped open with a broken bottle and she was immolated as people clapped and danced. In another incident, two sisters, one eighteen and one eleven, were decapitated and raped, the latter 'until there was nothing left to violate and no volunteers could come forward', after which she was burned. While all this was going on, a line of Buddhist monks appeared, arms flailing, their voices raised in a delirium of exhortation, summoning the Sinhalese to put all Tamils to deathThe Economist stated:"...But for days the soldiers and policemen were not overwhelmed; they were un-engaged or, in some cases, apparently abetting the attackers. Numerous eye witnesses attest that soldiers and policemen stood by while Colombo burned."Dr. Brian Senewiratne’s post Black July statement:It has been erroneously claimed that there has been an ‘ethnic conflict’ in Sri Lanka. There has been no ethnic conflict since 1915, and that was between the Sinhalese and the Muslims. What there has been for six decades, are a series of increasingly virulent pogroms against the Tamil people by a succession of Sinhalese-dominated government, assisted by Sinhalese political opportunists and ethno-religious chauvinists, and conducted by the Sinhalese Armed Forces (99% Sinhalese), with a degeneracy of Sinhala society and its rapid descent to barbarism. These anti-Tamil pogroms have been to crush the Tamil people into submission to accept Sri Lanka as a Sinhala-Buddhist nationPaul Sieghart of the International Commission of Jurists stated in Sri Lanka: A Mounting Tragedy of Errors that:Clearly this (July 1983 attack) was no spontaneous upsurge of communal hatred among the Sinhala people – nor was it as has been suggested in some quarters, a popular response to the killing of 13 soldiers in an ambush the previous day by Tamil Tigers, which was not even reported in the newspapers until the riots began. It was a series of deliberate acts, executed in accordance with a concerted plan, conceived and organized well in advanceCanadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, recently stated:“Today, we remember the thousands of Tamil people who lost their lives and the countless others who were displaced from their homes during the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms in Sri Lanka.“Black July was a week of violent riots and horrific destruction that followed decades of unrest and rising tensions in the country. It led to a conflict that lasted 26 years, killing tens of thousands more people and leaving lasting wounds in communities across Sri Lanka.“Thanks in large part to the advocacy of Tamil-Canadians, Canada implemented a Special Measures program in 1983 to welcome more than 1,800 Tamils. We see the resiliency of Tamil-Canadians in the tremendous contributions they make to Canada every day.“I extend my deepest sympathies to all those who suffered and lost family, friends, and neighbours during Black July and the conflict that followed. Canada continues to offer its full support to those working toward meaningful justice, accountability, peace, and reconciliation in the country.”The Black July riots officially commenced the 26 year civil war as the mainland Tamil population had now openly supported the LTTE and their movement for independenceSri Lankan government massacres of Tamil civilians during the war(1983–2009)*If what happened in Sri Lankan in 2009 happened in 2019, the entire world and social media would be outragedStatistically, the Sri Lankan government is responsible for 92.5% of innocent civilian deathsThe IPKF is responsible for 5%The LTTE is responsible 2.5%Sri Lankan government and IPKF killed more civilians than LTTE soldiersThe LTTE killed more Sri Lankan and Indian soldiers than civiliansSri Lankan government atrocities against Tamil civilians(*NOTE: This is a long list so brace yourself)Inginiyakala massacre ‐ 05.06.19562. 1958 anti-Tamil pogrom3. Tamil research conference massacre ‐10.01.19744. 1977 anti-Tamil pogrom5. 1981 communal pogrom6. Burning of the Jaffna library ‐01.06.19817. 1983 Black July riots8. Thirunelveli massacre ‐ 24, 25.07.19839. Sampalthoddam massacre ‐ 198410. Chunnakam Police station massacre ‐08.01.198411. Chunnakam market massacre ‐ 28.03.198412. Mathawachchi – Rampawa ‐ September 198413. Point Pedro – Thikkam massacre ‐ 16.09.198414. Othiyamalai massacre ‐ 01.12.198415. Kumulamunai massacre ‐ 02.12.198416. Cheddikulam massacre ‐ 02.12.198417. Manalaru massacre ‐ 03.12.198418. Blood soaked Mannar ‐ 04.12.198419. Kokkilai‐Kokkuthoduvai massacre ‐ 15.12.198420. Vankalai church massacre ‐ 06.01.198621. Mulliyavalai massacre ‐ 16.01.198522. Vaddakandal massacre ‐ 30.01.198523. Puthukkidiyiruppu Iyankovilady massacre 21.04.198524. Trincomalee massacres in 198525. Valvai‐85 massacre 10.05.198526. Kumuthini Boat massacre 15.05.198527. Kiliveddi massacre in 198528. Thiriyai massacre ‐ 08.06.198529. Sampaltivu ‐ 04 to 09.08.198530. Veeramunai massacre ‐ 20.06.199031. Nilaveli massacre 16.09.198532. Piramanthanaru massacre ‐ 02.10.198533. Kanthalai‐85 massacre ‐ 09.11.198534. Muthur Kadatkaraichenai ‐ 08, 09, 10.11.198535. Periyapullumalai massacre in 198636. Kilinochchi Railway Station massacre ‐ 25.01.198637. Udumbankulam massacre ‐ 19.02.198538. Vayaloor massacre ‐ 24.08.198539. Eeddimurinchan massacre ‐ 19, 20.03.198640. Anandapuram shelling ‐ 04.06.198641. Kanthalai‐86 massacre ‐ 04, 05.06. 198642. Mandaithivu sea massacre ‐ 10.06.198643. Seruvila massacre ‐ 12.06.198644. Thambalakamam massacres ‐ 1985, 198645. Paranthan farmers massacre ‐ 28.06.198646. Peruveli refugee camp massacre ‐ 15.07.198647. Thanduvan bus massacre ‐ 17.07.198648. Mutur Manalchenai massacre ‐ 18.07. 198649. Adampan massacre ‐ 12.10.198650. Periyapandivrichchan massacre ‐ 15.10.198651. Kokkadichcholai‐87 massacre ‐ 28.01.198752. Paddithidal massacre ‐ 26.04.1987.53. Thonithiddamadu massacre ‐ 27.05.198754. Alvai temple shelling ‐ 29.05.198755. Eastern University massacre ‐ 23.05.199056. Sammanthurai massacre ‐ 10.06.199057. Xavierpuram massacre ‐ 07.08.199058. Siththandy massacre ‐ 20, 27.07.199059. Paranthan junction massacre ‐ 24.07.199060. Poththuvil massacre ‐ 30.07.199061. Tiraikerny massacre ‐ 06.08.199062. Kalmunai massacre ‐ 11.08.199063. Thuranilavani massacre ‐ 12.08.199064. Eravur hospital massacre ‐ 12.08.199065. Koraveli massacre 14.08.199066. Nelliyadi market bombing ‐ 29.08.199067. Eravur massacre ‐ 10.10.199068. Saththurukkondan massacre ‐ 09.09.199069. Natpiddymunai massacre ‐ 10.09.199070. Vantharamullai‐90 massacre ‐ 05, 23,09,199071. Mandaithivu disappearances ‐ 23.08.1990, 25.09.199072. Oddisuddan bombing ‐ 27.11.199073. Puthukkudiyiruppu junction bombing - 24.7. 199074. Vankalai massacre ‐ 17.02.199175. Vaddakkachchi bombing ‐ 28.02.199176. Vantharumoolai ‐ 09.06.199177. Kokkadichcholai‐91 massacre ‐ 12.06.199178. Pullumalai massacre ‐ 1983‐199079. Kinniyadi massacre ‐ 12.07.199180. Akkarayan hospital massacre ‐ 15.07.199781. Uruthrapuram bombing ‐ 04.02.199182. Karapolla‐Muthgalla massacre ‐ 29.04.199283. Vattrapalai shelling ‐ 18.05.199284. Thellipalai temple bombing ‐ 30.05.19985. Mailanthai massacre ‐ 09.08.199286. Kilali massacre ‐1992, 199387. Maaththalan bombing ‐ 18.09.199388. Chavakachcheri‐Sangaththanai bombing ‐ 28.09.199389. Kokuvil temple bombing ‐ 29.09.199390. Kurunagar church bombing ‐ 13.11.199391. Chundikulam‐94 massacre ‐ 18.02.199492. Navali church massacre ‐ 09.07.199593. Nagarkovil bombing ‐ 22.05.199594. Chemmani mass graves in 199695. Kilinochchi town massacre ‐ 1996‐199896. Kumarapuram massacre ‐ 11.02.199697. Nachchikuda strafing ‐ 16.03.199698. Thambirai market bombing ‐ 17.05.199699. Mallavi bombing ‐ 24.07.1996100. Kaithady Krishanthi massacre ‐ 07.09.1996101. Pannankandy massacre ‐ 05.07.1997102. Konavil bombing ‐ 27.09.1996103. Vavunikulam massacre ‐ 26‐09‐1996, 15‐08‐1997104. Mullivaikal bombing ‐ 13.05.1997105. Mankulam shelling ‐ 08.06.1997106. Thampalakamam‐98 massacre ‐ 01.02.1998107. Old Vaddakachchi bombing ‐ 26.03.1998108. Suthanthirapuram massacre ‐ 10.06.1998109. Visuvamadhu shelling ‐ 25.11.1998110. Chundikulam‐98 bombing 02.12.1998111. Manthuvil bombing ‐ 15.09.1999112. Palinagar bombing and shelling ‐ 03.09.1999113. Madhu church massacre ‐ 20.11.1999 .114. Mirusuvil massacre ‐ 19.12.2000115. Pesalai housing scheme massacre – 23 December 2005116. Trincomalee students massacre – 2 January 2006117. Manipay family massacre – 24 January 2006118. TRO employees disappearance –29 January 2006119. Trincomalee riots – 12 April 2006120. Puthoor massacre – 18 April 2006121. Muthur bombing – 25 April 2006122. Uthayan Daily Press Office attack – 2 May 2006123. Nelliyadi massacre – 4 May 2006124. Manthuvil Temple massacre – 6 May 2006125. Allaipiddy massacre – 13 May 2006126. Vadamunai pressure mine – 7 June 2006127. Vankalai family massacre – 8 June 2006128. Kaithady mass grave – 6,7,8 June 2006129. Pesalai church massacre – 17 June 2006130. Action Faim INGO staff massacre – 5 August 2006131.Nedunkerni ambulance claymore – 8 August 2006132. Eastern bombing and shelling – August - December 2006133. Allaipiddy shelling - 13 August 2006134. Senchcholai bombing – 14 August 2006135. Pottuvil massacre – 17 September 2006136. PTK bombing - 16 October 2006137. Kilinochchi hospital precicnts bombing – 2 November 2006138. Vavuniya Agriculture School massacre – 18 November 2006139. Padahuthurai bombing – 2 January 2007140. Silavathurai claymore attack – 2 September 2007141. Periyamadu shelling – 25 October 2007142. Tharmapuram bombing – 25 November 2007143. Iyankulam claymore attack – 27 November 2007144. Madhu school bus bombing - 29 January 2008145. Kiranchi bombing – 22 February 2008146. Murukandy claymore attack – 23 May 2008147. Nahathambiran temple pilgrim claymore attack148. PTK bombing – 15 June 2008149. Mullaitivu petrol station and bus depot bombing - 2 January 2009150. Thevipuram and Vaddakachchi shelling - 8 January 2009151. Tharmapuram Hospital shelling - 8 January 2009152. Visuamadu shelling - 17-20 January 2009153. Suthanthirapuram, Thevipuram, Udayarkattu and Vallipuram shelling - 20 January 2009154. Vallipuram Hospital shelling - 22 January 2009155. Suthanthirapuram shelling - 24 January 2009156. Suthanthirapuram and Udayarkattu shelling - 26 January 2009157. Puthukkudiyiruppu shelling - 26-31 January 2009158. Udayaarkaddu Hospital shelling - 26 January 2009159. Puthukkudiyiruppu Hospital shelling - 1-3 February 2009160. Suthanthirapuram shelling - 3 February 2009161. Ponnambalam Memorial Hospital bombing - 5-6 February 2009162. Mahtalan, Moongilaru, Suthanthirapuram, Thevipuram, Udayarkattu and Vallipuram shelling - 6 February 2009163. Puthukkudiyiruppu shelling - 7 February 2009164. Putumattalan shelling - 7 February 2009165. Suthanthirapuram shelling - 7 February 2009166. Devipuram shelling - 9 February 2009167. Pokkanai bombing - 9 February 2009168. Mattalan shelling - 9 February 2009169. Mattalan, Thevipuram and Vallipuram shelling - 11-12 February 2009170. Iranaipalai shelling - 13 February 2009171. Puthukkudiyiruppu Hospital shelling - 13 February 2009172. Thevipuram and Vallipuram shelling - 14 February 2009173. Mullivaikkal and Putumattalan bombing and shelling - 15 February 2009174. Valayanmadam shelling - 15 February 2009175. Mattalan shelling - 16 February 2009176. Valayanmadam shelling - 17 February 2009177. Ampalavanpokkanai, Idaikdu and Puthukkudiyiruppu shelling - 18 February 2009178. Valayanmadam bombing - 19 February 2009179. Ananthapuram, Iranaipalai, Mullivaikkal and Puthukkudiyiruppu shelling - 19 February 2009180. Valayanmadam shelling - 20 February 2009181. Ananthapuram, Iranaipalai, Pokkanai, Puthukkudiyiruppu and Valayanmadam shelling - 20 February 2009182. Ampalavanpokkanai, Mattalan, Mullivaikkal, Pokkanai and Valayanmadam shelling - 21 February 2009183. Ananthapuram and Iranaipalai shelling - 21 February 2009184. Iranaipalai shelling - 23 February 2009185. Puthukkudiyiruppu bombing and shelling - 25-26 February 2009186. Ampalavakanai shelling - 4 March 2009187. Mattalan and Valayanmadam shelling - 5 - 7 March 2009188. No Fire Zone shelling- 12 March - May 18 2009189. Mattalan, Mullivaikkal and Pokkanai shelling - 13 March 2009190. Valayanmadam bombing - 17 March 2009191. Valayanmadam shelling - 20 March 2009192. Mullivaikkal, Putumattalan and Valayanmadam shelling - 2 March 2009193. Pokkanai shelling - 7 - 19 April 2009194. Pokkanai shelling - April 2009195. Valayanmadam makeshift hospital bombing - 21 April 2009196. Valayanmadam shelling - 23 April 2009197. Mullivaikal massacres - 23 April - May 18 2009*Please read the following descriptions of the details and victims of each massacre through the links : http://www.nesohr.org/files/Lest... http://www.nesohr.org/files/Lest...*Please take the time to watch Channel 4’s “No Fire Zones: Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields”*Every Tamizhan and political activist should watch this documentaryMullivaikal Genocide reportsBruce Fein, counsel for TAG, wroteI am writing to urge you to open investigations under the Rome Statute of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lankan Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Sri Lankan presidential adviser and Member of Parliament, Basil Rajapaksa, and Sri Lankan Army Commander Sarath Fonseka.The quartet should be investigated for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide of Sri Lankan civilian Tamils unconnected with the conflict between the government and the LTTE.A US State Department report noted a source inside the No Fire Zone as stating the Sri Lankan military was:“engaged in daily shelling and bombing of the NFZ, killing an estimated minimum of 100 people per day”The US State Department also stated that,“One shell landed in front of the admission ward, killing 26 people instantaneously.”“Among the casualties was the Administrative Officer of Mullaittivu Regional Director of Health Services (RDHS), who was killed while arranging a patient’s admission to the hospital.”“A witness at the hospital said that the shelling came from the direction of Iraddayvaikkal, which GSL forces had recently captured. Another source said that in addition to the 49 killed, scores of others were wounded, and he expected the death toll to rise. Shells were still hitting the area hours later, including one that landed about 150 yards from the hospital.”“the smaller NFZ unilaterally declared by the GSL continued to come under attack.”"An organization’s sources expressed their belief that the GSL was deliberately preventing delivery of medicine to the NFZ and reported that ―over the last week, at least 20 people have died due to starvation and lack of medication"A local source reported that the remaining hospital facilities were continually hit by SLA shelling, even though their locations had been carefully reported to the government.“An organization reported that shipments of food and medicine to the NFZ were grossly insufficient over the prior month and that the GSL reportedly delayed or denied timely shipment of life-saving medicines as well as chlorine tablets. A source in the NFZ reported that patients were brought to the hospital for fainting attacks attributed to their lack of food.”“Shortly thereafter the hospital was attacked, killing four or five people including a doctor and wounding more than 30. Several sources informed HRW that each time a hospital was established in a new location, GPS coordinates of the facility were transmitted to the Sri Lankan government to ensure that the facility would be protected from military attack. Witnesses said that on several occasions, attacks occurred on the day after the coordinates had been transmitted.”“Mothers were crying at the hospital and asking for milk powder. They had not eaten and were unable to feed their children, but the hospital did not have milk powder in stock.”Jacques de Maio, the ICRC head of operations for South Asia, in Geneva said, "not all the wounded could be evacuated today, and it is of the utmost importance that more evacuations take place over the coming days"."The food and medical supplies that have been delivered remain insufficient to cover the basic needs of the people there."A leaked US embassy cable notes,The Embassy has credible information that the Sri Lankan Air Force conducted an air strike south of the civilian safe zone yesterday afternoon, May 10."The Foreign Ministers of the UK, France, Austria and Costa Rica, as well as the U.S. and Mexico all strongly supported SC action, with Russian FM Lavrov on the defensive. Lavrov said the situation in Sri Lanka is a humanitarian disaster, but not a threat to peace and security. He said other fora in the UN were better suited to address this issue. He added that there were plenty of similar instances when the Security Council did not act. China said that the Security Council's informal meetings on Sri Lanka had made a difference.Ambassador Rice disagreed, and said the meetings had not yet made a difference; displaced persons were not receiving help, and the shelling continued despite government assurances to the contrary. On the margins of the meeting, the French said they intend to bring Sri Lanka to the Security Council this week, and would push for a product."Steve Crawshaw of Human Rights Watch commented,“If the Security Council stays silent on this issue any longer, it will be a failure of historic proportions… It is already late, but lives can still be saved”.In a statement, the Tamil National Alliance(TNA) stated,“there is genocide taking place in Vanni; the entire international community is being silent; we don’t want just statements of condemnations and pledges without any action; the killings of civilians must immediately be stopped; this is our urgent request”.“The use by the Sri Lankan State of internationally banned weapons, such as cluster bombs and chemical weapons, has been a characteristic feature of the current phase of the war being waged against the Tamil people.”“The Tamil people in the island of Sri Lanka are clearly being subjected to Genocide.”OISL statements:“A senior United Nations official said they were amongst the worst cases of malnutrition he had ever seen”.“a shell landed near a tent accommodating hospital staff and volunteers, killing a nursing assistant and causing serious burns to six others”.“At least two witnesses indicated that at that time, patients were being brought in with unusual burns, one of them describing the different parts of the body of the patients being blackened, with skin like “black charcoal”.”“Witness testimonies and other documentation refer to many dying of starvation, exhaustion or lack of medical care in addition to those killed by shelling and shooting”.“It remains to be investigated how many people - particularly the most vulnerable such as the elderly and children - died as a result of lack of access to food and medical care.”“One of the children who was 18 months old was suffering severe lethargy, she could not stand up or walk and had to be carried all the time. Even though we favoured the children with food, they showed signs of muscle wastage in their legs, they had distended stomachs and their ribs where showing through their skin where the normal layer of fat in a child of this age had disappeared.”“Cluster munitions release bomblets over a wide area above a target that explode on impact. However, indirect fire munitions may also be configured to explode into fragments overhead. OISL believes that given the persistent nature of the allegations of cluster munitions, further investigation needs to be carried out to determine whether or not they were used.”“Firing from the SLA would pass over the LTTE front line “and impact on the civilians behind it”.”“He said that everyone was squeezed into a small piece of land and practically each time a shell fell, people would be injured and killed. Another witness said he saw nine people being killed when a shell hit a mango tree by a well where they had gathered. One saw a woman killed when a shell hit her bunker… she had a sewing machine and used to make cloth bags to fill with sand for the bunker. “Often, people fled when family members were killed – they had no time to mourn or bury the dead…” Another witness described seeing more than a 100 dead bodies, including children, near his bunker.”“The SLA force now confronting the LTTE was probably in excess of 50,000 soldiers, with significant heavy weapons capability and air supremacy… The SLA was on one side of a large lagoon, the LTTE on the other, the civilians being at some distance behind the LTTE.“Between 8 and 12 May the facility was shelled on several occasions as the NFZ3 came under intense daily bombardment by SLA artillery, the air force and the navy.”“The U.N. has consistently warned against the bloodbath scenario as we’ve watched the steady increase in civilian deaths over the last few months... The large-scale killing of civilians over the weekend, including the deaths of more than 100 children, shows that that bloodbath has become a reality.”“Likewise, while OISL received allegations of the use of white phosphorous, and witnesses described such incidents, particularly in the last few weeks of the conflict where bombs caused intense burning and blackened skin, it was not able to gather enough information to confirm that white phosphorous was used. OISL therefore believes that these allegations should also be investigated further.”Human Rights Watch reported two witness testimonies from the day."K. Kanaga," a 35-year-old woman whose name is withheld for security reasons, said that around 7 p.m. on May 9, she and 15 others were hiding in a bunker that they had built under a tractor when a shell struck the tractor. "If it hadn't been for the tractor, we would have all been dead," she said. About eight to 10 shells struck the immediate area, which was populated with tents and improvised bunkers. Kanaga's 45-year-old cousin was staying in a tent nearby; she never reached the bunker and was killed in the attack. "Many other people were injured as well, but I don't know how many," Kanaga said. "I could hear their screams.""R. Raman," 29, said that he and his family had been hiding in their bunker in Mullaivaikal - a dug-out trench without any cover - for several days. "We were being attacked from all sides," he said. "My wife and I only left the bunker to get food and water for our three children."Early in the morning on May 9, a shell struck one of the tents closeby, killing Raman's 15-year-old nephew and wounding his nephew's older brother and sister. Raman believes that the shell came from Sri Lankan army positions and may have been targeting LTTE forces that were deployed in the jungle about 100 meters away. Several shells struck the tented area inhabited by displaced civilians.Catholic Priest Father Francis Joseph writes to the Pope from inside the No Fire Zone, calling on the Church to break its silence on the massacre of Tamils. The father, who was later detained by Sri Lankan security forces after passing through a military checkpoint in May 2009, has not been seen since and is one of the 12,000 Tamils who have gone missing under government custodyExtracts of his letter are below.Last night’s toll of the dead is 3318 and of the injured more than 4000. It was a barrage of artillery, mortar, multi-barrel shelling and cluster bombs…The cries and woes of agony of babies and children, the women and the elderly fill the air that was polluted by poisonous and unhealthy gases…I deem it my duty to point my finger at the Church for its silence while some of the countries like USA, UK, France and some of the European Union countries and others, even the UN have voiced their dismay at the way the Sri Lankan Government is conducting a war to annihilate the Tamils…Let it be known that under the guise of eradicating terrorism, the Sri Lankan Government is waging the war to annihilate the Tamil nation. It is a genocidal war.Tamil Genocide by Professor Francis BoyleProf Francis Boyle, a Harvard law school graduate and a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law, writes that "since the outset of this latest crisis in January, the GOSL has exterminated about 7000 Tamils in Vanni, certainly a "substantial part" of the Tamil population in Vanni and Sri Lanka.”“If not stopped now, the GOSL's toll of genocide against the Tamils could far exceed the recent horrors of Srebrenica.""A generation ago the world turned away from the Nazi genocide against the Jews--and lived to regret it. Humanity is at a similar crossroads today.”An exert from his book:These Nazi style concentration camps that the Sri Lankan government is now forcibly imposing on at least 300,000 Tamil civilians constitutes acts of genocide within the meaning of Article II(c) of the 1948 Genocide Convention, to which Sri Lanka is a contracting party.United Nations's Secretary- General's advisory panelThe UN released a 215 pages report on the human rights abuses during the war and states:The Sri Lankan military used large-scale and widespread shelling causing large numbers of civilian deaths. This constituted persecution of the population of the Vanni.The Sri Lankan government tried to intimidate and silence the media and other critics of the war using a variety of threats and actions, including the use of white vans to abduct and to make people disappear.The Sri Lankan military shelled on a large scale the three Safe Zones where it had encouraged the civilian population to concentrate. It did this even after saying it would cease using heavy weapons.The Sri Lankan military shelled the UN hub, food distribution lines and Red Cross ships coming to rescue the wounded and their relatives. It did this despite having intelligence as well as notifications by the UN, Red Cross and others.Most of the civilian casualties were caused by Sri Lankan military shelling.The Sri Lankan military systematically shelled hospitals on the frontlines. All hospitals in the Vanni were hit by mortars and artillery, sometimes repeatedly, despite the Sri Lankan military knowing their locations.The Sri Lankan government systematically deprived civilians in the conflict zone of humanitarian aid, in the form of food and medical supplies, adding to their suffering. The government deliberately underestimated the number of civilians in order to deprive them of humanitarian aid.Tens of thousands of civilians were killed between January and May 2009. Many died anonymously in the final days.The Sri Lankan government subjected the civilians who managed to escape the conflict zone to further deprivation and suffering.Screening for Tamil Tigers took place without any transparency or external scrutiny. Some of those separated by the screening were summarily executed whilst women were raped. Others simply disappearedUS Congress report in October 2009 reported:“Majority of shelling into the Safe Zone was from Sri Lankan government forces; the government forces carried out shelling during a 48-hour "ceasefire"; the government forces unlawfully killed captives and combatants seeking to surrender, including senior Tamil Tigers; the government forces and paramilitary groups abducted and then killed Tamil civilians, particularly children and young men; there was an acute shortage of food, medicine and clean water despite government assurances that it would supply sufficient amounts”Between January 14–16 2010, the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal reported that:“The tribunal found numerous instances of human rights violations committed by the Sri Lankan government. Violations between 2006 (end of the ceasefire) and 2009 (end of the war) included: bombing civilian objectives like hospitals, schools and other non-military targets; bombing government-proclaimed 'safety zones' or 'no fire zones'; withholding of food, water, and health facilities in war zones; use of heavy weaponry, banned weapons and air-raids; using food and medicine as a weapon of war; mistreatment, torture and execution of captured or surrendered Tamil Tiger combatants, officials and supporters; torture; rape and sexual violence against women; deportations and forcible transfer of individuals and families; and desecration of the dead”“Violations committed in the IDP camps included: shooting of Tamil citizens and Tamil Tiger supporters; forced disappearances; rape; malnutrition; and lack of medical supplies”“ There was also evidence of forced "disappearances" of targeted individuals from the Tamil population during the ceasefire (2002–2006)”In May 2010, the International Crisis Group reported, with vasts amounts of evidence including numerous reliable eyewitness statements, hundreds of photographs, video, satellite images, electronic communications and documents from multiple credible sources. The report concluded that war crimes were committed by the Sri Lankan armed forces displaying:The report found credible evidence of intentional shelling of civilians by the Sri Lankan armed forces; intentional shelling of hospitals by the Sri Lankan armed forces; intentional shelling of humanitarian operations by the Sri Lankan armed forces; deliberate obstruction of food and medical treatment for the civilian population by the Sri Lankan armed forcesThe report found evidence that suggested that during 2009 tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were killed, countless wounded and hundreds of thousands deprived of basic food and medical care which resulted in further, unnecessary deaths.The report suggested that the actions of some members of the international community produced conditions which allowed war crimes to be committedIn January 2011 the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, a German human rights group, sent a dossier detailing alleged war crimes committed by the 57 Division to the German Federal Foreign office:The ECCHR followed the military offensives as described by the Sri Lankan military, examined reports produced by the Sri Lankan government and NGOs, and talked to eyewitnesses present in the conflict area. The dossier concluded that many violations of international law were committed by the Sri Lankan militaryThe dossier states that the senior military and civilian leaders were responsible for these crimesEvidence for government war crimes range from a variety of sources such as:Satellite imageryA number of independent organizations have published an analysis of satellite images of “NO FIRE ZONES” showing heavy damage that could only have been caused by shelling and aerial bombardment. These contradict the Sri Lankan government’s claim that its forces had not used heavy weaponry.A confidential UN report dated 26 April 2009 comparing UNOSAT images of the “NO FIRE ZONES” taken between 5 February 2009 and 19 April 2009 was leaked to the media. The images showed numerous craters caused by shelling.The main finding of the report was that "there are new indications of building destruction and damages resulting from shelling and possible air-strikes".The report found that 60 main buildings had been destroyed to date in the “NO FIRE ZONES” but this excluded temporary structures erected by the IDPs as it was not possible to identify damage to these using satellite images. Over 5,000 IDP shelters had also been relocated during April 2009 due the shelling and bombardment. There was evidence of hundreds of craters and heavy damage to buildings outside the Safe Zone. The report concluded that damage estimates were a minimum and that the "actual damages are likely to be greater". The accuracy of some of the damage suggested that it could only have been done by air-dropped bombs. Although the report does not apportion blame, given that Tamil Tigers' air wing had been destroyed in early 2009, this damage could only have been caused by the SLAF.After being confronted with the UN satellite images during an interview with Al Jazeera’s Sri Lankan foreign secretary Palitha Kohona admitted that the Sri Lankan armed forces had carried out shelling and air raids in the “NO FIRE ZONES”.This contradicted the statements by the Sri Lankan government and President Rajapaksa, and an earlier statement by Kohona himself, that there was no shelling by the Sri Lankan armed forces in the “NO FIRE ZONES”.Following a request from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch the American Association for the Advancement of Science compared commercial high-resolution satellite images of the “ NO FIRE ZONES” taken on 6 May 2009 and 10 May 2009 to evaluate the impact of heavy fighting on 9/10 May. They found evidence of significant removal of IDP shelters, artillery and mortar emplacements, destroyed permanent structures, bomb shell impact craters and 1,346 individual graves. By calculating the trajectory of the shells which caused the craters the AAAS was able to conclude that the shells came from Sri Lankan army territory.US government satellites had been monitoring the war zone secretly. In April 2009 the US state department released two satellite images of the “NO FIRE ZONES” showing 100,000 civilians trapped in 8-square-mile (21 km) area.The State Department report to Congress (above) included a number of images taken by US government satellites. The images showed that Puthukkudiyiruppu (PTK) Hospital had been heavily damaged between 28 January 2009 and 16 March 2009.VideosAmateur videos, taken by civilians and SLA soldiers, detailed war crimes committed by government forces during the final stages of the warVideos have been used and seen as concrete evidence of human rights abuses and have been displayed in documentaries such as “No Fire Zones: Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields”All of the videos have been authenticated by the UNEyewitness accounts and statements by opposing leaders and civiliansOn 18 May 2010 Channel 4 news broadcast interviews with two people who claimed they were Sri Lankan soldiers and who made the allegation that they had been given orders from "the top" to summarily execute all ethnic Tamils, civilians as well as fighters. A senior commander claimed "the order would have been to kill everybody and finish them off..It is clear that such orders were...from the top". Sri Lankan Defence Secretary Gothabaya Rajapaska brother, was said to have given direct orders to army commanders at the battle front. It was also claimed in the story that Prabhakaran’s 13-year-old son Balachandran was interrogated by the Sri Lankan military before being executed. A front line soldier said "our commander ordered us to kill everyone. We killed everyone". The soldier claimed that the Tamils were tortured before being executed. Numerous photos taken by Sri Lankan soldiers showing dead bodies and Tamil prisoners were also shown in the broadcast. No audio of the actual commander or the front line soldier making the claims were aired to protect their identity, a standard practice.Civilians reported numerous signs of abuse in reports to journalists and aid workers which have been displayed in written reports, news articles, documentaries and short clipsEyewitness accounts from SLA soldiersIn 2012, Ravindra Watudura Bandanage, a former frontline soldier of the army’s 58th division, admitted that the SLA tortured Tamil civilians during the final stages of the war. Bandanage also admitted to being ordered to place a bomb at the home of MK Shivajilingam, a Tamil MP in parliament. During this time, Shivajilingam was an outspoken critic of the government and was aligned with the opposition, TNA. Bandanage refused to go through with any of these orders and admitted to seeing members of the Sri Lankan army torturing, beating and raping Tamil civilians.8 stages of the Tamil Genocide*No Fire Zones, 2009*Sri Lankan internment camps, 2009CLASSIFICATION: “Tamil vs Sinhalese”. Anti-Tamil riots and legislation sponsored and passed by the government, giving leverage to the Sinhalese majority while alienating the Tamil minority, exemplifies their pro Sinhalese attitude and “us vs Tamils” mentality. An example of this would be the Citizenship Act(1948), Sinhala Only Act(1956), Standardization(1971) and the distribution of Tamil voting addresses and information, given to Sinhalese mobs to systematically locate and eliminate innocent Tamils across the country during the Black July Riots(1983). The Citizenship Act can also be compared to Hitler’s Nuremberg laws.SYMBOLIZATION: Classifying Tamils as “terrorists”, “LTTE supporters”, and “Chola invaders”, hence, distinguishing them as outsiders and non-natives of the island. The government had also banned the importation of media that would prove otherwise or go against their propaganda.DEHUMANIZATION: Denying Tamils the right to equality during the country’s infancy. The classification of Tamils as “terrorists” dehumanizing them as individuals. The mass display of dead Tamils on Sri Lankan state-media, the systemic sexual and physical torture of Tamils, the continues bombing and shelling of Tamil owned hospitals, schools, orphanages and etc depicts them “animals” by the state.ORGANIZATION: The government has four options to turn Sri Lanka into a Sinhala-Buddhist state During the Black July riots, Sinhalese mobs were aided and lead by the states police force and abetted by the government. In 2009, the government transported 300,000 Tamil civilians to their sanctioned “NO FIRE ZONES” and then proceed to fire on them with artillery and other heavy weaponry. Then again, after the war had ended, the government packed 300,000 Tamils in concentration camps, many of each, died of malnutrition, dehydration, disease and suicide. The attempt toThe U.N. continues to impose a war crimes tribunal against the Sri Lankan government despite their continuous refusal.5. POLARIZATION: The Sri Lankan government began to arrest moderate Sinhala journalists who contradicted their propaganda, most notable being Lasantha Wickremetunga. The army would arbitrarily detain Tamils across the country, would subject them to brutal methods of torture, would threaten Tamil MP’s and would implement widespread polarizing propaganda against the Tamil population in the Vanni.6. PREPARATION: Tamils are identified and separated into groups and then transported to various No Fire Zones and internment camps.7. Extermination: The government would precede to shell Tamil civilians in all 3 No Fire Zones with artillery, other heavy weaponry and would block humanitarian aid for the internment camps. Tamils in state controlled camps would die of malnutrition, dehydration, disease and suicide, many Tamils were taken by the army for questioning and, as of today, have never been seen since. 100,000 Tamils were killed by the state in a span of 3 months and thousands more perished from the inhumane conditions in the internment camps8. Denial: The government’s continues to deny these claims. Despite international calls for a UN run human rights tribunal against the government, the government has insisted that they conduct their own investigation. Tamil victims are continuously intimidated by the police force and military, they are victims of “land-grabs” by the ongoing militarization of Tamil areas. “Sinhalanisation” and lack of accountability for war crimes continue to encompass the Tamil community. State controlled media continues to display propaganda denying war crimes while Sri Lankan diplomats attempt to defend the government’s actions and human rights hearings and blame the crimes on the LTTE or state that the victims were all LTTE soldiers.International recognition(Tamil Genocide Remembrance Day)On May 18th, Tamils worlwide remember the innocent civilians who were killed by government shelling in No Fire Zones and other areas during the final stages of the Sri Lankan civil warThe event is commemorated by many politiciansThe cities of Toronto and Brampton have officially declared May 18th as “Tamil Genocide Rememberance Day”The provincial government of Ontario has unanimously voted in favour of passing the implementation of Bill-104, “Tamil Genocide Education Week(May 11 –18)”Sri Lanka continues to defy the United Nations’ call for a international war crimes investigations, they have even appointed Shavendra Silva, Sri Lankan army commander who is accused of human rights abuses against the Tamil population, as the head of the army.Sources:Ceylon Citizenship Act - WikipediaSinhala Only Act - WikipediaPolicy of standardisation - Wikipedia1956 Ceylonese riots - Wikipedia1958 anti-Tamil pogrom - Wikipedia1977 anti-Tamil pogrom - WikipediaBlack July - WikipediaBlack July: Remembering the 1983 Riots in Sri Lankahttp://www.nesohr.org/files/Lest...http://www.nesohr.org/files/Lest...10 years today - A massacre in MullivaikkalSri Lanka Massacred Tens of Thousands of Tamils While the World Looked Away36 years of burn wounds: The Jaffna LibraryThe Burning of the Jaffna Public Library by the Police in 1981 – 1Burning of Jaffna Public Library - WikipediaThe Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka

I hold what may be the only PhD specifically in psychohistory: Psychohistory: Emergence, Theory and Applications, granted by the University of Liverpool in 2004, so I hope you may consider me sufficiently qualified to answer your question. Psychohistory is alive and kicking all right, although it hasn’t really learnt yet to walk properly. To answer your question in full, I’ll begin by asking your and the general reader’s indulgence and telling you something about how I came to the field.I’ve written on Quora here before on psychohistory - about its ‘mythic’ side (Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy), and its ‘real’ side - the International Psychohistorical Association (IPA) based in Manhattan, the ‘real life’ analogue to Asimov’s Trantor - fictional capital of the Foundation’s First Galactic Empire. The IPA however, remains focussed on psychoanalytic approaches to psychohistory rather than statistical. I could say that I began working in the mythic realm and gradually moved in the direction of more rigorous, scientific (but not ’Seldonian’) methodologies. Psychohistory is a judicious blend of thermodynamically-based metahistory (what is often called today ‘Big History’), complexity science, future studies, group process theory, neuroscience and yes, psychoanalysis, and yes, there certainly is some advanced mathematics - but math is not the Holy Grail of knowledge it’s so often set up to be these days. It has its limits. Let’s remember Gödel’s Second Theorem...In a way, I became a ‘psychohistorian’ well before the age of seven through being a pupil of the Jesuits, who were chaplains and confessors to the Carmelite Convent of Lanherne in St. Mawgan-in-Pydar, Cornwall, where I went to school as a child. That school at that time and place was, believe it or not, not at all bad. The teachers concentrated on Celtic myth and language (Cornish as well as English), but there was math and science too, since the school was so near RAF St. Mawgan and so many of the parents were pilots, engineers, aircraft technicians or (like my father) meteorologists. The Jesuits at the Convent were very kind, at least to me and my little group of Catholic kids. I learnt four things: 1) that we were ’aliens’ in this world, 2) that a Grand Master (Hari Seldon?) had a great, overarching ’Plan’ for the world we found ourselves in, 3) that as the Grand Master’s ‘special agents’, our duty in life was to discover the nature of this Plan and assist the Grand Master to the best of our abilities in bringing it to fulfilment, after which 4) upon passing from this world, we would return to our home planet - the ’Kingdom’ - for debriefing. I bought all this. The scenario - alienation and exile, agency in the service of a higher power, fulfilment of a transhuman Plan, future return to one’s home planet - i.e. exile, agency, return - was the Ursatz that lay deep beneath the surface of my life, my personal Ignatian legacy. But the words of the Creed “et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum” - also installed in me a lifelong terror of a zombie apocalypse should our civilisation collapse. I’m not quite sure if all this was the intended result of a Catholic education.Later, like others of my generation who resolutely refused to ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’ and who clung desperately to their hang-ups so as to avoid being sucked into the Woodstockian mass, I became ‘hooked’, not on cannabis or LSD but, after reading the Foundation Trilogy, on psychohistory. As a teenager, bunking off school whenever possible (‘high’ school was utter hell) and hiding out in the (then) dark recesses of the Picton Library in Liverpool, I came across Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History and read all 12 volumes. This not only made me an expert in the history of the Central Asian Khanates at age 13, but also confirmed me in my ‘life’s mission’ - since I was so often told that I was ‘out of it’ (I was an Aspergers or ‘high-functioning autistic’) I had to find out everything I could about the ‘it’ I was out of. Toynbee’s terrifying vision of the millions upon millions of unknown, unseen casualties who perish during a civilisation’s ‘fall’ moved me beyond words. I also read the works of the other metahistorians: Spengler, Sorokin, Dawson, Durant, Danilewsky, Turchin and the other Russians plus the philosophers Dilthey and Giambattista Vico, but as far as I could see, they each contributed further perspectives on what I felt was Toynbee’s key thesis - the affiliation between our contemporary civilisation and that of ancient Rome. I was shocked to discover the degree to which our own 21st century recapitulates, at a deeper, morphic level, the (terminal) fifth century of the Roman Dominate.I seemed to have no direct way, however, of pursuing my ‘life’s mission’. Psychohistory was not taught anywhere in the UK - if anything, the educational ‘establishment’ regarded psychohistory with fierce hostility (the ‘black art’, as it were, of the social sciences, a ‘vicious cancer’ spreading through academia etc.) and the IPA (International Psychohistorical Association) in Manhattan had not yet begun to develop basic university-level courses. Others who wished to study psychohistory after reading Asimov’s Foundation - like the economist Paul Kruger for example - turned to economics, but I had no talent for that ‘dismal science’ (Kruger later went on to gain a Nobel prize for the very thing which (IMHO) he made a pig’s ear of - New Trade Theory). Being something of a musical prodigy at the time, I went to the Royal College of Music in London (violin, conducting & composition), the University of Glasgow (B.Mus (Hons) in music and math), the Polish State Conservatories of Music in Warsaw and Kraków, the Universities of Warsaw (philosophy/math) and Toronto (12-tone theory, computer science) and MIT (computer music).In Warsaw I had two more ‘epiphanies’ regarding psychohistory. The first was at the Banach Institute of Mathematical Research, where I discovered a paper by the French semanticist Jean Petitot on the ‘historical chreod’ model created by the French topologist René Thom (whose brilliant work on catastrophe theory I had come across while at the University of Glasgow) and the Polish philosopher Krzysztof Pomian. In this paper, Thom had interpreted Europe’s transition from medieval feudalism to modern capitalism as a series of converging ‘catastrophe cascades’. It was a powerful and moving paper and provided me with the first specifically psychohistorical theorem - that of a historical ‘morph’ dealing with ‘cascading bifurcations and transition to chaos’ , i.e. World Wars I and II, which by the way are not two separate wars but a single thirty- one year war - in fact, Europe’s second ‘Thirty- Year War’, which this time marked the point of collapse of Euroamerican civilisation.The second ‘epiphany’ was the civil war in Sierra Leone (1991 - 2002) and the horrific torture and mutilation of little children, perpetrated deliberately as a strategy of war (a way of ‘destroying the future’). At this time I was working for the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, participating in excavations at the Treblinka extermination camp and translating survivor testimonies, written in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, German and Russian. I had also come across the life and work of Janusz Korczak (aka Henryk Goldszmit), a Polish-Jewish paediatrician, educator and founder/guardian of two orphanages in Warsaw during WW II who, on August 5th 1942, was taken to the aforementioned Treblinka extermination camp (Vernichtungslager) along with 192 of his beloved children from the Ghetto orphanage. I was living at that time in the former Ghetto district, and decided that I had to do something more with psychohistory than just pick up the odd paper, write notes or give the odd talk. I joined the IPA in New York, attended conferences at Fordham (a Jesuit university) and wrote papers for the Journal of Psychohistory. I was eventually forced to cease working with the IPA due to their psychoanalytic dogmatism, the ‘cult of personality’ surrounding their founder, their tendency towards American exclusivity (especially after 9/11), their political bias, their rivalry with and contempt for, the Asimov estate (with whom I had good relations at the time) and their general lack of rigour in their approach to psychohistorical analysis. I felt I had to formalise the discipline based on more scientifically cogent theories of mind, of society and of human evolutionary history. I entered the University of Liverpool’s Department of Psychology in 1999 as a PhD candidate and assistant lecturer, and on obtaining my PhD in 2004 became Senior Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Psychology for a further 12 years (the post was an excellent ‘cover’ for teaching psychohistory, which was still frowned upon in general by academia, though secretly approved by the then Head of Department and my PhD supervisor, both of whom were driven by intense curiosity concerning the possibilities of the field). During this time I refined my general research methodology, built experimental versions of the Prime Radiant and developed major training programmes in psychohistory.My courses were popular with students, but the faculty were, on the whole, hostile - a hostility which increased after the passing of the Head of Dept. and the retirement of my supervisor. Apparently they felt threatened by the subject-matter of my courses which tended to reveal the degree to which most supposedly ‘scientific’ research programmes, especially in the social sciences, were purposefully structured, and driven by the need to contain and repress sources of anxiety as well as to propagate a liberal capitalist democratic ideology.After I retired from teaching,, I continued in my capacity as Senior Research Fellow to do research, attend conferences and present papers for various space research organisations such as 100YSS, Icarus Interstellar, Centauri Dreams, Space Renaissance Initiative and others. By helping to catalyse the exploration and colonisation of deep space, I hoped to turn psychohistory into a powerful instrument for navigating the future, rather than just another academic discipline, eventually to be sidelined and forgotten in the turbulence and chaos of 21st century political, economic, commercial, cultural and social collapse.So this is the situation at present. There are many organisations involved with planning the future, with some of them pursuing variants of Asimovian psychohistory as an end in itself, without any specific goal, while others invoke ‘something akin to’ psychohistory in support of and advocacy for, various political or economic ends, the avoidance of catabolic systems collapse, the study of climate change and general ecology or the exploration and settlement of deep space. None of these projects however, engage directly with the psychoanalytic or evolutionary-psychological dimensions of psychohistory.The International Psychohistorical Association still holds annual conferences and continues to publish the Journal of Psychohistory while its companion organisation, the Psychohistory Forum, also holds meetings (under the auspices of the IPA) and publishes its own journal - Clio’s Psyche. Both organisations are based in Manhattan and would seem to cater for a limited readership.The Psychohistory Project: is a discussion group based on Isaac Asimov's predictive science of psychohistory, founded in 1998, the organisation’s activity seemed to peak at the turn of the millennium, but seems of late to have become more sporadic and tenuous, though still active as of 2018. There are also various independent academically-based programs: such as the Generational Dynamics, of John J. Xenakis, the Cliodynamics of Peter Turchin, Immanuel Wallerstein’s World Systems Analysis, Eagle & Pentland’s 2009 paper .Eigenbehaviors: Identifying Structure in Routine, proponents of the new Big History and thermodynamically- based history such as Eric Chaisson and David Layzer as well as numerous applications of chaos theory and AI models. Most of these (apart from the thermodynamic studies of Chaisson and Layzer) pay lip service to Asimovian psychohistory in some form or another, but none appear to be going anywhere in terms of real-life applicationsIn addition, various large-scale world systems models are continually emerging, all appearing to simulate Asimov’s Prime Radiant. These include a) the prodigiously expensive European Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Flagship Programmes, including Graphene, the Human Brain Project and the Living Earth Simulator, b) Integrated Global Models of Sustainable Development by Akira Onishi, and c) The World3 systems dynamics model described in Beyond the Limits by Meadows et al. (1972, 1992). There is even a corporate Global Models Group (Inc.) whose corporate mission statement is to “digitalise the model industry and help advertisers to find the right model through conversion data analyses and custom made algorithms”.Of all these however, it is worth noting that only the World3 model has remained in continual use since its creation in 1956 by Jay W. Forrester at MIT’s Sloane School of Management under the title: World Dynamics. The reasons for its comparative success can be attributed to its basic simplicity of design and a judicious choice of parameters that allow possibilities for growth and development through modification whenever necessary. Nevertheless, both Limits to Growth (1972) and Beyond the Limits (1992) continue to arouse controversy, and none of the other initiatives seem capable of engaging with the chief problem facing us today: that the very traits that once conferred adaptive strength during the time of human emergence on the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness (EEA) now threaten to become the evolutionary Nemesis of the species.Despite this proliferation of world system analysis and prediction models, global society continues to muddle along in ‘business as usual’ mode while instabilities continue to multiply and self-amplify. The main issues with mathematically-based predictive modelling were outlined by Alastair McIntyre in After Virtue (1981). These issues include a) the unpredictability of radical innovation in the domains of science and technology, b) the game-theoretic character of human behaviour, c) non-linearity: the unpredictable consequences of unforeseen decisions, d) historical contingency: the consequences of living in a non-ergodic world and finally e) the fact that ‘addiction to prediction’ skews, biases and constrains the search space of future possibilities. In addition, there is the problem of naïvety and the fact that in the creation of a model the sources of human motivation are often ignored,‘scotomised’ or purposefully concealed by being bound within webs of needless or inappropriate complexity. This gives readers a sense of comfort and relief from anxiety in the false assurance that ‘something is being done’ - even if no one knows exactly what. More importantly, it tells us to keep our heads down, get on with our assigned work and trust the élites. This is partly the legacy of John Locke who, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689/90), insisted that the age of ‘grand schemes’ and ‘system-building’ was over and that henceforth every researcher should confine him/herself to chipping away at the tiny section of the mighty rock of scientific knowledge allotted to him/her. The ‘big picture’ would somehow ‘emerge by itself’ in time. While there is certainly something to be said for this, we find ourselves now in an era dominated by William Bechtel’s ‘centrifugal logic of differentiation’ - at a time when an understanding of the ‘big picture’ is absolutely necessary for survival in the face of environmental degradation, climate change and other deep-level consequences of that massively-interactive complex dynamic system that is a planetary ecology.Living as we do in the terminal phase of ‘liberal capitalist democracy’, conferences organised by space research institutes or advocacy groups are less concerned with space exploration than with containment of anxieties. At such conferences the ‘hard’ sciences are still emphasised at the expense of the supposedly ‘soft’ biological and social sciences. Quantifiable models and attempts at mathematical prediction of the future still rule the agendas, no matter how absurd or futile these models may be, so long as they appeal to our fantasies or desires. ‘Dangerous’ topics, discoveries or lines of research that challenge the sociopolitical status quo (e.g. artificial reproductive strategies, transcendence of sexuality, radical life extension, genetic engineering, religious engineering, physical or mental enhancement technologies etc.) still tend to be poorly understood or deliberately scotomised for political or ‘ethical’ reasons - as are any social science perspectives that threaten liberal capitalist ‘democratic’ ideology. Such ‘conferences’ therefore usually devolve into tech fairs - the more significant advances that are presented do not involve deep space exploration, but rather communications, space-based weaponry and future war strategies, which is why so many of them attract CIA surveillance and/or DARPA support. Governments, the military-industrial complexes and corporations are, in reality, opposed to independent space exploration (see The End of the Space Age - The Economist, 30/06/2011) since it threatens the global balance of power with the possibility of diaspora and loss of control. Nevertheless they are prepared to tolerate and even seem to support approved space research and exploration as long as there is the possibility of strategic advantage or profit.Despite the fact that a wide range of basic technologies for interstellar exploration currently exists in virtual, nascent or experimental stages there is little effort to integrate these domains by means of transversal or generic research technologies into a single, overarching strategy. Attempts to do so such as the Integrated Space Plan (ISP 1989) are objects of admiration tinged with amusement but fail to attract serious commitment at a planetary level. Despite their often epiphanic beginnings, space advocacy organisations and research institutes eventually succumb to primate dominance dynamics, allowing group fantasies to contaminate their original visions, whereupon it becomes a matter, no longer of ‘what you know’ but of ‘who you know’.In the end therefore we find ourselves confined within a ‘human jam-jar’ created by the physical sciences and designed to keep us within the boundaries of corpocracy-sponsored ‘mainstream’ thought, while the social sciences, finding themselves at the mercy of large, grant-awarding institutions, are forced to act collectively as the ideological mouthpiece of that corpocracy. Modern (pseudo-) ‘scientific’ psychology ends up having little or no ecological validity since, as Asimov himself stated in Second Foundation, “those brought up exclusively on the axioms and thinking habits of the physical sciences can have no conception of psychology”. Domination by scientistic constructs leads us to fall under the spell of a wide range of naturalistic vs. poetic fallacies, all of which contribute to the formation of the ‘Great Filter’, which astrobiologists suggest may act as a barrier to most advanced technological civilisations in the Universe, preventing them from completing the transition from a planet-bound to an interplanetary civilisation (the K0 → K2 Transition), then later emerging as an interstellar (K3-level) civilisation.While I cannot deny that I learned much during my active membership and participation in the IPA, especially about childrearing and psychoclass formation, the trouble with the IPA as an institution is that it refuses to question the world in which it finds itself, remaining locked within its ‘comfort zone’ of psychoanalytic solipsism and cannot of will not advance, happy to dwell within the constraints imposed upon it from above and to become a repository for a ‘respectable’ but effectively neutralised psychohistory.So what might psychohistory’s future look like?If we survey the past to see which organisations were most successful in catalysing major social transitions and advances we find that it was monasticism, both male and female, Christian and Buddhist, that fulfilled this role to the fullest. This may not be a popular thesis in today’s oversexualised age where academia strives to equate scientific respectability with atheism, but deeper historical studied show it to be the correct one. In fact, it was the very ambiguities and contradictions inherent in the Judaeo-Christian construct that, in forcing a creative response to ‘living in the world’, effectively catalysed the emergence and evolution of a recursively self-enhancing scientific and technological culture. The Benedictines, Cistercians, Franciscans and Jesuits were the main Orders supporting the development of such a culture - the rise of which, I will not hesitate to say, was unique in the history of the world. Whereas the Benedictines engineered the ‘transition’ between the Roman Empire and the European Middle Ages (there never was any real ‘Dark Age’ - that is a modern atheistic fallacy), the Cistercians pioneered most major technological advances of the 12th century Renaissance, while the Cistercian abbot Joachim of Fiore (1135 - 1202) created the prophetic illuminations that, through the agency of the wandering Franciscan friars, were disseminated throughout Western Europe and formed the basis for a specifically European philosophy of history. Finally it was the Jesuits, founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1640, that avidly defended this tradition against the forces of secularism. Had these latter forces triumphed following the Reformation, we may well still have had ‘science’ and ‘technology’- but no ‘reaching for the stars’..If we wish therefore to make psychohistory a real and active force rather than simply a fossilised academic discipline, one possibility would be for a network or group to combine the Asimovian dual-Foundation paradigm with the Joachimite Novis Ordo Saeculorum and Toynbee’s affiliation model to establish a transgenerational, task-oriented group as a modern extension of the medieval monastic modus operandi. This ‘chrysalis’ would seek to catalyse a transition between terrestrial civilisation’s current state of K0 (Kardashev level zero - essentially a planet-bound, pre-interplanetary state) and K2 - an interplanetary, ‘Solar-level’ civilisation. This would be an ‘order’ possessing an inner discipline analogous to the orders of the past, while dedicated to the promotion and integration of the technological and ecological advances necessary to seed an interstellar civilisation - the imago, as it were, of the chrysalis.There do exist certain organisations seeking to fulfil this role, but as we have already stated above, in an era that we must acknowledge as leading towards catabolic collapse, dominated by a desperate and hungry capitalism, these organisations are unable to integrate lines of research to the degree necessary for achieving such a major step in human evolution as the K0 → K2 Transition. This transition will involve an evolutionary ‘long jump’ - a step far greater than that taken by our distant ancestors from sea to land. It will be a step involving radical speciation - pioneers of that transition will choose willingly to resign from ‘all that makes then truly human’ in order to approach closer to, and form a bond with, the Infinite. They will choose willingly to resign from their unique human identities in order to transcend the collective limits of that identity. Whether they will weep or exult in that transcendence will be their own affair.This step towards the exploration and colonisation of deep space must be taken as soon as possible though. If the K0 → K2 Transition is ever to be realised, it would appear essential to establish a permanent foothold in deep space (i.e. beyond Earth’s orbit) before the constraint and error catastrophes currently affecting global civilisation precipitate a catabolic systems collapse to the point where recovery to our present level will be severely compromised by key resource depletion. Failure to complete this transition does not necessarily imply immediate human extinction although eventual extinction is unavoidable for a planet-bound species. Failure to complete the transition may simply close off a vast number of historical options for the future. A general ‘critical path analysis ’ or ‘goal structure’ flow chart for a future chrysalis might look as follows:The kind of psychohistory I have been teaching and researching, while probably despised by the IPA as ‘defensive’ (ironically, given the IPA’s own position), is certainly not ‘Asimovian’. I have described it above as a ‘judicious blend’ of thermodynamically-based metahistory (‘Big History’), complexity science, evolutionary psychology, future studies, neuroscience and psychoanalysis, with ‘future studies’ including a vast array of technologies and navigational mechanisms.. Statistics do indeed play a key role in thinking about the future, but, in consideration of human agency, these are not the inferential statistics favoured by the academic social sciences (which, as a tool of ideology rather than of science, permit a wide range of falsification and interpretation). Rather, I favour the variational Bayesian statistics that conform more closely to Karl Friston’s ecologically-valid, free energy models of mind. Unlike the stated principle in Asimovian psychohistory that only human culture can be the subject matter of psychohistory, I include the study of astrobiology and deep cognitive theorems that can be extended to embrace a xenomorphic intelligence. The real-world equivalent of Asimov’s Prime Radiant would be a vast network of variational Bayesian domains extending far into the future. Today for example, the Drake Equation appears to be evolving as exactly this species of network.I have already stated that I concur with McIntyre’c reservations concerning mathematically-based deterministic predictive analysis. Nevertheless, we could recommend the eventual construction of an advanced form of post Singularity-level AGI - not as a predictive tool, but as a) a navigational instrument that would enable us to chart a path through the instabilities and chaos of the 21st century, b) as an educational instrument, or aid, to human neural and cognitive enhancement and finally c) as a species of ’vessel archive’. We might consider naming such a computational instrument the Prime Radiant in honour of Asimov’s visionary legacy. It would consist of an array of semi-autonomous, goal-seeking metagenetic programs operating on a universal quantum substrate which might eventually reach into the Schrödinger domain itself.In time, the social structure of an advanced chrysalis would merge with the Prime Radiant to form the first space-based arcology - either a) in the form of a permanent base on the Moon, Mars, one of the asteroids or on one of the major moons of the gas giants such as Titan, or b) as a free-standing, recursively self-enhancing structure situated at a major stable Lagrangian point in the Solar System and capable of self replication by means of the Von Neumann algorithm. The Machine will not dominate the Human - Human and Machine will become One.An alternative path of future ’chrysalitic’ evolution might be for a growing chrysalis to favour organically-based development over the mechanical. This is because the main threats to human survival in deep space - such as heavy radiation and microgravity - are more likely to have organic rather than mechanical solutions, i.e. through applications of advanced nanomedicine. Contrary to today’s mecha-biased ’intuition’, organic structures are far more intrinsically robust than mechanical ones and are likely to have far greater capabilities for self-repair in hostile environments. One likely result of this would be that space-based ’organic’ arcologies would eventually develop as fully autonomous, super-intelligent entities in which humans would function, no longer as the ’dominant’ species, but as some form of future ’mitochondria’.The reason why we should seek to bypass a K1 convergence and pursue manned space exploration and colonisation is that there is no way a planetary government could be effective unless it were a one-party dominated tyranny - one in which only near-Earth robotic exploration would be permitted, and then only in the interests of communication, containment and control, (as in the novel series Chung Kuo by David Wingrove (1988-99, republished as a 20-book series beginning in 2017 - and referenced here only by analogy or example of a historical morph, not as a predictive thesis).Like its intellectual sister psychoanalysis, it is not the question of its ’scientific status’ which renders psychohistory open to scrutiny by the ’mainstream’ and subject to continuing controversy, but rather its potentially subversive power. If ’culture’, as Freud maintains in ’Civilisation and its Discontents’ (1939) is an institutionalised set of defences against primordial anxieties, any attempt to deconstruct those defences clearly cannot be tolerated or even countenanced. To look at the world through the eyes of psychohistory is like looking at it through a radio telescope. Whereas an optical telescope reveals what you can already see - only magnified according to the power of the eyepiece - when looking through a radio telescope (by means of a computer display) ‘big’ things appear small, ‘small’ things appear big, and the true energies of the Universe are revealed for the first time.The ‘mythic’ power of psychohistory continues to inspire a great deal of SF literature - which still somehow refuses to transgress the boundaries of ’all that makes us truly human’ by entering the dark domain of radical human speciation or of future deep space cultures far more unimaginably bizarre than any we could ascribe to any Star-Trek style aliens. I’ve had trouble publishing my own arcology-based SF stories since, as publishers told me, that mysterious entity called ’people’ just won’t ’get’ what I’m writing about. I’m actually relieved, really. I now know I’m much closer to the ’it’ I was always out of. Here is a (slightly adapted) vision of another writer who is also ’out of it’ as regards both the IPA and the Asimov estate. The vision is that of our own time, seen from the point of view of a psychohistorian of the far future:“During those decades of profligacy, armies of superstitious 'scientists' continued in defiance of Boltzmann’s entropy to hunt desperately for new havens of information gone missing - under rocks, on the surfaces of black holes, behind the locked doors of alternate worlds - all havens (or heavens) where they felt sure they would find their home after they died. The debates were only be resolved by the Crash, when the 'scientists', together with everyone else, hit the finite time singularity and fell off the top of the exponential curve to their silence, or, if they survived, abandoned their fields of ‘cutting-edge’ research and turned to more pressing problems relating to personal survival - such as how to grow potatoes or light a fire with two sticks, how to skin, prepare and roast the corpses of humans, rats & lampreys or boil cockroaches etc...Documentation preserved from the centuries preceding the Crash revealed the excitement of the scientific revolution driving the population expansion plus plenty of evidence for the cavalier optimism of the richer nations, which were getting richer in their high-rise penthouse apartments through the labours of the Atlas of an increasingly impoverished and ignorant breeding population - and after the Crash, just sufficient material to gain some understanding of the strange, exotic cultures which produced the first generation of sublight starships.Every single one of the cultures that had fed the exponential 'ramp-up with its dynamism and energy simply vanished with the free-fall of infrastructural collapse as the world's population dropped by c. 10 billion to approximately 0.1% of pre-Crash levels. The people who emerged from this almost extinction-level catastrophe and who much later founded the first interstellar colonies bore absolutely no relation to the pre-Crash cultures - either in language, institutions, religions or ethnic origin. It was by no means easy to trace the threads that wove God’s 'living mantle' during this remote period in Earth's history, even with the refined tools of psychohistory."(adapted from Psychohistorical Crisis by Donald Kingsley)The fact is, human beings are built and designed for life on Earth, not life in deep space. To explore and colonise deep space we must first look to ourselves, to our physical, psychological and moral constitution, and be prepared to undergo radical steps in self-transformation before life in the wider Cosmos will become possible. In fact, we would need to undergo some form of psychological transformation if we are to continue to survive on this Earth. If humanity is indeed ‘one family’ it is a very dysfunctional one, and if some of us migrate to deep space, we will no longer be a ‘single family’ but a ‘speciation crucible’ - if we are not that already.To end with, here is a note on the course I have designed:At the present time, especially in the fields of astrobiology and interstellar studies, there is a strong movement towards convergence in the physical and social sciences with the aim of giving a fuller account of human emergence, evolution and possible destiny. We now find, in studying history, that the era of ‘kings and battles’ are over as we seek a deeper, thermodynamically-based account of biological life and its seemingly limitless capacities for growth and complexification. Although ‘Big History’ has come some way towards achieving this disciplinary convergence, it is only psychohistory that, while serving as a consilient basis or substrate for disciplinary convergence, also probes the psychodynamic depths of individual and collective motivation in human affairs. To look at our historical development over the ages through the ‘eyes of psychohistory’ is like looking at the stars with the aid of a radio telescope. With an optical telescope, we see the same stars that we see with our natural, unaided vision - only magnified. With a radio telescope however, small things become large, large things become small, and the true sources of energy in the Universe are revealed for the first time. As we take our first step towards the permanent colonisation of deep space, it is psychohistorical knowledge above all that will help us to attain deeper levels of self-understanding, to overcome the immense social challenges facing us at present, to comprehend and master the vast dimensions of space and time that will challenge deep space pioneers, and which will finally enable us to enter, in the fullness of self-knowledge, into that vectored domain of emergent process in which we are embedded, and in which we are destined to play such a crucial role. This foundational course will introduce you to the basic principles of a social science which takes a far more radical perspective on human life and destiny than any other so far. Such a course, in combining for the first time detailed technical knowledge with rigorous self-analysis, is not without its challenges - but then as Einstein is supposed to have said: “let’s keep everything as simple as possible - but for God’s sake, no simpler”.“Whomsoever is offered, and refuses, will later seek and not be given.”(Desert proverb of Arrakis: from Frank Herbert’s Dune)So have I achieved what Hari Seldon was supposed to have achieved, and turned psychohistory from a ‘set of vague axioms’ into a ‘profound statistical science’? No. I have simply refined and strengthened the main body of axioms, formulated some key theorems and indicated directions which research might take in the future. My contributions to the field may yet be revised or overwritten by Foundations of the Future. The age of Hari (or Harriet) Seldon is yet to come.And a final warning, worth 10,000 pages of models, charts and diagrams:

I’ve been paying for and reviewing HostGator Cloud for more than 41 months.During that time, I’ve carefully monitored and recorded all of the important metrics and data points, such as their load time, uptime, and customer service responsiveness.Over the course of this review, I’ll be laying out all of the objective statistics regarding my time with HostGator Cloud as well as taking a deep dive into the providers pricing, extra features, and support staff to help you determine once and for all if they are the right hosting provider for you.HostGator Hosting starting from $3/MonthLet’s dive in:What is HostGator Cloud?If you’ve never heard of HostGator WordPress Cloud hosting, you’re not alone.HostGator’s cloud hosting package has successfully been flying under the radar for months and I didn’t hear about it until EIG (the company that owns HostGator, BlueHost and several other hosting providers) reached out to me personally requesting that we review their new hosting service.I’ll be the first to say it:I didn’t have high hopes for this review. After all – their low cost shared hosting option (ranked #11 of 30) didn’t exactly inspire confidence in HostGator’s services.But I was intrigued when one of the HostGator representatives told me this:“Our high-performance managed WordPress platform bundles scalable cloud hosting and robust functionality, empowering your sites to run faster and more securely than ever before. Load pages at blazing speed worldwide without having to configure your caching and CDN.”So what does this jargon-filled statement mean?In short, they promised 2.5x faster load times among other improvements.But we had to be sure!Instead of using the account that they had already set up for us (to avoid receiving any special privilege that would bias this review), we decided to whip out our credit cards and pay for a real live plan under an anonymous Gmail account.After that, we set up a default WordPress site, integrated several performance tracking applications, and started monitoring HostGator’s performance.After more than a year of monitoring the site’s performance, we’ve compiled a review detailing the good, the bad, and the ugly (Hint: there was no ‘ugly’).Pros of Using HostGator CloudAll of the bells and whistles that come standard with most hosting services are useless if the servers can’t deliver reliable uptimes. In the past, I’ve been incredibly disappointed by HostGator’s basic plan.Despite that…Their cloud hosting service isn’t just playing in a different league. It’s a whole different ball game.Here’s why:1. VERY Strong Uptime of 99.97% (Over the last 10 months)Although HostGator Cloud’s uptimes have slipped a tiny bit in recent months, dropping from a perfect 100% to 99.97% (0.03% better than the industry average) their stats are still impressive.With only 2 hours of downtime over the course of this review and a total of 36 outages, HostGator cloud is the eleventh most reliable host that we’ve ever reviewed and they don’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon.HostGator Cloud Load Time & Uptime: (full data can be found here.)When choosing a web host, uptime is THE #1 statistic to pay attention to.You can have all of the advanced security features and rapid load times on God’s green earth, but if your site isn’t live, it won’t matter because nobody can see and experience it.Luckily, it doesn’t get much better than this…Last 10-month average UpTimes:December 2017 average uptime: 100%January 2018 average uptime: 99.89%February 2018 average uptime: 99.93%March 2018 average uptime: 99.99%April 2018 average uptime: 100%May 2018 average uptime: 100%June 2018 average uptime: 99.99%July 2018 average uptime: 99.89%August 2018 average uptime: 100%September 2018 average uptime: 100%2. Top 5 Load Times (Only 419ms)Your page loading time is one of the single most important factors in maintaining a high-quality and user-friendly website.Don’t believe me? Consider this:According to market research, if your website doesn’t load within 5 seconds, you will lose more than 74% of your mobile site traffic!Conversely, by decreasing your page load times, you can increase traffic and conversions by more than 74%. Coincidence? I think not!Luckily, if you choose to trust HostGator Cloud with your web hosting, you’ll never have to worry about losing a potential customer to sluggish load times again.With a speed less than 419 ms (more than 50% faster than the industry average of 890 ms), HostGator Cloud is one of the fastest and most affordable hosting providers that we’ve ever reviewed.Here are the load time averages from the past 10 months:December 2017 average speed: 440msJanuary 2018 average speed: 430msFebruary 2018 average speed: 456msMarch 2018 average speed: 479msApril 2018 average speed: 433msMay 2018 average speed: 491msJune 2018 average speed: 447msJuly 2018 average speed: 339msAugust 2018 average speed: 356msSeptember 2018 average speed: 318msUnlike many of the other hosts we’ve reviewed on this site, HostGator Cloud has managed to provide a service that is both stable and fast, ensuring a great customer experience for you and a phenomenal user experience for your audience.3. Special Discounted Pricing – Exclusive to 10 Best Web Hosting Services (33+ Hosts Speed & Uptime Reviewed)Considering the improved performance and additional features (which we will get to in a second) that come standard with HostGator’s Cloud hosting plan, their basic pricing tiers are fairly competitive.With prices ranging from $4.95/mo for the basic plan all the way up to $13.98/mo for their most premium package, HostGator’s Cloud package is far more affordable than the majority of the 30+ web hosts that we’ve reviewed in the past.If that’s not enough, you can also get a new domain name for only $2.99!Now I’m no mathematician, but anytime you can secure a web hosting package with incredibly reliable uptimes and lightning-fast speeds for only $3/month, it sounds like a good deal to me.For those keeping score at home, that’s about $2 dollars less than your morning Venti, Mocha-Choca, Whipped, Skinny, Soy Latte with two extra pumps of caramel and an extra shot of espresso at Starbucks. (not to mention the 600 calories that you’re keeping away from your waistline)Unlike any of the other hosts that we’ve reviewed, HostGator does allow you to pay for a 1 or 3-month subscription. Now, remember – because this deal is so low (and is only available for a limited time), you’re better off locking in this rate while you still can.4. Very USER-FRIENDLY…‘Bandwidth’ is an incredibly important part of a good hosting provider. As is ‘disk space’.If you ask ten different people to explain what it means in plain English, you’ll get ten different, jargon-filled answers that will probably make your ears bleed and your eyes glaze over.Words like “net bit rate”, “throughput” and “throttling” leave their lips and you’ll be left with little-to-no mental bandwidth (pun very much intended) to process what the heck just happened or what exactly you’re paying for with your soon-to-be hosting provider.Mercifully, HostGator’s website and sales copy understand your plight and explain, in Layman’s terms, exactly what you’re getting with your subscription.Furthermore, navigating their front-end site and control panel is a breeze.Even the most novice webmaster can quickly find and change important features, integrate useful applications, and make changes to account settings.HostGator instead uses clear terminology like ‘max sites’ and ‘monthly traffic’ to give even the most basic prospect a clear understanding of the bang you’re getting for each buck.And if you get stuck, their live support (detailed below) is available 24/7 and they have a deep library of support tutorials, FAQs, and other troubleshooting documents available.5. FREE Extras: Anti-Malware, Global CDN, Daily Backups etc…HostGator throws in a bunch of extras on their plans that push their offer over the edge.Here’s just a sample of what you’ll get:Free Migrations: One of the most notable features that HostGator Cloud offers is free migrations. Unlike BlueHost, which charges nearly $150 per migration, HostGator Cloud will transfer your site over completely free of charge. No nasty loopholes or upcharges included.Daily Backups: With a few mouse clicks, you can quickly set up full daily backups that will automatically store previous versions of your site so that, if and when the stuff hits the fan, you can quickly and effortlessly get your website back online and avoid the dreaded white screen of death.Automatic Malware Removal: One of the only notable problems with WordPress sites is that the sheer number of available plug-ins and third-party tools open every WordPress user up to potential security concerns from hackers and cybercriminals. Luckily, in the (inevitable) event that your website is infected with some form of Malware, HostGator will pitch in, help you put out the fire, and get back to business as usual.Global CDN: Content Delivery Networks help take all of your large files like images and video off your site so it doesn’t get bogged down by requests, and instead delivers them to customers using tiny little magic fairies closest to their location to make load times blazing fast.WPPro Developer Help: Another perk that is unique to HostGator Cloud is access to their WPPro Developer Help which includes access to comprehensive WordPress beginner training and a network of trusted professionals to help you troubleshoot a wide variety of different issues.For the non-tech savvy webmasters among you, this can be a HUGE perk in the event that you run into a technical issue that is beyond your skill or understanding. No more slumming around Craigslist to find shady “WordPress Experts” to help resolve your issues.Storage: The vast majority of basic shared hosting providers give you a couple of gigs of storage for uploads, for example, a video (singularly). HostGator sets itself apart from the competition by including unmetered storage on all of their cloud plans. No… I’m serious!6. Good, Quick SupportAs I’ve mentioned throughout this review, HostGator’s customer support is one the best in the industry.Their 24/7 live support team is available through phone, email, and their hyper-responsive live chat option making customer support queries a fast and painless experience (which is not the industry standard in case you were wondering).Cons of using HostGator Cloud HostingIn case you haven’t noticed, we’re a big fan of HostGator’s Cloud service. With the unbridled speeds, reliable load times, and savvy customer support, it’s hard to find much to complain about.There are a couple of minor drawbacks to consider (although you might be able to avoid one of them).Here’s an overview:1. Industry-Standard Pricing Tricks (If You Don’t Use Our Offer)Most web hosting companies are notoriously frustrating with how they explain and promote their pricing. HostGator Cloud is just as guilty of this.For example, if you’d like to take an advantage of the mouth-watering $2.92 deal on their site, you can only sign up either monthly or 1 year upfront. If you want more than 1 year, you’d have to pay $5.48/mo – which would be a deal-breaker, right?The good news is that our special deal can help take the sting out of a longer commitment, with such a low price that you’d be actually better off locking in that unbelievable (and time-limited) rate.2. Possible Con: No Social Support ChannelsIf you aren’t a fan of live chat, email, or phone support (a confusing stance to say the least), then you will likely be disappointed by HostGator’s lackluster social support.Unlike many of their competitors, HostGator doesn’t appear to be very active on their social channels and you probably won’t receive any sort of response if you submit an inquiry on Twitter or Facebook.While this certainly shouldn’t be considered a deal breaker, it’s definitely a point to consider.HostGator Cloud Pricing, Hosting Plans & Quick FactsHere’s a quick overview of the HostGator Cloud plans offered:Starter Plan: This plan starts at $2.99 per month. It supports 1 site, 25k visits per month, 1GB backups, and unmetered storage. <- We used this plan for our test site.Standard Plan: This plan starts at $7.98 per month. It supports 2 sites, 200k visits per month, 2GB backups, and 150GB storage.Business plan: This plan starts at $13.38 per month. It supports 3 sites, 300k visits per month, 3GB backups, and unlimited GB of storage.Ease of Signup: Signup process is a breeze!Payment Methods: You can pay by credit card or PayPal.Hidden Fees and Clauses: The only major ‘gotcha’ is a restriction that you can’t tap over 25% of their system for over 90 seconds.Upsells: There are some upsells along the way.Account Activation: It might require up to 24-48 hours for accounts to be activated in some cases.Control Panel and Dashboard Experience: cPanel.Installation of Apps and CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): Extremely easy, one-click installation process of the most popular apps available.Do We Recommend HostGator?Yes.The entry-level, shared hosting options from HostGator we previously reviewed weren’t that great.However, these upgraded Cloud hosting options are AWESOME.We cannot recommend these plans more enough.Between the impressive uptimes, our insanely low $3 dollar deal, the user-friendliness of their site and all the outstanding extras, this really is one of the best places to host your WordPress website.Courtesy Answer: HostingFact