Dismissing mounting criticism of Wednesday's bloody army offensive on
the Jaffna front, Army Chief Lt. General Sarath Fonseka asserted that
it suffered 43 fatalities with 33 more soldiers missing in action. He
vehemently rejected claims that the army lost almost 150 officers and
men in action and over double that number wounded. The correspondent
of the CNN TV channel and the Agence France Press (AFP) have re****ted
that the fatalities suffered by the SLA were more than 150 and claimed
that this information received from a Reliable Sri Lankan Police
source.
When, B Raman, Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt.
of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical
Studies, Chennai, re****ted the same figure on his Pro Indian web site
Lankaguradian blogspot and said LTTE fatalities were limited to 16, it
was well understood by Sri lankans, as a perpetual habit, the pro-LTTE
websites always do this to prop up the ever loosing image of the LTTE
terrorists in the international arena.
Dr. Sumanasiri, a consultant Psychiatrist in Colombo, however,
suggested, the only reason some of these people could visualise very
high number of dead bodies in a conflict like in Sri Lanka, because
they may be showing early sign of a psychiatric condition called
Necrophilia. Necrophilia, also called thanatophilia and necrolagnia,
is a type of psychiaric disorder characterized by a special attraction
to corpses and particularly, a ***ual attraction to corpses when it is
acute . The word is artificially derived from Ancient Greek: (nekros;
"corpse," or "dead") and (philia; "love"). The term appears to have
originated from Krafft-Ebing's 1886 work Psychopathia ***ualis
For psychologist/philosopher Erich Fromm, necrophilia is a character
orientation which is not necessarily ***ual. It is expressed in an
attraction to that which is dead or totally controlled. At the
extreme, it results in destructiveness and a hatred of life.
For Fromm, necrophilia is the opposite of biophilia. Unlike Freud's
death instinct, it is not biologically determined but results from
upbringing. Fromm believed that the lack of love in the western
society and the attraction to mechanistic control leads to
necrophilia. Other factors include; the impact of modern weapon
systems, idolatry of political affiliations, and the treatment of
people as things in bureaucracy. Interestingly, 'Lanka-e-News' claims
that issuing false re****ts on the killed war heroes is disrespect to
them and this statement alone can indicate early symptoms of
Necrophilia.
However, Necrophilia is not unknown in animals. Necrophilia was
practiced in some ancient cultures as a spiritual means of
communicating with the dead, while others employed it as an attempt to
revive the recently departed. A few cases of Necrophilia were re****ted
in the West.
Carl Tanzler was a German-born radiologist at the United States Marine
Hospital in Key West, Florida . He developed a morbid obsession for a
young Cuban-American tuberculosis patient, Maria Elena Milagro "Helen"
de Hoyos (1910-1931), that carried on well after Hoyos suc***bed to
the disease in 1931. In 1933, almost two years after her death,
Tanzler removed Hoyos' body from its tomb, and lived with the corpse
at his home for seven years until its discovery by Hoyos' relatives
and authorities in 1940.
In UK, ***ual penetration with a corpse was made illegal under the
***ual Offences Act 2003 and in US there is no federal legislation
specifically barring *** with a corpse, but individual states have
their own laws.
At the running rate , Sri Lanka may have to introduce new legislations
to protect their dead relatives in near future.
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