Promise and peril of relativism: Respecting perspectives without excusing injustice

MY article titled "Genocide, incitement to genocide and impunity", in this column, on Friday, 26 September 2025 (https://www.ft.lk/opinion/Genocide-incitement-to-genocide-and-impunity/14-782203), generated many likeminded comments from local and overseas readers, given it was not driven by any bias towards or prejudice against any side or written from the perspective of only one side.

- BY Ranel T. Wijesinha, FCA, MBA

Plato's Protagoras. Plato | by James Lewis Huss | Medium

A different perspective

However, a colleague from my accounting profession and friend of over four decades, suggested that the Israel, Palestinian, Gaza tragedy might be viewed differently. He cited a recently launched book titled "Sunset of Illusions" where the author, a colleague also of the accounting profession and a friend for decades, narrates a fictionalised story, based on real life events of our three-decades-old conflict.

Sunset of Illusions - Four young Sri Lankans

The story highlights the individual circumstances of four young people, a Sinhalese, a Tamil, a Muslim, a Burgher, and what I will phrase as "the way they experienced, lived and endured, defended, supported and contributed to, or opposed and offended, the reasoning, the motivation, the methods adopted, the organisation and players within that conflict. I fully understand and respect the different perspectives, as one who has for decades written about the cost of war and dividends of peace and the need for reconciliation and harmony. Therefore, to me, any explanation of the different perspectives is like preaching to the converted.

Relativism as a defence for indifference?

My colleague of four decades, cited the reference to "Relativism" of the author of the book, Sunset of Illusions, as a defence perhaps, to urge me to take the Gaza events less seriously and sensitively than I do, or even recklessly indifferently, by looking the other way as it were. He then quoted the following from the book "philosophers argue that there is no real truth, only a series of perspectives, each with its own interpretation of events. It is called Relativism" and opined that the Israel-Palestine situation is an example.