Reverting to colonial status
published: Friday | November 28, 2003
THE EDITOR, Sir:
HAVE WE lost our sense of pride and also our common sense? If the Prime Minister's reasoning for the need to fast-track a Terrorism Prevention Act is anything to go by, we have lost both and are willingly reverting to colonial status.
It may ostensibly be the UN pressuring countries to pass such unnecessary and dangerous pieces of legislation, but without the USA pressuring the UN then none of this would crop up in the first place.
There is no more effective repression than self-repression. Our heroes and all those who gave their lives in the struggle for a measure of independence must be turning in their graves at this - raising pragmatism, or is it visionless cowardice, to the level of principle. Michael Manley, would be horrified at the spineless-ness of his successors with their large signboard reading 'WE ARE FOR SALE'.
We have had glimpses of resistance to Pax Americana in recent years, including opposition to aspects of the Shiprider Agreement and even this year with firm statements against the US/UK war on Iraq. But never of course to the IMF, World Bank and WTO. These are the sacred cows. Omar is always looking to 'foreign' which is presumably why we have to be so licky-licky.
When will he put aside his intellectual arrogance and admit that all that he has learned, all that he has been told by Washington, really can't work. Our debt is quite literally strangling us. We surely need some of the radicalism of the G22 countries who put up such admirable resistance at the recent WTO meeting in Cancun. We may be little, but in Jamaica that phrase has (used to have?) a second part.
I believe that rekindling a sense of national pride and determination amongst our people by asserting our independence, come what may, is the only way forward, painful as it would be.
