Between the devil and…

Having invaded, looted, massacred and colonized vast swathes of the world’s territories from the fifteenth century on, and then enveloping the entire planet in two destructive world wars, the leaders of countries on both sides of the Atlantic declared themselves the “leaders of the free world”.

Since then, countries like ours are supposed to accept the hegemony of the trans-Atlantic alliance and even when we attempt to defend our independence, we could only do so by engaging not in an alliance of our own but under the protective umbrella of the “enemy of our enemy”, Russia aka the Soviet Union. Not only was this situation externally imposed but, by and large , the leadership of the newly independent countries, with notable exceptions, seemed to accept the ideological basis of this division. France continued to cast its evil colonial shadow over large chunks of Africa, independent or not, and recklessly used islands in Oceania, as did the USA, as testing grounds for nuclear weapons. The indigenous people did not matter.

As for the British ex-colonies, having adopted constitutions which were largely a clone of the Westminster model, our leaders convinced us that really “there is no other way”.

That was the ideological underpinning of hostility to any attempts to devise home-grown and genuinely democratic constitutions as witnessed by the shameful but successful campaign by the NDP in St Vincent to defend the monarchy in the 2009 constitutional referendum. Our future must lie with “the West”!

It is not a comforting prospect. The unprecedented massacres of the two World Wars did not end bloody international prospects as promised. Since then, we have had Korea, South-east Asia, and Afghanistan on the world’s largest continent, multiple “interventions” in the western hemisphere, notably Haiti, Dominican Republic, Panama and Grenada, and open support for murderous military regimes in Latin America.

And flying in the face of all the claims of “equality” and “democracy”, there continued to be support for apartheid and the white minority regimes in southern Africa.

At the Apex of all this lies the United States of America, a state forged out of the forcible pillage of the lands of the indigenous people and genocide against them.

A state formed by rebellion against a colonial power, but which forbids similar actions by colonized peoples elsewhere. What is known as the Pax Americana came to dominate political and economic realities in the western world.

Yet within this arrangement there are frightening possibilities. Take the USA for instance. That country is in the throes of a Presidential election campaign.

Frighteningly, the presidential challenger has just survived an assassination attempt. Supposedly “sh… hole” countries, as the wounded contender once described developing countries, would find this shocking. However, in the USA, violence at this level is nothing new. In the course of its history, four US Presidents have been assassinated while in office, (the westerns used to describe it as gone to “Boot Hill”). There have also been assassination attempts against many others and at least two Presidents have died in suspicious circumstances.