Submitted by Pachamama
As we write masses of people are demonstrating in the streets of Istanbul and many other Turkish cities calling Erdogan and Gul dictators, fascists, American puppets and Zionist traitors. They are chanting “we want the regime to fall’’, not the government – the regime, the regime! This call is not unlike what we have been hearing, for more than two years, in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisian, Libya and nearly all the European countries. It represents the latest flashpoint in the seismic changes the peoples of the world are demanding. Demands that world powers would prefer to misdirect into a full-blown world war to serve their corporate masters. The criminals Gul and Erdogan have their Gestapo in the streets cracking skulls, using tear gas that can kill and employing the most powerful water hoses against the people. Even in the United Stated the Obama administration used these extraordinary measures to quell the ‘Occupy Movement’’. These included infiltration by the intelligence agencies, the brute force of storm troopers, a propaganda corporate controlled media and up to that time an apathetic populace that had not felt the full force of a brutish grab for resources that has now left 150 million Americans at or below the poverty line. This is the central issue! The peoples of the world are engaging corporate interests in a popular war for resources everywhere. For them this will be a hot summer (fall) of rage. The lackeys in the Caribbean, through all of this, have no answers for their peoples. They responses are generally within the range of ‘this is a global problem and we are helpless to avoid it’’ and reverting to all the failed recipes of western financial capitalism, a dying political-economy model.
In Barbados, the regime deliberately misinterpreted the electoral expressions of the people for a government of national unity. Such a brazen and dictatorial power grab, under the rubric of an outdated Westminster system, merely serves the ruling clique, ignores the talents of nearly 50% percent of elected representatives, makes it more unlikely that the country will be able to exit the vortex of depression economics in the medium term, strengthens the idea of ‘the maximum leader’ and unduly sustains a false tension within the political system. When Caribbean people get hungry enough they will be in the street, not merely calling for the government to go, they will too be calling for the regime to fall. This will mean the government in the wider sense – BLP, DLP. The call must of necessity extend to the ruling elites as well – the education elites, the economic elites, the professional types, the elites in the clergy. They will be calling for a revolution! Barrow’s hideous Public Order Act will have no effect on ‘them’. The militarized police force will not be as persuasive to orders as the people will be to the hunger pangs they feels or the sight of hunger in their children’s eyes. The American trained special branch of the defense force, on call 24/7, may martyr some people in the streets but calls for the fall of the regime will continue, without ceasing. This call will be properly informed by a history of a lack of proper leadership, multiply betrayals of the people, an absence of land reform, political treachery by all parties and a growing mal-distribution of wealth.
In Trinidad, the calls for the fall of the regime will occur within a generally similar environment but in a context of sharper racial, classist, economic, political, social circumstances. These may make the revolution in Barbados a walk in the park by comparison. Successive governments of the Republic are all notorious for the mismanagement of the society, engagement in levels of corruptions that are difficult to equal, deepening the economic divisions between the predominate Indian and African populations, promotion of a culture of criminality that leaves the country insecure in many areas, allowed an ‘illegal’ drug industry to deepen, wasted the country’s resources in a profligate manner, tolerates leaders within the security forces that are know criminals, maintained a political culture for its own sake, developed economic expansionist tendencies to other smaller territories while subordinating the national interests to those of others. The Republic of T&T, the country that has given us a pantheon of the greatest Caribbean leaders, bar none, and after nearly 60 years of ‘independence’ there is still an absence of a deep sense of ‘real’ commitment to the nation. The call for the fall of this regime must come from the masses of the people in their hundreds of thousands. The people should not relent until their just demands are met. Such a call must attempt to be peaceful, if that is possible. Should the anti-revolution forces determine that a peaceful revolution is impossible; the revolution will still come – by any and all means necessary. There is no stopping us now!
In Jamaica, we have a repeat of years of misguidance as seen elsewhere In the Caribbean. Like most of the other Caribbean countries it continues to maintain a small elite of Chinese, Lebanese, Syrian, Whites but mainly Blacks in a society where guns are aplenty, where private para-military security forces guard wealthy citizens while the poor die by gun violence in ghettos daily, a country that seems not to have had any long term benefits from the production of arguably the greatest Caribbean personality (Michael Manley) of all times, a country that has failed to translate its abundant natural resources in ways that benefit the ‘under classes’. Jamaica, a country that for all intents and purposes, has been at war with itself for decades, needs peaceful revolution more than most if it to avoid the proverbial blood bath. But revolution must come! For it is only through revolution that most of the people of Jamaica could have a chance at justice. Yes we say justice, not peace! Justice – social and economic justice! All Caribbean people will soon reach the point where they realize that the fanciful talk about transformation through (mis) education alone is not enough. There must be some other non-capitalist force at work. That force must be a mass movement of the Jamaican people in search for justice, as is happening elsewhere.
And what of Guyana, again like most other Caribbean countries it has had hot flashes of violence in recent times – some not so recent. Guyana has been burdened by experimentation with foreign political philosophies that never really found wide acceptance, the corruption of the electoral process, super power rivalry, an historical Indo-Guyanese/Afro-Guyanese schism, political assassination, economic control by minority ‘grouplets’ and an American sponsored sanctions regime that crippled the country for decades. Such a country with a relative small population and a corresponding large landmass was once the most prosperous in the Caribbean. The most progressive initiative that comes out of Guyana these days is the surrendering of its lands to global corporate interests, like Kiffin Simpson and others, ostensibly to grow food because Simpson, unlike most in the Caribbean, has recognized that the global financial system is seeking to control food resources to prop up their dying system – similarly to how oil and the petrol dollar economy was constructed, as a benchmark. So expect Guyana to be producing GMO foods using corrupt industrial agricultural practices. Expect people to die of hunger as the corporatists gain strategic control of our food systems – in Guyana, a land that should have been the bread basket of the region.
The events in Turkey portend the television of a revolution coming home to the Caribbean soon. We should not seek to avoid these circumstances. Most Caribbean people know that it is a truism that our political classes are useless. Most Caribbean people know that the economic elites never took ownership of the problem the society faces, as should happen in a real capitalist system. Most Caribbean people know that generation after generation of leaders have promised much but delivered little. Most Caribbean people know that there is no internal dialectic that can produce answers for us, the justice seekers. Most Caribbean people can feel in their very bones that the system does not work for us, has never worked for us and that radical transformation is in the air everywhere. Let the trade winds of transformation blown away the old order. Let those winds blown out the backward regimes in all Caribbean countries. Let those winds travel from Bahrain to Bridgetown. From Turkey to T&T. From Greece to Georgetown. From Tunisia to Trench Town.
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