Submitted by Pachamama
In this piece we shall attempt to tease out the relationships between what Ralph Thorne presents, thus far, as an alternative to the Mia Mottley regime in Barbados. Unlike most, the forces considered cannot be seen as entirely internal to the petty politics, but are best considered within regional, continental and global contexts.
As Thorne has now emerged ‘well-washed’ in the ‘blood of the lamb’ and as supported by a motley crew of dispensationalists, and others, blindly guided by moralistic notions apparently derived from a book from which not a single material narrative has ever been proven to have occurred, using rigorous standards of proof. Belief was never the currency of intelligent and interdependent humans.
The religious zealots who have the ear of Thorne cannot independently prove anything central to the foolishness they speak. For a man like Thorne, well-known to wear Afrikan inspired garbs and who has had a long association with dance groups, and so on. Begs the question, how could it be that in his lifetime we’ve seen the greatest Afrikan cultural renaissance since Kemet. But yet, in that same lifetime, Thorne returns to the vomit otherwise successfully expelled.
Thorne is the embodiment of how a failed education system has delivered us well-credentialed mental vacancies who are unable to met the requirements for development, at least since the so-called political independence from Westminster. It’s a national irony that only tinkering is thusly allowed, as he proclaims.
Of course they are others, guided by a transparent need to return to power, by any means necessary. Still others who have an innate hatred for Mia Mottley. Yet others, in their political confusion, who are willing to indict Mottley on a variety of flanks. These include her woke-ist disposition, her determination to blindly follow the dying Western capitalist structure of a financialized neo-liberalism.
The internal contradiction here is that the backwardness of the religiously inspired forces now aligning themselves against Mottley make real the idea that sometimes the perceive cure from a snake-oil salesman, speaking with the zeal of a fictitious John the Baptist, could be worse than the social disease Barbados faces, and long has.
Indeed, that a man who has long thought of himself as smarter than anybody else, to have again arrived at a point where Sunday school informs what a still developing country needs in 2024 must elicit questions as to the relevance of the wider colonial culture of underdevelopment which has driven Barbados into a perennial cul-de-sac.
It is at lease concerning that at a time when colonial powers all over the world are losing relevance, when new formations are gaining power, when Afrika is kicking out the French, when the ‘Global Majority’ will not be anchored in Christianity as a propaganda instrument, that this foolishness could be the signpost for a man who pretends to have relevance.
It’s alarming that Thorne, by his mouthings thus far, locates himself to the right of Mia Mottley and the BLP. On issues as to whether one is a king’s council (KC) or a senior council (SC), on issues of reforms to the school system, Covid19, republicanism, internet freedom, etc.
On the issue of school reforms. Being an HC boy, Thorne presents as being imbued with a sense that this slavery and post-slavery system ‘cannot be toughed’ – his own words. Could it be a seemingly recent conversion to this wicked religious construction of Europeans which hold responsibility? Or might this be a purely, and previously failed, political tactic which now confronts us?
And then, overnight, the thinking of one man, Ralph Thorne, has become the articles of faith of his again found DLP. How can this Democratic Labour Party pretend to have any philosophy, even the jaded democratic-socialism Thorne often mouths when a man could walk from one side to the other, virtually overnight, without a set of principles being accepted, even declared.
Further, to implicitly determine that party ‘faithfuls’- pun intended – who do not adhere to the religiosity of Thorne and his retinue of evangelicals represent an imposition on people who have no commitment to the foolishness Thorne constantly spews from his book of lies. Can Ralph Thorne prove that anything he now says can be proven. And in the absence of proof, on this count, what gives this newly installed Leader of the Opposition, any credence to interrogate the administration of Mottley.
Should the public space not be a venue for conversations, the substances of which could be empirically proven from independent sources? Why should we need politicians, including Mia Mottley who wears a crucifix – a symbol of homosexuality – to come to us ‘inspired’ by biblical lies? Did the disestablishment of the church in Barbados not require a separation of church and state? And what of this effort by Ralph Anthony Thorne, through stealth, to reimpose a religious or christian ethos on the people of Barbados, under the guise of a sense of morality? Does he not know that moral principles long predated the Greeks and the Romans.
The British, the Americans, the Europeans, more generally, have used religious belief systems as the major force within their colonial projects. These historical experiences in the western hemisphere are well known. However, their evangelical agents in Barbados, and elsewhere, continue to sing from the same colonial hymnal.
What readers may not know is that this torn hymn sheet is as central to the global power equation today as it ever was. Of course, it has now several other equally vicious companions. As recently as the 1950s or 60s, the British invented a religion, in Iran, the Baha’i faith as a means of spying on that country, subverting its government and controlling its oil resources with British Petroleum (BP) as its instrument for economic war.
It was the British who gave birth to, and supported, The Muslim Brotherhood sub-sect in West Asia, the so- called Middle East, as a means of promoting internecine rivalries amongst the peoples of the region and to be their foot soldiers to do empire’s dirty work.
In recent times the Americans and their British lapdogs gave rise to Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State (ISIS), Boko Haram and several other deviant or dispensationalist tendencies throughout the world as a means of creating a nexus between a certain brand of military politics and religion, in the service of imperial ambitions, of course.
Indeed, the Afrikans have learnt that these religiously inspired, Western supported, tendencies are aimed at destabilising the entire continent thereby making exploitation of their resources easier. Even as the French, the Americans, pretend to be fighting terrorism when they are the founders of it. Trump as a broken clock was quite right this.
Enter Ralph Thorne in this cesspool of religion as a means to political power!
We think is was a pastor Ferdinand, an acolyte of Throne, who on Africa Bridge sought to highlight the presence of members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Barbados for meetings was something other than a government to government or party to party diplomacy. His American, evangelical, capitalist , orientation suggested that these were a danger, implicit. This is what Thorne is aligned with. People who we doubt have ever gone to China and would be reluctant to consider that the Chinese system is far more democratic than that in Barbados or America. The ignorance of Christians!
And while these criminal forces within Barbados, on all sides, seek to distract us with misguidances, the world is tending towards meaningful regional blocs, in Eurasia, for example. The very notion of the state itself is being redefined. But Ralph Thorne and his congregation of believers are so committed to the idea that their empty political-religious, or dated rhetoric could remove Mottley that there is, for them, no requirement beyond believing ignorance. They dream that some White man’s god in the sky somewhere will help them get elected to save Barbados, keep dreaming!
While Mottley doubles down of a dying capitalism, Thorne might not even know about BRICS and the radical, yes we say ‘radical’, cultural transformations which shall soon present on the country’s doorstep. We would have hoped that the ‘young turk’, pun intended, within the political leadership game would have presented an entirely different orientation instead of being the 2.0 model of the person last to hold his current position.
As the misleadership class of Barbados approaches the third decade of the 21st century it is confronted with a radical realignment of the global correlation of forces, current. Yet, we have a regime in power almost totally dedicated to the dying Western powers and particularly that in Washington, a clear and deeply conservative fixation, notwithstanding the liberal mouthings from its elected dictator.
On the other hand, we now have Ralph Thorne, as the contrived Leader of the Opposition. While Mottley seems keen enough to recognize the gathering storm, even when her policies don’t seem to reflect this, the same cannot be said of Thorne. This brand of conservatism, locates him to the right of Mottley. This is amazing for a poor boy from Grazettes as compared to an upper middle class girl from Sandy Lane. Added, his reluctance to engage the radical alternative needed to transform the country, utterly locates the people of Barbados on the horns of a dilemma.
As a class formation, there can never be any arrangement, sophisticated and nationalist in character, where Mottley sings for her supper to the Western powers whereas Thorne plays to the future, given present calculations. However this type of class collaboration will remain a fleeting illusion. For him, being subsumed with the trite is central, talking for long hours but saying nothing. This genetic predisposition informs a politics which will return us to the point of colonial departure.
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