Dear Editor
,An unusual occurrence, particularly noticeable in all history is the fact that intelligent leaders everywhere seem unable or unwilling to learn the lessons from the past. Failure to learn from these lessons brought untold suffering, pain and destruction to millions in every corner of the globe. As a youngster, my mother weaned me into the political arena by telling us stories, the horrors of the two World Wars, the 1917 Bolshevik Uprising in Russia, the Tulsa massacre against Afro-Americans in the United States, the bombing of Pearl Harbour and other incidents, which made headlines. These horrible incidents could have been avoided if our leaders took account of the underlying causes and attitudes, which brought so much pain and dislocation to their own people.
Dear Editor, August marks the 79th Anniversary of the most brutal human conflict ever recorded. I refer to the Battle of Stalingrad, August 1942 to February 1943. The lessons are many but our leaders on both sides of the political divide ought to examine the cause and personalities that allowed such inhumane behaviour among so called civilized nation states.
Members of the German leadership were consumed with a vaulting ambition to control the other people. The Germans launched this attack in Russia during the summer of 1942, but the next lesson is that they underestimated the resilience and courage of the Russians to defend the fatherland. Next lesson, the Germans did not recognize even unto this day, only the Russians could survive and function in the harshness of a Russian winter, ignoring the lessons of others who dared to tackle the Russians on their soil in a harsh winter.
Another lesson can be found in the justifiable complaint made by Prime Minister of Trinidad & Tobago and former Chairman of CARICOM, Keith Rowley that powerful nations seem poised again to intervene in the affairs of Haiti ignoring CARICOM.
But every story has two sides. If certain CARICOM leaders would only sip and chat with their kith and kin, when there is a problem with one of the Nation-States, we will avoid this embarrassment of joining with the powerful States that had no difficulty with slavery and indentureship. If we understood the importance of talking as members of a family, we would avoid the embarrassment of intervention by powerful nation states. This simple habit of practicing the wisdom that “all awe a wan family,” we would be better served. That’s the other lesson that our leaders need to learn.
The three big ‘Bs’ Burnham, Barrow and Bird and Dr. Eric Williams must be turning in their graves, when they look down upon the fragmentation within CARICOM, and instead of settling matters as dignified members of one family, we seem anxious to adopt the stance of our erstwhile imperial masters. And here I paraphrase a sentence from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.” As we recall the horrors of this brutal conflict of Stalingrad, I remind our current leaders as we unilaterally look at oil, gas, sugar, bauxite, etc, something the old folks said “easy lesson good for dunce.” I repeat my call that if we are to arrest this drift towards being recolonized, we must as Government and Opposition avoid the nonsense of scoring political propaganda points. When we speak with the oil, gas, gold, bauxite giants, we will speak as a united people with one voice.
Sincerely,
Hamilton Green
Elder
