I was very much tempted this weekend to write about Devils, Bastards and Demons – the words used by self-styled ‘Elder’ and promoter of moral revivalism, former PNC ‘strongman,’ Prime Minister Hamilton Green. He was speaking at the Burnham Foundation’s commemoration of the 101st birth anniversary of Burnham at the Critchlow Labour College and describing those who today hold political office. According to reports, Green said that the people who deserve to rule are those whose “ancestors…suffered for centuries without a cent.” He said that ‘we’ (himself and others of like mind, no doubt) welcomed the ‘indentured people,’ ‘gave them an education’ and Burnham sought to unite the people, but the ‘new’ Indians were a larger group and didn’t want that. Whatever conditionality Green may have expressed, he called for rigged elections to remove the ‘devils, bastards and demons.’ Green obviously felt that the occasion was an appropriate one to advocate those particular views. He cannot disguise with moral philosophy a deeply backward mentality capable of rising to the surface at any moment, in a gush of political and racist drivel.
