Ronald Thwaites | Hard choices

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke to us and for us last week at Davos. He told us that the post-war presumptions of human interchange, the mutual respect which allowed small size, chequered history, and material insufficiency not to disable countries like ours, have been ruptured.

He warned about a mentality familiar in our polity nowadays, where we “go along to get along”. He told us what we try to avoid: that sucking up to economic predators and social captors is devoid of principle and ideology, and, anyway, won’t work any longer because laws and rules are more brazenly disregarded than ever before (check the mentality behind chaos on our roadways), and power is used to disable rather than to enable. Professor Fukuyama believes that the pretensions of Empire go beyond this presidency and reflect the subliminal intent of an entire ruling elite.

Think of the bribery and favouritism exacted by elements of our state bureaucracy. Remember the picture of the shivering and terrified five-year-old kid arrested by state terrorists there or here. Lucifer is everywhere. Murder is normalised, cruelty masquerades and is excused as order or self-defence.

Shut up about breaches of territorial integrity and killings without cause. When does having “no ideological fantasies” become the equivalent of “going along (with wrong-doing) in order to get along”?

Do we not go with “compliance for safety”, no longer grovel at the Emperor’s kitchen door, and decline to accept the foreign deportees and instead insist on schooling our children in the canons of Judeo-Christian ethics and justice?

RADICAL ALTERNATIVE

Carney points to a radical alternative to prostitution. He promotes a strong international legal order and a local praxis of constitutional adherence, regional cooperation, strong bonds of internal unity, and self-confidence. Not clientilism.

Canada, he says, thrives because of its values, not as the kept woman of its ‘boops’ to the south. A few miles further to the south but still within the range of the Gatling guns, which values guide Jamaica’s foreign policy nowadays?

Remember Henry Kissinger’ s statement to the effect that the US doesn’t have friends – only interests. Relate that to Mark Carney’s aphorism that if you “are not at the table, you’re on the menu”.

So in the slipstream of imperialist resurgence, living in the armpit of the Americas, does Jamaica stand a chance of existing “because we are” Jamaicans and not “because of the United States”, as Carney insists bravely in response to the Emperor’s jibe?

Realistically, what leverage do we have given our reliance on the US for the release valve of migration and the oxygen of tourism, remittances – and tragically, even food supply?

Just face it. Visa restrictions will strike more terror in Jamaicans hearts then a flotilla of warships in Kingston Harbour. From now on, entry to America will not be on the basis of us wanting to travel there but on who that nation feels can advance MAGA purposes. That means low-skilled menial labourers who speak some sort of English and do the work that childless Wasps decline.

Caribbean nations jointly – let alone separately – may be strategically significant but will never be “middle powers”.

EXCLUSIVE CONTROL

Realise, too, that hegemony brooks no competition. While we will not provoke the equivalent of a Cuban missile crisis, our Chinese connections for capital and technology have become deeply embedded – many would say indispensable. That is inconsistent with the pretensions of the 21st century iteration of the Monroe Doctrine.

What if the external context forces upon us a binary choice between superpowers? There’s a mournful love-triangle song titled “Any way you choose, either way I lose”. Is this our eventual dilemma?

If the wild, grand design of the Western superpower can stretch to own or control Canada, a Gaza Riviera, North Nigeria, Venezuela, and Greenland, is the anaemic nationalist project for small island developing states like ours ready for extreme unction? Suppose we, like Canada, are subjected to 100% “beautiful” tariffs for daring to remain friends with China or even the ungrateful and disobedient Canada? Or what if we are so rude as to sell Blue Mountain coffee in yuan or yen!

Are we timidly looking over our shoulders to see who might take offence at an deep, transparent discussion among Jamaicans on this evolving situation? Can we look to the partisan invertebrates who govern us for leadership in this soul-searching, which is going to affect every life, like it or not? The choices we are facing makes rabid tribalism all the more absurd.

What about the reaffirmation, first internally and then to the world, of a values-based, constitution-affirming view of the society we crave for our children and a firm, calm commitment to keep Jamaica “great”? Will we craft a resolute, united outward-looking support for democratic ideals, respect for national sovereignty, human rights, and Judeo-Christian principles? Start with ourselves and then push out.

In short, we must continue to being better at who we are already trying to be. Or else the Gulf Stream of external pressures, the Melissas of politics will force us into spiritual distortion like the slave laws did in the 17th century.

We are not helpless. Education, thoroughly reformed, is the point of inflection towards a future of national integrity, productivity, and increasing self-confidence and self-sufficiency.

Answer the question of this newspaper’s letter writer last Tuesday: “What future awaits students who can’t read or count”? What future, indeed, awaits a nation where about half of school leavers fall into that category, and worse, have severe anti-social behavioural consequences?

When people can’t find their way in this complex world, they produce only marginally, are prone to frustration and anger and more likely to have evil powers tek liberty with them. That was why slaves were not educated. Then as now, the distemper of ignorance makes humans into pawns of populists and tyrants.

This need not be our fate. If we wanted, within five years, Jamaica can get close to eradicating illiteracy, innumeracy, and social dystopia in our school. But only if we have the courage to become our best selves rather than genuflecting to “bucky massa” again.

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at The UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.