By Raffique Shah
November 15, 2021

If Nazi leader Adolf Hitler were around today, he would be simmering in glory and bursting with pride as he watched the modern world finally come to embrace his lunatic rants that passed for an ideology, namely Nazism, which extolled the supremacy of the Aryan race, namely pure-bred white Germans, first and foremast, then others at their designated stations in life, starting with the Europeans of 100 percent pure Aryan blood at the top—the masters—with others—classless whites, contaminated whites, Asians, Africans and finally Jews, those being the survivors of the calamitous conflicts that culminated in him finally being recognised as the Fuhrer, the Emperor, the Maximum Leader of this all-conquering new world.

All the requirements for this new order are just about falling in place in almost every country in the world, Trinidad and Tobago being a front-runner. You listen to Tobago’s Watson Duke talk, and you see the Black sub-sub-Fuhrer, if there are such ranks in the hierarchy of Hitler’s reincarnated elitist empire. Last week, I looked at a news-clip on television in which he proclaimed himself the greatest trade unionist in history. He calmly swatted aside Uriah Butler, by omission-of-even-mention, dismissed George Weekes and his comrades of that era to a dark place, and by ignoring them as one might do to a vagrant in attendance, never even mentioned his colleagues in fraternal organization such as NATUC.

Just how did I arrive back in history, in a distant, dismal place that few adults know anything about, not to add the young ones who must be convinced that ‘Grandpa Shah’ has fallen off his rocker? I was trying to make sense of what is happening in the wider world where ‘the right’, as those who temper language with almost biblical reverence refer to hordes of hooligans and savages, and the only explanation I can muster is comparison with the gathering and alignments of forces in the run-up to World War Two.

In the USA, even as I write, one judge in a matter rendered small by his (the judge’s) undisguised hatred for Blacks, is about to deliver a decision that seems sure to be in favour of a White man who shot a Black man and left him to die like a dog. Much of the trial is telecast by some stations, so people can see and hear the judge’s racist bias. But that does not bother him. In a related but maybe more important matter, the joint select committee of the House and Senate in Washington had to resort to taking legal action to compel certain key witnesses to attend. That committee is investigating the events of last January 6, when, in an obviously planned assault, storm troopers coming from well-known ‘militias’ across the USA, attacked the Capitol as if it was a pit latrine, killed a few policemen and other low-level officials, and calmly walked out of the scene of mass mayhem as if they had gone into a bar for a drink.

This rise of the right, its apparent recognition by officialdom as having the right not only to openly carry weapons of war and to use them, has spread way beyond the boundaries of the USA, Canada and other supposedly civilised countries. At borders across Europe, where desperate migrants seek refuge because of the collapse of their homelands’ rule of law, only to encounter legal and illegal guns greeting them with stop-or-we-fire walls, which is characteristic of the new world disorder.

For the precious few hundreds of millions of us in the world who have retained our faculties to think, to apply reason as we evaluate good and bad, right and wrong, we must feel defeated as we encounter hordes of sub-humans who cannot even talk, string a few words into sentences, far less reason. As The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed columnist Lance Morrow aptly put it, “Welcome to the Age of Stupidity”.

Stupidity is driving this madness, these violent and sometimes fiery protests that pass for people’s legitimate rights to so do where government fails them. Except for such actions to pursue adequate supplies of water, the state of infrastructure, even poverty, which are justifiable, there are many uprisings that occur for no just cause. When journalists question demonstrators about the reason for their actions, they show blank faces.

Recently, I saw one MP, a doctor no less, when asked by a reporter to comment on an issue, said, “I have to hear what my leader says first before I answer you.” How much more stupid than that can you get?

I fear for Trinidad and Tobago when Members of Parliament cannot think, or the volume of stupidity increases in tandem with the noise they emit. When such ignorance—for that is what it is—is commonplace, we are in danger of imploding for no reason that is apparent.