by Milton Allimadi
American and British media and literature contributed mightily to the defamation of Africans – an historical crime that has conditioned Western audiences to the deaths of millions. Beginning with the Greek, Herodotus, and continuing in the pages of The New York Times, racist propaganda depicted the continent as home to misshapen monsters, savage cannibals, soul-less brutes, and sub-humans in need of white discipline.
Continue reading How European Writers Created the Racist image of Africa
Last Thursday night, in districts as diverse as Carenage and Laventille, Morne Diablo and Enterprise, the criminal communities (oh, yes: those fellas have “communities”!) fired assorted gunshots saluting Police Commissioner Trevor Paul. Paul, along with Brigadiers Peter Joseph and Edmund Dillon, had earlier appeared on television promising to “run the criminals to the ground” over the carnival season. For the millionth time a CoP threatened “zero tolerance”, vowing to lock up jaywalkers and gay-walkers and maybe a few pickpockets and drunkards and pamphleteers. Little wonder the real criminals, the gunmen who are our new rulers, who call the shots very literally, were celebrating.
Those of us who stood as helpless and detached spectators agonising at the repressive regime of the late Forbes Burnham of Guyana will recall that whenever the late comrade Prime Minister faced challenges with his domestic policies his political exit strategy entailed embarking upon some African foreign policy and demarche geared to divert Guyanese attention from his failures and lack of credibility at home. That is in keeping with the diversionary theory that when in trouble at home rulers choose to transfer the focus abroad.
Homeland Security: There’s a lot of talk about al-Qaida safe havens in Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. But the FBI is closely watching a potential hot spot in our own hemisphere.
It is a universally accepted truism that Trinbagonians are the world’s perfect copycats of the modus vivendi of another foreign country. It is also a universally accepted truism that Trinbagonians copy the absolute worst aspects of daily life and values of that alien culture.
The recent slaughter of four individuals in Morvant including a police officer and the horrific exposure to the atrocity by a young child, is a startling reminder that few are safe from harms way in our present-day society. 
The comical though heavy-handed manner in which the police handled the Inshan Ishmael issue makes one want to laugh till you cry. Here’s a man who decided to mount a crusade against the evils that bedevil the society. In the still of the night, on the eve of his planned shutdown of the country, tonnes (yeah, tonnes!) of cops swoop down on his home and drag him away from his family much the way kidnappers do. They cart him off to Police HQ, hold him for most of the day. They then charge him with publishing a pamphlet without identifying the publisher-one of the most trivial, archaic laws in our statute books!
Self styled and pathological struggler, Mr. Basdeo Panday who enjoys the unique distinction of having mashed up each and every recent experiment in electoral-based accommodation is again erecting another ego-centric unity platform carded for 25 January. As usual, unity, whatever that means is to be found in the mind of Panday, must be crafted under his skewed leadership and on his egocentric driven terms and conditions.