Powerful ignorant

December 01, 2004

I have just returned from a trip to Canada to attend the funeral of a friend who succumbed to pancreas and liver cancer.

While there I noted the building furore over the impending visit by George W (Dubya) Bush. There was wide speculation that Bush was opting out of addressing the Canadian Parliament due to fear of being heckled.

There are a number of bursting issues that have served in recent times to cause a deterioration of Canada-US relations, of which the US “ban” on Canadian beef and the US duplicity and inconsistency in regard to the lumber trade with Canada are probably the two issues that stand out the most.

On the other side of the coin, it is Canada’s continued unease about Bush’s National Missile Defence System, and therefore Canada’s refusal as a result to ratify it on the grounds that this is the first step to nuclear warfare in space, that has the US policy officials unnerved.

In fact, the peace-militants of Canada who were planning to protest during Bush’s visit are keen on making this the crucial and foremost of all the issues.

However, what I sensed in general is an underlying distrust in Canada of Bush’s belligerent and big-stick approach to foreign policy.

In fact, a columnist in one of the dailies described Bush’s past visits to Canada as “brutish, nasty and short” and referred to Bush’s diplomacy as possessing “the subtlety of a bulldozer,” as well as being characteristic of a “president who carries grudges.”

With such sentiments being prevalent, it was not surprising to me to see that one of the best-sellers in Canada today, highly showcased in all the bookstores I checked, was Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty, subtitled Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush.

It was quite amusing to hear Canadian Government officials at every opportunity appealing to their citizens to behave properly during Bush’s visit, obviously not wishing anyone to fly off the handle and call Bush a “moron” as happened before.

This next four years will prove most trying for W (Dubya) Bush, despite the fact that he has openly expressed the desire to use this second term of office to fashion a better world by extending the democratic system throughout. He leads the only superpower today and feels that he is duty-bound.

What he is incapable of comprehending is that the very principles of democracy rule out any big-stick approach and that democracy cannot be imposed from outside or from above but instead has to be an outgrowth from below that takes on its own specifics relevant to time and place.

For example, Iraq’s democracy will never be determined by American sentimentality and American culture. The Iraqis, despite all that may occur there in the final analysis, will work out their democratic set-up in accordance with their religions and their socio-cultural tenets.

Bush will never succeed in “holding their feet to the fire” to make sure that democracy in accordance with American sensibilities would prevail.

Neither will Bush ever see a Palestinian state fashioned to his own likeness and ordained by himself and his hawkish advisers.

If those were the issues that concerned Canadians in general, then for Canadians of West Indian descent the key concern in relation to US foreign policy was the question of deportees and the resulting increase in crime rates back in the region.

In the Caribbean Camera it was reported that so far for 2004, some 6,124 people were deported to the Caribbean, out of which the Dominican Republic received the largest amount, 2,941 to be exact, with 2,420 being described as hardened criminals and 521 as non-criminals.

Jamaica was next with 1,757 deportees, 1,579 criminals and 178 non-criminals. Haiti, third with 518 non-criminals and 212 seasoned habitual offenders. A total 289 were sent back to T&T, 254 criminals and 35 non-criminals.

Barbados admitted 68 of whom 67 were criminals, by far the worst-case percentage of non-criminals to criminals, but of course Barbados does not publicise crime as T&T and others do, so it is difficult to measure the impact of deportees to that island in terms of crime status.

It is however another reflection of US big-stick policy to foist on these small Caribbean societies people who were nurtured and moulded in the US, many of them from the very early ages of three and four.

And they are deported without any dialogue and without any information to the respective island authorities—that’s a big brother for you who talks about democratising the world and fashioning a new humanity. How do we believe them?