Dr Kirk Meighoo

In the mid­dle of this Venezue­lan cri­sis, Lloyd Best's thought couldn't be more rel­e­vant than it is to­day.

In 1965, he wrote the sem­i­nal piece In­de­pen­dent Thought and Caribbean Free­dom, which be­came the foun­da­tion doc­u­ment for the New World Group.

Soon af­ter Ja­maican and T&T gained in­de­pen­dence, and af­ter the break-up of the Fed­er­a­tion of the West In­dies, it an­nounced our in­tel­lec­tu­al in­de­pen­dence from the Cold War ri­val­ries and ide­olo­gies.

These im­pe­r­i­al ide­olo­gies were sweep­ing the new­ly in­de­pen­dent coun­tries at the time, and pre­vent­ing their de­vel­op­ment, by di­vert­ing their at­ten­tion from their own re­al prob­lems and get­ting them in­volved in un­nec­es­sary fights and bat­tles.

In their in­no­cence and ig­no­rance, some younger peo­ple as­sert that to­day is much dif­fer­ent from those days, and we can­not af­ford to be in­de­pen­dent.

At the time Best wrote, how­ev­er, the Cold War was at its height. The Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis was just a few years ear­li­er, right in our re­gion. You couldn’t get more dan­ger­ous than that.

Best’s les­son re­mains rel­e­vant: We must not get caught up in the ide­olo­gies and ri­val­ries of su­per­pow­ers.

We must think and act for our­selves, on our own terms, and in our own in­ter­ests.

We must not get drawn in­to oth­er peo­ple's wars. We are on­ly pawns to them. As an in­de­pen­dent peo­ple, we must have some dig­ni­ty and back­bone.

We have our own wars, which we are re­fus­ing to fight.

Be­cause of the re­lent­less di­et of US and UK me­dia, Trinida­di­ans and To­bag­o­ni­ans all of a sud­den want to save Venezue­lans.

Yet, when Trinida­di­an fish­er­men are kid­napped, there is nowhere near the same amount of in­ter­est or pas­sion.

It is like Trinida­di­ans who cry when Man­ches­ter Unit­ed lose a match. It’s not even our coun­try or city. Strange loy­al­ties, in­deed.

If Guai­do gets in pow­er, I high­ly doubt he is go­ing to stop this abuse of Trinida­di­ans. We will not be his pri­or­i­ty, as with pre­vi­ous Venezue­lan gov­ern­ments. (In fact, some past gov­ern­ments have made claims that Trinidad is still right­ful­ly Venezue­lan ter­ri­to­ry.)

I don’t be­lieve there will be some mag­i­cal change oc­cur­ring af­ter Maduro’s re­moval. There is some­thing chron­i­cal­ly wrong with the Venezue­lan econ­o­my, which I say even though ours is al­so ex­treme­ly de­fi­cient. How­ev­er, as Trinida­di­ans, we al­ways have heard about Venezue­lan toi­let pa­per short­age, long be­fore Chavez and Maduro; since I was a lit­tle boy.

"If you go to Venezuela, bring toi­let pa­per." That's what we've said here for decades to peo­ple go­ing over to vis­it.

How can a coun­try with oil re­serves greater than Sau­di Ara­bia have no toi­let pa­per?

This is ab­solute­ly in­cred­i­ble. And it says some­thing very sym­bol­ic.

It's not one man's fault: Maduro, or Chavez, or who­ev­er. One man can't do that to a coun­try. That takes a whole so­ci­ety to do that.

As some­one ob­served ear­li­er and shared with me: when poor Chi­nese come here they sell food, when poor Syr­i­ans come they sell gy­ros, but when poor Venezue­lans come, some sell their bod­ies. I know this is a gross gen­er­al­i­sa­tion, it's not every­body, for sure, but it points to a ker­nel of truth.

Fur­ther­more, their mur­der and crime rate is ac­tu­al­ly worse than ours! And we have one of the worst in the world.

Yet, we are falling for a script played over and over by the Amer­i­cans and their me­dia pro­pa­gan­dists be­fore a coup or in­ter­ven­tion: sanc­tion the coun­try and make it ab­ject­ly poor, then have me­dia re­ports on how evil the leader is; don't stop the re­ports, every day, all the time; de­monise every­thing you can about them; fund for­eign NGOs to have "colour rev­o­lu­tions" and mass up­ris­ings be­cause of the pover­ty ex­ac­er­bat­ed by the sanc­tions; whip up sen­ti­ments for war; if that doesn't work, bring out a pic­ture of a dead ba­by, or hurt ba­by or threat­ened ba­by to push the call for US in­ter­ven­tion fur­ther.

It's the same thing, over and over and over again. It is high­ly re­fined emo­tion­al ma­nip­u­la­tion by Amer­i­can news me­dia which are sub­di­vi­sions of the largest en­ter­tain­ment com­pa­nies in the world.

Time Warn­er owns both CNN and Warn­er Broth­er’s movie stu­dios. The me­dia are lit­er­al­ly fol­low­ing a script.

The movie Wag the Dog with Robert deNiro and Dustin Hoff­man shows (in thin­ly dis­guised fic­tion) this me­dia ma­nip­u­la­tion in the 1990s tar­get­ing East­ern Eu­rope. In the 2000s the tar­get moved to the Mid­dle East. Now it's fo­cused on Venezuela.

They man­u­fac­ture these nar­ra­tives. And they can flip the script when­ev­er they want: make the bad guy seem good one day, and make the good guy seem bad the next.

In the mean­while, the US is hap­py to be al­lies with the worst regimes one can imag­ine. But we are sup­posed to be­lieve they ac­tu­al­ly care about peo­ple's hu­man rights.

We must not get used in their games. I am not a sup­port­er of Maduro or his brand of so­cial­ism. Nei­ther am I a sup­port­er of clear­ly or­ches­trat­ed, neo­con regime change.

How re­mov­ing a pres­i­dent by force is sup­posed to pro­duce democ­ra­cy still makes no sense, es­pe­cial­ly af­ter Afghanistan, Iraq, the Arab Spring, etc. We just need some sta­bil­i­ty there. Not to take sides in what is shap­ing up to be an ex­ter­nal­ly ag­gra­vat­ed civ­il war.

That is a mess that is not go­ing to get sort­ed out soon. Whether Guai­do and the US take over or not.