The world does not need more suc­cess­ful peo­ple, there are enough of those—they rule the world. What the world needs are peace­mak­ers, car­ers, peo­ple who love each oth­er, and peace. In our world might is right and “peaceniks” (to use an old-fash­ioned word) are passe.

What would Ma­hat­ma Gand­hi, Mar­tin Luther King and Nel­son Man­dela make of to­day’s world? The on­ly con­clu­sion they could have come to is that noth­ing has changed in the last fifty years.

The world is as far from peace as it has ever been. In fact, there are those, me among them, who would say that it is fur­ther away than since the last World War.

What have we been fight­ing for—that some­one in a for­eign coun­try who has no sense of, nor car­ing for, the strug­gles of less­er folk would say to us that we must com­ply with their wish­es, even when those wish­es are in­hu­mane and un­jus­ti­fied? Is our con­cern on­ly about our ma­te­r­i­al well­be­ing, re­ject­ing the well­be­ing of oth­ers, es­pe­cial­ly one so near to us?

The very Unit­ed States, a year or so ago, launched a pro­pa­gan­da cam­paign against the Maduro regime, post­ing pho­tos of hu­mans com­pet­ing with dogs for scraps from garbage bins, al­leged­ly on the streets of Cara­cas; of chil­dren with bloat­ed stom­achs, and of emp­ty gro­cery shelves.

In a vain ef­fort to con­vince the world that the Maduro regime was starv­ing its own peo­ple, these pic­tures were giv­en broad cir­cu­la­tion for the gullible and pre­dis­posed to swal­low. Now these very peo­ple are re­pu­di­at­ing those im­ages and ask­ing where is the star­va­tion.

“Heart­less, mind­less zom­bies,” yes, so long as we fail to see the in­jus­tice fac­ing us next door, where the mighty US is seek­ing to un­der­mine a gov­ern­ment in or­der to im­pose a com­pli­ant pup­pet in charge for its own ne­far­i­ous pur­pos­es. That some politi­cians and their sup­port­ers would con­done (or worse) such in­ten­tions is rep­re­hen­si­ble in the ex­treme.

It may be be­yond the ca­pac­i­ty of some per­sons to ac­cept but the po­si­tion adopt­ed by the gov­ern­ment is un­ques­tion­ably the cor­rect one and any at­tempt to foist any oth­er in­ter­pre­ta­tion on the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion is a dis­ser­vice to the peo­ple of T&T and Venezuela.

Take that from a non-PNM sup­port­er!

Karan Ma­habirs­ingh