By Peter Polack

Peter Polack

Both versions of the classic Hollywood thriller, The Manchurian Candidate, show loyal persons being brainwashed into unconditional support of the real enemy as will happen in big and small ways throughout the Caribbean.

In some of the colonies sprinkled throughout the Caribbean many senior and junior government employees find themselves implementing policies of their rulers from other lands against the wishes of the local populace. In other cases these selfsame workers find themselves drowning in party loyalty giving rise to the frequent and widespread undercover release of information that is damaging to the elected officials.

Many persons in many major and minor conflicts ultimately bleat as a tribunal rules on their fate that they were only following orders or this was the law, then.

A rebuttal too thin.

As Charles Dickens’ Mr. Bumble proffered, the law is an ass. 

In one such incidence five of the most senior officials including the Attorney General and a few functionaries of the Cayman Islands became involved in crimes against humanity that resulted in drowning, death and injury of many Cuban refugees under an old arrangement with the Cuban government. The International Criminal Court has yet to have their say on this matter,understandable, given the profusion of accused elsewhere but not the former Grenadian officials and the Grenada Gulag.

There is no statute of limitation, so these acts will follow them as they depart offices or change jurisdictions.

Jamaica’s highest body of corruption oversight, the venerated Integrity Commission, now finds itself in an extended standoff with a thrice elected prime minister in circumstances where the majority of Jamaicans have decided that integrity is not a fatal issue in Jamaican politics.

All the organs of civil society might as well pack up or return to their benefactors. Corruption like sexual orientation is a non issue and there is no need to beat a dead horse. The diaspora should continue financing the Jamaican economy without criticism,oversight, accountability or more importantly, the right to vote overseas that has eluded Jamaicans since independence.

The Caribbean diasporas should rename themselves as the Manchurian diaspora or simply the enemy of themselves.              

Horse of a different color, donkey of a different shade.

Notes

CAYMAN ISLANDS: TREATMENT OF CUBAN REFUGEES A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY? PETER POLACK

Peter Polack is a former criminal lawyer in the Cayman Islands. His books are The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War: South Africa vs. Cuba in the Angolan Civil War (2013); Jamaica, The Land of Film (2017); and Guerrilla Warfare: Kings of Revolution (2019). He was a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Warfare (2013). His latest book is a compendium of Russian espionage activities 1940-88.