Opposition Leader Mark Golding speaking at the People's National Party's Manchester North Western constituency conference in Mile Gully. (Photo: Kasey Williams)
Show your hand!
Far-left dictators and their automatons are just as dangerous a threat to democracy today as their counterparts on the far-right. I believe those who vie for political office have not just a responsibility, but a duty, to declare where they are on the political spectrum.
Recently sections of the media reported that the People’s National Party (PNP) was gung-ho about a recommendation to abandon the nomenclature ‘democratic socialist’ and substitute it with the term ‘democratic left’. Has the PNP accepted the proposal? If yes, it needs to explain its ‘democratic left’ to the country. The recommendation came from Brown University Professor Anthony Bogues, the chair of the PNP’s Policy/Vision Commission.
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Shortly after taking the reins of the PNP as its president, Mark Golding declared that he was a socialist. The irony is loud. Following on his public admission, I asked in this space: “Just what kind of socialist is Mark Golding?” I also noted the following: “Golding is the de facto alternative prime minister, folks; therefore, we have a right to know the precise foundation upon which his socialist ideology is situated. Does he have sympathies with communism or totalitarian regimes? Are his socialist beliefs grounded in Marxist doctrinaire? Is he a Christian socialist? Or is he a devotee of Fabianism — the rotten dogma from which democratic socialism was hatched? Is he a libertarian socialist?”
More than two years into the job, Golding has yet to explain the wellspring of his socialism.
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MUNROE… socialism is communism and communism is socialism.
Why?
Now that it has come into the public domain that the PNP is excited about rebranding itself as ‘democratic left’ it is even more critical that 89 Old Hope Road engage the public. The days of “puss inna bag” are over, Golding.
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Recent and disturbing utterances at Weise Road in Bull Bay, St Andrew; Clifton in St Catherine; and Little Bay, Brighton, and Salmon Point in Westmoreland by Golding has led me to deduce that he is selling himself as a quasi-revolutionary socialist. This is a brand of socialist thinking that is rooted in far-left titivations and founded on the redistribution of wealth and not its creation.
Is the PNP again enmeshed in a scheme to bring back the re-distributive minus economic growth model which made us the “Poor Man of the Caribbean” 50 years ago? What kind of socialism is Norman Manley’s party fixated with at present?
“Higgins, why is that important,” some will bellow.
Daniel Ortega
These excerpts from The Gleaner of December 31, 1976, page 10, help to illustrate my fears.
Headline: ‘Socialism is communism, says Munroe’
The Gleaner reported, among other things: “A public meeting was held recently at the Savanna-la-Mar courthouse in Westmoreland by Dr Trevor Monroe, the communist leader. The meeting was held in support of Pearl McKoy, PNP candidate for Central Westmoreland. Dr Munroe said that there was no difference between socialism and communism. He said, ‘Socialism is communism and communism is socialism.’ “
The jockeying for ideological control inside the PNP between those on its left and the far left has been a constant for decades. The ideological bust-ups between the late Michael Manley and Dr D K Duncan are documented.
Recall, too. the explosive saga of the four 4Hs. For the more youthful among my readers, a bit of history is warranted here: Richard Hart; the Hill brothers, Frank and Ken; and Arthur Henry were expelled from the PNP in 1952 for allegedly operating a Marxist unit in the party. The expulsion of the ‘Four Hs’ signalled a parting of ways between the PNP and the Trade Union Congress (TUC), which was aligned to the PNP. The National Workers’ Union (NWU) effectively filled the vacuum left by the TUC.
Gabriel Boric, a libertarian socialist, rose to the helm of the Chilean Government earlier this year.
Dangerous realities
The far-left is by no means dead. This disturbing news item was published in this newspaper last Monday. It give these among other frightening details: “The Sandinista National Liberation Front completed its political domination of Nicaragua on Monday as electoral officials said it had won control of all the country’s 153 municipalities in elections that critics called unfair.
“Coming into Sunday’s elections, the party of President Daniel Ortega already controlled 141 of Nicaragua’s municipalities. But, having outlawed the country’s main Opposition parties and jailed dozens of Opposition figures, the field was clear for the Sandinistas’ sweep.
“They appeared to achieve de facto single-party status, wresting control of the last 12 municipalities that had been in the hands of other parties, though those groups were considered collaborationist by much of the exiled Opposition.
“The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights expressed concern Friday that “the minimum conditions necessary” to hold free and fair elections do not exist in Nicaragua. It called on the Government to re-establish democratic guarantees and stop the repression.
Hugo Chavez.
“The Government has shuttered some 2,000 non-governmental groups and more than 50 media outlets as it cracked down on voices of dissent. Some 100 civil society organisations were closed Friday, the Government announced.” (Jamaica Observer, November 7, 2022)
Far-left extremism is a scourge. One needs only to look at Venezuela to see its debilitating effect.
This excerpt from the respected The Economist is instructive: “As desperation rises, so does the intransigence of Venezuela’s ‘Bolivarian’ regime, whose policies have ruined the economy and sabotaged democracy. The economy shrank by 18.6 per cent last year, according to an estimate by the central bank, leaked this month to Reuters, a news agency. Inflation was 800 per cent. In 2001, Venezuela was the richest country in South America; it is now among the poorest.” (The Economist, January 28, 2017)
Very little has changed in Venezuela since this publication. In fact, things are considerably worst today.
Ecuador’s Rafael Correa.
Consider these excerpts from an article in the globally respected The New York Times of March 15, 2022 entitled ‘The disaster that is Venezuela’.
The news item delivered these and other shocking details: “Things are never so bad that they can’t get worse, inside the collapse of Venezuela.
“For Venezuela, 2012 was the eve of the worst national collapse in modern South American history.
“Hugo Chávez, the red-bereted firebrand who’d brought his socialist Bolivarian Revolution to power in 1999, would win another presidential term that October. But by March 2013 he’d be dead of cancer, and you could feel something malignant about to lay waste to his country’s social and economic body.
“Spiralling inflation, widespread corruption, and ludicrous financial thinking were erasing Venezuela’s historic oil boom. Through the decade, gross domestic product would free-fall almost 80 per cent and malnutrition would stalk the population. In 2015 the capital, Caracas, would suffer the highest homicide rate of any city in the world. Bitter polarisation, which the populist Chávez stoked until his last breath, would morph into antigovernment street fury — and brutal regime crackdowns that UN-appointed investigators in 2020 labelled crimes against humanity.
Evo Morales from Bolivia.
“One stark result: A fifth of Venezuela’s 30 million people would flee abroad.”
One should not need any more convincing, I hope. There is a proverb that says: “Communism is a cow of many; well-milked and badly fed.”
Socialism and socialists operate on the same principle of “hol’ dung and tek weh” economics. Like the far-right, far-left extremism is fuelled by a specific ideology characterised by anti-democratic opposition towards equality. The inner core of its primary narrative is founded on racism, xenophobia, exclusionary nationalism, conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and worse. Far-left, like far-right extremism has more than passing relationships with violence as a conduit to power. Its enemies are often targets of violence. Yes, enemies! Far-left extremists seldom think opponents. They see those who stand in their way as enemies. Their enemies are usually minorities, immigrants, and all who they see as a threat to their objective of power at all cost.
Resurgence of the left
There is a significant resurgence of the left or what some political scholars call ‘a new pink tide’ of left-wing governments in our region.
Gabriel Boric, a libertarian socialist, rose to the helm of the Chilean Government earlier this year. Between 2018 and 2020, the peoples of Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, and Honduras all elected left-of-centre presidents. And Colombia’s first-ever leftist president, Gustavo Petro, was sworn in on August 7, 2022. Except for Colombia, most of these countries have a very strong leftist tradition. Interestingly, all these new leaders say they are not the same as their progenitors. The proof of the pudding is always in the eating.
I remain extremely cautious because in the previous ‘pink tide’ in Latin America several of the presidents who committed to democracy at their inauguration later revealed themselves to be mini-dictators after only a few months of taking office.
Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, for example, followed Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez’s example in using new constitutions to take over the judiciary and other independent institutions.
A recent article in the scholarly publication Journal of Democracy noted that: “The resurgence of leftist parties in recent Latin American elections is best understood as a regional wave, in which extreme socioeconomic inequality has generated broad support for leftist candidates in many countries, while international factors, including the diffusion of democratic norms and increased economic integration, have encouraged moderation among both leftist governments and their traditional antagonists.
“This leftward shift in electoral politics will most likely be an enduring feature of Latin America’s democratic future.”
Democracies which are centrist in tradition need regeneration in order to better deal with the needs of today’s electorates, otherwise they may become political castaways.
Mere emotional spasm
The twaddle spewed by Paul Buchanan in his emotional spasm last Sunday in the Sunday Observer is confirmation that he is desperately seeking relevance. Indeed, The Gleaner of February 25, 2016 described the happy haste with which the good folks of St Andrew West Rural removed themselves from one of the worst Members of Parliament in the former Portia Simpson Miller Administration: “As if there is a mission to accomplish, voters in St Andrew West Rural this morning streamed into the Stony Hill HEART Academy with a sense of urgency to cast their ballots for their candidate of choice.” Buchanan was given a shellacking by the Jamaica Labour Party’s (JLP) Juliet Cuthbert Flynn, then a political neophyte.
Buchanan is the former head of the Operation PRIDE fiasco, a member of the PNP’s National Executive Council (NEC) and a veritable political carpetbagger.
Buchanan, in his tirade, did not refute any of the verifiable facts which I presented in my column, ‘The shame of PRIDE’ on October 30, 2022. Instead, like a spasm looking for spine to crawl up, he latched onto a page from the crumpled playbook of diversion and obfuscation.
I am not surprised at his inaccurate assertion about plots. It seems he was looking at a mirror.
Consider this banner headline in The Gleaner of September 1, 2018: ‘Central Kingston Comrades fear coup… Paul Buchanan reportedly plotting to overthrow Ronnie Thwaites’.
With regards to his inaccurate assertion that I was “removed” as principal of Tarrant High School, here are facts which I hope will make a dent in his heavy armour of ignorance:
“Yet another decision by a school board has been struck down by the Supreme Court because of breaches of the law.
“In the latest case, principal of Tarrant High in [St Andrew], Garfield Higgins was successful in having a decision by the board to terminate his provisional appointment overturned by the Supreme Court on March 21.” (The Gleaner, April 2, 2013).
I resigned soon after.
Buchanan needs to tell the public whether he was removed as the administrative head of the ill-fated Operation PRIDE. I leave that to him.
Recall a front-page story in The Gleaner, on Tuesday, February 9, 2002, which listed major money scandals that have occurred under the watch of PNP administrations. The story made this sad revelation: “Operation PRIDE/NHDC (1997-present) – $5.5 billion projected; approximately $22 billion today. Recall also a Gleaner editorial, entitled ‘A heavy coating of whitewash’, said among other things: “The Angus Report found mismanagement, corruption, and ministerial overreach in the scheme. The effect of Rattray’s review, commissioned by the then Patterson Administration, and couched in legal language, was to impeach key elements of Angus’s findings and provide cover for some of the key actors in Operation PRIDE.” (The Gleaner, August 10, 2017).
Garfield Higgins is an educator, journalist, and a senior advisor to the minister of education & youth. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or higgins160@yahoo.com.
