Elections on the horizon

Over the next year or so, the season to which one of my fellow columnists refers as “the silly season”, will take over the political spotlight in three Caribbean countries, Trinidad and Tobago, St Lucia and St Vincent and the Grenadines. This is because the Parliaments of all three  will exhaust their constitutional lives, necessitating the holding of fresh general elections. Incidentally, all three countries are suffering the scourge of violent crime, drug trafficking and murders principally by illegal guns.

While the electors in these countries “preparate” themselves, (to use the humorous term coined by a famous regional comedian), for another electoral phase, the international spotlight is focusing on another election battle in this hemisphere, that of the upcoming presidential elections in the USA in November. For some reason the powerful US media has in fairly recent time created a hype around the holding of what they have dubbed “Presidential debates” even though the evidence in recent years suggest that they are anything but real debates. In fact, after all the hype these events have again and again turned out to be what one would call a “damp squib”.

On Tuesday night of this week, the latest of these took place in the city of Philadelphia, pitting the current US Vice President, Kamala Harris, against former President Donald Trump. After all is said and done, one cannot in all honesty say that it differed fundamentally from those in the past, they seem to keep going around in circles. The very choices of the candidates themselves continued the impression of “much more of the same”.

Trump with his string of felony convictions is already well-known, if not well admired. Ms. Harris, though Vice President, will pitch her campaign on the fact that she is a female candidate, the first put forward by any of the major parties, and that she is black, wishing to continue on the ground-breaking track of Barack Obama.

Given the state of technology these days, a major feature of these debates is now what is described as “fact checking”, The statements and claims by the contenders are checked for their veracity or lack of it.

The results make disappointing reading in the context of such a high-profile event. If one goes through the lists provided by the various news agencies, one can only conclude that there seemed to be more falsehoods and half-truths than anything else.

This is now a prominent feature of US politics and duplicates what is done and said officially at the international level. Yet we continue to be reminded that the USA is “the leader of the free world”. Does this not require that those in such exalted positions must take the responsibility of being truthful, more seriously? The world is in a very precarious and dangerous state. Yet the leader of democracy prefers to provide hundreds of billions of dollars to those bent on genocide and wars, ignoring the plight of hundreds of millions of sufferers in the Sudan, Gaza, and other parts of Africa and Asia.

That contradiction continues to evade many of us. We have had enough experience of Donald Trump as to be able to apply the term “charlatan” to him, but yet black people, not just in the USA, but here in SVG and the Caribbean continue to hang on to his dirty coattails.

Imagine, in a Presidential debate broadcast to the whole world, he would display continuing racist contempt for black people, by accusing Haitians of eating white people’s pets! What respect could he, if elected, have for countries like ours?

It is a pity that the opposing side, given its record, cannot put forward a clear alternative, hiding behind “Israel’s need to defend itself”, to justify the criminal genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. We have an Opposition Leader here whose comment, when the USA once more brazenly seized Venezuelan property, was not raising questions about such a high-handed act, but asking for an explanation as to why the Venezuelan plane was allegedly here. Are we serious?

We live in a world where might is right. The USA for instance refuses to recognize Venezuela’s recent presidential elections, but the US Republican presidential candidate insists that the last presidential election in that country was stolen from him. Does this give Venezuela, or Jamaica or SVG for instance, the right not to recognize the US administration or to seize US property? Yet, neither in the USA nor the Caribbean, are these issues considered in our choices of leadership or systems of governance. It is as if we are satisfied to be perpetual slaves to the high and mighty. Will we take major issues into consideration as we move to make choices for the future? Or will we continue to be distracted from the real issues which affect us?

• Renwick Rose is a Social and Political commentator.