By Raffique Shah
August 02, 2019
A tragedy of our times is the absolute ignorance of the vast majority of our population of the nation’s history. And for once I cannot blame this void on information technology, on the electronic devices that most young people and many mature ones are glued to, in most instances day and night.
Continue reading CLR James: man without honour in his own country
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 25, 2019
After I spoke at London’s Maritime Museum last Monday, I traveled to France for personal as well as scholarly reasons. Years earlier I had spent a semester at Paris and had taken my daughter to the University of Strasbourg on another occasion to study the French language for a summer. I never mastered the language.
Continue reading Thinking Globally; Acting Locally
By Raffique Shah
July 12, 2019
Last May, Minister of Finance Colm Imbert announced at a post-Cabinet media briefing that Shanghai Construction had been awarded a billion-dollar contract to build the Port-of-Spain General Hospital’s new central block. Minister Imbert said that the Chinese construction giant, which is no stranger to undertaking big projects in Trinidad and Tobago, had bid TT $1 billion, which was $600 million less than Bouygues Batiment, a French company.
Continue reading US demonising China
By Raffique Shah
June 21, 2019
During the recent Venezuelan migrants registration exercise, I found myself subconsciously scanning video-clips and photographs of the hundreds of hopefuls who turned up at the three designated centres each day for, I am not ashamed to admit it, applicants of colour. “Where are the Waraos?” I kept asking aloud. “Where are the Afro-Venezuelans?” I spotted one or two of the latter during the two-week exercise, but not one of the indigenous people (Warao and other tribes), who, I am told by fisher-folks who routinely make trips across to the Main”, live closest to Trinidad and Tobago.
Continue reading Crisis next door will continue
By Stephen Kangal
April 18, 2019
After five decades of exercising our nationhood and political independence during which our foreign relations were carefully crafted and marked by clarity, unimpeachable consistency and firmly grounded in the achievement of our national interests on the global and regional stage by the likes of Rose, Constantine, Mc Intyre, Seignoret, Abdullah, Major, Ballah, Dodrige Alleyne, Naimool, Dumas et al our current foreign policy on Venezuela now in the hands of Prime Minister Rowley and a lame-duck Foreign Minister is driven by confusion, contradictions, lack of parliamentary over-sight and embarrassingly and patently inconsistent.
Continue reading Contradictions Mar our Foreign Policy on Venezuela
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 06, 2019
“If you compared Britain to a sphinx, the sphinx would be an open book by comparison. Let’s see how that book speaks over the next week or so.”
—Jean-Claude Juncker, President, European Commission
Last Friday Britain was supposed to leave the European Union (EU) after which the land, as Boris Johnson and his Tory friends assured us, was supposed to be flowing in milk and honey. March 29 has come and gone. On that very day the British Parliament rejected Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan to leave the EU for a third time. This left British citizens asking: “How did we go so perilously wrong?”
Continue reading The Brexit Quagmire
The Other Venezuela
By Alborada/Redfish – March 29, 2019
A 15 minute documentary, produced by Alborada for Redfish, shows a reality of Venezuela that is absent from the mainstream coverage.
Continue reading The Other Venezuela
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
March 28, 2019
Tony Barber, Oxford scholar and European editor of the Financial Times, recalls an interesting occurrence when the European Union sought to write a European history book. “One historian from each EU member state was commissioned to write a chapter. The project was abandoned after the British complained that a Spanish historian had dismissed Sir Francis Drake, the Elizabethan maritime hero and victor over the Spanish Armada in 1588, as a mere ‘pirate'” (Financial Times, March 16).
Continue reading Our Living Past
By Raffique Shah
March 26, 2019
I find it incomprehensible that supposedly-intelligent persons, many of whom have been around for as long as I have, and who ought to know the bloody history of American interventions in the politics of Latin American countries, routinely regurgitate the propaganda emanating from Washington by referring to Venezuela’s besieged president Nicholas Maduro as an “evil dictator”.
When such description comes from the mouths of the lying US president Donald Trump and his close associates, or from Venezuelans who oppose Maduro (and his predecessor Hugo Chavez), I understand that. They have to paint the man as a monster to rally support and political and economic ostracism that they hope will hasten his demise.
Continue reading None so blind…
‘The mask of the US is off’: At UN, Anya Parampil speaks on Venezuela regime change war
By The Grayzone – YouTube – March 19, 2019
The Grayzone’s Anya Parampil spoke about the US-led regime change war on Venezuela and the right-wing opposition’s use of violence, at a UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva on March 19, on a panel titled “Humanitarian crisis in Venezuela: Propaganda vs. reality.”
Continue reading At UN, Anya Parampil speaks on Venezuela regime change war