Orville Taylor | CARICOM a model for international peace

Exactly five years ago, I woke up on Resurrection Sunday, after fighting for more than two weeks with the COVID-19 virus, which tried every night to kill me. In my head, a song, whose chorus eluded my memory from Crucifixion Friday, popped up. “The resurrected king, is resurrecting me!” bounced around inside the cranium and flowed out my mouth.

A terrible singer, this might have been the only time, that I could hold a note, without it being written on a piece of paper.

Call them dreams, hallucinations or vision; but nightly, deceased relatives and teachers appeared during the ordeal. As normality crept back into my still weakened body, which my wife said looked like a corpse at my worst, my belief in the sanctity of life was strengthened with even greater resolve. Life is precious and sacred.

Say what you want, I have never supported the death penalty and will never accept that the old Mosaic Laws or Islamic Sharia have any place in a post-Christian society or world. People might want to live by the Old Testament, with barbaric punishments and mandates for God’s ‘Chosen People’ to carry out all kinds of atrocities. These included the razing of other lands, murdering and abducting other neighbouring ethnicities and confiscating all their property.

Christian or not, I am happy Jesus existed, because he ushered in a period of history, where there were no longer any chosen people, or gentiles with inherent inferiority. As repugnant as that is to some who think that we must privilege some groups over others and exempt them from the laws, which are binding to us all, this is a prescription for perpetual war.

For the record, inasmuch as I appreciate the Catholic/Christian timing of Easter (probably an original pagan holiday) to coincide with the Jewish Passover, there is no way in which a Christian could celebrate the latter, because, God in those books, killed innocent offspring, including babies for the sins of the Pharaoh, the leader of the Egyptians. In Christianity, one never pays for the sins of another.

Taking the life of any other creature, except for the saving of other human lives is simply wrong. Therefore, armed military conflict, without clear understanding that it is in the protection of other human lives, should never be supported or justified.

For the record, apart from killing rats, mosquitoes and cockroaches, we should not even kill insects. Neither should we kill any amphibian, reptile, bird, mammal or fish except for food or where human lives are at stake.

While we struggle under the rubble of conflicting versions of the truth and incompatible stories regarding the war initiated by Israel and our big brother, the USA, against Iran, Jamaica and CARICOM on the whole, have to brace for the fallout in the world economy and hope to God, that, the powers comprehend that the careless firing of a single nuclear warhead anywhere on the planet, will bring us all to prehistoric times, and not the stone age, if we survive at all. Ironically, only cockroaches and rodents, will remain after the real fallout.

Former Prime Minister of Jamaica, P.J. Patterson addressed a gathering at the Norman Manley Law School last week, and in the kernel of his address, lies a big part of the lesson we can teach to the powerful nations, at war. However, we must refocus, given our privileged history and demographics.

Undeclared civil war

Patterson was leader of a country that came from out of a two-decade undeclared civil war and slow recovery from an epoch of tight austerity measures, directly imposed or caused by the USA which punished us for our romance and cadence with Cuba.

There was so much hatred and political division, that comments like, “labourite fi dead” and “socialis’ fi dead” were daily taglines. Extremists were willing to kill others for being politically different and for even wearing the colours similar to their political rivals.

By a demonstrably conciliatory approach, based on mutual respect and minimal ‘long tongue tracing’, he presided over a period where escalation became the exception, rather than the norm. Fact is, like Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, he understood that ‘an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.’

Nowhere in the world is there such a region like CARICOM. With two minor blips in the post war period, we have treated democracy and respect for territorial borders as sacrosanct. Our ‘coups’ are more from our myriad doves, like the bald pate and ‘toutwel’. Governments have typically been changed by the ballot and not extraordinary external efforts to ‘regime change;’ “A region where we enjoy and accept as part of the air we breathe a system in which the rule of law prevails.”

CARICOM is a zone of peace. Declared so in 2014 by ECLAC and reaffirmed in 2025 and rightfully Patterson pushes for a regional final appellate court. As we ‘pree’ the Middle-East war now, we have to appreciate that our peaceful and law-abiding countries have existed; not because we have foreign military bases here; but precisely the opposite, because we make very few enemies, due to our adherence to a Christian-type approach to inter-regional and international relations.

In his speech where Patterson warned about the disregard of international law in the current dispensation and the failure of the US to be part of the International Court of Justice, we can teach the rest of the world something.

As the British learned the hard way in the 1700s against the Maroons, having superior firepower does not bring peace. Respect for others and commitment to equal treatment under God, is the only way.

I celebrate life and the Resurrection today.

Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.