If it’s one thing your Eyewitness is proud of about his beleaguered Mudland is that it ain’t just our religious plurality – with the major world religions of Christianity, Islam and Hinduism firmly ensconced – but the religious harmony they maintained. When he looked around the world and saw the number of bloody conflicts spawned by religious differences, he’s very thankful – ‘Thank you’ – that he’s born in the land of the Mighty Roraima!!
Dragged across the Atlantic from Africa, and enslaved from across the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and indentured to join our Indigenous Peoples left in the interior, the Europeans forcibly wiped out the Africans’ and Indigenous Peoples’ religious practices and imposed Christianity. But even though trying their darndest to do the same with Hinduism and Islam of the folks from India, they weren’t very successful. Hence our present religious mix.
While our politicians exploited our ethnic differences, they not only steered clear of religious disputations – but actually went out of their way to court non-Christian holdouts. Burnham’s African-Christian- backed PNC actually introduced public national holidays for Hindus – Diwali and Phagwah and Eid-ul-Adha, and Youman Nabi for Muslims. Later, governments facilitated an Inter Religious Organization and legislated that religious reps sit on the Ethnic Relations Commission etc…
The Constitution protects freedom to practise one’s religion of choice. All of these steps clearly paid off – helping with the above-mentioned religious amity.
But at the same time, the colonial biases hadn’t completely disappeared. Every now and then, someone or other – especially from Christians imbued with the doctrine of “demonism” – would jump on Hindu practices and denounce them!! A few years back, one pastor arbitrarily ripped out one family’s religious flags that signify worship of their Gods!! Demon worship!! Around that time, a Guyanese at UWI came out with a book that denounced Hinduism to our court – for allegedly being racist against black-skinned people – read Africans. Never mind that the two last incarnations of God in the Hindu pantheon – Krishna and Rama – were described as “dark as the monsoon clouds”!! And that’s daaaark, Budday!!
Anyhow recently, and very sadly, as folks flailed around looking for an explanation of Adrianna’s death, some insisted she had been “sacrificed” in some bizarre Hindu human sacrifice ritual by the hotel owner!! Why?? Well…duh!! Hindus do this to gain wealth, don’t they?? And finally, into that religious storm, up came someone by the name of “Baby Skello”, who described – in the most obscene and graphic manner – sex acts he performed on the Hindu Goddess Lakshmi!!
Now you’d think this was stepping over the boundary, wouldn’t you?? But some leaders defended the obscenity as “free speech”. Seems that while even corporations can be defamed, Hindu Gods are fair game!!
Thankfully, the ERC doesn’t think so!!
…US–China gap
Trump entered office with a very clear message – he was gonna Make America Great Again (MAGA)!! Now, greatness is a relative notion – we all hear about “big fishes in small ponds”!! But with the US – which had straddled the world like a colossus after the USSR imploded into the Rump Russia and some dozen republics – being “great” will be how well they’re doing vis-a-vis China!! The irony, of course, is they built China up industrially to miniaturize the USSR!! But they clearly caught a dragon by the tail!!
Trump’s initial weapon was gonna be imposing “imposing” tariffs on America’s imports from China – 145%!! The theory was it would raise prices on those products so high that American companies would start producing them at home. China would be weakened with American companies leaving – and setting up operations in America. Brilliant, eh??
But sadly, Trump couldn’t deal with the rising prices inflationary potential – and has had to reduce Chinese tariffs to 30%.
Xi can’t stop smirking!!
…the Adrianna case
Adrianna’s family want the FBI to investigate her death in order to secure “justice”. Yet, according to an FBI memo, their mission was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralise” the fight for Black rights in America!!
