Tweet
People as commodities
Common SenseJohn Maxwell
Sunday, July 22, 2007
It's easy to distort history, especially recent history, and especially if you were on the periphery of events.
In Michael Burke's column in last Thursday's Observer he gives the impression that it was the PNP that abolished free education in 1994 when PJ Patterson introduced 'cost-sharing'.
John Maxwell
Earlier, Burke suggested that Edward Seaga had found the money for free education by means of the so-called education tax.
The fact is that free education was abolished by the JLP and the Education Tax was never used for educational purposes and was simply added to the Consolidated Fund. When PJ Patterson announced 'cost-sharing' in 1994 it was a euphemism to disguise the fact that the PNP had broken its solemn promise to restore free education. Both parties defrauded the Jamaican child. We don't have to argue which one was worst.
When it is realised that the human brain does not attain maturity until about age 24, it appears to me obvious that the society has a duty to nurture its children until they can properly fend for themselves. This suggests to me that if we intend to have our children fitted to replace the previous generation, we owe them all we can give until they are ready to assume adult responsibilities.
I do not know exactly what the present situation is in Cuba at this moment, but for a very long time the Cuban society, poorer than ours in GDP terms, made sure that any young person in the education system was entitled to a free litre of milk every day.
We can laugh at Cuba where doctors may be found driving taxis to boost their incomes, but in that same society there is a doctor available on every city block or its rural equivalent. And when I went to Cuba for the first time in 1960, women were entitled to visit a doctor at least four times during pregnancy, although at that time the number of doctors had been reduced by half and was less than the number now graduating from medical school every year.
Cuba is by no means perfect. There are many faults in the system and many failures. But the Cuban attitude to its children has meant that the Cubans are among the best-educated people in the world with one of the highest life expectancies and one of the lowest infant mortality rates.
In such a situation it will come as no surprise that the Cuban murder rate is among the very lowest in the world.
The contrast with Jamaica is stark.
If you read Castro's defence at his treason trial half-a-century ago - "History will absolve me" - you will discover that the social situation in Cuba was not very different from Jamaica's at that time, only worse.
And when Michael Manley made his idealistic but easily misinterpreted speech about going to the top of the mountain with Castro he made it plain he was talking about the betterment of the lives of his people, not about Communism.
But that speech, and another a few days later when he returned to Jamaica, were twisted and turned into propaganda suggesting that Michael Manley was against the rich and for Communism.
The Americans bought the lie, and large numbers of Jamaicans, particularly the Chinese and upper-class light-skinned people, fled Jamaica - away from the wrath to come.
So, after Mr Seaga had become prime minister he surprised many people, including the Rockefeller Committee, when he told the committee that there were no communists in the PNP; he had been saying so for political reasons.
That's what he said.
He also said on another occasion that when people were fleeing Jamaica because of his party's scare tactics, he was busy buying up real estate.
It is not really surprising to read Martin Henry, also on Thursday, giving Seaga credit where no credit was due in an article which generally takes Seaga to task for his denigration of the Jamaican voter's intelligence.
It is worth quoting Mr Henry's first three paragraphs at length:
"Edward Seaga's last Sunday Gleaner column confirms - and frightens. I find its subtext, "The voter/citizen as simpleton", highly offensive.
The general drift of Mr Seaga's view is that it is the masses of simpletons who determine election victories and defeats. And since the people are incapable of sophisticated political understanding only simplistic messages can be delivered to them as entertaining sloganeering from the political platform. The political platform he regards "as the best means of communication to the general public" in this age of mass media. In countries where the society has a literate tradition, there is better understanding of the main issues which affect the country, he says, but Jamaica is not a literary society; it is an oral one, implying incapacity to deal with complex issues."
Class Snobbery
Furthermore, people who frown on what they consider a condescending and denigrating form of political communication are guilty of class snobbery and ignorant of the power of popular culture, as if there is any irreconcilable chasm between the oral discussion of serious and complex issues and using the popular culture in public communication."
I don't have too much of a quarrel with that because I first said the equivalent 50 years ago, in 1958, in two articles, one titled "Scientific Balderdash" and the other "Pseudo-scientific Balderdash".
What irritates me about Mr Henry's column is how much of the Gleaner's version of history he manages to swallow. According to him (courtesy of the late Ulric Simmonds), Seaga was the author of the "first and great Independence Five-Year Development Plan" when that honour rightly belongs to Norman Manley and Don Mills of the Central Planning Unit. Seaga simply found the plan, and with minor changes, claimed it as his own.
When Seaga announced the Plan at Headquarters House in 1962 he added something uniquely his. He said that "Jamaica needed to export" between 12,000 and 15,000 people annually. I confess that that day was the day I decided that Seaga did not mean this country good.
When you speak of exporting people you cannot be speaking my language. People are not tradable goods.
Since I was heavily involved in such matters as the National Minimum Wage and the struggle for Equal Rights and Pay for Women, I believe I understand the motivation and rationale of the PNP led by Michael Manley. As I said then, long before Seaga, for the PNP to be Communist it needed to have at least a few communists within it. There were none in or near any position of leadership in the party.
What may have doomed the party was something that Michael Manley believed: "To think", he said, "is for me, to act." He may have been a good man and a great politician, but he was not a wise man.
When I went to Cuba in 1960, there were slogans all over declaring "We are Humanist, Not Communist" and I believe that throughout the seventies, the PNP could truthfully have said the same.
The party was in fact generally running on the 1964 plan whose lead author was David Coore. Apart from the land policies, the PNP's behaviour in the 70s was rooted in that document.
So Martin Henry riles me profoundly
Cont'
Copyright 2007 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com
Common SenseJohn Maxwell
Sunday, July 22, 2007
It's easy to distort history, especially recent history, and especially if you were on the periphery of events.
In Michael Burke's column in last Thursday's Observer he gives the impression that it was the PNP that abolished free education in 1994 when PJ Patterson introduced 'cost-sharing'.
John MaxwellEarlier, Burke suggested that Edward Seaga had found the money for free education by means of the so-called education tax.
The fact is that free education was abolished by the JLP and the Education Tax was never used for educational purposes and was simply added to the Consolidated Fund. When PJ Patterson announced 'cost-sharing' in 1994 it was a euphemism to disguise the fact that the PNP had broken its solemn promise to restore free education. Both parties defrauded the Jamaican child. We don't have to argue which one was worst.
When it is realised that the human brain does not attain maturity until about age 24, it appears to me obvious that the society has a duty to nurture its children until they can properly fend for themselves. This suggests to me that if we intend to have our children fitted to replace the previous generation, we owe them all we can give until they are ready to assume adult responsibilities.
I do not know exactly what the present situation is in Cuba at this moment, but for a very long time the Cuban society, poorer than ours in GDP terms, made sure that any young person in the education system was entitled to a free litre of milk every day.
We can laugh at Cuba where doctors may be found driving taxis to boost their incomes, but in that same society there is a doctor available on every city block or its rural equivalent. And when I went to Cuba for the first time in 1960, women were entitled to visit a doctor at least four times during pregnancy, although at that time the number of doctors had been reduced by half and was less than the number now graduating from medical school every year.
Cuba is by no means perfect. There are many faults in the system and many failures. But the Cuban attitude to its children has meant that the Cubans are among the best-educated people in the world with one of the highest life expectancies and one of the lowest infant mortality rates.
In such a situation it will come as no surprise that the Cuban murder rate is among the very lowest in the world.
The contrast with Jamaica is stark.
If you read Castro's defence at his treason trial half-a-century ago - "History will absolve me" - you will discover that the social situation in Cuba was not very different from Jamaica's at that time, only worse.
And when Michael Manley made his idealistic but easily misinterpreted speech about going to the top of the mountain with Castro he made it plain he was talking about the betterment of the lives of his people, not about Communism.
But that speech, and another a few days later when he returned to Jamaica, were twisted and turned into propaganda suggesting that Michael Manley was against the rich and for Communism.
The Americans bought the lie, and large numbers of Jamaicans, particularly the Chinese and upper-class light-skinned people, fled Jamaica - away from the wrath to come.
So, after Mr Seaga had become prime minister he surprised many people, including the Rockefeller Committee, when he told the committee that there were no communists in the PNP; he had been saying so for political reasons.
That's what he said.
He also said on another occasion that when people were fleeing Jamaica because of his party's scare tactics, he was busy buying up real estate.
It is not really surprising to read Martin Henry, also on Thursday, giving Seaga credit where no credit was due in an article which generally takes Seaga to task for his denigration of the Jamaican voter's intelligence.
It is worth quoting Mr Henry's first three paragraphs at length:
"Edward Seaga's last Sunday Gleaner column confirms - and frightens. I find its subtext, "The voter/citizen as simpleton", highly offensive.
The general drift of Mr Seaga's view is that it is the masses of simpletons who determine election victories and defeats. And since the people are incapable of sophisticated political understanding only simplistic messages can be delivered to them as entertaining sloganeering from the political platform. The political platform he regards "as the best means of communication to the general public" in this age of mass media. In countries where the society has a literate tradition, there is better understanding of the main issues which affect the country, he says, but Jamaica is not a literary society; it is an oral one, implying incapacity to deal with complex issues."
Class Snobbery
Furthermore, people who frown on what they consider a condescending and denigrating form of political communication are guilty of class snobbery and ignorant of the power of popular culture, as if there is any irreconcilable chasm between the oral discussion of serious and complex issues and using the popular culture in public communication."
I don't have too much of a quarrel with that because I first said the equivalent 50 years ago, in 1958, in two articles, one titled "Scientific Balderdash" and the other "Pseudo-scientific Balderdash".
What irritates me about Mr Henry's column is how much of the Gleaner's version of history he manages to swallow. According to him (courtesy of the late Ulric Simmonds), Seaga was the author of the "first and great Independence Five-Year Development Plan" when that honour rightly belongs to Norman Manley and Don Mills of the Central Planning Unit. Seaga simply found the plan, and with minor changes, claimed it as his own.
When Seaga announced the Plan at Headquarters House in 1962 he added something uniquely his. He said that "Jamaica needed to export" between 12,000 and 15,000 people annually. I confess that that day was the day I decided that Seaga did not mean this country good.
When you speak of exporting people you cannot be speaking my language. People are not tradable goods.
Since I was heavily involved in such matters as the National Minimum Wage and the struggle for Equal Rights and Pay for Women, I believe I understand the motivation and rationale of the PNP led by Michael Manley. As I said then, long before Seaga, for the PNP to be Communist it needed to have at least a few communists within it. There were none in or near any position of leadership in the party.
What may have doomed the party was something that Michael Manley believed: "To think", he said, "is for me, to act." He may have been a good man and a great politician, but he was not a wise man.
When I went to Cuba in 1960, there were slogans all over declaring "We are Humanist, Not Communist" and I believe that throughout the seventies, the PNP could truthfully have said the same.
The party was in fact generally running on the 1964 plan whose lead author was David Coore. Apart from the land policies, the PNP's behaviour in the 70s was rooted in that document.
So Martin Henry riles me profoundly
Cont'
Copyright 2007 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com
Comment