Prime Minister Rowley would have made a better choice had he tried to attend the historic BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, with 20,000 participants attending, rather than the archaic (British) Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Samoa, which took place almost at the same time with BRICS.

While India, Africa, South America, and many parts of the Arab world, as well as much of the rest of the world that is tired of Western monetary and trade oppression, were present in Kazan, it is lamentable that a Caribbean which gave to the world such classics as Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery, George Beckford’s Persistent Poverty and CLR James’s Black Jacobins should choose to walk instead with unrepentant imperial Britain all the way to Samoa.

The BRICS Summit ended with a declaration condemning the use of trade as a weapon of war, and BRICS is correct in that condemnation. Economic sanctions, as well as the use of inflation as a weapon of war, are not only in conflict with international law, but more so with moral law.

They are shameful, disgraceful, and manifestly sinful. But thanks to BRICS, the oppressed of the world can now see a promise of a silver lining behind the dark clouds of monetary and international trade oppression with which they have lived since Pax Britannica.

Economic sanctions and inflation have been used to strangle our dear neighbours, Cuba and Venezuela, as a result of which this country’s government has faced totally disgusting difficulties in establishing mutually beneficial trade relations with Venezuela in the exploitation of oil resources.

The political opposition to TT’s government appears to dutifully support those sinful economic sanctions. Like yesterday’s slave master, they appear to have lost consciousness of what is “sin.”

But there are many others in the Caribbean, and even more elsewhere, who are different, and who recognise yesterday’s imperial slave master – who inflicted horrendous, unspeakable oppression on our peoples in India, Africa, and so many other parts of the world – to be unrepentant, and to still harbour in his heart a lust to rule over us.

While we no longer live with a British governor, and no longer sing “God save the King” at school, and still live with such painful relics of that past as the Churchill Roosevelt Highway, there are many who recognise that the monetary system that was created by the West, as well as their use of economic sanctions (against Iran, Venezuela, Russia, etc), represent an effort to continue to rule over us by proxy through trade and monetary warfare.

It is time enough for the Caribbean to read and understand the movement of monetary history that is now taking place through BRICS, and which heralds a blessed new chapter in international affairs with a promise of restoring such moral integrity that would deliver justice to those who have had to live with grievous wounds inflicted in the past, and which continue to this day.

It is time for the Caribbean to use insight to recognise that the unjust monetary system imposed on us by the West is taking mankind to a cashless world of digital money, which would deliver to the West even greater control over us, and an enhanced capacity to rule over us by proxy.

IMRAN N HOSEIN