Lessons from Reagan era(Grenada)

TrinidadExpress ^ | 06/09/04 | TrinidadExpress

[Pikamax]

As the United States organises to bury its 40th president the people of the Caribbean, Grenada, in particular, may want to spare a moment or more to reflect on the impact at least one of his actions has had, and continues to have, on their lives.

After all, it was Ronald Reagan who, in the face of opposition from both the United Nations and Britain, sent American troops to Grenada, in the wake of the coup staged by the hardline faction of the New Jewel Movement which resulted in the murder of that country's prime minister, Maurice Bishop.

"Had Reagan not acted," according to John Compton, St Lucia's prime minister at the then tumultuous times "then the history of the Caribbean would have been much different from what it is today."

Certainly the history of Grenada would have been, although since the Marxist ideals that the still imprisoned Bernard Coard and his cohorts espoused became rubbished with communism's dramatic collapse almost the whole world over, the question is moot whether that regime would have long survived.

Still, Sir John may know of what he speaks. The bloody anarchy that gripped Grenada dealt a mortal blow to the left in the Caribbean even before the communist implosion in Russia itself, along with its former satellites, consigned much of what was considered to be radical 19th Century thought to the dustbin of history.

Reaganites, on the occasion of the death of the former president, have insisted that credit for this must go to him, although his Soviet counterpart at the time, Mikhail Gorbachev, continues to insist that the system whose death he hurried along really imploded under the weight of its own contradictions.

Whatever the truth of the effect of Reagan's "evil empire" foreign policy as well as the real effect of his domestic economic policy that came to be known as "Reaganomics"-and neither truth may ever be satisfactorily established-the inescapable truth remains that he was the man at the helm when the Iron Curtain sundered.

As America and the world says its final good-byes-some grateful, some resentful-the Caribbean, in general and Grenada, in particular, might spare a thought for Coard and company, imprisoned these last 20 years-and ponder the lessons that still have to be learnt about the dangers inherent in blindly following ideologies, secular as well as religious, that have been spawned in other countries and, indeed in other centuries.

Indeed, if we owe Mr Reagan anything and if Sir John is right, it is the space we now have to settle on our own truths in the full knowledge that other people's "truths", whether they come from the "left" or from the "right", and even when they are worthy of examination and particularised selection, can never rid us of the need, responsibility even, to discern and implement our own, based as they must be, on individual insight derived from the collective of native wit and imagination.