The mouthings of many a United Nations envoy ever prove to be labyrinthine.
Meandering in unsound and dissuasive fluff, these world operatives gorge themselves on homespun, candy cotton obligations, regurgitating undigested fill that passes for analysis. They present an intricate and confusing arrangement of thought that belies their own misunderstanding but intimidates many others into agreement lest they appear idiotic and unworthy.
These United Nations spokespeople fool themselves – and the unsuspecting – that they have everything under wraps, actually being mostly blatantly ignorant of the place and people they speak of. The road to what could possibly be meaningfulness is paved unfortunately with condescension and stereotyping.
There is this growing tendency these days of United Nations operatives to look down on other people’s traditions – for example, child spanking (which they refer to as corporal punishment and brutal violence) and the death penalty (which they, for all their legacy, deem barbaric – and raise questions about their effectiveness.
Faced with such intimidation, it is not surprising that the faint-hearted political leaders among us, and those in a hurry to make international friends, are ready to sink themselves into the bosoms of these mind-altering imperialists.
Clearly, our political leaders sign on to a myriad of these UN protocols, the implications of which they care not to find out – so long as they appear to be with it internationally – or are simply ignorant of.
In either case, it is an unpalatable picture; one that disturbs the very foundation of our own imagery of nationhood. It is an insult to the memory of our Father of Independence National Hero Errol Walton Barrow and to the cause of those who rallied to the call of self-determination.
We understand better than any United Nations operative our laws and rules; what are relevant and what are not; why they are broken; and what we will suffer by such and what we won’t.
We need to keep connecting with our past, so we do not lose sight of where we are going because of these newfangled and untested notions of a Eurocentric thinking that has produced uncontrollable youths, a regular manifestation of incivility and bad manners, a general lack of neighbourliness, and imprisonment with possible parole as a punishment for cold-blooded murderers.
Where does United Nations High Commissioner For Human Rights Navi Pillay get off preaching to us about the death penalty in Barbados and the urgent need for its abolition?
Everybody accepts, except Ms Pillay and her kind, that the majority of us Barbadians are unreservedly settled on having barefaced murderers put to death.
That is social and legal justice for us, plain and simple.
The nonsensical argument that the death penalty is not a deterrent and therefore murderers should not have to forfeit their lives is as vapid as the notion that robbers and thieves should not be imprisoned because jail has no proven “deterrence value”.
So hanging a murderer isn’t necessarily a deterrent.
And what? Jailing a burglar isn’t either. So shall we not punish the housebreaking thief we catch?
Ms Pillay revels in “the Government’s commitment to abolish the current mandatory death sentencing”, which she is in haste to see done. Good for her! Attorney General Adriel Brathwaite’s proposed amendment to the mandatory death clause will neither be here nor there, seeing how Ms Pillay is able to boast that Barbados hasn’t had an execution in nigh 30 years.
Under pressure, it seemed not too long ago, from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, our Attorney General has gone on record as saying that “the mandatory nature of the death penalty is what we are going to change”. But, to his credit he did declare that “we are not saying that we will not have the death penalty”. Good for us!
Ms Pillay shouldn’t be licking her chops too soon!
The pressure from outside bodies on sovereign states to abolish capital punishment ought to be met with the strongest resistance. It is an accepted fact that people will from time to time kill, or be killed.
Retribution is the natural leveller.