For those who remember: The best article I've read on Seaga

[malaise]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/14/edward-seaga-and-the-institutionalization-of-thuggery-violence-and-dehumanization-in-jamaica/?fbclid=IwAR3uhrQkJMrgmskMJ_QKe406R75tcekF0CmjuY9KFuXVBUZZXMPZGf_I5DU

Introduction

The island of Jamaica has achieved international notoriety as a space of unbridled violence and as one of the main hubs for the trans Caribbean and trans-Atlantic drug networks within the illicit global economy. These features of Jamaican society developed rapidly after 1980 when Edward Seaga, became the fifth Prime Minister of Jamaica. As the leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) 1974 to 2005, Seaga was associated with the refinement of a mode of politics that garrisoned poor Jamaicans into areas controlled by political contractors. Seaga was born in Boston in 1930 and died peacefully in Miami, Florida in May 2019. In the ensuing 89 years, his insecurity as to his identity and his wish to be accepted as part of the Jamaican ruling oligarchy sent him into a career to be an expert on Jamaicans of African descent. Edward Seaga and the JLP mobilized Jamaican workers against their own interests in organizations that guaranteed his success as a political entrepreneur. One organization that has been linked to Edward Seaga was the deadly Shower Posse that wreaked murder, violence and drug running in the Caribbean, North America and Europe. The historical record now attests to the fact that this organization was integrated into the networks of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States when the USA moved to destabilize Jamaican society in the 1970’s.[1]

Elements from these same networks were to later name Seaga as involved in drugs in Congressional hearings and in court cases in the United States. Names such as Lester Cole aka ‘Jim Brown,’ Claude Massop, Vivian Blake, Cecil Connor also known as (Charles “Little Nut” Miller), and Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke are forever etched into the political history of thuggery, violence, money laundering and drugs in Jamaican society. Edward Seaga was dependent on these gunmen within the polity and in the process undermined the office of the Prime Minister and left this position in Jamaica devoid of dignity, authority and values. The case of the extradition of Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke from Jamaica in 2010 to prison in New York revealed to those who followed the case the extent of dehumanization of the poor in the political constituency of West Kingston. This debasement of politics and humanity was to be fully revealed under the leadership of Bruce Golding who attempted to extricate the Jamaica Labor Party (JLP) from the clutches of dons (political enforcers). The killing of over 70 Jamaicans in Tivoli gardens in 2010 exposed the levels of dehumanization that had overtaken Jamaican society when Prime Minister Golding ordered the army to kill innocent civilians who defended Christopher Coke.

[NBachers]

1. I was a Michael Manley supporter, myself. I lived with a colony of Jamaicans in Miami at this time.

I could see how they had tried to recreate the British colonial system to their own advantage after the English left.

[malaise]

2. Interesting

The British effed up this planet royally.

[NBachers]

3. It was like a twisted, Bizarro World image of the English caste system.

With its own built-in systems of cruelty and exploitation.

[malaise]

4. Have you ever read Thomas Thistlewood's Diary?

I cried at the cruelty - if they were civilized, give me the barbarians.