Declaring Crime to be a Public Health Emergency: Trinidad & Tobago Out Front

When it should be that the declaration of a public health emergency is itself the crime

“There are efforts being made to ensure that countries respond in the way that we are responding here in Trinidad & Tobago....We are a bit out front on it”. These were the words of Dr. Keith Rowley, the Prime Minister of Trinidad & Tobago, at his media conference on Monday, July 18, 2022. “The way that we are responding” refers to the application of a “public health approach” to a wider range of domains of social life. This comes as “public health,” globally, has become synonymous with lockdowns, confinement, curfews, states of emergency, and regimentation—in short, a program of authoritarian rule with totalitarian ambitions. Rowley also stated that the initiative—treating crime as a public health emergency—would attract unspecified international funding.

Many readers may be ready to minimize what happens in a small, distant, Third World island republic. Yet, in his own words, Rowley revealed that Trinidad is being used as a test case, as a lab—and it would not be the first time that “developed countries” used the periphery as their laboratory. Outside interests will be studying Trinidad, and applying the lessons to a broader range of countries. Unfortunately, many North American readers only start to pay attention to what happens in such nations when they explode, like Sri Lanka.

“Efforts being made to ensure” that Trinidad’s response succeeds, with the promise of “international funding,” was revealed by Rowley only on his return to Trinidad after an extended absence abroad—which lasted from June 6 to June 30, 2022. He was away in the US for weeks, both prior to and following the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles in June, allegedly for some unspecified “medical tests” (about which Rowley said almost nothing on his return to Trinidad). Previously, in April, Rowley met in Washington, DC, with former US Senator Chris Dodd, who serves as a special adviser to Joe Biden. There Rowley also met with the US Deputy Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Barbara Feinstein. Rowley met Dodd again in Barbados, when the latter headed a US congressional delegation to Barbados, for a meeting of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). Dodd also served as Biden’s special adviser to the 2022 Summit of the Americas. The reported subject of these discussions between Dodd and Rowley was, in broad terms, crime. Just two days after his return to Trinidad, Rowley was off again to another CARICOM summit, in Suriname.

Keith Rowley (centre); Chris Dodd (left of Rowley); Barbara Feinstein (right of Rowley)

Before leaving for Suriname on July 2nd, Rowley made his first comment that violence would be treated as a public health emergency. Apparently this was done without even consulting with his own Minister of National Security, who claimed to have heard no such remark, and angrily, insultingly assailed anyone who claimed such words had been spoken (as they had been, on camera, in front of journalists). Then Rowley returned, and confirmed his own statement, and expanded upon on it.

Rowley has experience with blindsiding his own ministers, who are minor officials with dubious qualifications and a minimum of intellectual acumen. He also announced the end of mask mandates, just a day after his Health Minister asserted that mask mandates would end at no point in the foreseeable future.

But if the Minister of National Security was apparently surprised to hear about violence being defined as a public health emergency, it was because the idea was not of a local origin. It was not internal to the government. Rowley flew in from overseas, dropped the announcement, flew out again, and then returned to develop his statement further.

A Public Health Approach: Policing, Militarization, Re-education

Signalling a “crisis,” Rowley spoke of the “dramatic escalation in criminal conduct in the country,” during his July 18 press conference. He said that he had met with the heads of the Police and Defense Force, and other elements of National Security, during the recent cabinet retreat that preceded the now notorious press conference. The prime minister, as Chair of the National Security Committee, said that “certain decisions were made, much of which I cannot disclose with you in public”. What was disclosed is that the military was going to be engaged, domestically. The language the prime minister used was appropriately coded for a local audience: he said that the Police affirmed that “illegal quarrying” was responsible for sustained funding of criminal activity. One group in particular has been accused of dominating illegal quarrying in Trinidad: the Jama’at al-Muslimeen, which for decades has been at the receiving end of abuse from the state.

Yet domestic counterinsurgency was not the only plane on which Rowley focused his sights. He expanded to include, “criminal behaviour from our young people”—while conveniently omitting any mention of the much more costly and damaging white collar crime and corruption that are rampant, as they have been for decades. (Even at the time of writing, the ongoing scandal of the corruption surrounding the construction of the international airport at Piarco was still in the news, where hundreds of millions of US dollars were spent over budget, for an airport that resembles a modest warehouse. The Attorney General now prosecuting the case, previously worked on the defendant’s side.)

Like China’s Zero-Covid strategy, Rowley announced that the “elimination” of all crime, and motivations for crime, was the aim of his new policy. The even broader aim was the creation of a new and improved citizenry.

Here are some of the key remarks from the video file presented here.

“I did say recently, that with respect to breaking the cycle, and stemming the flow of new recruits into the criminal element and the flush of criminal behaviour from our young people who form significant parts of these minorities that are terrorizing the country—that to break that cycle, that it is the Government’s intention to declare violent crime as a public health issue, because violence across the society is now the norm: from domestic violence, violence in schools, violence of person against persons, armed responses for everything, and of course the gains to be had from criminal conduct, where lives are lost and property being destroyed and stolen, and so on—a whole plethora of violent, unacceptable conduct....We will focus on it as a public health issue, even before we have been able to flesh it out and present it to the country....

“The intention is to have—in the context of this issue being raised in this way—that we develop a national plan of action. And that plan of action will be driven by a public health approach. And that approach will involve the defining of the problem....We will identify the causes, and the risk factors. We will design a response, and we will test the interventions that we are going to make, and we will implement and scale-up the effective interventions, and support continuous evaluation.

“The objective here is to enter the youth population, at various levels, and to begin a line of education which should steer people away from participation or being desensitized by crime and criminal activity. We believe that if we do that effectively, we would begin to generate a wave of people who will reject crime, or be in a position to respond to it—from the personal, through the home, through the school, into the wider community. In short, preparing a better citizenry”.

The Ministries of Health and Social Development will co-chair this “exercise,” overseen by the Office of the Prime Minister, plus the Ministry of National Security, the Trinidad & Tobago Police Service, the Ministry of Sport & Community Development, the Ministry of Education, and the Tobago House of Assembly. This is what US counterinsurgency strategists called a “whole of government approach,” which is needed to achieve “full spectrum dominance”.

This team, the prime minister stated in revealing language, “will be free to co-opt experts”—because in reality, this is what experts do: they serve to uphold the ambitions and interests of their sponsors. He also anticipated support from both CARICOM and the World Health Organization’s regional partner, the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO).

Masked and Blinded

When the Minister of Health, Terence Deyalsingh, was asked on July 20 for details about his ministry’s work on the above plan—he had nothing to say except for a sentence confirming the ministry would be involved.

Even that was more than his response to a rare question about the ministry monitoring adverse reactions to the injections: he did not even acknowledge the question. He devoted half his time to reprimanding Trinidadians for letting a vast number of Pfizer doses go to waste, thus removing the country from the list of recipients of donations; the other half of the time he spent praising the “intelligence” of those still wearing masks, despite the end of the mask mandate.

Delivering his remarks while masked (as always), one has to wonder what Deyalsingh will do when—to fight crime—all masks will be completely banned. At present, violent crimes including murder occur in broad daylight and the perpetrators remain unidentifiable thanks to masking.

Interestingly, Trinidad has two contradictory laws: one which requires masking, and an older one (from 1872) that absolutely prohibits all masking outside of festival periods (Section 5[5]: “Any person who appears in public masked or otherwise disguised except during a public festival at which he is authorised to do so by Regulations under subsection (2) is liable to a fine of one thousand dollars and to imprisonment for six months”). The 2020 law appears to have been passed without knowledge of the preceding 1872 law, which it contradicts.

Why Now?

Crime is not new in the history of Trinidad & Tobago—many history books, journal articles, and dissertations have already been written about it, for generations now. Trinidad, along with Jamaica and Guyana, is reputed to be among the “most violent” societies in the Caribbean. Crime is the stuff of legends and fear. Upper middle class Trinidadians sometimes asked me how I coped with “all the crime”—in one instance I was asked this as we sat at night in an open terrace overlooking a large floodlit park, where men gathered to play late night football, a picture of peace. Sacha Ann Geer explains their complex in better, more academic terms, in the abstract to her doctoral dissertation:

“upper middle and upper classes increasingly assert, re-create and negotiate their class position with reference to changing informal rules of ‘safe’ behaviour and movement in reference to this conjured ‘bad man’. Home spaces are created and fortified against those construed as ‘risky’. Informal rules of appropriate ‘safe’ behaviour are negotiated and emerge through endless talk of crime. This talk re-imagines and reifies nearly all lower classes as ‘risky’ and the conclusions of this talk invariably lead to greater attempted isolation of upper classes from lower classes”.

This is not to say that crime does not exist in Trinidad, it does, and like many others I have also witnessed it (I once witnessed a woman getting severely beaten in her car, before both she and the car were abducted, as I chased behind; I was one block away, staring out the window of my apartment, as a local bank manager in Arima was shot dead on the street on his way to opening the bank; my father in-law was held at gunpoint outside of the gate to his home, and chose to fight off his attackers). Broadly speaking, Trinidad has a per capita murder rate which exceeds that of Chicago.

No evidence has been supplied by the authorities to show an increase in a range of crimes, let alone such an extraordinary increase that it merits being called an “emergency”. What there is, instead, is a sense of an increase, one created by the obsessive sharing of gory videos on social media, and in the alternative and establishment media. Everyone has had a hand in creating this atmosphere.

Crime has been abundantly sensationalized in Trinidad. The local newspapers and television stations latched onto the persistence of a colonial discourse that depicted locals as savage beasts, incapable of self-rule. They splash screens and spray front pages with bloody scenes of bullet-riddled corpses—and this has been true for decades. It is a decidedly colonial discourse that persists around crime, one rooted in images of “unruly savages,” “brutish negroes,” and “untrustworthy Hindoostanis”.

Ghoulish voyeurism has been accentuated by the advent of “social media” and the wider spread of first cell phones, then smart phones. Competing media, in the form of online television channels such as Synergy TV, have provided platforms for hungry hosts keen to sensationalize, in order to attract viewers and of course commercial sponsors.

What has happened in recent weeks, as the lockdowns ended and almost all restrictions have been lifted, is a spate of (social)media sensationalism about violence among returning school children. Such videos existed over a decade ago, when cell phones came into wider use. Today videos circulate of large, elaborate confrontations between schoolgirls, resembling sporting events; of a young boy leaping into the air and landing on the back of his victim—a veritable circus of beatings...and then it all faded out. After that, we saw videos of home invasions, shootings in streets, robberies. Panic is pervasive again.

Covid panic and crime panic easily blend into each other. Indeed, one prominent local online television program, Ian Alleyne’s nightly “Crime Watch,” features the “Covid death toll” on the upper left side of the screen, and the “Murder toll” on the upper right:

“Government must do something!” is the cry. Even social media activists and opponents of Rowley’s government, are among the loudest to call on government to act, as they continue to lionize the former acting Police Commissioner, Gary Griffith, in a vain attempt to elevate him as a hero. They sidle up to the police, “Ey! How yuh goin’ pa’dner!” This despite having vigorously condemned, criticized, and protested 2.5 years of lockdowns, curfews, and policing of citizens in the name of “Covid management”. Not even they have learned. And when “the government” finally does something, they complain still. Those braying about crime and demanding government action, are no different than those screaming about Covid who demanded government action.

Trinidadian society is unfortunately one in which reform, action, beneficence, and justice is still widely seen as only flowing from the state—this is a lethal cultural flaw. Mass dependency on the state has been normalized. When the state acts, however and whenever it chooses to act, it acts already on a basis of imputed legitimacy. Even those superficially libertarian critics have learned the game: “I will fix it!” promises an aspiring leader when speaking of the mess which the country faces.

What one never hears instead is: “Who will fix it? You will fix it!” That does not win electoral campaigns. But it does guide revolutions. Revolution, however, is also alien to the world of Anglophone ex-colonies—the United States being a notable exception.

What has pervaded countless radio talk show episodes, call in programs on television, and endless letters to editors over the decades in Trinidad, is the dogma of morality, values, and family life. Crime is reduced to the desperate actions of members of the lumpenproletariat—specifically urban, Afro-Trinidadian youth. Then crime is personalized, as the failure of parents to instill the right values in their children (building on the stereotype of broken black families). Crime is a sign of personal, moral failings—which spares the socio-economic system of any culpability, and whitewashes the far bigger sins of those higher up in the predatory food chain. No, instead the entire focus of concern is on little black Johnny Buckshot.

There is never instead a focus on social conditions, on inequality, and the oppressive smog of consumerism. Poor people are schooled by the social system that teaches them the value of acquisition of luxuries as the ultimate proof of achievement, status, and self-actualization. Commercials on television, radio, and billboards all boast of the modern lifestyle of luxury and comfort, symbolized by expensive things, and the act of getting more things. Extreme inequalities in wealth and income continue to grow at the same time. Invidious comparison becomes almost impossible to avoid.

The situation was made even worse by the lockdowns: businesses were shut down; employees were laid off; and there was minimal, if any, social support for huge numbers of workers who were immediately plunged into dire poverty for the sake of a “virus” whose real death toll is almost as minimal as the murder death toll. When businesses that survived reopened, workers faced new barriers: submit to mandatory “vaccination” or else shoulder the cost of extremely expensive PCR tests themselves—which is actually an illegal requirement.

This is a country that for generations has exported oil, natural gas, fertilizers, and steel—and yet two thirds of the country’s homes lack access to pipe-borne drinking water. Capital flows upwards and outwards.

As for little Johnny Buckshot—there will be thousands more after two years of school closures that thrust children from working class homes into complete oblivion. Not having laptops and/or expensive Internet connections, and lacking government support, those without the money to pay were simply left out of the glory of “online schooling”.

The “public health” approach to “crime” is a situation that has been largely produced by the “public health” approach to Covid. Both privilege police work. Curfews, lockdowns, and rolling states of emergency will characterize both. The main difference might be the changed status of the mask.

Why a Public Health Approach?

There is no single, universally accepted definition of “public health”. The Encyclopædia Britannica defines the concept as, “the art and science of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting physical and mental health, sanitation, personal hygiene, control of infectious diseases, and organization of health services”. While violent crime may challenge the goal of “prolonging life” for some, it is clear that this definition does not place emphasis on deliberate, non-medical, non-biological factors. Even so, as one continues reading that article and the history of “public health,” one notes the constant expansion of the areas incorporated into the concept, the development of state programs, the work of international organizations, and the vesting of multiple interests focused on labour productivity, urban conditions, and international mobility. It is not, in terms of power, an innocent concept. The same source also presents an almost open-ended definition of “health” itself: “health, in humans, [is] the extent of an individual’s continuing physical, emotional, mental, and social ability to cope with his or her environment”. This too opens the door to non-biological and non-medical factors. The “social ability” to adapt to one’s environment potentially raises the issue of “deviance” from a society’s accepted norms.

The Government of Canada presents a definition that is potentially even more amorphous, where “public health is, “an organized activity of society to promote, protect, improve, and when necessary, restore the health of individuals, specified groups, or the entire population. It is a combination of sciences, skills, and values that function through collective societal activities and involve programs, services, and institutions aimed at protecting and improving the health of all people. The term ‘public health’ can describe a concept, a social institution, a set of scientific and professional disciplines and technologies, and a form of practice. It is a way of thinking, a set of disciplines, an institution of society, and a manner of practice”. The Canadian government has no definition of “health” in its glossary. There appears to be something taken-for-granted about the term “health”. Where the encyclopedia article above emphasizes promotion, the Canadian government adds protection. In practice the latter means that an entire protection racket has engulfed “public health” and sped its merger with Big Pharma and the security state.

The Canadian Public Health Association has a definition that opens the doors widely to include certain other factors, such as potentially crime. For the CPHA, “public health” is “the organized effort of society to keep people healthy and prevent injury, illness and premature death”. To the extent that violent crime causes injury and can lead to premature death, crime would seem to be relevant. The American Public Health Association offers almost the same definitional scope.

The University of Pittsburgh’s School of Public Health defines “public health” as, “the science of protecting the safety and improving the health of communities through education, policy making and research for disease and injury prevention”. Again, we can note the openings provided by the concern with “safety” and “injury prevention”—violent crime impacts on both.

The CDC Foundation outlines “public health” as, “the science of protecting and improving the health of people and their communities. This work is achieved by promoting healthy lifestyles, researching disease and injury prevention, and detecting, preventing and responding to infectious diseases. Overall, public health is concerned with protecting the health of entire populations. These populations can be as small as a local neighborhood, or as big as an entire country or region of the world”.

In discussing the “social determinants of health” (SDH) the World Health Organization includes “working life conditions,” “social inclusion,” and “structural conflict,” each of which opens the door to inclusion of “crime” as a determinant of health. The WHO adds: “addressing SDH appropriately is fundamental for improving health and reducing longstanding inequities in health, which requires action by all sectors and civil society”. Health is not just a matter for doctors, clinics, and hospitals, in other words (assuming that any of these are properly concerned with health normally). But when it comes to defining a “public health emergency of international concern,” the WHO does not have a broad definition at all: it is exclusively focused on the spread of disease.

What I am trying to demonstrate here—and not in defense of Rowley, but as a critique of “public health” itself—is that Rowley is neither as far off base, nor as “stupid” as some of his Trinidadian critics assert. While not a single definition of public health ever explicitly mentions anything such as “crime” or “violence,” violent crime can still be viewed as a relevant factor, and Rowley is not wrong in having his attention drawn to such openings. Indeed, in terms of public health’s history of constant expansion of areas of operation, the accumulation and centralization of power, and the commanding role of the state (embedded in a network of international relations), and the state’s partnership with the health industry, Rowley and his foreign backers are simply continuing along the same trajectory, extending the dotted line onwards and upwards.

What Rowley outlined for Trinidad, is precisely where “public health” and “public health emergencies” are going and where they threaten to take us. “Public health” boils down to a hierarchical system that subordinates the public to the dictates of the state and and the profit-seeking of industry.

At the same time that Rowley was speaking in Trinidad, in Washington the discussion was whether Biden should formally declare “climate change” to be an “emergency,” while the EU commission is declaring a gas emergency. Emergency is now the norm, and emergencies create needy subjects, which artificially creates a demand for intervention by self-appointed saviours and protectors.

Governance in Post-Liberal Post-Democracies

It is not so much that “liberal democracy” has failed, which was what I had been thinking for the past few years, it is more that the concept of liberal democracy was hijacked and arrested almost from the start, in order to reflect and secure the dominant interests of the time. It then became ossified. Liberal democracy, like the Westminster-derived systems across the Commonwealth, has truly come to an end. The system where politics is monopolized by parties, and political participation is taken away from the people, has clearly lent itself to venting tremendous injustices and even cruelty against citizens, as we have abundantly seen and experienced these past 2.5 years. A system of coordinated and organized abuse such as this, can only produce a “public health” that is equally abusive and distorted.

Instead, if by liberal democracy we mean a free and open competition of ideas and interests, in something akin to an open market, where all individuals are equally free to participate in making the decisions that affect their lives, then liberal democracy in the Commonwealth has not so much failed as it has never been tried.

What we have in Trinidad & Tobago, as in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, is a post-liberal, post-democratic form of governance that is known simply as authoritarianism. In authoritarian systems, governance lurches from one declared “crisis” to another. Most of the crises are either invented by the ruling regime, which arrogates to itself the sole right to define reality, or they are in fact the outcomes of regime policies—but with blame always transferred to the people. Also in authoritarian systems, governance privileges rule by “emergency,” because emergencies can be used to quell debates, freeze opposition, hound dissidents, and extract tribute. Perpetual states of emergency, which is what we now have, are last-ditch attempts to stave off the eventual collapse of a system of gross inequalities in wealth and power.

Public Health is the Crime

Nobody ever says “public health is a crime,” which is too bad really, because by now they should be saying just this. “Public health” is almost universally misunderstood to be “a good thing,” and understandably so, because the makers of meaning have appropriated certain signs and symbols to advance the project of their bosses.

But this is what “public health” and the “public health system” have revealed themselves to be during the past 2.5 years of pandemicism: a system of command and control, that imposes obligations and erases rights, and which operates by policing words and conduct. Bad medicine is a hallmark of its practice.

No wonder then that Rowley would appropriate an opportunistically selective, blame-transferring scheme like a “public health emergency,” to address “crime”. He knows all too well from recent experience all the wonderful authority, privileges, and power that a “public health emergency” delivers into the hands of a regime. Under Rowley, Trinidad bore witness to the birth of what Giorgio Agamben calls the Health Security State.

The Health Security State in Trinidad

Ruled by curfews, lockdowns, extreme and arbitrary restrictions, and a lengthy state of emergency, the Trinidadian regime’s mode of “public health” was primarily one based on policing, that is, the downwards projection of state power that was intended to drown out known and established means for individuals and their families to protect their own health. (This did not happen without substantial resistance, which we get to next).

One has to understand the long historical relationship between “public health” and colonialism in the periphery to appreciate what transpired in the Caribbean, and specifically in Trinidad. Suffice it to say that British colonial authorities were frequently possessed by concern, even alarm, with tropical diseases and the “backward” practices of local populations. Disease plus backwardness also coloured their caricatures of the Dark Continent—and thanks to the WHO and US regime media, that narrative is making a strong comeback. The colonies, especially in the “steamy” tropical zones, populated by dark and musty “brutes,” were seen by the British as being in need of concerted sanitation. Personally, having studied the nineteenth-century archives of the Colonial Office on Trinidad, I have gone through many reports on a variety of local outbreaks, enough to gain a picture of the paramount concern for public health in British colonialism. Why? Because poor health conditions, and the unchecked spread of disease, harmed labour productivity in this export-oriented colony. Public health also served the colonial ideological discourse of “civilization”: across British colonies around the world, documents abound with statements by colonial officers and settlers “saving” primitive lice-ridden aboriginals from early deaths, the result of living in a fictive Hobbesian “state of nature”.

Health discourse has also found its way into more contemporary acts of imperial violence. Violence is often cast as a therapeutic measure, one designed to “save lives,” as in bombing Libya into utter destruction and chaos in order to support “democracy”. Violence against Iraq in 2003 was also framed as therapy, in terms of “prevention” designed to “protect” Americans from the threat of things such as Anthrax. Violence as therapy and and as a sanitation campaign is also encoded in the term, “ethnic cleansing”. Again, this is what I call humanitarian abduction.

Linked to “saving lives,” there is not a little bit of messianism that pervades the speech of leaders of health regimes. Rowley himself spoke of the experience of what he called Covid-19 leading to “the birthing of a new order” in Trinidad & Tobago. Who would ever say such a thing about a disease, unless they were thinking of something other than the disease to begin with? In his recent media address on July 18, he continued to speak in science fiction terms with reference to the creation of a new and better citizenry, one where youths would almost instinctively come to reject violence. Is it going to be chemical castration all round? The result is already promising dystopia, where we can discern the shape of things to come.

Who Will Fix It?

A state that enables, facilitates, and causes conflict cannot be trusted to remedy the effects of its actions. There is, however, one advantage that Trinidadians have, that Canadians do not—the Health Security State in Trinidad lacks the material and financial resources of its counterpart in Canada. Unlike Canada, where the ruling party under Justin Trudeau lavished hundreds of millions of dollars on subsidizing all dominant media, Trinidad’s regime cannot yet afford any such luxury (without foreign funding). In Canada, the massive bailout of the media not only helped to buy their loyalty, but it also prevented competition among news media: there was no more incentive to be the one, lone, different newspaper, radio station, or television channel where one could hear the news and views that were heard nowhere else—which would have instantly commanded a large market of interested listeners, viewers, and readers. “News” coverage in Canada presents a bleak landscape of monotonous homogeneity, where one can get the exact same story, written in an almost identical manner, across a range of media sources.

In Trinidad instead, what is arguably the most prominent local television news—TV6 News, owned by the Caribbean Communications Network, a private company—more than once featured damning and brilliant criticisms and condemnations of the pandemicist regime, whether by the National Trades Union Centre (NATUC) which hosted a panel on “vaccine” injuries, or the pastors united in “TT Response” who condemned the “vaccines” as such. It was rare, but it happened. In Canada, this never happened.

In addition, local churches of different kinds, including the Nation of Islam headed in Trinidad by David Muhammad, stood up in defiance against mandatory “vaccination” and produced supremely articulated critiques and incisive analyses.

Prominent social media activists, such as the businessman/environmentalist Gary Aboud, gave impassioned speeches against medical apartheid.

As long as lessons are not learned from the past 2.5 years, about what the Health Security State is, and what it does, the Public Health approach to “crime” will proceed unimpeded. It promises to be no less sweeping and intrusive. In Prime Minister Rowley’s own presentation, it aims to penetrate the youth, their minds, their schools, their homes, and their family life. It is intended as a total, final solution. It represents a return to the essence of the Nazi state as the foundational health security state.

If left unchecked, this will be the closest Trinidadians have ever come to being marched back into slavery. And it will let those guilty of crimes against humanity walk away free after the epic assault of the past 2.5 years. The last thing anyone should be demanding, is for the state to do more.

Recently, Claudio Grass wrote in a straightforward and effective essay: “Given that the vast majority of the population happily and eagerly made that Faustian deal of trading freedom for the illusion of safety, there is no telling how far the state will go tomorrow, exploiting that very same weakness”. Well, now we have an answer as to just how far.