THERE is overwhelming consensus among Third World scholars that the psychological penetration of the colonial ruler was far more harmful and dangerous than his plunder of the colony’s resources. When you get into the mind of Third World folks and you see how deeply embedded are the subliminal effects of colonialism, it makes you both sad and angry.

The former colonies now have control of their own resources but they don’t have control over their own minds. Right here in the Caribbean, the colonial mind is emblazoned on the shirt sleeves of so many of our people. It is incredible, unimaginable and downright stupid that after 60 years of Independence, some CARICOM countries delight in the existence of the Privy Council as their final court of appeal.

The agony and irony are that the judges in the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) are of higher quality than their counterparts in the UK and the West. And we don’t have to go far back in history to make the comparison. We just have to rewind two years and see how the British judiciary treated Julian Assange. Did those CARICOM heads who won’t part with the Privy Council look at how the judges behaved in the Assange case? If they did, do they still believe that British judicial officers are superior to CARICOM’s?

The colonial mind is playing out graphically in Guyana. Our former colonial masters have warned us about climate change and urged us to avoid the fossil fuel industry. It was a subtle form of colonial brainwashing and many believe that our former colonial rulers want to save the planet and they believe them. They believe them because they are the people who once educated us, so they must know what they are talking about.

So, they have been demanding that the Guyana Government get out of the fossil fuel industry because Guyana has to help save the world. They sold us similar narratives when they ruled us. When they ruled us, they told us Hinduism and Islam were pagan rituals so we rushed to change our names and religion because we felt inferior to them.

When they ruled us, they told us that the monuments in France, Italy and Greece were historic sites. They told us about London Bridge. They didn’t tell us about the Taj Mahal in India and the Great Wall in China. And 60 years after Independence, we are still fascinated with their cities. We want to see their cities not those in Malaysia, Indonesia, India, China and Egypt.

The colonials left us with a template of how our leaders must behave and the pattern must be to emulate their leaders. And we think their leaders have more democratic instincts and more respect for laws and tradition when in fact our own leaders are far more rational and democratic. They instructed us in the value of an independent media and 60 years after Independence, we accept that our journalistic standards must follow the Western press.

But the stark reality is that their leaders and their media organisations are no examples to follow. The genocidal devastation of the Palestinian people has laid bare for the entire world to see that their journalism is politically and racially driven and far from the glorious journalism they drummed in our colonial minds.

One of the things we need to understand about the West’s continued mental subjugation of Third World peoples is the symbiotic relationship between governmental power and the media. It is not the Western leaders themselves that describe how better they are than their Third World counterparts, it is their media that portray them as such and it is their media that paint the Third World in negative and condescending terms.

Western leaders do not bad-mouth the Arab world and rundown their leaders. They don’t have to do that when their media do it for them. The classic case is Yasser Arafat and Muammar Kaddafi. All the negative descriptions and misrepresentations of these two Arab icons did not come from the mouths of Western rulers. They came from the Western media. No Western leader ever referred to Kaddafi as a madman. That was how the Western media painted him.

For a fine account of how partisan and unprofessional the Western media are, see the recently released autobiography of Guyana’s international economist, Dr. Maurice Odle. So, are those Western leaders of higher quality than those of the Third World? Rishi Sunak is gone, Boris Johnson is gone. Joe Biden is gone. Look at their record. Biden’s final week in office was nothing but clownish. More on that in another column.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.