ON Wednesday, May 21, five days before Guyana observe 59 years of Independence, Mr. Kian Jabour, while on the Freddie Kissoon Show, told viewers that why people do not break the laws in all (he used the word “all”) developed countries is because they have systems in place to hold people accountable.

I immediately objected to that by asking why he didn’t include India or the Caribbean. He responded in three ways. Firstly, he exclaimed that people get raped in India. Secondly, India has the worst poverty levels in the world, and thirdly, there is no accountability in the developing world.

There are two people who write letters in the newspapers often eulogizing the developed world as the paragon of democracy. They are Henry Jeffrey and Vishnu Bisram. But these men are old. Kian Jabour is a pretty young personality who is a foundation member of the political party, ANUG.

What is so interesting is that Mr. Jabour could display this type of political thinking five days before we celebrate 59 years of Independence. It is a thinking that Guyana should have erased from the present generation a long time ago. But it is still there and we have to find an answer for it.

When I confronted Jabour on his remarks about India, he expressed surprise that I didn’t know what he was saying. He informed me that you can read about it all the time. Here is one of the clues as to why Jabour highlights the developed world as democratic and Third World countries are not having accountability.

It has to do with what the Western media have done to post-colonial nations. Take Israel. This country has been presented to us by the Western media as a military giant that could defeat countries much larger than Israel with a much larger armed force than Israel has. This invincibility of Israel has been fed to us for decades now.

When Iran attacked Israel last year, the Western media carried what Israel reported – no serious damage at all. This was what Israel told the Western media, but they did not ask Iran what targets they struck inside Israel.

So up to this day, people in the Western world believe that the Iranian strike was ineffective. It was not. It destroyed important military places in Israel. But to get that information you have to look elsewhere for it; not in the Western press.

So we have had two sets of brain washing when we were colonies of the European empires. One is the narrative that the colonial shape for us. The second is the saturation of that narrative that came with the role of the Western media. Can you blame Jabour for running down India and praising the developed world?

The answer is both yes and no. No in the sense that Third World people, particularly the Caribbean (because we speak English) have been psychologically penetrated by the colonial narrative and the Western media ensures that the narrative is preserved. And it is preserved in the Caribbean.

We, in the Caribbean get insight into what the developed world does through the media and the movies. Perhaps all post-colonial people have grown up with the belief that the Western countries defeated Nazi Germany. Up to this day, Third World nations believe that?

How can you blame them when the Western media dominate the news in the Third World? Which English movie since 1945 has shown the defeat of Germany by the Russians? It was the Russians that played the decisive role in defeating Nazi Germany. We still do not read about the Russian sacrifice that led to the defeat of Hitler because the textbooks on history that we use in the Caribbean have been written by the colonials.

So while we cannot blame Jabour for thinking the way he does about the developed world, we still can cast blame for Third World people not learning from changing times. We believe the Western democracies were more democratic than us because they rammed that myth down our throats. But what have we been doing for 59 years of Independence?

In those years, we have seen myths exploding. Why are we not learning from that explosion? The Barbadian Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, when asked about corruption in developing countries told her Western interviewer that the developed world has equal levels of corruption.

Where are the eyes of the present Caribbean generation when we have been seeing the façade of democracy in the Western world? Why Jabour thinks there is no accountability in the Caribbean and India, but there is in the West when the sham of democracy in the Western world has been laid bare for the world to see the past 40 years?

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.