T<$>HE letter writer Veritas (Mid-Ocean News<$>, May 20) states that trying to engage me in a rational discussion on Independence is as unprofitable and exhausting an exercise as challenging an octopus with no sense of fair play to an arm-wrestling competition.Well, Veritas is right. I am not prepared to surrender on the question of Independence for Bermuda. As I have stated before, only death will prevent me from being an advocate for Bermudian Independence — death or censorship, an option that some of my critics have suggested in a bid to silence me.

But even then I would find other ways to express my unshakeable opinion on this issue.

Veritas compares me to an octopus with no sense of fair play. Well, I say this. This is a level battleground, your mind and ideas against my mind and ideas on this question of Bermudian Independence.

Let the people judge. Perhaps Veritas wishes to return to the days when his ancestors faced mine armed with guns while mine only had spears and their inherent courage to fight back with. History does not speak of fair play, only those who have won the battles. The circumstances have now come full circle and Veritas had better get used to that.

In his effort to seek comfort and support for his point of view, he talks about the opinions of an old Bermudian taxi driver of colour who criticises the Progressive Labour Party Government, saying what it wasn’t screwing up or wasting in terms of tax dollars it was seemingly trying to steal.

But it is not that taxi driver or his opinions that Veritas faces on this issue. It is me. He links me to the PLP’s stance on this issue, but that’s not accurate. Even though some members of that party have come out publicly and voiced support for Bermudian Independence, the Government as a whole has not stated that it supports Independence as the direction Bermuda should go in.

With the Bermuda Independence Commission now holding meetings on Independence, it is clear that Government is playing the role of facilitator in an ongoing debate on the question of Independence. It is not playing the role of advocate. But I have long since made it clear that is what I am — an advocate of Independence for Bermuda.

Veritas is quite wrong when he states that I am not prepared to answer facts on the question of Independence. For I am one of the few who has attempted to look at this question from different perspectives and I suspect that is what troubles some of my detractors.

In any event, I did not get the impression that Veritas was presenting facts on the question of Independence — only a biased opinion full of anti-Independence statements. Of course, his comments were couched in a great deal of supposed moral superi\ority when it comes to human rights on the part of the West as opposed to non-Western countries, something I will comment on later.

He cites an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report to back up his attempt to claim that sovereignty is bad for a country. The subject of that report, “Graduate Emigration”, is just another term for brain-drain and that occurs when a country trains its nationals in particular skilled occupations for which there is a world-wide demand.

As an example, look at the medical field. Third World countries develop doctors and nurses only to have a richer country come along and poach its newly trained medical workers. I cite the medical field because Britain has been accused by its own national medical board of doing just that.

It has gone to Africa, Asia, and India to lure away much needed medical personnel to come and work in Britain. And where are the British medical workers? Well, they are to be found working in Canada, in the United States and even in Bermuda. So this has not got anything to do with whether a country is Independent or not. It’s an old activity of mankind, people will always migrate to areas where they can find a better standard of living. This was true even in Roman times and we see the same process taking place within countries where people living in the farming and rural areas seek to migrate to the cities where they think they can earn a better living. So where is Veritas’ argument? I will let the readers decide on that one.With respect to Frantz Fanon, I think that I have said enough on this question. All I will add is that you have your writers who you hold in high esteem and I have mine.

I am glad that Veritas recommended that Bermudians read Fanon’s books — it shows that perhaps Bermudians have moved away from the time when certain United Bermuda Party politicians wanted to ban the book War of the Flea <$>which they didn’t want young black men such as myself to read.

For those of you who don’t remember it, Robert Taber’s 1965 War of the Flea <$>wasa classic study of guerrilla warfare in the developing world. Poor Mrs. Baxter, co-owner of the now closed Baxter’s Book Store, as liberal as she was (she and her husband Mr. Ford Baxter were some of the few whites at that time who used to go to the annual PLP banquet), she still asked me when I purchased my copy: “Young man, you are not going to burn down the city after reading this?”

“No, Mrs. Baxter,” I said. “I have no intention of doing that — at least not to your book store.”

In fact, I have two more books to add to Veritas’ reading list that will challenge his assumptions and built-in sense of cultural superiority: The Iceman Inheritance: Prehistoric Sources of Western Man’s Racism; Sexism and Aggression<$> by Michael Bradley and The Isis Papers <$>by Professor and Dr. Frances Cress Welsing. Who knows, Veritas might discover something about his own mindset if he reads them.

I see that Veritas has picked on the French and their attempts to re-impose colonial rule at the end of World War Two. Not that I have any sympathy for the French efforts but all of the European imperial powers tried the same thing.

The Dutch, the Belgians and the British all sent military forces to their colonies to attempt to re-impose control in the face of nationalist movements. The British and the French in particular collaborated with each other in these efforts.

For example, little is known about what the British did at the close of World War Two in what was known at the time as French Indo-China, in particular Vietnam. After the Japanese surrendered the British took over the South, while the Russians were in the North.

The Vietnamese patriots who had fought the Japanese during the war, of course, wanted Independence. But the British, in an effort to forestall this, rearmed the defeated Japanese military to fight the Vietnamese liberation movement who had a right to national Independence whether they were led by communists or not. They did that to give the French enough time to bring French military forces to the area, which in the end they lost anyway.

Did not an Anglo/French military force attempt to take back the Suez Canal after nationalist leader President Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalised it?

The British in Kenya fought the liberation movement led by the Mau Mau, a conflict in which the British military killed thousands of fighters and detained and brutalised hundreds of thousands of the Kikuyu, the former British colony’s largest ethnic group.

The conditions they kept these prisoners in make what the Americans are doing in Iraq look tame by comparison. The reason such atrocities are not very well known today is because the British government ordered all documentation relating to detention and torture during the last days of British colonial rule in Kenya destroyed. In an interesting book Imperial Reckoning (The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya) <$>by Caroline Elkins, the truth comes out. I don’t think anyone in the West can lecture anyone in the rest of the world on the question of human rights and the use of violence.

And I have just given a few examples for Veritas to ruminate on and digest. I could provide others.

Finally, I will say this about Veritas’ statement that an Independent Bermuda will drop leave of appeal to the Privy Council in London instead of joining the Caribbean Court of Justice. This assertion comes out of his own head.

Certainly I don’t see this Government moving in that direction: I’ve not heard any statements to that effect. Again, much of what he is saying boils down to scare tactics — employing the spectre of the bogeyman to frighten Bermudians, something I have long since dubbed “bogeymanism”.

I doubt that even our children, who the bogeyman is supposed to scare into good behaviour, would be much impressed by such tactics these days. It’s time for the rest of us to catch up.Now<$>, on a tangential issue relating to Independence, it seems I have upset some people by discussing what would be the most appropriate national bird to include on the future national flag of an Independent Bermuda. As it turns out the longtail is not Bermuda’s national bird. The cahow is (by the way, I let myself in for a lot of teasing on the job when I mistakenly called the cahow a “cowhow”. A nickname can come out of the blue with lifetime implications, as most Bermudians know. I hope that I will not have to leave my job to get rid of this one).

However, to return to the question of the longtail as opposed to the cahow as the most appropriate symbol to go on a flag, I have been made to understand that the white longtail that hangs around Bermuda has a black cousin in the Caribbean — same bird, different colour.

One can imagine the problems I would run into if I tried to push that one! However, I am still partial towards the longtail.

Even though it does not hang around here during the winter time, I nevertheless like to think the bird has Bermuda status. (It seems to have much in common with Veritas, who has not denied that he has the option to take the chicken run out of Bermuda if he does not like the way things are going).

I recommend the longtail for the same reason the Americans rejected the turkey as their national bird and chose the bald eagle — because in flight it simply looks more spirited and majestic.