International relations lecturer likens US, TT insurrections

INTERNATIONAL Relations lecturer Prof Andy Knight has drawn a comparison between the January 6 insurrection in the US and the July 27, 1990 attempted coup in Trinidad and Tobago.

Speaking at a webinar organised by the Movement for Social Justice titled Coup Attempt? Insurrection and What next for the US? on Wednesday evening, Knight said America has to stop pretending it is somehow exceptional.

“The attempted coup d’etat on January 6 shows that America is not an exceptional country. This notion of exceptionalism is very much on the centre of US foreign policy and gives the impression that these sort of things don’t happen in the US.”

Knight sat on a panel with American Professor Emeritus Abdul Alkalimat, one of the founders of African-American studies in the US and Estela Vazquez, a former executive vice-president of the US 1199 SEIU Health Care Workers Union.

MSJ leader David Abdulah, who chaired the panel sought from Knight the foreign-policy implications of the January 6 events and the declaration by President Donald Trump, who was impeached for an unprecedented second time on the same day, in the dying days of his presidency, that Cuba was a sponsor of state terrorism.

Abdulah said Trump’s Cuban declaration, around the same time he was inciting people to engage in terrorism in the US, was both ironic and hypocritical, as the US believes it is a paragon of democratic virtue.

From that perspective, Knight said what the event revealed is that American democracy is fragile.

“The American body politic is no different from that of TT, which experienced a failed coup led by (the) Jamaat al Muslimeen and its leader Yasin Abu Bakr on 27 July 1990.

“The American body politic is no different from that of Nigeria, which experienced a failed coup that same year, 1990, led by Major Gideon Orkar. It is no difference from Panama, which experienced a failed coup against President Endara in 1990.

It is no different than Haiti, whose armed group FRAPH ousted the democratically elected president of that country, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 1991.”

He dismissed the distinction former president George W Bush made that: “This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic – not our democratic republic.”

“Can America, under Trump, claim to be any better than so-called banana republics? What makes America any better than Turkey, which experienced a coup attempt in July 2016, or Austria, which came very close to a right-wing coup d’état in April of 2017?

“America is not exceptional. It has had over 200 years of attempting to become a beacon of democracy, yes, but we all know that the country was founded on strategies designed to subvert the will of some of the people in that country – namely, black/brown people.”

He said while January 6 was a dark day in American history, it was not the darkest of days. The battle of Antietam in Maryland on September 17, 1862 between Union General George McClellan and the Confederate troops of General Robert E Lee, which left 23,000 soldiers dead or wounded, Pearl Harbor and the September 11 attack by Osama bin Laden were darker days.

What made January 6 one of the dark days, he said, was that the current president “incited a domestic terrorist mob to engage in insurrection in what can only be called a failed coup d’état.

“But it was more importantly one of the most shameful days in the four-year presidency of Trump.”

Pointing to the realisation the insurrection was not spontaneous but a planned assault, Knight said unless the FBI can get to the bottom of this and punish those responsible, America will never heal.