In fact, torture is not part of their instincts.

The humanists and modern liberal lawyers seem to lay claim to being more Christian than Christ and have elevated the virtue of forgiveness  over the societal need for harsh modes of punishment; and while, seemingly indifferent to the various forms of barbarous killings, are using a chronological age to differentiate between adult and child, thus excusing the young murderer(s).

The question as to where the idea and urge for sadism came from and entered the mind of the boy murderer needs to be explored.

In the meantime, however, I venture to speak the unspeakable, until we can ascertain the societal cause for the psychopathological act, I cannot help but make the horrendous relationship between the boy’s murder as a fitting symbolic celebration of the 50th anniversary of the coming of Eric Williams and the People’s National Movement (PNM).

There is always the darker side to any revolutionary social movement in history. As the saying goes, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.

Jesus Christ intended that men would follow a teaching that would lead them to an other-worldly kingdom of heaven and the subsequent history of Christianity was fields of blood, corrupt clergy and popes living in luxury and sin on this earth.

Robespierre and Danton and other founders of the French Revolution wanted a heaven on earth and instead precipitated the “terror”, where thousands were guillotined.

Lenin wanted a Communist paradise but instead got a merciless dictator, Stalin, who massacred millions in the name of Communism.

Eric Williams wanted to build a nation according to the contemporary version of the State, and the struggle for black independence from white colonialism.

So the evil that blights the land is not strange, only a recurring theme in man’s historical quest, but also with  something unique in the 50 years (minus 10 or so years) of PNM rule.

With the advent of Williams, the liberal democractic philosophy of English history freed up an underlying Latin culture of political corruption, nepotism, racism, idleness and feudal values, contrary to the democratic ideals.

The carbon copy of the English political system resulted in the polarisation of the two major races by political party, as the Indians  took the place of the wicked white man.

In addition, the impact of modern American liberal sexual values on an underlay of post-slave African sexual irresponsibility, unleashed a  mass of women with illegitimate children fathered by different men, none of whom looked back to “father” the children.

Then to add fuel to the flames, came American imperialism and the influence of the Black Afro-American ghetto culture, in music, dress and behaviour, all aped by the youth as they saw them in the movies and heard on the tapes and now DVDs, etc.

The negation of paternal responsibility had its consequence in the rebellion against hitherto accepted social values.

The corruption from the top began to be emulated down the hierarchy of the public service, the police, the army down to the URP gangs and the rise of the drug culture bringing guns and murders with it.

The legacy of the PNM is a continuing saga, as everyday adds a new page to its horrors.

When former leader of the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR), Lennox Sankersingh blames the Inter-Religious Organisation (IRO) as being  hypocritical for saying that “evil was stalking the land” and called for studies about the causes and solutions, he opened my thoughts to the history of man’s quest for God (good) and his struggle against evil (the Devil) sometimes one wins and sometimes the other.

That religious leaders throughout history and some at present, have been hypocritical is well-known.

Up to today, people’s faith in the priest is so strong that even if they found out that the priests of their church are paedophiles, they still believe in the teachings of the Church.

Men have lavished thousands of dollars, dinars, rupees or other forms of wealth to finance the building of cathedrals, mosques, temples with a religious piety in their beliefs that the buildings are pathways to their God, while living profligate lives; and they still continue today with the added incentive of the God of capitalism.

Because we have more records of European history, we can read what went on among the Renaissance Popes, for instance.

One writer (1501) says: “There is no sort of outrage or vice that is not openly practised in the palace of the pope ... Rodrigo Borgia (Alexander VI 1492-1503) is an abyss of vice, a subverter of all justice, human or divine.”

We don’t know if Erasmus was being satirical in his praise of Julius II (1503-13) when he writes; “The invincible Julius ought not to answer (to) a beggarly fisherman” (Christ) and goes on to describe Julius as if it is in the Pope’s own words: “My mother was the sister of the  great Pope Sixtus IV.

“The Pope made me a rich man out of church property.

“After suffering great misfortune, I knew all along that I should become Pope myself ... I have done more for the church and Christ than any Pope before me ... I annexed Bologna to the Holy See.

“I beat the Venetians ... I defeated a schismatical council by a sham council of my own.

“I drove the French out of Italy ... I have torn up treaties, kept  great armies in the field, I have covered Rome with palaces ... and I have done it all myself too.

“I owe nothing to my birth, for I don’t know who my father was; nothing to learning, for I have none ...

“Spite of fortune, spite of Gods and men I achieved all that I have told you in a few years ... and my friends at Rome call me more a God than a man.” (Renaissance Europe 1480-1520, J.R. Hale, Lon. 1971, Fontana, pp.225-226).

It was history like this of the Church in Europe that led the historian Prime Minister, Eric Williams, to advocate and pursue the establishment of State schools, moving away from religious schools to secular ones.

What happened in the secular schools was that the “hidden curriculum” changed from a moral and spiritual atmosphere to an amoral and nihilistic one.

What is most amusing is the ministry of education advertising the teaching of moral values in the secular schools, when it is most glaringly absent at the top.

While post-Christian secular societies in Europe and North America are faced with the same challenges, Trinidad society has not been able to cope with secularisation as they have.

It would seem that Europe and America had inherited the values and culture of the Christian days and had not shed them completely and extensively despite modernisation.

But William Barret’s observation on the decline of religion in the West is more cataclysmic in Trinidad’s society than elsewhere because of a different social structure.

“... Religion is no longer the uncontested centre and ruler of man’s life and the church is no longer the final and unquestioned home and asylum of his being ... The waning of religion is a much more concrete and complex fact than a mere change in conscious outlook; it penetrates the deepest strata of man’s total psychic life ... the loss of the church was the loss of a whole system of symbols, images, dogmas, and rites”. (Irrational Man, Anchor Books, 1962, pp. 24-25).

While the Nation-State has replaced the church in the modern West, in TnT, it is politics that has replaced religion and the political party  the church; since there is no Nation-State but a multi-national State.