THIS LAW IS OPPRESSIVE!

NATIONAL heroes Makandal Daaga and Tubal Uriah “Buzz” Butler were jailed on charges of sedition, the same troubling law that has been trumped up against the Canadian digital media man.

Through the years, other agitators for the oppressed have been accused of sedition, an offense legislated in the 1920s by the colonial powers to keep the natives in their place.

Political elites have retained the draconian law and inflicted it from time to time upon the working class and their leaders.

Daaga’s “crime” was the populist 1970 campaign he led for a better economic stake for the small man and Afro-Indo unity.

Butler fearlessly crusaded in the 1930s against the colonial powers on behalf of struggling oil workers.

Sedition is an archaic and tyrannical law used by authoritarian regimes to curb expression and limit movement.

It is a bitter throwback to a dark era when public drumming was outlawed and police rained batons on marchers, including pregnant women.

Hong Kong, a virtual police state, recently jailed a pro-democracy activist for 40 months for sedition and rounded up other campaigners for “advocating hatred.”

In Trinidad and Tobago, the post-independence government supplemented the sedition law with the anti-worker Industrial Stabilisation Act and other legislations and attempted to impose Karl Hudson-Phillips’ repressive Public Order Act.

Modern, progressive societies have repealed anti-democratic sedition laws.

In T&T, the police, executing political dictates, a few years ago threw the sedition book at trade unionist Watson Duke and publish-and-be-damned Sat Maharaj.

The ancient and unjust law has been selectively enforced.

The authorities have ignored politicians who excite divide-and-rule and barely literate talk show hosts who preach race.

The law was not employed when a radio demagogue urged listeners to “raid their homes, hold them and deal with them.”

Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley has refused to repeal the law, and survivors of the 1970 Black Power movement are as silent as the labour sector, which once stoutly defended the working masses.

To be fair, some attorneys, led by powerhouse Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, legally challenged the validity of the legislation.

Over the years, calypsonians have canvassed against the law.

In “Sedition,” Sparrow sang: “Sedition, careful how you talking/Careful whey you walking/Incompetent idiots have genuine patriots/Always under escort in the sedition court.”

In colonial times, a calypsonian protested: “They want to license we mouth, they don’t we to talk/They mean to license we foot, they don’t want we to walk.”

Trade unions, publishers, broadcasters and most of civil society may have lost their voice, but prosecuting Chris Must List for sedition is damn wrong.

Inflicting the sedition law is oppressive, backward and disturbing.