History does not repeat itself, but as the old saying goes, it often rhymes.

We are watching the slow assembly of a second Cold War, with smaller states, Jamaica among them, once again asked, implicitly, to choose a side.

Old ideologies are being repackaged as new discoveries. Small nations that cannot tell their own story clearly become vulnerable to having it told for them, and Jamaica's most urgent task in this era is narrative: an honest account of how we arrived here, more complicated than either "it was slavery and colonialism" or "it was bad policy in the 1970s".