Still suffering? Don't be ridiculous. Give an example!

The idea that anyone today should have to apologise for actions taken centuries ago by people they did not know and with whom they would not agree is absurd and would in itself be an injustice. For the religious out there, "the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father".
I believe that reparations can only ever be relevant and just when they are paid by the actual perpetrators of a wrongful act, and they are received by those who actually and directly suffered from the harmful act.
To claim that reparations need to be paid now, centuries later, can only be camouflage for a desire for a free hand out, for the only way reparations could be justified now would be if people genuinely felt they were worse off and suffering now than they would have been if slavery had never occurred. My ancestors were brought here in chains by British or Americans, but do I think my life would be better if I was now living in West Africa...hell no. Those who truly suffered the abhorrent degradation and abomination of slavery are no longer with us; the human excrement who perpetrated the slave trade (including the Africans who sold their own people) are also gone, and hopefully burning in hell. For the whole Caribbean to be asking for reparations now is, I believe, a shameful and transparent attempt at a money grab by countries that have done appalling jobs at ruling their own destinies since they became independent. Now they seek to use emotional blackmail and current woke and politically correct excesses to make a windfall profit.
P.S. there is one country in the Caribbean that does, legitimately deserve reparations for a crime that lasted 122 years and which only ended in 1947, and that is Haiti. Up until 1947 France was receiving payments from Haiti as compensation for the slaves that were freed when Haiti became independent, payments that amounted to extortion at gun point and would equal some $21 billion in today's terms. 1947 isn't that long ago...some direct perpetrators and many direct victims are still living. France should pay up. And no, I'm not Haitian.

Mr. Allen writes well, but so many points are such a clear spinning of the truth.
If Putin and Xi both believe that the West is trying to militarily encircle their countries, then they are both living in the same delusional parallel universe. Russia and China are the countries doing the sabre rattling, invading or threatening to invade neighbouring nations to enlarge their own countries. China is the country building military bases on artificial islands in the middle of the territorial waters of other countries. Any position the West takes with regard to Russia or China is clearly only a defensive reaction to their offensive (in multiple ways) actions.
The Western interventions of our lifetimes have always been with a guiding moral imperative of protecting those who did not wish to be forcibly subjugated or cruelly and inhumanely treated by ideologues and tyrants, or they have been in direct response to attacks launched against the West first. Vietnam, Cuba, Iran, Syria...happily Vietnam is now a success story, and is the one case out of those four where I will agree that Western intervention probably did more harm than good, although I am certain there were many millions of South Vietnamese who didn't want to have communism forced down their throats. In the other three cases, look at how many political prisoners those dictatorships hold in their prisons, how many of their citizens are desperately unhappy and lack the basic freedoms that we take for granted. Mr. Allen would seem to believe that holding political prisoners, lack of basic freedoms and dropping chemical bombs on women and children who oppose the rule of a tyrant are all acceptable things and the West is evil for opposing them.
Ukraine in 2014 wasn't a "right wing coup" (that's Mr. Allen/Putin's propaganda), it was a popular uprising against an unpopular Russian puppet leader.
Yes, indeed very many more civilians died in Iraq than have died so far in Ukraine...the crucial difference that Mr. Allen intentionally ignores, is that Russia is intentionally targeting civilians, schools and hospitals.
The point about Nicolas Maduro is comical in its blatant spinning of the truth. The West isn't interested in having Maduro as a "friend". As is obvious to everyone, apart from Mr. Allen apparently, the West just needs more oil to be able to switch off the Russian tap...their dislike of Maduro and his ways remains, but it is far lower down the totem pole than the need to stop buying Russian oil.
Mr. Allen started a previous letter with "sensible people stopped taking the western media seriously at the time of the 2003 Iraq war". With this latest pro-Putin, anti-West diatribe, I imagine sensible people have stopped taking Mr. Allen seriously.

A "journalist" who seeks to undermine a democratic country's national security and to endanger the lives of it citizens by publishing classified documents is, in my opinion, a criminal who deserves to rot in jail. If he had a legitimate concern about alleged crimes committed by the US Government, information about which he had obtained illegally, then there were other ways he could have acted to address the problem, which would not have landed him in the trouble that he has created for himself.
Everyone agrees that the WMD accusation turned out to be rubbish; everyone also agrees that the Allies did an awful post-war job in Iraq...but that doesn't take away from the fact that Saddam Hussein was an evil tyrant whose demise made the world, and the lives of all Iraqis besides those in his inner circle, better.
"Every other Western military operation"...so you would have preferred the Serbs to commit genocide in Kosovo? You would prefer General Noriega to be pumping more cocaine into the US? You would prefer Bin Laden to still be living a life of luxury in Pakistan?
Maintaining peace, especially when doing it by running away from what is the right thing to do, is pretty easy. Lloyd George managed to maintain peace for an extended period of time...by appeasing Hitler...ah, but I guess in your eyes he should have been given an award and heralded in the media for achieving "peace in our time".

I think the only "puppet" here is the writer, whose expressed views have come straight from Putin's propaganda machine. If there's one thing you can guarantee from reading Mr. Allen's frequent missives, it is that they will give you genuine LOL moments. I love how he spews his twisted, ulterior-motive versions of history as "facts"...they are about as truthful as Putin's insistence for weeks and weeks that "Russia has no intention of invading Ukraine"!

There will only ever be one, authentic place to see the real swimming pigs, and that is Big Major Cay in Exuma, where nobody exactly knows how the pigs first got there, and where the pigs learned to swim themselves, voluntarily. These copycat, fake and artificial "pig experiences" are an embarrassing attempt to rip off unsuspecting tourists who have heard of the famous (original, in Exuma) swimming pigs and think they are going to see the real deal. The real swimming pigs in Exuma are a quirky and charming facet of the wider, upscale out island tourism product...these copycat con artists sully our tourism image with their cheap, fake alternatives and misrepresentations. They should all have to cease and desist.

Then their beef should be with their “first world” government and not with our little country that just wants to have some common sense protections in place. We are a tiny developing nation and can get antigen and PCR tests for travel very easily. Shame on the Canadian government that we can do things so much better here. The writers of these letters need to focus their anger at the shortcomings of their own country. Blaming us for having a few requirements because their country can’t get its act together is like a passenger being angry at at airline for not letting him on the plane after he lost his boarding pass…presenting your boarding pass is a simple requirement, but you were so inept that you lost it before you got to the gate!

So sick and tired of this small group of Canadians and a couple of “travel agents” from upstate New York complaining and complaining. The Bahamas is not to blame for the requirements that your Canadian government impose upon you to return. Their entry requirements were the draconian ones…they wouldn’t let anyone who wasn’t Canadian enter Canada for the longest time, when we were open for business. I have personally travelled in and out of The Bahamas half a dozen times during COVID and never had any trouble getting the few requirements fulfilled. I have never had a health visa take more than 45 minutes to get approved. All you need is a tiny bit of common sense and organizational ability…in fact, my kids even organize their own paperwork using Verifly…have you heard of Verifly? And the US…they make you get a test within one day of flying…The Bahamas gives you 3 days, yet we are the draconian ones. One rule for them and one rule for us, I guess.

Totally agree. It’s just a couple travel agents from New York and Ontario who keep whining about the visa when it is actually very simple and the few I have done took less than 30 minutes to get approved. Must be intellectually challenged. Who even uses travel agents these days…so 20th century. Maybe that’s their problem.

So sick and tired of hearing this guy whine and moan about the travel visa and all the alleged difficulties of travelling to The Bahamas. His clients must be seriously challenged if they can’t work it out. I have travelled in and out of The Bahamas at least 4 times under the travel visa rules, and never had a travel visa take more than 30 minutes to get approved. What’s more, the rules being applied by The Bahamas are far less strenuous than those applied by countries like the UK, and you are give two more days to get your tests in order than countries like the writer’s own USA gives you. And our hotels are enjoying pre-COVID occupancy rates in some cases! The writer must be living in some kind of parallel universe for people who aren’t mentally capable of the little extra bit of admin that travel in the Covid era requires.