Andrew Sage

It's unnerving to see militias marching down your street.

Now, the neutral movement was starting to become more focused on establishing a vanguard core, the more they oriented themselves toward Marxism-Leninism.

So, like I mentioned before, they were making this shift away from the sort of popular mass democracy that people like C. Lord James was talking about, the more they read and they studied the works of Marxism-Leninism.

And there were people within the party who became more and more convinced that

Again, remember the end positions of power this point in time.

So you're in positions of power and you're reading theoretical justifications for why you need to be in power.

You know, you'll stand by those theoretical justifications because it

lines up with your interests, your self-interests to, you know, further your position of power and the continuation of your role as an authority, as a leader.

And so this vanguard core that they were pursuing, it ended up creating a hierarchy of in-group and out-group.

You had the people who were in the vanguard, the people who were out the vanguard, who didn't get picked, who didn't make the cut, you know, who felt snubbed.

And this was facilitating, it was fostering this, an air of secrecy that people in the country were beginning to resent and lose trust in.

Because imagine you're going from this sort of popular engagement with the people as you, you know, take part in these efforts to push Gary out of power.

Then you have this sort of secrecy, you have this sort of militarism that is starting to remind people a bit of the exact Gary government that they wanted out.

And then two major events took place in 1981.

There was a bombing under the stage of a rally that killed some youths.

And there was a car ambushing as well.

Both of these incidents were blamed on counter-revolutionaries in the country.

That famous buzzword, that famous catchphrase, that famous justification for any and every response.

So it further pushed the country and really the whole society forward.

into this culture of suspicion and repression and also resentment for the New Jewel Movement.