Professor of geography at Durham University - UK

To vilify and criminalise Sunsplash Rototom is frightening.  Here is a beautiful, peaceful, hopeful and very exciting event that involves young and old, and people from so many nations in unity, which the regional authorities see as dangerous, too alternative.  Here is an event that puts the locality on the world map and generates a lot of revenue, which the friends of parochialism want to destroy.  Here is a week of happiness that does not need to promote the use of drugs to foster human warmth, which the enemies of democracy want to bring to an end in the most underhand ways.  Here is a rare moment when young people flock to listen to serious voices on another Europe and another model of togetherness, which those nostalgic for a past that can never be recovered to stifle.  Here is a space of wonderful music, laughter, encounter, which someone has decided is not worth keeping.  Why?  That a Reggae festival can lead to such a vehement and punitive reaction is a measure of how intolerant and authoritarian our times are becoming.  We must not allow ourselves to sleepwalk into despotism.  There are too many painful echoes from the past, when Europe woke up in dark times after a slow and surreptitious accumulation of wrongs– times that allowed anyone deemed to be different or undesirable to be persecuted in shocking ways.  When an innocent and playful moment becomes labelled as wrong or dangerous, you know that something terrible is happening, you know that it is time to wake up, to scream loudly against the suppression of freedom.