Germany and Guyana, Hitler and Castro: Philosophical notes

Feb 03, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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On January 30, Germany began the commemoration of the rise of Hitler and his party to power. The event takes a myriad of forms involving every major city of Germany.
There will be museum exhibits, lectures, film festivals, orchestral performances, etc. The event will last for one year.
In declaring the commemoration open, Chancellor Merkel made a point that historians have written about long before the Chancellor was a teenager – Hitler could not have done what he did without help from the German people.
For me, the two indictments of human civilization that question its very foundation are slavery and the Holocaust. The British people (and the rest of the world) cannot be excused for accepting slavery, but it was not occurring next door at their neighbour’s home.
Londoners did not see their neighbour’s head taken off by a slave-owner. In Germany, Nazi killers arrived at banks, factories, restaurants etc., and hauled off Jews (who in fact were German citizens) by the millions and murdered them for no civilized reason. It could not have happened if other Germans didn’t tolerate it or encourage it.
Any student of philosophy will tell you that if human civilization could have accepted slavery and the Holocaust, then civilization itself is flawed. I believe it is. I believe the world can return to slavery and there can be many more Holocausts.
Rwanda’s genocide was more bestial, savage and inhuman than what occurred in Nazi Germany. How can these nihilisms return? Because sane, rational minds will bring them back.
As a Guyanese I can only start with my own country, Guyana, and my confession of being a supporter of Fidel Castro when I was a university student.
I lived under Forbes Burnham and I saw how he deteriorated from an anti-colonial intellectually strong politician into a dictator. I would not dignify with a reply any argument that rejects the label of dictator as applied to Forbes Burnham. No brilliant polemicist can erase Burnham’s dictatorship. The facts are too mountainous. And how do I know about these things? Well, we who didn’t live under Nazi Germany may never know about the death camps.
Those who benefited from Burnham’s generosities may not want to know about his power madness. But this writer came under Burnham’s radar, so I know that the man was a dictator. My mom in her grave probably still remembers what he did to me. My wife is alive so she knows about the memory.
Guyanese, especially our business people and the Guyanese East Indians, have learnt nothing from history. Burnham took an inch and we let him. Then it went to a yard and we remained silent.
Then Burnham went on and on and took Guyana as his personal possession. He scared the entire country. Business people were devastated. Civil servants were dismissed at his pleasure. Judges bowed to him. The East Indian people complained bitterly that they were discriminated against. Guyanese on the whole resented Burnham’s descent into absolute power. Guyanese on the whole succumbed to fear.
What have we learned from the violence, inhumanity and nakedness of absolute power under Forbes Burnham? Absolutely nothing. Today business people suck up in the identical ways to the new rulers as they did when Burnham took away their dignity. In today’s Guyana, they garland the possessors of naked power and bow at their feet. Burnham had Hope estate as his Coliseum. Jagdeo had the Providence Stadium. The Indians in Guyana hated Burnham because he loved power and used it against them. A new Burnham under a different ethnicity does the same, but this time to Africans, and the Indians look away. What goes through the mind of a human that cries to his God when his daughter is molested but he becomes a policeman and protects his friend who rapes someone’s girl child? Can that analogy be applied to today’s Guyana as power in this land becomes more macabre?
What do humans learn from history? Maybe nothing. But I do believe I have learned. I no longer support Fidel Castro and I wish for his removal, his brother’s and the Communist Party’s.
I believe the Cuban people should prosecute them for crimes committed against the hard-working people of Cuba. The Germans felt aggrieved at what the world did to their country after World War I. Hitler appeared as their saviour. But they stood silent as his lunacy and mediocrity roamed all over their country.
We resented American hegemony after the World War II because America was in company with the bad guys – South African apartheid rulers, Latin American dictators, the Haitian monsters etc. So we looked to Castro who defied the “Yankee imperialist.” But we shut our mouths and closed our eyes when Fidel Castro became a Cuban imperialist. We refused to tell Castro that he had brought back slavery to Cuba; the only difference was that in the era of British slavery, few plantation-owners ran their slave kingdom for half a century.
Fidel Castro, the tropical Mussolini in Havana, sat on his plantation throne for half a century. In huge parts of the Third World, this Caribbean Mussolini is admired. It is so easy for civilization to throw up another Hitler in this 21st century world of ours.
Koestler was right. Homo sapiens are a flawed animal.

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