Inside the mind of a newspaper owner

Jul 19, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

As a commentator on Guyanese contemporary and current history, I will always regret that I never spoke with Peter Taylor, one of the Guyanese media barons in the sixties during the Premiership of Cheddi Jagan.

It is not that I did not try. Each time I shook the gate, the nurse told me he was resting and that I had to return.

Taylor was in his eighties and bed-ridden so I understood his craving to be left alone. He didn’t want to talk about the role of the paper he owned in the sixties, the Argosy, and about events of that era. But I know he would have chatted with me.

He fathered three kids with the sister of a close neighbour when I lived on D’Urban Street, Wortmanville, and she was kind enough to tell Mr. Taylor that I needed to reflect on Guyanese history with him. I understood that he agreed but as it turned out our timing didn’t coincide.

The two Peters are gone, (D’Aguair being the other one), and they left no recording about why they took such a bitter stand in the newspapers they owned against Premier Cheddi Jagan from 1959 to 1964.

It is left up to Kit Nascimento to give us the numerous dimensions, angles, nuances and unreported circumstances that characterize the deadly confrontation between the citizens of Georgetown and the Jagan Government of the sixties.

Mr. Nascimento is gradually creeping up to the 80th birthday and I hope he realizes that the gaps are too precious to be left unfilled.

I am convinced that unless people like Mr. Nascimento write about the sixties, present and future Guyanese generations will continue to see that epoch in a one-sided way as told by the protégés of Cheddi and Janet Jagan.

I do accept without hesitation that the opposition led by Burnham and D’Aguair had their narrow agenda and did unpleasant things. But I also believe that for too long the equally negative side of the Jagan Premiership has not been revealed.

The sixties were not about good guys versus bad guys but about people who genuinely believed they were right in what they wanted for Guyana.

In this context, one should reject the continuing subjectivity of Jagan’s admirers that the media of Peter Taylor and Peter D’Aguair were demonic potters. The latest contributor to this ongoing pro-PPP stance is Mr. Harry Hergash of the Guyana-Canada Forum.

Mr. Hergash has been writing about me lately and his acceptance of private media harassment of Premier Jagan Administration is veiled and subtle but nevertheless the one-sided view is there for the reader to see once he/she reads between the lines; the private media sabotaged the Jagan Government in the sixties.
Here is how concealing Mr. Hergash has become.

In the KN (July 14, 08) he cited pages 84, 85 and 87 of Father Andrew Morrison’s fantastic journey into Guyanese contemporary, political history, “Justice: The Struggle for Democracy in Guyana, 1952-1992.”

On those pages was Father Morrison’s factual description that the three privately owned newspapers were opposed to the Jagan Government (in Father’s words).

Hergash didn’t go on to say that Father Morrison was close to the editors of all three of those papers and supported their crusade against communism.

Hergash didn’t make the point openly but he subtly left it there; the private newspapers attacked Premier Jagan.

It is this kind of writing that has seeped into the minds of thousands and thousands of East Indians who migrated from Guyana and locked away inside the prison walls of their minds that in the sixties it was Jagan the good guy versus the press barons, the bad guys.

This is a reduction of the events of the sixties into arid simplicities. What was wrong with the three newspapers that were opposed to Jagan’s communism?

Where in the history of journalism was it written that there is a law that morally forbids newspapers from taking a stand against a government policy that the media feel is nationally destructive?

Objective scholars have to get into the mind of the newspaper owner in the sixties and try to imagine what was taking place inside his psyche as he watched a liberal democratic state in the British West Indies being transformed into a communist polity.

Why are we against what the Americans did to Jagan in the sixties when in the very sixties, Jagan openly embraced the Soviet invasion of other countries including Hungary, Poland, East Germany and the tragic rape of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Why do we hate the Americans for what they did to Jagan in the sixties when Jagan was an unashamed supporter of Castro’s horrible execution of thousands of innocent Cubans? What scholarly nonsense is this?

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