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The Freddie Kissoon column…The rise and role of paranoia in the PPP

Jul 21, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The times are too numerous to cite when President Bharrat Jagdeo has accused the private media, commentators and his critics of being unfair in their treatment of his government and are just plain anti-Government.

Mr. Jagdeo daubs everyone with the same brush. Rickford Burke and Gerry Gouveia got the same tongue-lashing even though one is involved in political commentary while the other is a human rights activist.
When Mr. Gouveia assessed the two recently bought helicopters as a bad deal, he was subtly referred to as an expert who knows everything.

Mr. Yesu Persaud merely advised that other investors should be given the same generosity as Queens Atlantic, and he was told that he is ignorant of the laws under which the concessions were granted. 

On Thursday, the Guyana Press Association was labelled as the new opposition. And so the story goes on. 
Mr. Jagdeo has two styles in his reaction to criticism – one is to see malice in the media, the other is to spontaneously hit out. This type of attitude can lead the commentator to believe that a creeping paranoia is on the rise.

The role of paranoia has been a major factor in the erasure of a heroic role for the PPP. My own feeling is that, if the PPP loses the 2011 elections, its legacy will be rubbished by historians, scholars and social analysts.

In Guyana and the Diaspora there will be an outpouring of evaluations that will reduce the PPP to a destructive performer, as with Burnham, Gairy, Mugabe and other Third World autocracies. There will be analyses on the two decades of misrule, from 1992 to 2011.

Those writers who are presently afraid to castigate the PPP will be mentally liberated to write bravely.
If the PPP wins the forthcoming general elections, never mind who it chooses to lead it, paranoia will step in again. By 2016, the PPP will be in the same category of some of the worst dictatorships the Third World has seen.

One has to understand the evolution and function of paranoia inside the collective psyche of the PPP from the forties onwards.

I have dealt with the rise and role of paranoia in the PPP in several pieces stretching back to the later eighties when I became a newspaper columnist.

From the time Cheddi and Janet Jagan entered politics in a British colony dominated by the colonial zeitgeist, they became a target of resentment and attack. There was a double dose of harassment.

While on the receiving end of the suspicion of the colonial administration, they also had to contend with the relentless condemnation of communism in a world characterized by anti-Soviet fears.

From the forties onwards, every printed line, every spoken word of criticism and condemnation of the PPP, PPP leaders have interpreted as anti-PPP malice and as part of the inexorable persecution of the party.

The crucial mistake the Jagans and their close associates made from the forties until this very day is that, instead of assessing the harsh treatment they have continuously received as part of the territory of politics, they have internalised the condemnations as evilly intended destruction of the PPP.

Thus was born and cultivated the syndrome of paranoia. I functioned with all the top PPP leaders in the Patriotic Coalition for Democracy, and on every occasion when a strategy was announced that would assign the PPP to a secondary role for tactical reasons, the PPP cadres will be ragingly mad, because they sense it was a conspiracy against Cheddi Jagan. It was the syndrome of paranoia at work.

Read every line Mrs. Jagan writes in the Mirror and you see no change in the analytical approach from when she wrote from the forties onwards.

It is a style that betrays an obsession with trying to stave off the “permanent enemies” of the PPP. The style has the stamp of paranoia all over it.

Mr. Jagdeo is no different from his predecessors who lived many moons before he was born. I continuously refer to the PPP as a culture. All its leaders are prisoners of that culture. Mr. Jagdeo was not born when the paranoia took over. He wasn’t born when the paranoia reached horrible levels in the sixties.
But his reaction, like that of all PPP leaders gone before him, is one of paranoia.

One could very well understand what Lloyd Searwar wrote when he said that if an enemy walked into Burnham’s office he leaves as a friend, but when a friend goes into Cheddi Jagan’s office he comes out as an enemy.

Not only is the PPP a culture by itself, it is also an immense tragedy for Guyana and the world.    

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