The Oxford Syndrome

Jul 28, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

---

The leader of the political party ROAR, Mr. Ravi Dev, continues to assail my thesis of elected dictatorship. His column yesterday again focused on my adumbration of this concept. Mr. Dev refers to my dishonesty.
Let’s quote Mr. Dev: “Firstly, the writer (Mr. Kissoon) dishonestly now alters his ‘text’ and raises his estimate of the Burnhamite regime to an ‘autocracy,’ whereas he has previously denounced it …as a totalitarian dictatorship.”
Later in his column, Mr. Dev accuses me of more dishonesty. But let us evaluate this first accusation. I never, and I repeat, never altered, reshaped or cancelled my description of the Burnham Government as a dictatorship. In my media commentary and academic presentations, I have never wavered from that assessment.
What Mr. Dev has done is to read into the term “autocracy” to mean that I no longer categorize Burnhamite use of power as a dictatorship. In hundreds of columns I have assigned the concepts of ‘tyranny’, ‘oligarchy’, ‘dictatorship’, ‘authoritarianism’, to the Burnham years. Those labels have been used interchangeably.
Mr. Dev cannot point to one single line, since 1988 when I began writing, to say that I have changed my theoretical classification of the type of rule Guyana endured in the seventies and eighties. Mr. Dev makes his accusation against me to obfuscate the dilemma he finds himself in. He refuses to see manifestations of political degeneracy under an elected government as forms of dictatorial rule.
These forms are perverted in nature and so morally reprehensible that the term elected dictatorship is graphically applicable to the PPP Government.
Let’s quote Mr. Dev again: “(Kissoon) then disingenuously ignores the concept of his year-long polemics – a Guyana under siege by an armed insurgency.”  In defence of myself, I have never ignored this shocking social catastrophe, as Mr. Dev would like his readers to believe.
As a columnist, I have both intellectually and emotionally denounced the bestial killings of sleeping children. I will continue to do that. I recall Mr. Oliver Hinckson, who advocates some form of dialogue with people he calls insurgents, saying that the killings of the children and other innocents at Lusignan could not have been the work of ex-army personnel turn insurgents because army people will never kill children.
For the past four months, what Mr. Dev has done in several letters to the newspapers and in his KN columns is to accuse me of endangering the lives of East Indians by labelling the Government an elected dictatorship. Mr. Dev keeps repeating that mantra. His column yesterday was full of this stuck record.
His reasoning is that the gunmen will be emboldened by my condemnation of the PPP Government. If one wants to see ingenuousness, then one just has to read what Mr. Dev writes about me.
In his column yesterday, he again discreetly ignores my question to him – is it Freddie Kissoon’s categorization of the PPP Government being an elected dictatorship that may cause violent attacks on PPP supporters and the state (‘state’, the word Dev used) or the brazen, vulgar, nasty violations of democracy and the rule of law by the Guyana Government?
Mr. Dev has written so much on my position since I first posed that question to him but he just would not answer the question.
Mr. Dev wants me to inculcate the Oxford Syndrome. I refuse to do so out of nationalistic love of my country, my work as a human rights activist, political decency and philosophical morality. The Oxford Syndrome refers to the British intellectuals at Oxford and Cambridge who chose to side with Stalin against Hitler because the latter was the worse of the two.
These intellectuals gave Stalin more latitude to kill his people. Both were monsters. Both should have been denounced. After the war, a majority of these professors expressed profound regret that they had made a preference for one violator over another.
The politically correct thing to do is to write against the inhumanity of the violent gunmen and the dictatorial behaviour and political corruptibility of the PPP government. This is what I have done. This is what I will continue to do.
But there is more about Dev’s disingenuousness that readers ought to know about. Let us quote Dev for what can only be considered a self destructive path. Yesterday, he wrote the following: “I am not asserting that the nature of the PPP regime should not be analysed.”

But why does Dev does not undertake that task? His party holds an opposition seat, so he is expected to dissect the rule of the PPP. Why write about the danger of Frederick Kissoon’s writings, and not the disaster in the PPP’s policies?
I guess by now most readers know the answer.                 
                 

---

---