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MENTAL FIXATION
I have been trying to re-examine the sixties for two reasons; personal and scholarly. The personal takes two forms.
One part of it has to do with the need to erase the guilt I have lived with while I was growing up as a teenager. I was brought up in a racially divided country and my side offered me a tale of the evil PNC versus the angelic PPP.
Looking back then, East Indian youths like me were fed the most unbelievable propaganda imaginable. Every major act of violence against PPP persons was committed by the PNC. Every violent death suffered by PNC persons was the act of the PNC itself to blame the PPP.
So an inflexibly anti-PPP editor was gunned down and it was the PNC that did it to blame the PPP. The atrocity of this incredible propaganda the older folks sold to the younger generation.
I began to research the sixties to exorcise this embedded false consciousness that I lived with as a teenager.
But there was the other personal side that pushed me angrily into revisiting the sixties.
I grew up and witnessed the PPP in power as the 21st century dawned. I saw a regime that was the opposite of angelic as my relatives painted it when it was in power in the sixties.
This apocalypse drove me to the pursuit of revisionism of my country’s history. Were these the good guys that my relatives told me were besieged by the PNC and the United Force in the sixties? Were these the guys who stood by and allowed the PNC to assault them in the sixties?
Could it have been the other way around – businessman Peter D’Aguiar was trying to save his country and media owner, Peter Taylor was simply doing what the New Yorker, New York Times and other newspapers do in relation to the war in Iraq?
With Dr. Jagan in power after 1992, and watching him and his protégés and underlings perform, I could have understood the dynamic flow of the United Force, the commercial classes, and the public servants in the sixties.
What the PNC did in the sixties was to have discovered a gold mine of protest and anger which it used to confront a hardened, obdurate PPP Government.
The stubbornness is still there after 48 years. The insensitive attitudes still endure after 48 years.
The selfish politics haven’t changed after 48 years. I once wrote that if Cheddi Jagan were alive and he was to continue his autobiography, “The West on Trial” that he would paint genuine nationalist and patriots I know in the most inelegant and false manner.
Fifty years from now, a new generation would inherit the world of false consciousness as I did.
I figure it would go like this: Stabroek News was the agent of the Portuguese class and continued from where Peter D’Aguiar and Peter Taylor left off.
The WPA was paid by a foreign government to undermine the PPP but the love of the people for Cheddi Jagan caused them to fail.
The opposition murdered Ronald Waddell to create unrest so as to bring down the PPP Government.
Father Rodrigues became active again because the Government refused to give in to the unreasonable demands of the Catholic Church.
The Guyana Human Rights Association was the agent of the West that sought to weaken the PPP Government. I could go on but these examples just disgust me.
Rewind the tape and it was these types of foolish propaganda propagation that my generation bought.
We return to the past as it lives in the future – the statement by Dr. Luncheon at the conclusion of the PPP congress that the party and Government will have to concentrate on the private media since that is where the danger to the government lies.
The mental fixation on imaginary enemies lives on. Nothing has changed from the sixties.
And if Dr. Jagan were to continue his “West on Trial” he would have painted a private media that took on the role of the opposition in order to topple the PPP which it cannot live with; the inherent instinct is that the PPP should not govern.
Fifty years from now the generation that bought this falsification of historical facts would not know that under the PPP the sugar levy was prolonged for eleven years; the PPP turned around and enjoyed Burnham’s Constitution; the PPP rejected the universally accepted Freedom of Information Act; the PPP was happy to play football with the state media even though it condemned such manipulation when the PNC ruled; that sexual harassment of the worse kind is tolerated; that the PPP Government became one of the most corrupt in the world. I guess someone will write part two of “The West on Trial.”
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