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Decent, honest, hard-working Americans fought for freedom

Apr 25, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I was appalled by a line in Peeping Tom’s article on Thursday in dealing with the Freedom of Information Act. The writer observed that; “Freedom of Information does not improve public access to information; it is merely a façade used by western governments to bolster their credentials as a free society.”
This is a gargantuan statement of misinformation that shows immense ignorance of European history and how freedoms came down throughout the centuries to the European people after the break up of the Holy Roman Empire.
The Freedom of Information Act (FIA) came out of the United States in 1975, but it is part of a long tradition of the struggle for rights that can be traced back to the establishment of the Magna Carta. There is no need for a lengthy historical outline. We can begin with the Act itself.
Millions and millions of Americans revolted against the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. They took to the streets. They protested. They were jailed, among them the great Mohammad Ali (formerly Cassius Clay).  The Freedom of Information Act was a demand by the people of the United States, dozens and dozens of millions of them for changes in the way power was used in the United States after the Civil Rights movement had achieved success in the sixties.
To say that the FIA is a stratagem of western government to deceive the peoples of the world is tantamount to saying that the West gave us Barack Obama to fool us into thinking that they are so democratic that they can elect an African as President of the US. But this is what actually happened.
An untold number of American were scared that the democracy they fought so hard for and that brought them the FIA and other priceless changes to the US (like acceptance of immigrants) were in jeopardy during the reign of the second George Bush.
They put their energies towards reasserting their rights. Whoever wrote that Peeping Tom column should be severely criticized for his/her unforgivable ignorance. Obama picked up votes in certain States that never went to the Democrats since the sixties—states like Virginia. Was that a deception to fool us that America had changed?
Jesse Jackson and Oprah Winfrey were crying as Obama spoke to the crowd after the results came pouring in that put him ahead of Mr. Mc Cain. They were crying because they knew that the Civil Rights movement had reached its climax in Obama. To say that the FIA is an invention of the West that creates a false sense of freedom is an insult to Americans who struggled bitterly to change America for the better.
We in the Third World slip into an arrogance that is unbelievably stupid when we criticize the West. We read intellectuals in the Third World derogating the West for masquerading as democracies that care about their people as if only the people of the former colonies know about struggle. There are hundreds of millions of Europeans who fought for the rights that they now enjoy. Whoever wrote that Peeping Tom piece must have been living on a mountain top in Nepal during the Iraqi war.
The people of Europe and America took to the streets in their respective capitals and denounced the war. In Spain, the protestors reached a million. That was struggle in a beautiful form. While the Europeans and Americans were doing what every decent person who hates war should have done, we in Guyana didn’t even stage a protest vigil against the war.
It is nonsensical to think that the US Government, then the European Government sat down, composed the FIA and laughed at how they persuaded the world to think that their people can get information out of them.
The FIA, which first started in the US, was not a creation of the American Government. It was a demand from the very minds that brought Barack Obama to power. It was a right that was not requested but demanded. The US Government was faced with anger and it buckled and passed the FIA.
How can you put down the energy that went into that historic moment as something the US Government did.  As the value of the FIA spread around the world, the Europeans fought for it too
The FIA has taken its place in the annals of historic institutions that have brought freedom to the world, among them trade union rights and universal adult suffrage. To say that the FIA is a sham of western government is to deny all the pain and suffering that have gone into making European and American societies more democratic.

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