Freddie is wrong on dictatorship and Ravi Dev

Oct 28, 2009 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
Just when I thought that Freddie Kissoon had turned over a new leaf after an unsavoury allegation from Muniram, he proved me wrong by reverting to the old type of writings of cussing out others and calling Guyana a dictatorship.
Even though I had alerted him time and again on his blatant misuse of the name of Fareed Zakaria, in categorising the present PPP government as an “elected dictatorship” he once again repeated his abuse in his column “Guyana: Narco-Violence and a Failed State”.
I can only assume that he trots out Zakaria’s name to lend authority to his outlandish assertions. So I will instruct Freddie once again that the point Zakaria made in “Illiberal Democracy” is not that democracies can become dictatorship; that is banal.
Any form of government can descend into dictatorship and have done so throughout history.
Zakaria was suggesting to the American administration (which was conducting a policy of “exporting democracy” to the third world and ex-communists states of Eastern Europe) that by using its own history could possibly head off such descents.
Zakaria proposed that the US should first insist on the introduction of liberal institutions and a higher per capita GDP in the former authoritarian countries which would make it more difficult for their nascent democracy to backslide into dictatorship.
Zakaria went as far as proposing that authoritarian leaders who support liberal institutions should be preferred. I don’t think Freddie will support this option for Guyana having already gone through 28 years of authoritarian rule.
He misrepresented what Ravi Dev said on the “totalitarian” PNC regime. It was Freddie who applied this label to the Burnham-controlled PNC – in a reply to Burnham’s daughter.
First of all, Freddie does not even know the name of the author that is the acknowledged authority on “totalitarianism” – it is Carl Friedrich not Carl
Liebnicht. Friedrich did not write his work in the 1920’s but in the mid fifties and amended his work in 1969.
Ravi Dev had first applied Friedrich’s typology to the PNC regime in 1988 at the 150th Anniversary of the Arrival of East Indians Conference that Prof.
Mahin Gosne and myself and others organised at Columbia University. The analysis on the PNC dictatorship was published in Mahin Gosine’s “The East Indian Odyssey: Dilemmas of a Migrant People”. In it, Ravi took Friedrich’s descriptive typology to a more heuristically productive level by introducing the variable of “control” of the dictator over the institutions of the society.
I showed the paper to a professor of mine at City College Graduate Center and he was blown over. Another Prof of mine at NYU was also very impressed. I suggested to Ravi to further develop it into a thesis.
It should be of note that when the following year, the Berlin Wall fell and the Eastern Communist bloc all began democratising, many of their intellectuals such as Kolakowski Rupnik also extended Friedrich’s theory of totalitarianism to their regimes. Ravi was prescient.
If Freddie was not so consumed with dealing with personalities and ignoring ideas, I believe that with the variable of “control” as adumbrated by Ravi, he could have produced an incisive critique of the present PPP regime – rather than repeating alleged “abuses” ad nauseum. Freddie, again I am advising, please move beyond personalities.
Vishnu Bisram

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