The blind man and the black cat: A short history of fascism in Guyana

Nov 14, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Consistent readers of this page would know that I have insisted that we can only know the true history of our country if we use the revisionist methodology when we analyse contemporary Guyanese history.
Too many, way too many fictions have been passed on to my generation as facts. My generation has internalised these naked myths and has come to accept them as truths. This explains the virulent anti-PNC feelings of thousands of Guyanese East Indians who are in their fifties and sixties and whose profession does not lead them to re-examine history.
Of late, many East Indian intellectuals are pursuing the revisionist avenue. The list include Baytoram Ramharack, Clem Seecharran, and Malcolm Harripaul among others.
The main culprit in this perpetual drama of myths, mythology and fiction is Dr. Cheddi Jagan’s autobiography, “The West on Trial.” This book offers a picture of the sixties in Guyana and his party, the PPP from within the tilting windmills of Jagan’s mind and not from the objective horizons of a man in search of history’s purpose.
Jagan’s book is a phantasmagoria of mental mirages that denies the average citizen a glimpse into what Guyana was really like 48 years ago. The story of the ‘tortured little boy’ near crucifixion by the police brings into sharp focus the role of violence in the history of the PPP.
It was the respected political activist, Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine, who wrote in a letter to the press that when he and other WPA activists were charged in 1978 with arson of a Ministry building, they were not tortured.
The PPP has a long association with torture. In the sixties, a brave photographer, Eric Mosley (still alive in Guyana), sneaked into the Georgetown Hospital and got a photograph of a PNC political activist who was brutally tortured by the police during the reign of Premier Cheddi Jagan.
Emmanuel Fairbairn called Emmanuel Batson, was so badly tortured that he lost the use of his testicles. His family and the PNC only knew of his condition because of Moseley’s photograph.
The PPP also has an enduring intimacy with violence. It is a logical embrace that comes from its adherence to communism/fascism.
Any scholar who studied the history European social thought would tell you that fascism and communism sprang from the same philosophical conceptualisation and draw their inspiration from the same dream. Ironically fascist, activists and communist adherents were always devastating each other because they were competing for the same space and the same minds.
Both fascism and communism deride the value of emotions and humanism in the role of revolutionary processes in history. Both ideologies regard violence as a pragmatist tool that inheres in human nature.
It was no accident that under fascism and communism, civilisation’s worst two tragedies occurred – the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and the deaths of over ten million people in the 1920s under Stalin in the USSR
The way history was presented to us by Dr. Jagan was that Guyana’s messiah, the PPP, was set upon by evil forces – the colonial government, the United Force of Peter D’Aguiar and the PNC of Forbes Burnham – to undo the historic mission of saving Guyana.
This was far from the correct situation. The PPP was part of a broader picture of the desperate quest for power and the willingness to resort to horrific levels of violence to achieve that goal. The PPP’s long association with violence includes some serious allegations that take in the bombing of the Sun Chapman, the arson-murder of eight members of the Abraham family, the attempted murder of the Argosy’s editor, Peter Taylor of which this writer has intimate details of who the intellectual authors and physical perpetrators were.
Out of power after 1964, the PPP’s appetite for violence did not diminish policeman, James Henry, son of PNC activist, Gershom Henry, was shot dead at the Corentyne toll gate while guarding it.
Those who defected from the PPP and threatened to expose its dark secrets were mysteriously killed. The most notorious example of this was when Freedom House’s manager, Balchand Persaud was charged with murdering a defector. The chief witness for the prosecution in front of Justice Akbar Khan was a semi blind Berbician teacher, named Sydney Sukhu.
In discharging Persaud, Justice Khan told Sukhu; “You are like a blind man searching for a black cat in the dark of the night.” One must mention Donna Herod whose dead body was found just outside of Freedom House during the post-election violence of 1997.
It was logical for the PPP to seek comfort in a cruel man like Roger Khan. Khan loves violence. So do fascists and communists.

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