“Us against them” – Propaganda versus revisionism

Nov 25, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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In my Monday article, I indicated that I will complete my argument against the accusation of Ravi Dev (in his last Sunday KN column) who deemed my attempt to look at Dr. Jagan’s “The West on Trial” using the revisionist approach as negative revisionism.
Mr. Dev observed that there are two kinds of revisionism – positive and negative. My approach falls into the unproductive category while Clem Seecharran’s and Baytoram Ramharack’s, according to Dev, are the useful kind
For reason which we can easily explain, Dev didn’t tell us what are the revisionist publications of Seecharran and Ramharack. Maybe Dev didn’t want to alert his readers to the scholars’ books because when these books are read, their trenchant questioning of the political integrity of Dr. Jagan will recall similar points by Frederick Kissoon.
Let us explain what these two gentlemen did to the legacy of Cheddi Jagan.
Moses Nagamootoo told me that Professor David Dabydeen was deeply hurt when Mrs. Jagan turned down his request, at the last moment, to attend the launching of his friend’s publication, “Sweetening Bitter Sugar: Jock Campbell, the Booker Reformer.” Apparently, Mrs Jagan was ready to attend the event but at the last minute decided to read the book, the contents of which got her mad because her dead husband’s legacy had taken a hammering. She refused to accompany Dabydeen.
Clem Seecharran’s masterly work is a brilliant exposition in revisionist history. It has demolished the elevated pedestal that many historians had put Cheddi Jagan on. Seecharran showed where Jock Campbell stood in the way of Jagan’s manipulation of the sugar workers for the furtherance of his communist conspiracies.
According to Seecharran, Jagan had no answer for Campbell’s penetrating charisma and influential Fabian socialism on the sugar estates which attracted the sugar workers to Campbell.
Here was the plantation boss who was a nice man but more importantly had workers’ interest at heart.
Campbell was such a modest person, writes Seecharran, that he refused to have his dinner at the white elitist niche, the Georgetown Club. Unable to compete with Campbell, Jagan sought to destroy him by opposing Campbell in every conceivable way.
Unfortunately for Dev, this is not the “negative” revisionism of Kissoon but the writing of a historian not known for any anti-Jagan politics thus the avoidance of any discussion of Seecharran’s revisionist treatment of Dr. Jagan by Dev.
I don’t know what negative and positive revisionism is. These are terms Dev used as convenient tools in his spin for the PPP. But this I know; Seecharran’s book is a long-awaited exposure of the countless faults of Cheddi Jagan that are slowly coming out through revisionist writers.
Next is Baytoram Ramharack’s “Against the Grain: Balram Singh Rai and the Politics of Guyana.” Here is another trenchant display of revisionist history.
Ramharack is less diplomatic than Seecharran. He writes that Cheddi Jagan had a fierce competitor in Rai who was equally charismatic and admired by the East Indians of Guyana.
In order to cut down Rai, Jagan arranged a rigged election that saw Rai losing the party chairman to someone that could never have beaten Rai in a straight fight. Ramharack’s chapter on this subject makes for absorbing reading.
If it were Frederick Kissoon writing on these Machiavellian plots and diabolical realpolitik of Cheddi Jagan, then it would have been negative revisionism. Thankfully, the job has been done by two scholars not known for any political activism against the PPP.
Dev next moved on to his favourite topic – incitement of violence against the state. This is where Dev deceives himself into thinking that he is spinning brilliantly. He is spinning alright only that his toy is going in the wrong direction. Writing about my work and other critics of the PPP Government, this is what Dev has to say; “Their (Kissoon and others) new history is a narrative of hate, a narrative of “us versus them”, a narrative that is guaranteed to divide us further.”
This is what Dev has accused me of. But not to worry. Dev’s propaganda and spin do not fool the Guyanese people. The Guyanese people know that President Jagdeo told Berbice supporters in 2006 that if the opposition won the forthcoming elections, AK 47 guns would be given away to the very people that stole them.
According to Dev that is not a narrative of “us versus them.” According to Dev the murderous rampage of drug barons in league with ruling politicians is not a narrative of “us versus them.”
According to Dev, taking away money from Critchlow Laboir College is not a case of “us versus them.” Is this comical or dangerous spin?

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