The ‘West on Trial’ is no myth

Nov 27, 2009 Letters

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Dear Editor,
My friend, Freddie Kissoon, applauds the revisionist method of reinterpreting historical events. I studied revisionist methodology at CUNY Graduate School under distinguished scholar Arthur Schlesinger, the Kennedy man who was responsible for toppling the Cheddi Jagan government in 1964.
Revisionism is a method of study in history or the social sciences that reinterprets historical events as a result of the discovery of “new data or evidence”.  Revisionism is essentially the reinterpretation of what is known as the “prevailing or orthodox” view of an event.
I was quite surprised to read that Freddie has never heard of “negative” revisionism. When most persons hear of “revisionism” it’s the negative aspects that come to their minds. This kind of revisionism is also called “negationism: – “the illegitimate distortion of historical records such that certain events appear in a more or less favourable light.” It usually comes from the pens of those that have axes to grind and have no compunction in “altering” the facts of history to push their cause.
In contrast to negative revisionism, there is positive revisionism which is generally welcomed by historians because a revised interpretation of an event is done objectively supported by evidence and the revisionist position is not distorted and created out of fiction. Profs. Ramharack and Seecharan’s recent biographies on Jock Campbell and Balram Singh Rai, which Freddie often cites, are described as positive revisionism because they are based on solid evidence.
An example of negationism or negative revisionism is the denial of the Holocaust by President Ahmedinejad of Iran. Just because the state of Israel may be committing atrocities against the President’s Muslim co-believers is no reason for ignoring all the evidence painstakingly accumulated by historians and eyewitnesses to deny that horrible historical event (holocaust).
Other examples are the Japanese denial of their atrocities in Korea, the Russians in Eastern Europe, the Turkish denial of genocide against Armenians and Turks, etc. Even some historians engage in revisionist studies because they feel the interpretation of a historical event or period, as routinely accepted by other scholars, needs significant change – to suit their ideology or belief system.  Hence, they go about seeking or manufacturing evidence to debunk the mainstream explanation of an event.
Freddie claims that the work of the late Dr. Jagan, West on Trial, which focuses largely on how the US and Britain toppled Jagan from office, was a work of fiction. Freddie calls the work “phantasmagoria” meaning, in short, a deception or illusion. There was noting illusory or fictional about the US involvement in Guyana during the 1950s and 1960s. It is well documented by the participants including Prime Ministers MacMillan and Callaghan and those who worked with Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. There are, as the brilliant scholar Ravi Dev pointed out, the declassified CIA papers on their destabilisation of the PPP government 1961-64. And at any rate, Freddie has offered no evidence to debunk the mountain of evidence indicting the West for conspiring against a democratically elected Jagan government and installing a dictatorship which the US later condemned as “racist and opportunistic”. Freddy’s claims are thus negatively revisionistic because they are not backed by scholarship and he engages in an almost daily attack on the government.
I have done extensive research, reviewing articles from the NY Times (which Freddie describes as authoritative) during the 1960s and other documents released from the US archives and Info Office now deposited at the national library. They all supported Jagan’s claims in his autobiography of how he was engineered out of office. I am not judging the US or Britain for their actions because they acted on what they thought would best serve their interests at that time in history.  I am merely examining and analysing the evidence based on facts about the events surrounding the fall of the Jagan’s government.
In fact, I think Jagan was naïve about geopolitics and erred in subscribing to communist ideology that triggered the wrath of the Americans against him and their embrace of Forbes Burnham who went on to establish an autocratic state that oppressed the nation.  I believe that had Jagan not embraced communism, Guyana would not have had to endure the 28 years of dictatorship and the country might have been the Singapore of the Caribbean and Latin America.
Prof Schlesinger would not have agreed with Freddie that The West on Trial was a myth. Schlesinger was no negative revisionist.  We met a few times outside of class. He knew Jagan well and read the West on Trial because we discussed it when I was his student. He did not find any serious errors or flaws with the contents of the book. And he confessed that Burnham was the CIA man and that it was the CIA that made the recommendation to President Kennedy to topple Jagan from office. Schlesinger agreed with Jagan’s account. No amount of revisionism can undo the facts. Schlesinger apologised to Jagan after the restoration of democracy.
Freddie should be mature enough to do the same for twisting facts to satisfy his anger at Jagan and the PPP.
Vishnu Bisram

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