Who are the drummers of war?

Jan 12, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Over coffee on Saturday morning with Dale Andrews and Mark Benschop, I made the point that if the constitutionally mandated Human Rights Commission was in existence, I would have asked it to examine Ravi Dev’s assessment of my columns with a view to interpreting what Dev writes.
For six weeks, the Ravi Dev column in this newspaper took the perspective that I am inciting violence against the state; his last Sunday piece faithfully followed the pattern.
My problem with Dev is that I believe he is inciting violence against me and that violence can come two sources – state personnel and extremist supporters of the PPP.
Let’s offer a few samples from Dev, beginning with his latest incitement last Sunday; “The strategy of confrontation will almost inevitably segue into violence because of certain narratives nourished by rhetoric such as Mr. Lewis and Mr. Kissoon.”
Here is Dev on November 29; “The narratives of Mr. Freddie Kissoon and Dr. Kean Gibson are framed to arouse strong passions to bring down the freely elected government of the day.”
On December 13, he wrote; “After 2006, the violent discourse was taken over and given a new twist by Mr. Freddie Kissoon and others.” Finally, in his piece last Sunday, he accused me and Lincoln Lewis of beating the drums of war.
What Dev has failed to do so far (and this to my mind is deliberate) is to dissect the particular columns that bother him and lay bare their inflammatory paragraphs. For two years, since his conversion to the PPP’s agenda, Mr. Dev has been in lamentation moods on my columns.
In two years, I would have done more than seven hundred essays. That is a strong number from which Dev can easily pick a couple of dozens of incendiary articles that are designed to (1) incite violence, (2) drum up war sounds, (3) bring about the downfall of the government.
So out of seven hundred columns the past two years, Mr. Dev cannot tear me apart by quoting extensively from at least one, I repeat one composition of mine where the style, language and sentiments are inflammatory.
No doubt next Sunday, there is going to be a rebuttal of this assessment that will take the following form.
“Mr. Freddie Kissoon wrote that I have accused him of inciting violence but Kissoon need to go back at his writings and see the meta-narratives and narratives of his where he advocated the recourse to confrontation that has as its ultimate aim the bringing down of the Government.”
These are my words. Dev will perhaps change up some verbs and adjectives but the contents will be identical to the imaginary one of mine. It will be a stuck record as he keeps writing but missing from his pieces are the reproductions of the quotes of mine that can unambiguously place me at the site of violence.
To date, we have two articles of mine parts of which worry Dev. One is; “The blind man and the black cat,” (November 14). In that item, I looked at the unpublished role of internal violence in the PPP where defectors were murdered. Dev claims that the article lacked retrospection much less research.
What does that have to do with the meta-narrative of violence that comes from my columns? The answer is none. Next he quotes from my July 28 article titled; “This is an historic letter: Circulate it now!” It was about Rupert Roopnaraine’s assertion that when five of them were charged with treason by the Burnham Government, they were not tortured. It is my right to endorse or reject what Roopnaraine wrote.
I agreed with Roopnaraine; Dev did not. What that agreement has to do with my meta-narrative where I egg on people to attack the state?
My opinion is that Dr. Randy Persaud and Ravi Dev are the two newcomers to the PPP’s strategising endeavours for the 2011 elections. It would appear to me that because Persaud is a newcomer to the Guyanese social milieu, the decision was made to allocate Dev to counter me. I have no problem with that. I can handle Dev.
What the Guyanese people need to know is that Dev has been assigned to the only bandwagon the PPP knows – racial alarm. Dev’s task is to drum into the heads of East Indians that I do not like them and I have joined with “Black extremists” like Kean Gibson and Lincoln Lewis.
It is the PPP Government since 1999 that has been beating the drums of war and its latest band-player is Ravi Dev.

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Who are the drummers of war?

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