I have only Guyanese nationality

Feb 14, 2010 Letters

Dear Editor,
In the debate between government critics and government propagandists, the latter descend to levels that are either horrifyingly ironic or immensely comical.
Just recently in my column I had to refer to Dr. Prem Misir’s defence of his government as comical when he chided critics for referring too often to corruption.
Corruption is what you will constantly hear from those who castigate the PPP Government because corruption is ubiquitous in this country
Dr. Randy Persaud replied to my article titled, “An independent foreign policy of a poverty stricken nation is a mirage, “(Kaieteur News, February 2) and wrote; “It is unfortunate that some elite Guyanese have become so slavish in their perspective about the wider world. They have become more loyal than the King. They have become more American than the Americans.”
Let me set the record straight for Dr. Persaud. My wife is Guyanese, holds a Guyana passport. My daughter was born in Guyana, holds a Guyanese passport.
I don’t need to give facts on my nationality; that is public knowledge. Unlike Dr. Persaud, I do not have an American passport and none of the members of my family (wife and children) have. Maybe Dr. Persaud can explain. Factually, he is closer to the US than I am. I made a deliberate choice to stay in Guyana. I studied in Canada then took a job at home – home being where I came from, the Caribbean (Grenada to be specific)
Randy Persaud and Prem Misir have borrowed a style from Ravi Dev. Put lots and lots of quotes from textbook authors in your article to masks your weak and propagandistic rebuttals.
Every week we are treated to a garden of rosy quotes from textbook authors that are absolutely irrelevant to the debate between me and Ravi Dev and that is, the Government of Guyana is an elected dictatorship that violates the rule of law, Constitution and practices racial discrimination.
We get sesquipedalian quotes from obscure textbooks by Dev and by the time you reach the end of this voluminous column, these outpouring of extracts are irrelevant
Misir is up to the same foolishness and now newly arrived spin doctor, Randy Persaud has slavishly copied his two fellow PPP propagandists in the copious use of superfluous references to all kinds of textbooks which in the end do not directly contribute to the essence of their rebuttals.
In his rejection of my contention that very devastated economies cannot sustain an independent foreign policy, Persaud makes use of several seminal International Relations (IR) texts that are authorities on the subject.
Every first year IR student is familiar with these publications. He goes on and on but does not meet my challenge head on.
In fact, one senses a policy of careful avoidance in Persaud’s letter (Kaieteur News, February 4) Instead what we have is a deluge of deliberately misleading statements.
For example, he argued that Guyana had an independent foreign policy that allowed it to condemn apartheid. He omitted salient facts. First, this was at a time when Guyana was not a poor Third World country, comparatively speaking. Secondly, Guyana was doing so under the canopy of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Thirdly, the Cold War at that time allowed small states to pursue an independent foreign policy.
Fourthly, the US from the beginning of the Vietnam War to the Watergate scandal and the Chilean coup was so burdened by the misuse of power that it could not have confronted small states that moved away from its traditional foreign policy mooring.
This explained Henry Kissinger’s famous statement, “Power has never been so great yet so useless.” Those glory days are gone. The NAM is dead. The Cold War is dead. Guyana is an extremely poor country. And the Caribbean needs the West
Finally, Persaud shows a lack of familiarity with the configurations of the international system and the features of realpolitik inherent in international relations when he asked why if the US has relations with Libya, can’t Guyana do the same. This is comparing an elephant and an ant. The US supplies Guyana’s income. It is not the other way around
Frederick Kissoon

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I have only Guyanese nationality

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