Ravi Dev responds to Frederick Kissoon

Mar 22, 2010 Letters

Dear Editor,

I refer to the Sunday ‘Rant’ of Mr. Fredrick Kissoon, “Fascism takes shape in Guyana”.

From his previous fulminations, I had gathered it had been fully entrenched for some time now, but…ah well, everyone is entitled to change their mind.

Mr. Kissoon claims that in a debate with him on his claims about the possibility of a dictatorship existing in Guyana I referred to the “typology of Kar Liebnech”.

Firstly, I believe that Mr. Kissoon is talking about “Karl” Liebnecht not “Kark” Liebnecht or this may be a typo. Not being prone to drop names without reference to the substantive arguments of authors, as Mr. Kissoon habitually does, I would like Mr. Kissoon to indicate where I ever cited Liebnecht in reference to dictatorships. Liebnecht is famously linked with Rosa Luxemburg in the formation of the German Communist party. In analysing the Burnhamite dictatorship, I actually referred to the work of Carl Friedrich “Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy” which was first published in 1956 and revised in 1969. Burnham began to construct his totalitarian regime in 1968.

But this is not just a matter of getting names wrong. Mr. Kissoon main argument is that the work I cited was written in the “19th century” and is therefore “no longer applicable to the post WWII world”.

Now that the question of names and dates has been cleared up, can we hope that Mr. Kissoon will possibly finally read the text to judge its applicability or not to the local scene?

Ravi Dev

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