Fascism always carried the morbidity of narcissism

May 18, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The talk always centres on Guyana’s riches and its persistent poverty and how our politics is messed up whenever foreigners engaged Guyanese academics in conversation about this land.
No more graphic example you want of this answer to our permanent tragedy than the outlandish celebration of Mr. Jagdeo and his Government of an award he got from the UN for environmental protection. Our messed up politics has no ending.
We are poor indeed, we lack a sound human resource base, we don’t have money for many modern essential things.
President Jagdeo himself admitted to Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott, during Carifesta that there isn’t money to go around so his government when faced with the choice of financing the arts and buying a tractor will have to choose the latter. And this wasn’t told to Walcott in a private conversation. This statement was made at an open forum.
Yet despite our economic and social misery, money and resources were spent last week in a sickening display of personality cultism to celebrate this UN award. The topic of conversation is about this recent circus but a milder form of it appeared in the Guyana Times for which there wasn’t any awareness because few people read that newspaper.
The ruling cabal must have found the Guyana Times bacchanal a dilemma and they still do not know what to do about it. If a dictatorship is going to nurture a narcissistic cult of its leader, it needs to have the attention of the nation.
The headache in Guyana is enormous for the dictator’s sycophants. How to get the citizenry to notice the grandiose displays of narcissistic fireworks? It didn’t work in the Guyana Times.
I didn’t know about the Times’s narcissistic cultism until people began to talk about the Roman excursion at the Convention Centre last week.
I was told that in the issue of April 25 of the Times, the UN award was celebrated with fanatical rage. No one I asked in the media and at UG knew about this abomination in the Guyana Times
In that issue, 64 photographs were carried of President Jagdeo. This writer says without fear of contradiction that no newspaper since printing press was invented carried 64 photograph of a leader for merely receiving an award.
Knowing that the Guyana Times’s phantasmagoria failed to catch the attention of the Guyanese people, the Convention Centre circus was staged. Classifying what went on at the Convention Center as narcissism, the Sunday editorial of the Stabroek News opined that the demonstration of this maximum leader image may have to do with the patent failure of the leader to achieve anything longlasting or to take attention away from the hydro project scandal
I will offer an alternative explanation. What happened in the Guyana Times in its April 25 edition and what took place at the Convention Centre last week with billboards of the President’s portrait all over the territory are the finishing touches being put to fascist rule in Guyana.
Any study of communist/fascist dictatorship from the beginning of the 20th century onwards will reveal that narcissistic adornments are an essential component in the exercise of power. From Lenin to Castro taking in Mao-Tse Tung, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Kim-il Sung, the narcissistic feature has always been present.
Hitler was in love with himself. One evening he went sailing with Herman Goering, his deputy. It was getting late and Goering suggested it was time to sail back. Hitler asked for more time because he wanted to test the idea of walking on water.
I am convinced that Castro is in love with himself. I am convinced that Castro sees himself as a very special person that history created to save the Cuban people. After fifty years in power and leaving Cuba is a state of economic primitiveness, Castro still uses his influence on policy-making through his brother.
He still is a narcissist even though his failure can be seen for fifty years in Cuba.
At home here in Guyana, the same pattern is being played out.
We have the highest rate of American visa refusal in the world; we have our citizens running away to live in semi-modern conditions in one of the smaller lands in the world, Barbados; we have a country where electricity supply has broken down, in our capital city, sewage flows through the streets, not to mention that our capital may be the nastiest in the world.
But as in Cuba, the Leviathan cannot see these things. Narcissism prevents the acceptance of reality.

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Fascism always carried the morbidity of narcissism

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