Harry’s areolation and harlequinade

Jan 15, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Nature has produced some intriguingly funny, little people, harmless, unobtrusive, but a bit irritating. You sometimes wonder why they do the tiny, exasperating things they do. There are explanations for who they are and why they do what they do. In the case of Harry Hergash of Canada, an analysis will not be elaborate.
He lived in the sixties, witnessed the racial clashes as a teacher in Annandale and migrated with some traumas intact. Of course one would like to think that mental and intellectual development takes place in all human beings.
An example is in order. If the Tamils, Basques, Palestinians, Corsicans, Kurds etc had won independence for their homeland, surely memories of their leaders’ great patriotic struggles would be implanted in the minds of the citizens.
These leaders would always be treated with adulation. After all, they were the ones that made independence possible. But what happens after they settle down as rulers of a sovereign state? Should they rape their constitution, pillage their treasury, and kill their critics. Should our sentiments of the past condemn us to be silent and keep supporting them? Human decency should guide us to denounce such leaders.
Even if Hergash left with frustrations of how he felt the PPP was treated in the sixties, Hergash should be able to assess that party after 19 years of domination of Guyana. By any stretch of the imagination, a19-year hold on power is a very, very long time for a political party. In that time, the PPP’s sins have become countless.
From his base in democratic Canada, Mr. Hergash writes his occasional letters to the two independent dailies. Most of them are commentaries on my columns and the style is subtle in support of the PPP Government.
Mr. Hergash writes with some Freudian shame. He does not want to come out in support of the East Indian government in Guyana (maybe because he is chairman of the non-political Canada-Guyana Committee) so he shows vexation with critics who ridicule the PPP’s hegemony in Guyana.
Hergash wears a strange, esoteric pair of glasses. These lenses obfuscate the abominations and immoralities that have characterized the 19-year-old autocracy of Cheddi Jagan’s party. But somehow, his spectacles direct him to this page of the Kaieteur News.
Hergash has skipped from Frederick Kissoon to Dr. Cary Fraser. In a trenchant analysis of the PPP misrule in the Stabroek News (January 6, 11), Fraser concludes that today the PPP “confronts a legacy of failed governance and economic stagnation…”
Harry Hergash does not agree. He finds an excuse for Jagdeo. According to Harry, when Jagdeo assumed the throne he was greeted with a baptism of fire from the PNC and that shaped his attitude.
Now read this. Harry did not say that Jagdeo is dictatorial. This is how he puts it: “Jagdeo is now described as being autocratic.” Harry does not tell us what he thinks but what Jagdeo has been painted as. This is what I mean by the Freudian shame in Mr. Hergash
We come now to Harry’s areolation. Describing the era of “mo fyaah, slo fyaah,” Harry wrote, “The reality is that the PPP’s hold on government during that period was tenuous.” I lived in that period while Harry was in Canada. That of course does not make my assessment superior. But let us stick with Harry’s areolation.
Mr. Hergash calls upon Dr. Fraser to quote from original documents when he makes political statements because it is standard academic procedure. Mr. Hergash should do likewise and take his analysis to its logical climax.
If the PPP’s hold on power was thin after the implementation of “mo fyaah/slo fyaah,” then how did the Jagdeo presidency survive?
It is important that opposition politicians and anti-dictatorship activists and objective commentators find time to reply to people like Harry Hergash. We are at the beginning of an election campaign which, from the look of things, will be nasty, dirty and definitely unpleasant.
People in Guyana will read letters from PPP supporters like Harry Hergash and they can fall for the propaganda content of such judgements. Last year, Hergash did a two-part series for the “In The Diaspora” column for the Stabroek News.
He overlooked the tyranny that inheres in the PPP’s hegemony and declared that the PPP will win the up coming poll. There will be more viewpoints from Hergash and his ilk as the campaign intensifies. Even though they live outside, the possibility is that people can fall victim to their subtle PPP advocacy. Those people will certainly be the object of my pen.

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Harry’s areolation and harlequinade

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