Zeitgeist and great expectations

Jun 19, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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For a number of years now, people, including UG students, would ask me why Guyana was confrontational with President Burnham and Mr. Jagdeo gets away with excesses that are unspeakable, and if they had occurred under Mr. Burnham, all hell would have broken loose.
It is a question that I encounter all the time and it shows no sign of abating. This is an intellectualized inquiry that is best answered using sociological and philosophical concepts. Some variables centre on the external environment, while there are specific factors in the Guyana context.
Every age has its own zeitgeist. Each zeitgeist has its expectations, permissibilities, vicissitudes, vagaries, mores and values.
Take the eighties when the cold war was raging. Israel invaded Lebanon and terrible war crimes were committed. There was no war crimes court and no one dared rebuke Israel.
If an invasion of that type should take place in this age with those kinds of barbarism and mass slaughter, Israeli leaders are bound to face arrest warrants at some European airports.
There was a time in the thirties when the Jewish population of Europe was a victim of genocide and the world turned away. In today’s western culture, there is no place any longer for the music of Barry Manilow.
In the sixties, post-colonial people had colossal expectations of their Independence leaders. The white man was expelled and citizens dreamt of a classless society, a dream fuelled by the ubiquity of Marxist ideology.
In the immediate post-colonial period, life was to be like the agora in ancient Athens where people participated in the shape of the demos.
In the Third World after Independence when those expectations were not met, the frustrations of the masses were shaped by a brilliantly educated middle class.
In Guyana, as Burnham faulted, he had to contend with this kind of middle class. Added to this was the mix of ethnic politics with a large East Indian population driven by the PPP to oppose and overthrow the Burnham Government.
Guyana in the 21st century bears little resemblance to the country that got Independence in the sixties. First, the educated middle class is gone. This was always the class that could educate the masses into demanding what was naturally theirs.
Secondly, while the ethnic community from which came the PNC made demands on their government, the East Indians are not playing the same role in today’s authoritarian Guyana where political depravities far exceed the nastiness of the Burnham regime. Thirdly, in the eighties, exit valves were closed off to the Guyanese population. An American visa was hard to get, the Canadian moved their consular out of the country and Guyanese were not welcomed in other Caricom territories.
Today, Guyanese know that they don’t have to stay and fight their tyrannical government because once they have a teaching diploma, a nurse’s certificate or a university degree they can migrate to any country they want to.
Fourthly, money was scarcer than elephants in Guyana during the Burnham epoch. A thriving narcotics industry that began in the early nineties is in competition with the formal economy at the moment and it provides the formal economy with dollars, the absence of which would have made life more miserable
Fifthly, a relentless opposition created a nightmare for Burnham that eventually sunk him. With the demise of Desmond Hoyte, the existence of a defunct opposition emboldens a dictatorship to extend its repressive tentacles to all walks of life. The barefaced venalities that characterize the Jagdeo regime would not have been tolerated by the society under Burnham.
Sixthly, and very importantly, the pessimism of the Guyanese people under President Burnham was never allowed to grow, because the zeitgeist of that period contained a flowing concern about human rights around the world.
The Burnham Government was always under the spotlight of the world. The Guyanese people were eternally optimistic that other countries would put pressure on Burnham to behave. And they did. Guyanese opposition leaders traveled to foreign states where they exposed Burnham’s autocracy to foreign leaders, particularly in the US Senate.
That zeitgeist is gone. Since the fall of communism, the globe has become a more insular place. Countries, both big and small, have enormous problems in the area of trade, economics, terrorism and declining resources. Interest in arresting pathological governance in the Third World is simply not there.
As a consequence of this, a creeping pessimism has taken over the Guyanese population, driven by extensive fear. The fear is that there is no country that is willing to help stop Jagdeo as Burnham was thirty-five years ago.
The 2011 election becomes the last throw of the dice.

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