Freddie Kissoon’s historical revisionism on the PNC/APNU is wrong

Oct 28, 2012 Letters

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Dear Editor,
The PNC/APNU has nothing to offer Africans except political wilderness. Kissoon does not appear to grasp this reality in his letter titled “The PNC is desperately trying to survive” (KN, October 24, 2012). Contrary to Kissoon’s panegyric masturbation about “the great and historic role in this country’s evolution of the People’s National Congress,” I see the PNC/APNU as a tragic and sordid tale of race politics, marginalising, economic despair, dismal leadership, failing African-Guyanese, profound laziness and elitism. This has been the PNC’s legacy just as it has been the PPP’s.
There is nothing great about the PNC’s role in Guyana’s history. The PNC was formed out of one man’s sick quest for power at all costs, built entirely on racial antagonism and political strife and played willing lackey to a foreign ideology and outside puppeteers. The PNC is the only main party in Guyana’s history formed entirely and completely as a race party. The PPP was formed as a multiracial communist party in 1950 and eventually became a race party. Strong African support for the Jagan-led PPP over the Burnham-led version of the PPP in the 1957 election confirmed the early multiracial appeal of the original PPP.
By contrast, the PNC was formed from day one by Burnham to pursue destructive race politics with the aim of securing power. The politics of the PNC from 1957 onwards and in the sixties was one of ethnic segregation and necessary violence in pursuit of it. The same applied to the PPP although the violence was a lesser feature.
This country still suffers from it. Kissoon exclaims “As someone who practises revisionist history, I believe historical evidence exists to justify the PNC’s politics of the sixties that brought it to power in 1964.” Kissoon then renders the following explanation for his theory “When historians look back at the true nature of the Jagans and their organization and the people they nurtured in their party, but most of all the morally bankrupt and truly sickening nature of the PPP’s rule since the death of Cheddi Jagan, the people who embrace and support the PNC have nothing to be ashamed of.”
That is an abjectly shallow and intellectually nefarious statement. I frankly cannot see where in the historical tableau Kissoon can extract justification for the PNC’s politics of the sixties based on those considerations. Kissoon cannot be justifying the race-actuated and violence-ridden political stratagem of the PNC of the sixties because to do so would logically endorse the same strategy employed by the PPP as a counter to the PNC. Kissoon’s contention is undermined by the fact that Guyanese history has revealed to us since 1957 that the PPP and the PNC were not two extremes but similar entities in structure, orientation, philosophy and leadership structure.
The major difference between the two parties is the PPP’s rabid pursuit of communism, which appalled the West, which in turn engineered events to alter the political landscape. However, history has proven from 1964 to 1985 the PNC pursued a socialist agenda with distinctly potent features of communism such as nationalization. The authoritarianism of the PNC was very communist. The true nature of the Jagans and their fixation on power and ideology is no different from the true nature of Burnham, his megalomania and his quest to impose a radical and authoritarian form of socialism on Guyana.
The PNC and PPP organizations were never widely dissimilar. They are both decrepit cesspits stocked with the same character-less men. Kissoon has to be deluded to believe that the PNC/APNU would not be morally bankrupt, incompetent and obscenely corrupt if they regain power. There is nothing in the PNC/APNU to suggest otherwise. While Burnham may have attracted more intellect into the PNC, he crushed and suffocated them to his own power drunk authoritarianism. The Jagans did not seek cerebral types because they believed oxen minds were more pliable.

The PNC and the PPP have delivered the same level of corruption, indecency and venality to this country. It is just that the opportunities to rape and pillage are far greater under the PPP today. The PPP and PNC are two sides of the same coin. For every Burnham there is a Jagdeo, for every Hamilton Greene there is a Leslie Ramsammy, etc.
Therefore, Kissoon’s support for his thesis is flawed. There can be no justification from a nation building and a future-focused perspective for the PNC or PPP’s racially divisive and graphically violent politics of the sixties. That said, historical evidence reveals there was justification from a geopolitical axis for the Western powers (British and Americans) to encourage race politics in Guyana for their own aims. The West recognized it had a power-crazed politician in Burnham who was willing to do anything to secure power, even wreck the mood of national unity and racial tolerance that underlined the 1953 and to a lesser extent the 1957 elections. The heart of Guyana’s problems is Forbes Burnham and his power-drunk ways and Jagan and his ideological rigidity.
A proper revisionist could argue that if Burnham remained in the PPP and restrained his megalomania, his charisma would have led to a different type of change that avoided the racial cleavage in Guyana. Burnham’s arrogance, impatience and ignorance caused him to attempt to hijack the PPP shortly after the successful 1953 election where national and racial unity was at its highest ever in Guyana’s history.
This was a profound tactical blunder that exposed Burnham’s error and egomania in the 1957 election when Africans utterly rejected him and his party. My theory is that if Burnham remained in the PPP and fought the Jagans ideologically from within the party, the Jagans would have cracked by the early sixties under the crescendo of American interference and pressure. The Jagans would have yielded and Burnham’s internal pressure and his sway could have forced the PPP to become more socialist and less communist on most of its positions.
If that did not work and there was a split in the PPP at a later time such as the early to mid sixties, it would have occurred primarily on lines of ideology and not starkly on race as happened in the mid-fifties. A split on ideology would have seen substantial African and Indian voters breaking into two ideological camps supporting communism or proper socialism. What makes Burnham’s decision to pursue racial intolerance as a political strategy even more reprehensible is not only the fact that it evaporated the racial unity in Guyana up to 1957 but also the fact that Burnham adopted some of Jagan’s most bizarre communist policies like nationalization during his dictatorship.
This begs the question – why did Burnham go on a racial politics spree to oppose the PPP when he ruled in a manner the PPP would have generally ruled Guyana from 1964 to 1985? It was all about self and power for Burnham and the PNC was a mere accessory to his self-worship. Burnham was blinded by his raw hunger for power and even worse, his instant gratification mentality. Jagan was blinded by ideology and power to feed that ideology.
If Burnham, Jagan, the PPP and the PNC cared about nation, they would not have pursued the politics they did in the sixties. There is no justification from the PNC or PPP perspective for their politics of the sixties. No leader or party can justify fracturing and separating a nation and sending it to violent and murderous ethnic reprisals. Burnham knew the West was ultimately going to dictate the outcome in Guyana.
He decided to position himself to gain power from that geopolitical chess move by going racial with his politics. Jagan’s head was in a cloud misguidedly believing from his communist baloney that power was going to be delivered by the people, not the West. Burnham read the end game far better than the Jagans because he was not ideologically blinded to reality. The PNC started on a road to race and remains on that road to race. The PPP started on the road of multiracialism and ended up on the road of race and remains there. There is nothing great or historic about the PNC or the PPP. Historical evidence and the power of nation-building do not justify the racial or the violent racial politics of the PNC.
M. Maxwell

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