What solution best resolves charges of ideological racism?

Feb 05, 2013 Letters

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Dear editor,
Mr. Roger Williams must be commended when he wrote that, “racism in every form must be condemned … or else we are all living a lie!
We are all safe in a social-policy space delineated by a respect for fact, truth, detail and evidence!” in referring to “Kissoon cites stats to support position on Jagdeo Presidency” (SN 1-29-13).
So let’s await the same forthcoming response which explains what he means when he suggests that “in that not-too-distant and cataclysmic event-paradox, Bharat Jagdeo’s efforts to ruin Frederick Kissoon (may) become the instrument of his own exposure!” as he wrote in the KN of 2-1-13 titled ”Kissoon is highlighting the fact of racism”.
Whether or not Mr. Williams responds to Mr. Devanand Bhagwan’s letter in the KN of 1-31-13 titled “there are many questions pertaining to Mr Kissoon’s research material” he will find it very difficult to explain whether living legend President Nelson Mandela, was not exactly a copycat “ideological racist” by Mr Kissoon’s analysis.
President Mandela cannot be right in seeking to correctly reflect his country’s ethnic makeup in South Africa’s public and armed forces (whilst President Jagdeo is conversely wrong) and so pander to anyone’s prejudices or hate, thereby invalidating  pursuance of such justifiable fairness.
Few can ignore the irony where the ethnic stocking of Guyana’s public service and armed forces by the PNC (1964-1992) is most justified, but that done by South Africa’s  white apartheid era rulers is condemned, even by the PNC,  as blatantly “unsustainable and wrong”.
In yet evidencing celebratory glee, Mr. Williams is most proud to harp on how “former President Bharat Jagdeo may well rue the day that he forgot that Satya Meva Jayate (“Truth Alone Triumphs”) and that even the most hardcore of the “jati” in Guyana would one day come to the inescapable position that the level of overt and covert racism heaped upon Afro-Guyanese post-1992 was unsustainable and wrong!”
Isn’t there something ominous which gives credence to Mr. Williams’s talking drum echoes of Dr Kean Gibson’s attack on Hindus targeting their en masse creolised transformation even as there is a conjoined retributive dangling danger over them like the sword of Damocles?
Additionally, how can identifying Dr Gibson’s attack on Hinduism be seen as just initiating “honest debate”? What underlies Mr. Williams’ satisfactory relief that “one of the most hardcore of the ‘jati’” i.e. “Frederick Kissoon, has obviously (and to his credit) been ‘transformed’ since”, to be finally aligned with those who feel they own Guyana, can only be obvious. If so, all well and good for him. Then Mr. Williams should have no difficulty in accepting that the same self admitted Africanised approved “hardcore jati’s transformation’ only gives much more profound elevation to significantly embellish his previous public condemnation of Dr Gibson’s attacks on Indians and their religion.
What juicy morsel will now be served when Mr. Williams (or either Mr. Kissoon himself) attempts to explain what Mr. Kissoon actually was, prior, to him being enabled to see the blinding light. Both men cannot be both diametrically right and wrong at the same time on the same issue. Neither are Mr. Williams’s protestations any more credible after allegedly misrepresenting distinguished Professor Ali Mazrui as alleged by KN’s Peeping Tom in his 2-2-13 column titled “What is the source of our fears”.
In fact, none can fail to detect Mr. Williams’s uncertainty after his failure to convert water into wine. An unsure Mr. Williams points out how the “Africanised hardcore jati”, i.e. Mr. Kissoon “is delicately trying to side-step the core sociological/cultural premises of the racism Gibson outlines (supposedly in Hinduism) by characterizing such racism as “ideological”… (and ironically here is where Mr. Williams created a vortex which can only drown  him when he equivocates that)… “one senses that there is no significant distance between their analyses and conclusions”.
If Mr. Williams’s fanciful hocus pocus can equate and convert Dr Gibson’s venomous attacks on Hindus and their religion with Mr. Kissoon’s uncertain charges of “ideological racism” such that “there is no significant distance between their analyses and conclusions” wouldn’t it again sentence President Nelson Mandela, the South African-led ANC government and all its black citizens to a new improved apartheid hell, all over again, because they are all likewise “ideological racists”?
There has to be better hope in Federalism if we are to survive and grow. What better alternatives can Mr. Williams suggest which does not condemn all his countrymen to permanent acrimony?
Sultan Mohamed

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