President Ramotar played the race card with respect to my letter

Mar 09, 2013 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
Nothing shocks me anymore from the PPP, but I am very disturbed at two things reportedly uttered by President Ramotar at former President Cheddi Jagan’s memorial at Babu John.
In his feature address, Mr. Ramotar reportedly called Moses Nagamootoo a ‘jackass’, a contemptuous act unbecoming of a President. I believe this is clear signal of the influence of the Jagdeoites over President Ramotar. The second was Mr. Ramotar’s reputed condemnation of my letter titled “Was Janet Jagan the controlling force behind Cheddi Jagan?” (KN, March 3, 2013).
Kaieteur News reported Mr. Ramotar’s fulminations in its article titled “Ramotar takes on opposition haters at Babu John” (KN, March 5, 2013) as follows: “Commenting on a letter which appeared in Sunday’s Kaieteur News in which a letter writer claimed that Mrs. Janet Jagan was behind all of the decisions made by Dr. Jagan, Mr. Ramotar called it a “racist propaganda, trying to say that only white people had brains. Imagine, someone to this day, in our newspaper today, still has that in their minds…and (George Maxwell) and the crew of them really need to have new brains! This is the quality of journalists we have in our country today!”
I have no problem whatsoever with President Ramotar and anyone else for that matter attacking my writings. I actually look forward to it, for this is how intellectual debate is generated for the betterment of the nation. What I have a problem with is blatant falsification of what I wrote, deceitful attribution of motives to my writings, mis-characterization of what was written, dismissal of the factual underpinnings of my arguments, drawing fatally flawed conclusions, misreading obvious inferences, ignoring what the article really said, tendering wrong and duplicitous perspectives on what was actually written and most importantly, jumping to a race-centric culmination when the facts and positions in  my article simply rejected this racial angle.
There is nothing in my article that allows for the President to jump to his misplaced race-centred conclusion on it. Absolutely nothing. I write letters almost every day condemning race politics and castigating racism in Guyana, a scourge that has decimated this country, yet the President paints me with the sickening race brush.
There is a certain vulgarity and reprehensibility for a president of a racially fractured and politically divided society to stand on the presidential pulpit and call a true son of the soil a jackass and to so callously and wrongly paint a commentator with the race brush.
I remind Mr. Ramotar that there is no greater office in this country with the capacity for ethnic healing than the presidency. One has to seriously wonder what prevails in the President’s mind if this was all he could have extracted and highlighted from my article.
To think that someone would see an honest question about Janet Jagan’s ideological influence over Cheddi Jagan in this light is frightening. Either the President did not read my article himself and was handed this speech to parrot or, heaven forbid, he read it and this is all he could reap from it. I remind everyone that the race card, misused or abused in a racially divided society is reputationally destructive.
Now that the President has raised this racial angle in attacking my argument that Janet Jagan ideologically, not racially, controlled Cheddi Jagan, there are questions I need to ask the President.
If my letter asserting that Janet ideologically controlled Cheddi and the PPP was, in the President’s mind, my endorsement of the horrible belief that ‘only white people had brains’, was Cheddi Jagan endorsing that ‘only white people had brains’ when he fawned, dutifully followed and tried to faithfully execute the ideologies of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Frederick Engels, Che Guevera, Josef Tito, Josef Stalin and Fidel Castro, among others, all Europeans or of mostly European descent?
When Cheddi Jagan tried to ram down Guyana’s throats the foreign ideologies crafted by Europeans like Marx, Engels and Lenin, was he trying to convey in doing so that ‘only white people had brains’? Was Cheddi Jagan promoting the belief that Europeans were superior when he so blindly embraced ideologies crafted in Europe by Europeans? Was Cheddi Jagan’s extreme and fanatical embrace of these philosophies and ideologies almost entirely borrowed from European thinkers and leaders an embodiment of the ludicrous ‘only white people had brains’ argument in Cheddi Jagan’s mind?
Was Cheddi Jagan’s borrowing of his entire ideological frame of mind and reference from foreign sources, predominantly European, confirmation of Cheddi Jagan’s submission to Eurocentric thinking without attempting to craft a made-in-Guyana model? Was this a manifestation in Cheddi Jagan of the debauched ‘only white people had brains’ mentality?
At the end of the day, this country is too entangled in the continuing bitterness of racism for the President to utter such ill-conceived and misdirected abominations. I welcome condemnation from the President if it is factual and intellectually grounded, but I will not allow anyone to wrongfully accuse me of racist propaganda.
M. Maxwell

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