Posterity is always painfully cruel to dictators

May 25, 2013 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
The consternation over Burnham’s entitlement to the OR Tambo Award has really opened up some deep psychological and intellectual hypocrisies and savageries in this country. It has given us an opportunity to see the real grave underbelly of this country, and it is a terrible sight.
Minette Bacchus’ letter titled “The evidence to date does not suggest Burnham was responsible for Rodney’s death” (May 7, 2013) is the kind of logically suspect and morally strained analysis we suffer from with enduring constancy in Guyana and particularly, with respect to the Rodney assassination.
We will never get a smoking gun on the Rodney’s assassination because there would never be an independent inquiry conducted by impartial foreigners into Rodney’s assassination, largely because the PPP and PNC are not going to like the truth that emerges.
As such, we are left with the kind of compelling facts and unanswered questions such as those brilliantly posed by Tacuma Ogunseye to David Granger (see “Questions for David Granger” SN, May 7, 2013) that will never be answered by the Burnham backers.
Ultimately and unequivocally, a powerful national figure like Walter Rodney could not be killed in a closely controlled police state like the Burnham-dominated Guyana in 1980 without Burnham’s prior knowledge, or more to the point, involvement and endorsement. That is a fact. No amount of flouncing around it will eviscerate it.
One must ask the probing and difficult moral questions about Minette Bacchus’ reasoning for an entire generation growing up today with no direct knowledge of Burnham. They must understand the moral importance of exposing the revisionism today so they can arm themselves morally for the future in this perilous political climate. This is not about realpolitik, it is about justice, morality, decency, fairness, patriotism and balance. Minette Bacchus should start by answering some of the questions Tacuma Ogunseye posed to David Granger before extending these fallacies.
I am going to use Bacchus’s inexplicable reasoning and smutty moralizing against her. For the purpose of this experiment, let us assume Bacchus’s reasoning is correct. Accordingly, she must tell us under what moral philosophy does Rodney’s revolutionary praxis, rooted in his beliefs that confrontational armed resistance is necessary to overthrow dictatorship absolve his political enemies who killed him?
Wasn’t this the same revolutionary praxis that Burnham defended in Nelson Mandela’s ANC by sending US $50,000 every year for forces to revolutionize against an apartheid South Africa? Does Rodney’s pursuit of violence against a violent dictatorship in the name of freedom demoralize the legitimacy of his struggle and justify the oppressors’ murder of Rodney? Is one entirely to blame for one’s demise if they sacrifice on behalf of an entire nation for the sake of freedom to battle a dangerous despot and is killed? Is one to be defiled for confronting a dictator and losing? Is this act of confrontation enough to justify the killing of that confronter?
Dictators that deny their political opponents and their entire populace due process and the avail of self-defence, do not have the advantage or relief of self-defence, nor are they, by any sensible measure of morality or justice, entitled to that cloak. No moral calculus allows for a dictator to be elevated above a freedom fighter, no matter how twisted the moral compass of the nation becomes by ethnic agitations. That is the immovable moral watermark in any fundamental moral philosophy of life and civilization. It cannot be overturned, extinguished, revised or altered.
Burnham did what he did. But there can be no justification or excuse for it. It is a rankly immoral act that offends decent-minded people everywhere. It is wrong. It is savage. It is heinous.
From a nation or patriotic perspective, how could a dictator practicing atrocity be ethically condoned and defended when accused of the murder of a man who promised freedom, democracy, economic revival and the elusive promised land of ethnic inclusivity and reconciliation, ideas that would have transformed Guyana?
The nation benefits from one idealism and is capsized by the other. It is no contest from a nation-building perspective or a futuristic scope. So, to eliminate a leader who professes these values while seeking to entrench heinousness and abominations strips away any semblance of morality for the aggressor. It is a morbidly unpatriotic act to do so. It destroys the potential of the nation while preserves the nation of self for that ruler.
Even worse, Burnham’s worst period of repression, economic misery and anguish came after Rodney was killed. It was a horrific karma for those who defended Burnham’s beastliness. The period from 1980 to 1985 when Burnham died was the most crippling and disgraceful period of economic and moral destitution in Guyana’s history. Desmond Hoyte was a dramatic light for many when he came to power after all that darkness. As fate would have it, Burnham perished in his miasma a mere five years after Rodney’s assassination and his brutal empire collapsed seven years after his death.
Indeed, dictators and despots will defend their ill-gotten gains and will kill or maim with impunity to do so, but it does not make it moral or right, no matter how naïve, innocent, inexperienced and gullible their resistors are.
Regardless of Rodney’s mistakes, his naiveté, his underestimations of Burnham’s capacity for callousness and his sometimes misplaced courage, the act of eliminating him was dastardly. There is no refuge for Forbes Burnham. No amount of intellectual contortion and epistemological masquerading will free Burnham from this savagery. It is why, fittingly, time has reversed the outcome and legacy for Burnham and the force of moral outrage is now exposing him for his cruelties even when he is entitled to the OR Tambo Award for the good he has done for South Africa.
Posterity is always painfully cruel to dictators. Those who still lionize Forbes Burnham, PNC leader David Granger included, are caught in the moral trap and are too deep down that disturbing cave to know they are perpetually lost. There were two profound African giants of the Guyana post-Independence period; Burnham and Rodney. They stood for very different things. One stood for freedom, justice, fairness, equality, morality and ethnic tolerance. The other stood for self-idolization, indignities, immoralities, ethnic aggrandizement and abominations. One played a savage hand in sending the other to the grave.
That some Africans can cry now for salvation from the PPP and wail for democracy, freedom, economic integration and opportunity while defending Burnham who played a role in wiping out the very man who held the greatest promise to give those things to Africans is the one of the great moral hypocrisies in Guyana’s history. Just as some Indians still celebrate Cheddi Jagan, whose colossal blunders and hard-headed irrationality helped the PNC claim power and left Indians in the political cold for 28 years.
Let us begin this conversation on hypocrisy in Guyana now. Let us talk the talk that needs to be talked, without fear or favour. We desperately need to do this as a country before we become eternally lost in darkness in a world that is roaring to the highest sun of civilization’s greatest period.
M. Maxwell

 

 

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