Rodney’s killers have no moral or legal defence

Jun 22, 2013 Letters

---

 

Dear Editor,
Minette Bacchus has written many letters criticizing my position that the facts support Burnham played a role in Walter Rodney’s assassination. For some strange reason, Kaieteur News has failed to publish my rebuttal to Bacchus. I wait to see if this letter will be published. Bacchus’ blind zealotry on this issue must be confronted factually and morally. In this letter I will examine the moral danger of Bacchus’ soulless positions. I will present my factual research in a later correspondence.
For Bacchus, Burnham had nothing to do with Rodney’s death. She further contends that Rodney’s death was payback for his revolutionary activities and his murderers are morally and legally absolved because Rodney was plotting to overthrow the PNC with guns.
This is morally and legally abominable. It misses the point on proportionality where the self-defence must be proportionate to the force faced. Under the doctrine of proportionality, any proper court will convict a citizen who shoots and kills in cold blood an unarmed attacker who is physically incapable of subduing or harming the citizen.
No matter what guns the WPA was allegedly accumulating, the WPA and Rodney never posed a serious threat to overthrowing the PNC, especially not after Burnham shook up the leadership of the military in July 1979 to install his loyalists in all the top posts. No rational analyst could argue the WPA had the critical mass, weaponry and capacity to wrest power from Burnham or even get close to attacking Burnham.
In fact, the PNC had infiltrated the WPA and knew all of Rodney’s plans, so it was never under any threat from the WPA. The PNC had the means to charge, try and convict Rodney of sedition, for it had previously charged and jailed Rodney before. So, the murder of Walter Rodney in cold blood was egregiously, morally and legally disproportionate, and a gravely sickening act by the PNC.
Nothing more absurdly exposes this myopic and nasty intellectual fabrication by Minette Bacchus than the fact that the apartheid regime jailed but did not assassinate Nelson Mandela whose ANC forces killed many apartheid forces, but the PNC regime killed Walter Rodney who was supposedly accumulating weapons.
The moral depravity in Bacchus’ reasoning has wider implications. If replicated and applied liberally, it immorally shreds the entire historiography of the struggles of oppressed people. This position would sinfully mean that because Cuffy, Damon, Quamina, Enmore Martyrs and Devonshire Castle resisters took revolutionary action against their oppressors, their oppressors were justified and morally absolved in killing them in self-defence or retaliation.
Using this same shameful moral deceit, if Oliver Tambo or Nelson Mandela was killed by the apartheid regime by a walkie-talkie bomb, the apartheid regime would have been justified and morally blameless because Tambo or Mandela was nothing but a revolutionary who played with fire and got killed. The same defunct moral transference applies to the killers of the scores of innocent young African men who were killed during the death squad heyday in Guyana. Their killers could rely on Minette Bacchus’ apocryphal reasoning and get off scot free.
The moral shamefulness of Bacchus’ reasoning utterly rapes and laughs at the entire history of mankind’s struggles against oppression, terror and dictatorship. It vaunts the oppressor and despot above the freedom fighter. It decimates and mocks the vehement struggles of Africans from the time of slavery to present.This moral denigration cannot be allowed a free pass in our country, for in trying to morally absolve a single despot, it threatens to make a colossal mockery of the bitter battles for betterment and freedoms of this nation of oppressed and enslaved peoples
If Bacchus’s skewed moral reasoning is now allowed, is the government of the day in Guyana at any time in its past and future allowed to assassinate rather than prosecute any senior political figure it contends is engaged in revolutionary activities and walk away with impunity?
If society is to be ordered on Bacchus’ savage primitivism of ‘I should kill you because I believe I think or you are plotting to kill me’ without resorting to the rule of law and the criminal justice and law enforcement system, then any mere suspicion or even knowledge of a plot, no matter how unworkable and unattainable, is good enough for one citizen to kill another.
This debased vigilantism is not only self-destructive but morally reprehensible, for it demands us to return to misplaced Neanderthal self-preservation without the rule of law. Do those on the right side of morality automatically lose any moral and legal protection because they resist or take up arms in the name of freedom, justice, democracy, betterment and hope? Because if we are to cloak ourselves in Bacchus’ terrifying morality, the people of this country, including the Africans whom Burnham falsely claimed he cared about, should quit complaining about their corrupt, dictatorial and uncaring government because they lack the moral or legal right to do so. Heaven forbid if they resist or become revolutionary, because their oppressors will be justified to obliterate them under the bizarre rules of Minette Bacchus’ very own twisted moralism.
M. Maxwell

 

 

---

---