Today is June 6. Do you know the significance?

Jun 06, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I have repeatedly warned my only child not to see the movie, “Sometimes in April.” As a teacher in philosophy, I used to show it to my UG students each year. Even though I believe the average person should not see the film, philosophy students cannot avoid that fate.
If you are doing a course in philosophy, then you have to try to understand the human condition, the nature of Homo sapiens and the fundamental questions of ontology.
Starring Idris Elba, who played Nelson Mandela recently, “Sometimes in April” is about the Rwanda genocide. It is a movie whose depictions will leave you seriously depressed. The bestiality in the violent methodologies in the Rwanda genocide, in my opinion was more savage than in the Holocaust. “Sometimes in April” is not for the faint-hearted.
What does genocide in Rwanda have to do with today’s date? On this day in 1944, the world sealed the fate of Adolph Hitler, the worst dictator in human history. He perpetuated the second most horrific act in history after slavery – the genocide of six million Jews that has since been recorded as the Holocaust.
On this day, Allied forces landed on the beaches of France to end Hitler’s reign. And it started as a massacre. The Germans were waiting and the American forces were simply gunned down as mangoes falling from a sugar estate tree in Guyana. For the best depiction of this great sacrifice in history, see the movie, “Saving Private Ryan”.
People who live under dictatorship, no matter how young they are, need to remember the symbolism of that landing on this day in 1944. Soldiers gave up their lives willingly to remove a vicious tyrant. If it wasn’t for D-Day landings on this day, maybe the world would have been different and the Nazis would have killed off the entire Third World and all non-German races.
Whenever June 6 comes around, the peoples of the world must reflect on the nature of dictatorship, what encourages it, what makes it grow, what makes it become impregnable. The answer is simple. You don’t need to read history texts to understand it. Men and women enslave their peoples because their peoples refused to speak out when the tentacles first started to move. The tentacles grow larger and larger and by the time a pen is raised or voices gives off an echo, lives are lost, freedom is dead and slavery is reborn.
If any country should worship the symbolism of June 6 it is Guyana but we don’t and we are paying the price for such an unforgivable lapse. June 6 has arrived at an appropriate time in this land. Taking place right now is a judicial commission into the death of Walter Rodney. At this moment the minds of the business community is burdened with the fear of an international blacking listing. How are the two issues connected?
Let us leave out of the discussion blame for Rodney’s death. This column is not about that but it is about the reign of President Burnham at the time of Rodney’s activism. Witness after witness has described the repression that characterized the seventies in Guyana. I know I was there.
In 1974, I was just days into my freshman status at UG, when Rodney addressed a large gathering at UG about the Council of the University refusing to employ him as a lecturer. I have vivid memories of the moment. I stood next to final year student, Hubert Devonish (now professor of linguistics at UWI in Jamaica) and watched Rodney denounced the government’s control over UG.
This was in 1974, thirty-nine years after that event. I watched my daughter in the audience listening to Drs. Mellisa Ifill and Patsy Francis denouncing the government’s control of the University that led to the abrupt termination of my contract. Could I ever have imagined that I would have become a Rodney-like victim at UG as I stood next to Hubert Devonish thirty-nine years ago? What has this nation learned about the cruelties of dictatorship?
So we want to find out who killed Walter Rodney in 1980? Who can argue with that? Rodney was killed in 1980. Twenty-six years later, Ronald Waddell was murdered. What has this country learned about the tyrannies of dictatorship? We come to 2014, and a nation remains helpless and silent as the world is about to put serious financial sanctions against Guyana for inadequate anti-money laundering legislation.
And all because a dictatorial government refuses to concede even an inch of their vast power. Maybe some nations deserve to be enslaved. Maybe that is their destiny.

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