The silicone mind: Suárez, Hitler and Guyana

Jun 29, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The police raid a brothel and you are found in a room with a prostitute. The same thing happens again. Then it occurs for the third time. Conclusion – prostitutes tend to you. Why would any reasonable mind believe your denial? But this is what an entire country is doing with one of its sporting heroes – footballer, Luis Suárez.
It may appear to the ordinary eye that this is just a country in support of its hero. But heroes do good things. Heroes are nice people whose action is never to intentionally hurt others. Heroes will kill in war out of self-defence, but heroes do not seek to kill a batsman by intentionally directing a vicious bouncer to his head in a game of cricket.
From one end of the country to another, from ten-year-old to ninety-nine-year-old, from one important institution to another, in Uruguay, people praise Suárez as a superstar and see nothing wrong with him. In researching Suárez, even the archivists and librarians do not cooperate with researchers on Suárez. They protect him. They love him. He is the person they believe in.
Such a mental state of a country does not help Luis Suárez and Suárez is a self-destructive Uruguayan footballing talisman who needs help. The danger with the Uruguayan attitude is that it will reinforce a lie that over time both Suárez and his nation will come to believe and accept as truth.
At the moment, Uruguayans don’t believe Suárez has a psychological problem even though his career has been marked by horrible indiscretions, including biting his opponents three times in high profile matches, racially abusing a French football star on the field and causing deliberate head injuries to a referee in his youthful days in Uruguay. And these are just a few examples.
The egregious reaction of the people of Uruguay to the faults of their so-called hero is identical to the way Germans felt about Hitler. Suárez says the western press and Italy and England are out to get him so they vilify him. Hitler said the West was out to get Germany so Germans rallied around Hitler. They couldn’t see Hitler’s faults until it was too late. As the West sounded alarms about Hitler, the bigger the alarms the greater the protection for Hitler.
As the Suárez incident keeps attracting biting (no pun intended) analyses from around the world, the people of Uruguay will continue to lie to themselves – our hero is telling the truth, he didn’t bite that player. The result will be disrespect for the nation of Uruguay, perhaps even scorn, and Suárez will be driven to deep levels of self-delusions. Nothing positive can result from such a dystopian drama.
If any country should see the chasms that Uruguay is heading into, it is Guyana. The Suárez incident comes at a time when many East Indians from Guyana are chasing the PNC for an apology for when it was in power, and the Walter Rodney Commission is causing vexations among African Guyanese on what witnesses are saying about Forbes Burnham and those who served under him.
In Guyana, Uruguay and Suárez live. Long before Uruguay started to deny the faults of Suárez, Guyanese Africans were denying the nasty faults of Forbes Burnham and Guyanese Indians were in love with Cheddi Jagan, a man whose flaws were immensely tragic. Burnham’s lust for power destroyed Guyana, but like Suárez he was the talisman, the icon of African Guyanese, and they were happy to accept as truth the lies Burnham spun them.
Cheddi Jagan had a tiny mind and was a willing stooge of Stalinist communism. He loved the Soviet Union more than his own country, and like Burnham, devastated Guyana in the process. But he was the icon of the Guyanese Indians and they accepted as gospel, the lies he sank into their psyche. Surely, Uruguay is not alone in the example of a nation seeing a man with dangerously bad habits but still loving him because, after all, he is our hero.
Before there were Suárez and Uruguay, there was Guyana with its African and East Indian communities. Burnham bit the Guyanese people and Africans said it was an invention of his Indian enemies. Jagan bit the Guyanese people and Indians said that was a fiction created by his African enemies.
Luis Suárez has put Uruguay on the map in 2014, and maybe the peoples of the world will help the Uruguayans to see that their boy Suárez is dragging them down, that they must face the truth and see their boy for what he is – a man with a dangerous problem. Little Guyana remains unknown, and the lie Africans and Indians accept as truth will live on.

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The silicone mind: Suárez, Hitler and Guyana

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