Evil has descended upon this nation

Dec 27, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

For 2015, the particular incident that has really brutalized my psyche was the shooting to death of a mini-bus driver by a bandit, as a passenger closed the door of the vehicle sensing that a boarding passenger was a robber. There wasn’t even a confrontation. There was absolutely no circumstance of confrontational anger that would have infuriated the criminal.
The robber was left on the road and he just fired a shot at the driver. Is this criminal, a man born to a mother? Is this man human? More importantly, how can a small, non-industrial society like Guyana produce such bestial forms of violent sadism?
We may revolt at how hitmen behave, but the sociologist would point to a rational cluster of motives. Take the Robb Street granny murder. It was gruesome. Four underprivileged young men took money to kill a poor woman who made her living as a nanny to a Caricom employee. But the sociologist would say the lure of money to buy luxury items would have been a strong inducement.
You may throw up when you hear the details of any such story, but the fact remains, money was the motive.
But how do you explain the situation where the mini-bus driver drove away yet the gunman wanted to kill him. Is this what Hannah Arendt referred to as the “banality of evil?”
I have no doubt that others would find more horrible homicides of more analytical importance to focus on. The dismemberment of a woman in Buxton by the handyman comes to mind. But no doubt whichever murder you select, evil has descended upon this land.
How can a country with our kind of tiny population manifest such murderous instincts? The ghoulish violence used in criminal acts defies logic.
This is not large industrial America or Europe where alienation and psychosis lead people to commit psychotic barbarity. Almost one hundred percent of Guyana’s homicidal perpetrators are under thirty-five and are quite sane.
We are dealing with the banality of evil. This was the term the German philosopher Hannah Arendt used to describe German officials, bureaucrats and public servants who were ordinary, sane people, but with invisible streaks of evil in them.
For any scholar in or out of Guyana to say they anticipated this violent syndrome after the new government came into being early this year is not being honest. The military dimension of rulership was a hopeful sign. Untold numbers believed that with the former soldiers and former Commissioner of Police in the top echelons of government it would send a dreadful signal to criminals that their marauding, murderous ways would be confronted with a no-nonsense fist. It was not to be.
Violent bandits have defied the soldiers. They are robbing people in the presence of hundreds of onlookers at anytime of the day or night on any street throughout the length and breadth of Guyana.
What are the explanations? They would not fit in a column, but are here are some brief notes. First there is the Chato’s Land theory. About five years ago I did a column captioned Chato’s Land (title of the Charles Bronson movie).
It was about the Wild West in the gold mining areas in the interior. No law, no morality, no stability, no mercy, no values. This is the gold mining areas of Guyana, where life is dependent on Darwinian principles. You kill who you want to and you too can be killed at anytime.
Policemen take money and watch as you kill or as you are being killed. Chato’s Land in Guyana is a horror chamber of violence. When you live in Chato’s Land and you leave it and come to dwell in Regions Two, Three, Four, Five and Six, you bring your violent mentality to these places.
If you rob someone you will be bestial in your attack. If you get into a normal fight, you will be savage in your attack. I think many of the robberies being committed with such callous coldness in the use of violence are done by young men who had a taste of Chato’s Land.
A second theory is that the male species in Guyana who live in depressed areas have come to hate the society for what it is.
These young men believe that the legal and the judicial system are unfair and brutal, and they resent the fact that they are helpless to change it. They cannot confront the forces of authority, so they take out their anger on the person they rob or they murder the person that they have a quarrel with.
I will explore other theories in a forthcoming column.

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