Donald Ramotar: A Freudian analysis

Jun 03, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Perhaps the least apparatchik that the PPP’s hierarchy would want to publicly defend is Mr. Kwame McCoy. The simple fact is that Mr. McCoy has earned the name as the bad boy of the PPP, eclipsing Odinga Lumumba by a long way. Why then would a former General-Secretary of the PPP and a former President of the country wax lyrical about McCoy, as Donald Ramotar did in a recent letter to all the daily newspapers?
Ramotar’s public endorsement comes at a time when McCoy is charged for violent crimes, and other investigations into his past conduct when the PPP was in power are going on
The answer lies in the theory of the Vanguard Party. Even though fascism in Germany referred to as Nazism and communism in the USSR, had different types of political programmes, there was one fundamental thread that connected them – the Vanguard Party and Nietzsche’s Übermensch. The communists prefer the description of their action as the birth of the Vanguard Party. The Nazis in Germany chose to explain what they were doing was the coming of the Übermensch that Nietzsche hoped would one day save civilization. In political philosophy, they mean the same thing.
Between communism under Mao Tse Tung, Stalin and Pol Pot, dozens of millions were murdered because of the sacred understanding of the Vanguard Party. Under the Nazis, dozens of millions were killed because of the belief that the Third Reich was the embodiment of the Übermensch. Even one of the greatest thinkers in philosophy of both the 19th and 20th centuries, Martin Heidegger, honestly believed that in the Third Reich, Germany had discovered Nietzsche’s Übermensch.
What are the Vanguard Party and the Übermensch that have led to genocides in China, the USSR, Cambodia and Germany? Space would not allow for an elaboration and there is no need to define the Vanguard Party and the Übermensch separately; essentially they mean the same thing, though it would be an injustice to the brilliance of Nietzsche to think what the communists and the Nazis did was what Nietzsche meant.
The Vanguard Party or the Übermensch is the arrival of a philosophical force that was destined to come to save civilization. It is a metaphysical abstraction (even though Marxism is based on materialist thinking, the Vanguard Party is purely a metaphysical concept). History is the linear progression of the soul of mankind (as Hegel interpreted it; both communist ideologues and Nazi theoreticians were Hegelian). History goes through several evolutionary stages but because life is a dialectical process, history will naturally end in purification.
Most amazingly, a pro-American, pro-capitalist , right-wing scholar working for the Reagan presidency in the 1980s also embraced Hegel’s dialectics and wrote a sensational best seller that, for that year, won a prestigious award as the best academic text. Titled, “The End of History”. Francis Fukuyama argued that with the collapse of the USSR and Eastern European communist states, history reached its zenith in the form of the triumph of liberal, capitalist democracy, and that there cannot be anything dialectically beyond liberal, capitalist democracy. Ironically, like the communists and the Nazis, this American pro-American, pro-West thinker agreed that the Übermensch had come to save civilization. Since then Fukuyama has rejected his essential arguments of his breathtaking text.
The Vanguard Party or the Übermensch is sacred and invincible. Its role is to save society. Its leaders were specially chosen to have that date with destiny. Any questioning of the role of the Vanguard Party or the Übermensch would be to display destructive and anti-nationalist rudeness and philistine ignorance.
We need not detain ourselves with details of the genocides under the three communist leaders mentioned above and Hitler, but suffice it to say that the countless millions that were murdered by the State had to die, because the party leaders saw them as backward people whose ignorance made them unhistorical and a threat to the paradise that Russia under Stalin, Germany under Hitler, and China under Mao Tse-Tung were building.
Space does not permit an elongated analysis of why Ramotar ventured out so boldly to defend McCoy. But it has to do with Ramotar’s fanatical embrace of the Vanguard Party theory. He always espoused this aspect of communist theory and was so doctrinaire in his mentality that he was the logical choice to run the PPP after its leader became President in 1992. Ramotar never abandoned this mentality, even after he became President. He was the campaign leader to retain the section in the PPP’s constitution that referred to it as a Marxist-Leninist organization, after Khemraj Ramjattan tabled a motion at a party congress to remove it. A second part of this analysis will follow.

1 thoughts on “Donald Ramotar: A Freudian analysis”

JuanMcLeland June 3, 2016 at 11:24 am

Oh Freddy !! Your slip is showing . The first time this fan heard the words Vanguard Party was from the lips of the Comrade Leader as a result the nation received a healthy dose of Paramountcy of the Party .If you don’t believe me ask Mr.Harris hour editor. Obermensch and Donald Ramotar that’s one for the coffee table chat . Good laughs too .