An even worse nightmare

Jan 01, 2019 Editorial

A message bandied about by handpicked opposition veterans in selected neighbourhoods is gaining ominous traction. It is that there is only one man who could run this country. Opposition stalwarts cum aspirants should find that objectionable; if they don’t, it is to their discredit.
On the other hand, that has to be considered insulting to conscientious, ethical, and forward-thinking Guyanese from every stratum of this society.
The insistent fostering of such a position amounts to a rejection of the CCJ ruling. It signals a willingness and corresponding determination to return this country to the fascism and totalitarianism from earlier this century, and which so horrified this land.
At this point, it is time to resurrect a Leninist maxim: anything is ethical once it advances the interests of the party. In this country there is a party that is a virtual one-man show; a trick show it has been; a trick show of legitimate (but dissenting) media being squeezed first, then blacklisted financially; of one favored contractor receiving many of the richer awards; of one corrupt bidding process; of one set of cronies with their hands in every public pie; of one army of mercenaries recruited for extrajudicial activities; of one huge underground economy facilitating the narcotics and money laundering trades; of one ruinous bridge; of one collapsed insurance company with many secrets; and one sinister world abundant in closely held secrets and many casualties. There were few limits.
Do Guyanese really desire returning to that tragic paradise? If so, that is their call, and their right. Or for the great majority is that one-man powerhouse marketed recognized as the worst nightmare imaginable? One even worse than what went before, and as is only partially outlined here?
It is difficult to believe that honest, decent, everyday Guyanese would really look forward to what has been so malicious, so vindictive, so destructive. The unanimous response ought to be: not today! Not tomorrow! Not ever again!
Whatever it is that opposition unmoving loyalists prioritize, they should easily recall what occurred during Stalin’s Great Purge of 1936. The terrible fates of original, proven brethren named Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev (and a host of other faithful) should jar the memory as to the depths of megalomania then.
Sober men and women in and out of the party must summon the quiet courage to ask: what is going on here? Is this not what has happened in different forms to different people to different degrees? The conclusion should be that no one is safe, none exempt.
No one was exempt when a semblance of this visited Guyana from around the birth of this millennium and then forward. There were no conscientious objectors, only enemies. Today, there are more identified. There were no questioners and seekers of truth, merely challengers to be banished. Few dared to speak of witch hunt or whitewash, or the delusional guiding hand behind airtight compartmentalization.
The corrective, objective, and subjective were all considered subversive. And a la Josef Stalin, there was only visualized a suspect, fevered world standing against and the corresponding Machiavellian solutions of plots, conspiracies, and solution final in intent and result.
There was a Star Chamber functioning as judge and jury under the smooth all-purpose blanket of National Security. There were neither victims nor martyrs; only the collateral damage of traitors and enemies of the state.
It was a ONE-MAN state. That was democracy at work then; constitutional freedoms ruptured, but casually denied or dismissed.
However probed and addressed (and this has not happened here), the past cannot be undone; it is, indeed, past. The attendant ills remain through future generations as oral mythology, and with all the bottled rancor and antagonisms.

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