Kissoon, Gaskin, Roopnaraine: More notes on race and class

Jan 28, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – David Hinds recently declared me a madman and wrote that I am compromised. Mark Benschop said the PPP pays me $500,000 monthly. Adam Harris said he would not be surprised if the PPP is paying me. Dr. Melissa Ifill said I am concerned about earnings.
For the record, I have no relationship with the PPP as a party and I have no financial arrangement or otherwise with the Government of Guyana from the time I was born and never had one.
In an interview, Khemraj Ramjattan referred to me as a PPP agent and in the same breath wax lyrical about Dominic Gaskin. Ramjattan stated that Gaskin is still the treasurer of the AFC where he remains a member.
In assertion by the AFC in March 2020 that the APNU+AFC won the election, one of the top leaders of the AFC, Dominic Gaskin rejected that claim of victory and asserted that the results were wrong. It was not only the firing off of a national nuclear weapon but it had international effect. In any other country, Gaskin would have been expelled from his party not because he spoke the truth but because he went against the stables.
The man making that statement was from the leadership of the party in power at the time and the son-in-law of the president. At the time of Mr. Gaskin’s announcement, I was exposing the election conspiracy in my Kaieteur News columns and on Kaieteur Radio. But I was the subject of ridicule of many Facebook postings. The frenetic claimers of an APNU+AFC said not a word against Gaskin.
In July, when the election fraud by APNU+AFC was still in full swing, Mr. Gaskin delivered the death blow to the hopes of APNU+AFC that they will succeed in having illegal power. Mr. Gaskin on his Facebook post of July 17 tore the claim of victory to pieces. His sentences were no different from those contained in my columns.
To date, the lunatic fringe, the usual suspects, and those associated with them continue to attack Frederick Kissoon. But if you come from another planet you would never believe that one of the leaders of the party in power at the time of the election boldly denied that his party won the poll.
In private conversations and on their email strings I am described as the worst thing in Guyana while in the AFC, Gaskin’s colleagues continue their friendship with him. Why is Gaskin seen in this way and I am singled out for mistreatment?
The answer is class and colour. It is psychologically impossible for the people of class and colour to attack Gaskin. He is white, European, and quintessentially middle class. I am a dark-skinned co..lie with no connection to wealth and eugenics. I am lower in the ladder of humans to Gaskin so there is no insult in attacking me.
Now mind you, I see what Gaskin did as patriotic and I see him in a positive light so what is written here is not a criticism of him, I am looking at the mind of a dangerous undemocratic class of people. The same brushed that has tarred Kissoon was used against that Berbician co..lie, Charrandas Persaud. Kissoon and Charran are driven by money thus their political stance. Someone with the class and colour of Gaskin is above those indignities.
It is a permanent, colonially driven instinct that exists in the minds of Guyanese people. Those with class and colour have cleaner DNA and purer blood than dark-skinned Guyanese from low earning classes. When it comes to two Indians – Frederick Kisssoon and Rupert Roopnaraine – who have criticised the long rule of the PPP, Indians treat Roopnaraine with respect and adulation but I am vilified and called a self-hater.
Prominent Indians in and out of Guyana have publicly derogated me in the worse possible manner. They have written how I lost my way a long time ago and have become a hater of my own race and I hate myself for being Indian. There has never been even one word so vitriolic about Rooopnaraine from any Indian in or out of Guyana.
Comparing my cultural, political and ethnic evolution with Roopnaraine is comparing a spoon and a tractor. I am far more imbued with things Indian than Roopnaraine. Roopnaraine was criticising the PPP government like me since way back in the early nineties. Roopnaraine formed a bond with the PNC after 2010.
But he was never called a self-hater. Why? He is from the crème de la crème of society. He is light complexioned, went to Queen’s College and Cambridge University, and is completely westernised. Those Indians who ridiculed me for years as a self-hater admire Roopnaraine for his class status. For them, I’m just a co..lie nobody so I am easy target.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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