Guyana where unashamed prejudice passes for patriotism

Jun 01, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News – Each day I digest the news reporting, I really wonder if the cruelest societies, the most depressed countries, the most unstable nations on Planet Earth still have a quota of morally focused and ethically endowed humans that Guyana lacks.
It is unbearable to have been an activist in the 1970s and see what types of humans occupy Guyana today. This mental mummification is not ubiquitous because Guyana’s young population is not part of this runaway train of evil but its mere presence is destabilising to the soul.
You read what passes for patriotism in Guyana and you wonder if Samuel Johnson, who is purported to have composed the first dictionary of English words, was not phenomenally erudite when he wrote: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
In Guyana, since the no-confidence vote (NCV) in December 2018 and from thereon, taking in the five months of election rigging in 2020, the flow of dangerous bias is reaching alarming levels. Each day, we read personalities being quoted in the newspapers and letters by these very personalities to the newspaper expressing lamentations of unaccountable governance, etc.
As you look closer, you recoil in disgust because the people clamouring for truth, justice and fair-play have no moral authority to make those claims. In the same breath that they call upon state authority to respect principles, they embrace the negativity of intense ego-tripping opportunism.
It is a bizarre, surreal situation. These people’s daily adumbrations are laced with the vocabulary of the need for justice, the taming of power, racial toleration yet those very expressions are from people with a destructive agenda. If one is to begin to enumerate these oxymoronic situations since the NCV, it would literally fill two book length manuscripts.
I witnessed a situation about the behaviour of a certain organisation that this entire country would be dumbfounded if I describe what went on. I am bound by my source not to repeat it. Yet it is organisations like these, drowning in an ocean of horrible and horrific double standards that criticise what they call unaccountable governance in Guyana.
Here is what I will do. I am prepared to tell selected people about this situation because it should be told. No one in Guyana knows more about the ocean of evil than I do because the waves wash at my feet. I have to put up with people who take colossal license at saying what they want but when you do a rain check on them, their response are vitriolic outpourings against you. It is an unadulterated manifestation of intolerance, superior thinking and fear of being exposed.
There isn’t a day that passes that the lunatic fringe, the usual suspects, and their barefaced supporters do not express themselves either on Facebook, Zoom, television, or newspapers and quote extensively from the dictionary of valued language while at the same time using the dictionary of inciting scatology.
Let’s quote for you some of the things said by people whose daily outpouring make you believe they are patriots but when you expose them, the dark side is revealed. A certain person who says he is from civil society wrote these words in public: “Mr. President, it behoves you to cancel these elections. You have the power, you have the right to so do… Mr. President, for the good of Guyana, her laws and people, cancel these elections.” (Jul 28, 2020).
In case you live on another planet, and you didn’t know, the president the gentleman referred to was the head of the party that had lost the election. Simply put, a president must cancel election if he, as a contestant is losing. Here is what a columnist in another mainstream newspaper wrote in 2020: “In this historic election, where once again the country is divided, many alien voices have made their opinions known, with some seeking to instruct how we handle our electoral process.”
This was a barefaced criticism of an international process that the world accepts – international election observers. Professor Jay Mandle wrote an email to me about the policy newspapers in the US should have taken on losers in an election battle raving about being cheated.
Jay Mandle is one of academia’s most prolific writers and one of the most learnt scholars to have written on Guyana and the Caribbean. His words were that he doubted very much that the New York Times would have published a column saying that the US election was rigged (as claimed by Republicans). Finally, a mainstream newspaper insists seven times that an opposition politician must be the head of a strategic public sector institution. Those who profess democracy are in essence and practice, anti-democratic.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)