Death and devastation

Apr 04, 2023 Editorial

Kaieteur News – It is said that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. History is littered with repeated examples of both. The human experience has emphasised that the lust for power drives some men to madness. This is what currently grips America, with its citizens perched on the edges of tension, paranoia, and distress over how matters erupt, and how they are managed. As many Americans fear, at stake is the state of their Republic.

It is incredible that all of these fears are energized by no less a figure than that of a former President. It is unbelievable that a man approaching 80 years of age, once a leader of the free world, could be the source of what he verbalized as “death and destruction” if held to account. The January 6 insurrection of two years ago in America’s capital has now taken on new dimensions, electrified by new energies. It could be the worst energies expressed through heaving passions, with mayhem and chaos resulting. It is in circumstances like these that sober heads are most needed.

The trouble is that there have been few objecting voices from among the former President’s side of the political crowd. It is one that howls for blood, on the prowl with ambitions at crushing whatever stands in the way. This is an America no longer content with its ideals and the discipline that they foster. Among them are to yield to the expressed will of the people. Another is that there comes a time when obvious contradictions of facts and circumstances on the ground must be given the true value of what they embody. Hence, they cannot be upheld, nor supported in any form or fashion.

Elections are the platform and pathway to power. In even the most advanced societies, with the most sophisticated technologies, elections have come to represent what are the essences of life and death struggles. The call for “death and destruction” is an offshoot of what was thwarted by a few holding the line against chaos, and standing for things as they actually are, and not as some wish they would be. If this could be the state to which America has deteriorated to, then what leadership role can it project in a world torn by existential battles for power, and by any means, and at any cost? If this battle to the death for power could be in America, then what are the prospects for Guyana, possibly even more divided and angry and compelled to deal with its own rankling wounds?

In Guyana, we have leaders who love to tell us how much they are about democracy and its standards, only for them to function in secrecy. When they are challenged and exposed for their deceptions, failures, and fantasies, they sense threats to their hold on power. These same leaders have become so consumed with the trappings of power that they lash and bash any citizen, any entity, any truth that speaks to how they misuse power. The thinking of some Guyanese was that after a bruising, traumatizing national elections season that leadership lessons would have been learned about frankness and genuineness with Guyanese. A river of lies has been the Guyanese reality, and like Donald Trump, there is this delusional insistence that the local truths presented by local leaders are the only ones that have substance, and which, therefore, should prevail here.

In Guyana, there is America’s ExxonMobil given free rein to trample all over Guyanese interests, and our leaders’ postures are so twisted that they cooperate with the equivalent of what means nothing but ‘death and devastation’ to Guyanese. Death to their aspirations to be a self-sufficient people proudly standing on their feet because they are prospering. Devastation to what they could and should be, but for men’s naked lust for power, even if that means selling every citizen of this country out. Leaders rouse and rally some, and they also demonize and ostracize some, from coast to coast. The result is that, like America, there is a Guyana that is bewildered and shell shocked. Lust for power is the source, leaders knotting themselves into the unrecognizable to get what they want, however they get it: power.

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Editorial, History, human, power, President

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