Like Gaza, like Guyana

May 07, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – For the last six months, a dirty little secret of America has been exposed.  It is no longer a secret as before, and it is not a little one.  This is about Israel and America’s inseparable relationship with it.  It is more about what is going on in Gaza, and the devastations wreaked against the Palestinians, the existence to which they have been doomed.  But of which the world media is carefully bland, subtly disengaged, with few exceptions.  As a survivor of the World Trade Center Day of wrath and resistance, there was deep pain from my American wounds, of which public expression has been repeated.  As a human being today, a universalist in motion, I cannot continue to cling blindly to how I was, what that planted inside.  Regarding my sacred Guyanese heritage, and present developments (also involving Americans), I cannot help probing for understanding of Gazan grimness and what that imparts of where Guyana is today.

The land of the Gazans (the natural extension is Palestinians) was seized under various rationalizations, some said, others silent.  Holocaust.  Holy texts.  Homecoming.  A people uprooted and run off from their abodes, the treasures of their pastures.  Then more land bought and sold or seized.  They run from country to country, live in hovels and camps, clustered tightly like so many cattle.  This is the price of their land.  The cost to their existence for their oases and waters.  America has constantly run to the defense of intruder and usurper.  Security Council.  Advanced weapons.  The vaunted US Congress.  And all to assure the subjugation of people whose children have rocks and slingshots.  The shepherd boy David’s role reversed, with poverty and peril ever-present realities for the Palestinians.  Yet, and yet, America has the unmitigated gall, the overweening hypocrisy, to lecture the colored people of the world about savagery and its human rights philosophy.  The Gazans have been impoverished and humiliated, so that the Israelis can steal their land.  Then they are insulted with food aid, while billions are set aside for weapons for Israel.  Feed with one hand, and fatally wound them with the other.

What is different about Guyana and Guyanese?  Long before the world heard about boat people, Guyanese were pioneers.  Suriname, seamen, to England at first, then Canada, and generations to America.  Living in basements (hovels), and cramped communities (camps in ghettos).  First it was ideology, then the big prize of the newfound patrimony.  Exxon is Israel.  Exxon is America’s interest.  Exxon must be powered and protected, so that America prospers.  Exxon grabs, America gives cover.  Look at the Guyanese people and most of them are not too distant from the trauma of the Palestinian people.  As Israel did to Palestinians decades ago, so Exxon is doing to Guyanese today.  There it was land, here it is for oil.  In the Middle East, it was for water rights and grazing rights; here it is for contract rights and exploration rights.  Twist it, swallow it, kick it: exploration is exploitation under civilized cover.  Business is business, whatever the underlying driving forces. What is America about, if not the business of its own priorities.

Look at the sacred kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the sheiks and princes are so fattened that they cannot and would not lift a finger to assist their fellows.  Palestinians, not Arabs, but people, nonetheless.  Brothers of the faith consigned to a dreadful fate.  Right here and right now, there are those who stand silent, participate in the selling of their own people into new slavery, when their patrimony makes prosperity their birthright.  I need not name names, for their titles smear them: the White man slaves bearing the White man’s burden.  In Iran, he went by the identity of Mohamed Reza Pahlavi, of the Peacock Throne over the Persian people.  In Jordan, the Hashemites who are in control can barely whimper a word of protest over Rafah and Judea and know that to say more would be the end of them.  The common denominator is America, which was also in Iraq, and how Saddam Hussein was used, then made into a monster, reduced to rubble last.  Guyanese have a domestic bruiser flitting to world capitals, thinking that he is their darling, when he is seen as just another dockyard worker, which description begins with a capital c and ends with an e.  Another man also being used, but not caring.  We have men from the neighboring side of the local political demographic recruited into service, and the best that the best of them can ever amount to in the eyes of those they court is another hateful word that is spelt with an n and terminates with an r.  They love where they are, who uses them, scorns them.

This is what our Guyanese brothers are proud of; they shrink from being made into, seen as, an Arafat.  They surrender to the visions and compulsions of the White man.  They brutalize and pulverize the local Brown man, Black man, Bronze man.  This they call governance.  Oneness.  Nationalist.  I see a sickness, and a chronic madness, inside of men in leadership positions across the Guyana political landscape.  They condemn themselves to crawling before, sucking up to, and drooling over themselves for the pleasure of the foreign businessman and White man.  Let this be understood unambiguously: I mean no insult to any Guyanese brother or sister.  It is my duty as the messenger tasked to deliver the hard messages that cause great embarrassments, trigger endless rage.  I press forward.  They still have to be delivered.  If not me, then who?  If not now, then when?  If not for Guyanese brothers, then for whom can I ever be, if not only for myself?  And whatever pitiful, treacherous life lived.  We are Guyanese.  We are Gazans.  We are well along that same trickster-filled, well-camouflaged road.  The parallels are very prevalent.

(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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• Americas, Gaza, GHK Lall, months, World Trade Center Day

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