Dear Editor,
Inevitably, in the wake of Vincent Alexander’s seismic revelations of what would have amounted to subverting the will of the people in favour of the People’s Progressive Party, there will be – outside of the inevitable cowardly campaign to seek to discredit him – a barrage of rhetorical questions about the late timing of these revelations. There has been much energy similarly expended in the wake of Ralph Ramkarran’s unequivocal claim of corruption being the domineering ethos of the PPP. Now and then, the degree of interrogation of motive is unhelpful.
We who want true change in this society should not condemn but encourage and defend anyone who breaks the silence, however belatedly we believe that they are doing so. They represent a growing, but still relatively small, flowering of dissident voices, one that needs careful cultivation and not petulant and reactionary pruning – the bulk of the society, particularly the supposed intellectual class continue to remain in thrall to the corrupt monolith that dominates this country, Freedom House.
I attended the Caribbean Press’ launch of yet another batch of Guyana Classics earlier this week and saw here firsthand what Havel was speaking about when he said, “The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.”
I watched as otherwise good, bright people participated in a farce, both praising and perpetuating it. Almost everyone there, stood and applauded a mechanism in which the principals – Dr David Dabydeen and Dr Frank Anthony – blatantly continue to ignore any call for accountability or transparency in its operation, with the Minister’s daughter being featured, reading from her book published by the Press, even as the programme was absent the anthologies of local fiction and poetry that we were assured would be launched, with no explanation given. The next day, that lie was given greater and equal credence in the state and independent media with Stabroek News giving front-page coverage to a GINA photo of a handover of books.
This again brings to mind the work of Havel who said of his society, and which can clearly be applied here:
“We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all — though naturally to differing extents — responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.”
Any mapping of what is most wrong in Guyana today is necessarily going to be an anatomy of reticence, that tendency to be unwilling or reluctant to give public voice to our recognition of what we know to be immoral and unjust, just like Ramkarran and Alexander once were reluctant. The reasons we rationalize that reticence are many as there are individuals who refuse to speak out, although broader categories – fear, personal status, economic security, personal relationships, prejudice – can be established. However, if there is any lesson that can be gained from the example of reputable and untainted patriots like Ramkarran and Alexander is that reticence only works to perpetuate the very system that the reticent believe they are working to quietly dismantle from within. If you say nothing, and by extension do nothing, then nothing will change for the better.
Coming out of the events of recent months, we have found that the PPP, with all its corrupt money and with its demonstrated capacity to usurp its legitimate authority for illegitimate partisan gain, is not infallible and certainly not unchallengeable. True power lies neither in riches nor position but in what we individually and collectively know – there is indeed no knowledge that is not power.
The thing is, if we are reticent with that knowledge, if we only whisper it, they will at the least seek out the sound and try to crush, like an ant, the person who has dared to make it. But, if we speak together, if we give a collective voice to what we know about what is wrong with this place, if we create a chorus of outrage, if we shout out our umbrage all at once, the fortress of indecency that Freedom House has become will collapse into dust. Now, more than at any point in the past twenty years, is the time to be heard.
Yours faithfully,
Ruel Johnson
