Dear Editor,
Both the Stabroek News and the Guyana Chronicle came out recently firing on all cylinders. Lengthy editorials reflected the thinking of the editors of these two dailies. The target was the PPP’s staunch defense of Cheddi Jagan’s legacy associated with the Red House.
The party is accused of pandering to a culture of “dominance instinct”, of being “undemocratic” and “anti-Jagan.” “Jagan,” they claim, “would have wanted Red House to be shared”. They seem to know Jagan better than the leadership of the PPP.
One cynical letter writer suggested: “Put Jagan’s records at Congress Place and Burnham’s at Freedom House.” He called for the creation of one PPP-PNC party headquarters named ‘Common Place’ or ‘Common House’ where, PPP and PNC apparatchiks would cohabit. He ended by calling for Jagan’s remains to be removed from Babu John and to be put at the place of the Seven Ponds and Burnham’s put at Babu John.
The cynics jumped into bed with the critics. The demand from above is clear: either the PPP shares it or vacates it. Jagan, they declare, has no right being there alone. Red House must be shared with Burnham and Hoyte, is the cry.
History is turned on its head, logic is turned upside down and authoritarianism rears its ugly head. Recall Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth: “By a kind of
perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it!”
Jagan’s followers are being pressured to accept Burnham and Hoyte as co-leaders of the PPP and this is being pursued in the context of a crusade to revise the annals of Guyana’s political history. And the recent statement that Guyana needs a second independence must not go unscrutinized. Its objective seems altruistic but the subterfuge can be pernicious.
Intellectual heresy has replaced objectivity and consistency. Nothing of historical significance seems to matter these days save only what is associated with the Burnham era on the one hand and all that is anti-PPP and anti-Jagan on the other. This is clearly the flavour of the day.
Rigged elections, political murders, starvation economics and brutal oppression and
suppression, racial and political discrimination and witch-hunting associated with the PNC/APNU have become forgiveable and righteous and pale into significance when compared with the media-orchestrated and invented wrongdoings by the PPP/C administration.
Nowadays, in certain quarters, it appears anathema to speak out or write in favour of the PPP, much less have such views published in certain newspapers. An aggressive psychological war is being waged for the hearts and minds of the Guyanese workers, farmers, women and youth. A section of the media continues with the of role being anti-PPP while it was in government to anti-PPP now it is in the opposition.
Ganja and cocaine are not only being trafficked physically, for instance in pepper sauce, fruits and vegetables, it is being trafficked in the pages of certain sections of the media as a journalistic psychotropic substance to twist the minds of readers.
Historical distractions, defamations and degradation are inching their way into the psyche of the gullible and unsuspecting supporters and sympathizers of the APNU+AFC, who in their innocent naivety, either cast a plague on the houses of both the PPP and PNC or, with a sense of total abandonment simply respond in whatever way they deem fit, to what is told to them by their political leaders.
Media generated stereotyping of the PPP and its leaders by the rulers has become the order of the day; the objective is to control and adjust the flow of information to the public to keep a particular picture of the PPP in their heads.
A culture of sycophancy and subservience is being promoted by the Granger-led administration and the trend in certain quarters seems to be to go along to get along. This culture of sycophancy is gradually infecting sections of Guyanese society and its depth and pervasiveness is dangerously inching its way into the pages of sections of the media, and as a result, is helping to play the game dictated from the top by the APNU+AFC.
But the fight back by the PPP to undermine this sycophancy is exemplified in the movie, Any Given Sunday with Al Pacino and Jamie Foxx, the coach and the quarterback respectively, who, together with the ‘Sharks’, fought back valiantly to win the game.
Yours faithfully,
Clement Rohee
General Secretary
People’s Progressive Party