Dear Editor,
Local history is being rewritten by a determined, crafty, and less than honest opposition. It is a calculated comprehensive assault through the auspices of the independent media, in view of the steady saturation efforts. In so doing, Stabroek News and Kaieteur News, two sometimes truly objective channels, have been converted to extensions of the PPP controlled and stage managed Mirror newspaper. Meanwhile, the saturation is pointedly clever in that inconvenient truths are trampled upon, as if they never existed.
According to the main PPP propagandists, their reign was marked by a succession of glorious revolutions tumbling upon each other. As I contemplate this abomination in 2017, I seem to recall a similar claim of another glorious revolution from 1917. History has since exposed the Russian one as one huge cruel fraud that foisted untold misery upon a trapped hapless people. History, in the fullness of time, but starting right now, will do the same to those vacuous clamours here.
Still, I must hand it to the opposition’s public men of letters (clearly scarlet ones), they are without peer in the propaganda, creativity, and manufacturing fields. It is even more astonishing that this comes from men who have little acquaintanceship with the English alphabet; one must be thankful for ghostwriters and other willing resources. But there is a method to their consistent madness: they know that fictions repeated endlessly become accepted truth in due course. Thus, those who once blocked open inquiry, now block honesty, accuracy, and reality through their producing tomes that torture truth, while titillating at the same time.
So now there are these presentations (serial misrepresentations, really) that speak rather shamelessly of a glorious era under the PPP. Rather artfully and wickedly, the transformation of Guyana into a narco-state, a money laundering state, and a virtual criminal state where the rule of law was dictated by the incorrigibly lawless, who were (and still are) part of an extensive bosom comradeship is totally ignored. This is the relentless accentuation of the positive and the false, too. One main man, who thankfully does not write, gave that evil transformation the glorious blessing of “progress and development.” This is the Guyanese leadership that knows no compunction.
The opposition writers forgot to remember and to share with the nation that during the big glorious party with those whose visas are now revoked, the US DEA was not invited; nor were the UK police reform experts and dollars welcome. Too much was at stake, so a whole country was sacrificed and surrendered, while luckless gullible supporters lost in the shuffle were viewed as merely collateral damage. Such is the price of power at any cost.
Nobody from the opposition is writing about any of this; or that the third arm of government ‒ the judiciary ‒ has scant standing in the eyes of principled practitioners or a sceptical public. Today a new record of this self-described and self-congratulating glorious time is being carved out in the public domain; meanwhile, the actual sordid records from that same glorious period have either taken premeditated flight, or ended up in ashes or a watery grave. The new storytelling and political yarns do not share any episodes of where the public treasury metamorphosed into private ATMs, and with all the withdrawal slips now irreversibly lost.
Moreover, I am surprised that in these opposition recitations, there is conspicuously missing one of the great success stories, an unparalleled one, from the golden age of the PPP ascendancy. There is no writing, no encomia, as to how the simple lowly phone card business became a multi-billion dollar enterprise. I could use a piece of that action. They should write and tell society about whose money the cash jet pilot was ferrying; the real commercial source of those cash proceeds; and how many trips were made on behalf of others. Perhaps, they know that citizens know, so why waste time?
These are just some of the tips of many icebergs, wisely avoided by the leading PPP mythologizers; men whose RPMs are on the low left side of the tachometer. It is enlightening and warming that these same men who could not recall anything about anything (including which month it is, and which planet this is) now bubble over with the detritus of concentrated mischief. It is why citizens are now reading and hearing and learning that the tawdry PPP rule was the best of times; that it epitomized Elysian Fields of prosperity, equity, and modernity.
Today the wrack and ruin of the long years of yesterday is revisited through an unceasing hegemony in, and monopoly of, perfidy. As Aeschylus wrote, “in war, truth is the first casualty.” Or as General Patton himself said, “there are only three principles in warfare: audacity, audacity, audacity.” And all of these are very much present.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall