Dear Editor,
The debate that started with Dr. Ramharack’s article, “Rethinking Forbes Burnham”, (SN, Nov., 30th, 2021), has been quite instructive in many ways. There have been several enlightening responses in terms of historical documents, levels of analysis, and re-interpretation of history. The most important question is, to what end? Why is this debate taking place at this time?
The “1619 project” in America has led to a backlash from the right wing’s “culture war”, where “critical race theory” has been equated to spreading hatred, and has been banned from some schools. It is very clear that a research into history leading to a re-interpretation, and retelling is not a simple project, and has serious consequences in the present. This is expressed in the popular saying that, “It is important that we know where we come from, because if you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know where you’re going..” (Terry Prachet). So what is history? Why do we revisit history? How do we reinterpret history? What tools are at our disposal to carry out this project?
The same political scenario dominated the Walter Rodney Commission of Inquiry. The WPA was divided on the issue of participation in the COI. The argument was that it was a political attempt on the part of the PPP to discredit the PNC on the eve of the elections. The work of the COI was aborted prematurely although the PNC-dominated APNU + AFC party won the elections. The PNC did not want the truth revealed, and used their power to terminate the life of the COI, and to discredit the findings of the COI. The truth had to bow to the dictates of politics. Dr. Ganpat’s article, “The post-mortem of Jagan’s historical counterfactuals merely delights the analysts”, (SN. Dec.5, 2021) delivered a crippling blow to those who argue the “what ifs”. He is correct when he states the following. “…some bloggers and letter writers seem to be equally naive and defensive and take refuge in an imagined world. Hence their ruminations on what would have been and not what is (was), rest on historical counterfactuals and not reality…”What-would-have-been” thinking is both unhelpful and misleading…it appears that the only way to examine Jagan is to ask historical counterfactuals. Anti-critics can ask what-would-have-been questions and supply responses until they turn blue. None of it would change what actually happened in Guyana. We live in the real world and not an imagined one.”
The movies “The Time Machine”, “Back to the Future”, “The Butterfly Effect”, and “Sounds of Thunder”, all make the point that if we change one event in the past, we inevitably change the future, sometimes beyond our wildest imagination, into something we can barely recognize or comprehend. The movie, “Matrix” gives us a coded reality of what appears in front of our eyes as being different from the real “reality.” Dr. Ganpat asserted that: “…There were four principal agents in the political equation: Burnham, Jagan, Britain and the United States of America. Burnham was interested in power and domination. Jagan in creating a socialist nirvana. Britain in getting rid of its insect infested, racially divisive mudflat as it was becoming a huge financial burden, and the US in protecting its geo-strategic interest in the region at almost any cost (the Bay of Pigs (Cuba) nuclear fiasco easily comes to mind)…Since Britain almost abdicated its responsibility, the dominant agent in the quadripartite relationship was the US. Both Britain and the US suspected that Jagan had communist leanings since the early 1950s (the suspension of the Constitution in 1953 easily comes to mind). And the dominant agent, the US made its position on Dr. Jagan; it did not want another communist regime in the region. Whether or not Jagan was a real communist is not the point. The point is that the US geo-strategic interest was above the interests of Jagan, Burnham, Great Britain and Guyana. It is perception and beliefs that matter in politics, not reason, logic, evidence and reality. The post-mortem excursion into historical counterfactuals thereby delights the analyists but has no bearing in reality”. What does this statement mean? Whose “perception and beliefs”? Whose “reason, logic, evidence and reality”? Are we in the Matrix? Are we in parallel universes?
The “303” documents provides new information that make it imperative for us to reexamine our history, as a first step in moving forward. As the resistance to the “1619 project” reveals, there are political interests involved on all sides to this re-examination of history. A re-examination is not an exercise in “what ifs”, but a reassessment of “what is”, given information that was not known at the time in that period, information that influenced the period, which is an extremely useful exercise. As the sign at Jonestown warned, “Those who forget the lessons of the past are condemned to repeat them.” (Santayana). We have seen the renunciation of Marxism/Leninism as the ideology of the PPP, as Guyana becomes one of the richest oil producing nation of the world, totally dependent upon US goodwill. The present debate suggests that the PPP has learnt from the lessons of the past. Perhaps, it should be commended in not being adventurist, thus preventing the PNC from undermining them, as the debate reveals.
History is never an objective process, but essentially a political project. “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world”, claimed Archimedes, as he discovered the law of the lever. We need a philosophical/ideological position to stand on, if we need to write history, as historians are well aware of. Slaves writing their own history would tell a profoundly different version from those of their masters. Who gets to judge what history is? It should be noted that 28 years of the PNC and 23 years of the PPP must have had some lessons of the past fifty years, lessons that having learnt in the present, have guided us into making informed decision about the future. Furthermore, if we choose to wait for another tranche of revelations of nefarious machinations that are taking place today unknown to us, then we will be having this debate again in the future. The point is, we struggle today for what we want, thereby shaping the future, by actions in the present. It is impossible to revisit the past to reshape the present. The power to shape the future is in our hands today, as it always has been. We simply do not accept the results of our handiwork. But what we do may be a matter of “perception and beliefs” as distinct from “reason, logic, evidence and reality” whatever these mysterious entities of Dr. Ganpat happen to be.
Sincerely,
Rohit Kanhai
