Latest update May 13th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jan 21, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
There isn’t much scope in a short newspaper column to debate the question whether life should have absolute values or that values in general should be relative because life is a dynamic process with dialectical consequences.
It was the last Pope, John Paul, who popularised the meaning of absolute values. Students of philosophy tend to be very skeptical about the meaning and purpose of absolute values. To end the debate right now, I believe life would have no meaning if civilisation does not embody some values that are absolute.
Further discussion on the subject in this article would not leave much space for the argument that before it came to power in 1992, the PPP leadership, particularly Dr. Cheddi Jagan rooted for absolute values. Now that it is in power, the PPP has contemptuously rejected the permanency of many sacred concepts that have held civilisation together. One needs to mention that Dr. Jagan’s philosophy was so flawed that it rendered many aspects of his struggle for a better world, absurd.
Take the right to chose society’s governor at the ballot station. The PPP fought a tempestuous campaign for Guyanese to have that right. But it shamelessly, and with typical fascist mentality, justified Fidel Castro’s abrogation of that right.
We come now to Peeping Tom of Monday. Whoever wrote that essay is either too young to have lived under Burnham’s rule or is someone who never lived in Guyana or is just a plain PPP propagandist, the type of which only causes more people to despise the PPP whenever he/she rushes to the defence of the PPP Government.
Uncle Tom vehemently disagrees with my viewpoint that the GECOM’s Chairman’s swearing-in of Mrs. Jagan in a closed room in a secret manner was illegal. Uncle Tom went further and praised Doodnauth Singh for that act. My postulate is situated within the framework of absolute values. Let’s turn to rigged elections under Burnham.
President Burnham, using the power of rhetoric and the concept of relative values, persuasively convinced a group of visiting African-American scholars that the PNC had to rig the national elections because the alternative was perpetual damnation for African Guyanese. Burnham told the visitors that if East Indians were allowed to win the government they would dominate Africans forever.
I was a teenager in those days and was with a group of PPP activists and some UG lecturers including Dr. Paul Singh when one of those American scholars told us that Burnham’s reasoning was plausible. The scholar then went on to argue that elections were a bourgeois deception of capitalist society.
I can vividly picture in front of me the hearty laugh on the face of Dr. Singh.
So was Burnham right? Let’s return to Uncle Tom and the secret bestowing of the presidency on Mrs. Janet Jagan. According to Tom, had Doodnauth Singh not done that, then Guyana would have been imperiled, because anti-PPP forces wanted to derail the election announcement and nullify the election results.
Doesn’t this sound like the doom and gloom Burnham preached to the American professors? The two situations are so identical that their resemblance makes them appear eerie, uncanny and Mephistophelean.
To understand the method in what the GECOM Chairman did is to recall what Burnham said. He exclaimed to the visiting American academics that to hold free and fair elections in Guyana would result in the dissolution of the existence of the African-Guyanese. That reasoning by Burnham was feverishly accepted by hundreds of thousands of Guyanese and other African people around the world.
When in 1992, the PNC lost the election, a big leader in the PNC confronted Mr. Hoyte at Congress Place and reminded him of what Mr. Burnham had told the American delegation because he was present at that meeting in the seventies.
Since the surreptitious swearing in of Mrs. Jagan, the PPP has committed worse violations than Mr. Burnham and these perversities are justified under the theory of relative values. So Burnham was wrong to pressure judges because he was a bad leader. We are right to cajole judges because we are the good guys.
Burnham was wrong to use state resources for the PNC because he wasn’t elected. We can do that for our party because we are chosen by the ballot. Burnham was wrong to mix the party and the state because no one elected his party. We can turn our cadres into Permanent Secretaries because we were voted in.
In other words for the PPP there are no absolute values; everything is relative. The danger with relative values is that any kind of political bestiality and administrative nastiness can be justified, including murder, using the relativity of time, space and values.
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