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Apr 03, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
Facing its worst moment of crisis since the party was born in the fifties, the PPP is desperately utilizing in nasty forms, its only weapon of survival – race. Mr. Jagdeo has not only become the lead figure in the PPP election campaign, but also the PPP’s main proponent of a race campaign.
The man that Donald Ramotar owes everything to, his benefactor, Bharrat Jagdeo, is infusing the election season with ideological racism. In doing so, Mr. Jagdeo believes he is being smart in the ways in which he uses his weapon. Mr. Jagdeo has the right to think he is smart, but he should possess the commonsense to know when his slip is showing.
His first big racist brawl was when he announced in Berbice at Dr. Jagan’s 2015 death anniversary that he knows that APNU personnel at the last general election in 2011 were beating drums in the early hours of the morning, chanting to their supporters to remove “dem coolie people from power.”
Jagdeo, so in love with himself, thought that he would have got away with it, by resorting to the silly trick of saying that he was merely reporting what took place.
GECOM let Jagdeo get away with political murder, by not insisting that he bring the evidence. No such incident occurred in Guyana during the last election. It was a naked pursuit of race-baiting by Mr. Jagdeo. But most of all, it is dangerously evil, because the method he is using can take billons of forms.
Tomorrow Jagdeo could say that he was told that opposition elements in Georgetown were saying “chase dem coolie people out of Guyana.” Jagdeo just has to sit back and say, “ah hear this or ah hear dat.” The point is Mr. Jagdeo is campaigning on a race ticket and GECOM has to intervene.
Next, Jagdeo sermonized that the opposition murdered Courtney Crum-Ewing to engender racial passion. Simply put, he was saying it was done to make African-Guyanese angry. Again, Mr. Jagdeo thinks he is being smart. He is not. All he is doing is whipping up racial feelings.
Once he tells his ethnic audience (it was a predominantly Indian affair at the Kitty rally) that the opposition is out to instill racial vexation in African Guyanese, then you are creating a racist backlash, because Indians will see African anger as being directed against them.
Jagdeo’s third use of the naked symbol of race was his brutal twisting of the context of Moses Nagamootoo’s alleged statement that he is not Indian, but Guyanese. Jagdeo hammered away at what he, Jagdeo, termed an act of being ashamed of one’s own ethnicity.
The vulgarization of Mr. Nagamootoo’s philosophical attitude by Jagdeo again has missed GECOM. The question is what more inciting racist statement does Jagdeo have to make before GECOM intervenes? And by intervention, I don’t mean sanction. GECOM does not have the legal power to discipline Mr. Jagdeo, but it could offer a moral condemnation.
For a politician to say he/she is not a Tamil but an Indian citizen or he/she is not Venetian but Italian, simply means in philosophical terms that he/she sees land of birth and nationalist credential as having more important worth in the country that gave them life.
It denotes that one is more moved to identity with the higher goal of patriotism than the narrow instinct of ethnicity. In their final training session, before they go into the battlefield, American soldiers are instructed to think as themselves as Americans first and foremost.
If any country needs nationalism as a driving force over ethnicity it is Guyana. Guyanese have put race before country and it has destroyed every one of us. It has extirpated the humanity in us. It has taken away the civilization that should inhere in us. It has left us as a soulless country.
Mr. Nagamootoo then should have been commended for his distance from the negative value that has ruined Guyana. This columnist wants to be pellucid and use unambiguous grammar; he is saying to people who read his columns and see him in his social activism that I am first and foremost a Guyanese. I am not an East Indian.
If I am seen as an East Indian, and if genetically I am East Indian, then in my psyche I feel as and want to be a Guyanese. I have little use for being a racially instinctive person. I want to see myself as a Guyanese.
Mr. Jagdeo and other PPP leaders on the podium at the PPP’s Kitty rally are playing an evil game of race hysteria. It can only end in sadness and tragedy before and after May 11.
LISTEN HOW JAGDEO WILL MAKE ALL GUYANESE RICH!!!
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