Latest update May 10th, 2024 12:59 AM
Mar 31, 2013 Letters
Dear Editor,
When I saw the caption and read the first few lines of Peeping Tom’s March 28, 2013 KN column, I knew that I had started reading an attempt at revisionism on the Jagans’ role in our nation’s politics, though Peeping Tom (PT) would later in the same column argue about the futility of any ”political revisionism” of the roles the Jagans played in our nation. I personally welcome evidence-based revisionism because without it our world would be technologically backward and I’d still be afraid of jumbies. By the time I was finished reading PT’s column, I determined it was a revisionism attempt, without evidence, that morphed into crass, galling, history-ignoring propaganda which, though demonstrably false on all its main claims, was aimed at elevating the Jagans and disparaging their political foes.
Choosing Janet Jagan’s death anniversary to wax lyrical about the roles of the Jagans and others in our nation’s struggle for independence, but showing little regard to the fact that Guyana did not become independent under the Jagans, PT assigned the premier and catalytic role to the Jagans and claimed: “The vested interests from the middle class that was making token appeals for self-rule and independence did not have the mass support to press the British to concede what the British did not wish to concede. Had independence come under this opportunistic political class, it would have been much later and Guyana would have been doomed to become another banana republic.” PT further opined that had it not been for the Jagans ”Guyana would have been granted independence when the British would have emptied this country of all of its wealth.”
Given that Britain had already started unloading territories of greater value in Africa, it is obvious that PT is exaggerating in trying to accentuate the roles of the Jagans, whose adventure with communism actually caused our country to become independent later than the British had planned. Declassified US documents show that the British wanted to unload us before 1966, probably between 1962-1964, because the British deemed us to be a financial burden. With regard to that “banana republic” status that was predicted if Guyana had become independent earlier than PT wanted, I doubt that many Guyanese honestly believe that we are currently much better than one.
PT’s demonstrably false claim that the Jagans helped our nation achieve independence faster than the British intended pales in comparison to his claim “that no woman in this country has done more, has endured more than Mrs. Janet Jagan for the cause of freedom.” Made in willful disregard of our objectively written history, PT tried to mitigate its impact by beforehand begrudgingly acknowledging that, ”The struggle for Guyana’s freedom may have begun centuries ago.” But this acknowledgement was constructed and juxtaposed in a manner that inherently destined it to irrelevance and oblivion: PT did not identify a time period, name any individuals, or say if any sacrifices were made in that struggle, and immediately followed-up by observing that ”… by the time the 1940s came, that struggle had come to a halt.” That is, from PT’s perspective, until Janet Jagan arrived here in 1943 as the 23-year-old doting wife of the 25-year-old Cheddi Jagan, and suffered for freedom as no other woman has suffered.
As I said earlier, I have no problems with evidence-based revisionism. But not ones like this twaddle pushed by PT. And not by attempting to erase the equal or greater valor, contributions, and heartrending sufferings of those who have fought, died and suffered on and for this land before and since Janet Jagan came here in 1943. This kind of revisionism-cum-propaganda must be challenged. So I am unable to join PT in ignoring the fact that many women suffered greater punishments, including death, for participating in slave rebellions for freedom in our country. The colonists meticulously recorded their horrific punishments of the women who managed to survive the battle field: death, horrendous beatings, or permanent separation from children and husbands were among the outcomes known to every slave woman who contemplated participation in a slave revolt. But many still chose rebellion. Many women also chose to confront the PNC and PPP, and bear the physical and emotional scars to this day.
If one first became aware of the Jagans through that column penned by Peeping Tom, it would come as a great shock to find out that the Jagans served less than a combined one year in prison and were detained for two years (house arrest) during British rule, and never complained about being physically tortured by the British and the PNC. It would also come as a great shock to find out that the Jagans, who were Communists, were devotedly silent as Communist regimes denied their citizens the very freedoms the Jagans were supposedly throwing their lives and livelihoods on the line for in Guyana. And the sentinels of grand corruption who now run the minority PPP government are no different. When the United States recently requested that they ask the Cuban government to grant the Cuban people the same freedoms that Guyanese enjoy, these barefaced hypocrites refused and told the United States that Guyana recognizes that countries have different systems of governance. What an answer from the same party that had gone to Washington and genuflected before politicians, asking their interference in Guyana’s internal affairs to force the PNC to hold free and fair elections! Neither history nor those who were or are being oppressed by Communist/dictatorial regimes will absolve these PPP hypocrites or any others who so conspire!
In obvious expectation of crtiticisms of the hypocrisies of the Jagans, PT urged us to judge our political leaders, more particularly the Jagans in his view, as we would wish to be judged; an advice he immediately ignored by referring to the Jagans’ political contemporaries as an ”opportunistic political class”. PT disregarded the possibility that someone’s faults could lead to his/her becoming an opportunist. But even if we agree with PT that we citizens should judge our leaders/politicians as we wish to be judged, by what standards are our leaders/politicians supposed to judge each other? Should the Jagans have judged Burnham by the same standard they used to judge themselves? If they did, then Cheddi Jagan’s West on Trial would have to be rewritten to make Burnham as saintly as Jagan has made himself. I hope that Peeping Tom agrees.
Lionel Lowe
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