Guyana is a breeding ground for moral revulsion

Jan 22, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News – It was too daunting a task to research my archives of articles to find the column in which I noted that the US would overcome Trump and resume its democratic functionalism. The trouble with such research is that you have to ascertain the title of the article.
But here we are. The US has gone past Trump and the moral corruptibility he and his cabal generated since 2016. In Guyana, the start of 2021 has been mentally devastating. Three utterly disappointing waves have come ashore. This is indeed a deeply disturbed land but even though it has a dying psychology, it is still worth saving. Guyana has one of the youngest populations among more than 200 nation states.
It is truly a horrific thought that such young minds will not have a moral compass to guide them in their relationship with other humans. One example should suffice. What becomes of a society where humans have not the remotest clue of the value of lower animals that are inherently nature’s most prized possession?
I have now become a senior citizen. I’m not happy about how my country has turned out and nothing, absolutely nothing in this country shocks me. I have lived for too long in my homeland and have seen too much to have a mental jolt at the most graphic manifestation of incredible flaws. But there are times you wonder how Guyana can have the kind of people it has. I am asking a truly philosophical question when I enquire if there isn’t a genetic line fault in the psyche of the Guyanese nationality that has destroyed the capacity of that nationality to understand ethical commitments.
In life, there has to be moral criteria that are absolute (yes, absolute, even though the moral relativity argument in philosophy is persuasive). Two come to mind. We disqualify ourselves to belong to modern society if we believe women are inferior to men and that there are superior and inferior races. In society, its citizens must adhere to the right of people to vote for those who they want to constitute their government. In western society under which our university curricula was shaped that right goes back to the year 1215 at Runnymede in England in what is now known as the Magna Carta.
How can any modern society accept individuals and organizations that support rigged elections in which government is composed of persons who were not legally elected? I picked up our newspapers and read that a new civil society body was formed that includes the Catholic Church and the Trade Union Congress (TUC).
Do not take my word for it. Google the five-month old election saga and you will find a plethora of material by the TUC in support of rigged election in which the vocabulary was unapologetic and sordid. I ask from deep within my soul what moral right that civil society grouping has to be part of civilized society in Guyana.
The second wave relates to Dr. Vincent Adams. Dr. Adams speaks on certain technical issues in Guyana but is yet to tell us about the AFC’s role in the five-month election nastiness. He is qualified to expatiate on the subject because he was part of the top leadership of that party. Why did Dr. Adams not join his executive colleague, Dominic Gaskin, in distancing himself from the immoralities of election rigging? Does Dr. Adams feel the AFC’s adherence to the policy of the APNU+AFC that the PPP tampered with the election results is justified?
The third wave relates to that iconic Guyanese, Moses Bhagwan. As a youth growing up politically in front of Bhagwan, he became one of the anti-dictatorship fighters that I deeply respected and admired. Immensely different in his class versatility, he never showed that persistent partiality for middle class socialization that was a sickening trait in other WPA leaders including Walter Rodney, yes, Walter.
When I read his letter in Monday’s edition of this newspaper imploring that there be justice for Donald Rodney, I became even more irritated at this fine mind that so impressed me in the seventies. Bhagwan has an analytical capacity that is on par with any social scientist Guyana has produced. Yet for over five years, he has remained silent on the degeneration of his WPA comrades in the APNU+AFC government. He has printed not one word of the PNC’s attempt last March to take us back to the era of Burnhamite permanency of power.
I saw the opportunity for him to comment when the APNU commissioner in GECOM, Desmond Trotman, cited his name as someone who would justify what he, Trotman, had done in GECOM. But Moses’ pen seems to have died.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)