I WOULD LIKE to comment on a number of themes that have recently surfaced in the press in Guyana. One of the most important of these is the notion of a revisionist history. Kaieteur News columnist and UG lecturer, Mr. Frederick Kissoon has been the leading (public) intellectual on the subject of a revisionist history. His claims, when scrubbed of academic-like language, can be summarized as follows:

(1) The PPP is the original sinner of all that is wrong with Guyana;

(2) Dr. Jagan was an irrational communist who sacrificed the national interest of Guyana for the larger interest of global communism;

(3) All Indans in Guyana are inherently racist because they have generally tended to vote for the PPP;

(4) There were some historical conjunctures when Indians were not racist, the most important of these being when the same Indians openly and willingly supported the WPA, or those who more recently supported the AFC;

(5) The PPP is nothing other than a vast machinery for the advancement of communism and racism, while all other parties and ethnic groups are liberal democrats dedicated to the advancement of man;

(6) The PNC was not that bad in government, and in the words of Mr. Kissoon, LFS Burnham was a saint;

(7) President Hoyte saved Guyana, but his good deed has been squandered by the successive PPP administrations since 1992; and

(8) The current PPP administration, led by President Jagdeo, is the logical conclusion of a quintessentially dictatorial impulse inherent in the ‘mind’ of the party and its supporters.

The revisionist thesis propounded by Mr. Kissoon has its followers, some of them long established in the business of letter-writing. The most significant of them is Dr. David Hinds. Hinds accepts the view of ‘Original Sin’ by the PPP noted above. For all practical purposes, Mr. Kissoon and Dr. Hinds have become heroes of the new historiography.

Let me make some comments on Dr. Hinds’ work. Hinds is miffed at the Greatest Wrong done by the PPP, namely, that in 1992, the party adopted a winner-take-all position. Is this really what happened? The evidence is rather thin on this. The source of my contention is Dr. Hinds himself. The good gentleman from the WPA published an article in Social and Economic Studies, a refereed journal, in which he clearly stated that the preferred position of the WPA in 1992 was for the just defeated Hoyte to become the President, and that there should be no role for Dr. Jagan in the government. According to Hinds, the WPA thought that Jagan should be left out because he has been too divisive in Guyana’s history. If you don’t believe me, you can contact Hinds and ask him to send you the article in question.

Given this perspective, it is little wonder that Dr. Hinds would find the revisionist thesis quite attractive.

Kissoon’s revisionism is a God-send alibi for Hinds and the WPA. Why is this? This is so because it allows the 10 or 12 people who currently make up the WPA to hide behind the new history, a history that has been so twisted out of proportion that no-one would ever really know what happened. That is, of course, the whole point. The one thing that is guaranteed to provide cover is the notion of ‘Original Sin’, this being the central articulating principle of Kissoon’s revisionism.

Let me now turn to Kissoon, Guyana’s most prolific writer in the press, and someone who has a following. The central claims and propositions of the columnist have already been adumbrated above. We could go in two directions with this. The first of these is empirical in nature, whereby parties to this debate would engage in a long-drawn-out fight over the facts.

This is not worthwhile, but I must get to the second possible ‘direction’ before I tell you why the empirical route won’t be productive.

I argue here that in contradistinction to a legitimate exercise of revisionist writing, Mr. Kissoon is actually engaged in a form of ‘negationsim’. The two things should not be confused. Revisionism is basically about reinterpretation. The new interpretation is not simply about the empirics of the case, but about a shift away from the established ‘schools of thought’ in the subject area. Legitimate revisionism, such as AJP Tylor’s work on the Second World War, can be quite useful.

Negationsim, by contrast, is driven by historical presentism, that is to say, by the politics of the present moment in history. In this vein, the negationist uses the historical record as a platform for waging political battles in the current conjuncture. The strategy of the negationist is not to throw out the settled historical commonsense, but to introduce sufficient arguments that allow those engaged in current politics to draw from the past in ways that are convenient. I should illustrate my argument here a bit.

Take the notion that President Burnham was a saint, and that President Hoyte was a liberal democrat. I rather doubt that anyone anywhere in the world believes this to be the case. Burnham rigged elections (something that seems to be irrelevant to the negationist); controlled 80% of the economy; developed a militarized State; employed coercion or threat of coercion to get his way; and blasted a lasting association with Dr. Walter Rodney that no revisionism can rearrange. Hoyte did many good things for Guyana, as did Burnham, but his lasting legacy is about refusing to give up State power, even on the day of his electoral defeat. Instead of behaving like most liberal democrats, by wishing the new government well, his words for posterity were “slow fire, mo’ fire,” and “we will make this country ungovernable.” Surely, these were not threats issued after years of PPP rule.

By the way, L.F.S. Burnham’s name was on the voters list in 1992! When this was pointed out to Mr. Hoyte (the newly-minted democrat in the new revisionism), he went wild. He went on national TV and railed about foreign interference!

The
so-called revisionist history offered by Mr. Kissoon and supported by Dr. Hinds, therefore, is not about a critical reexamination of the past, aimed at new knowledge. It is, rather, a form of negationism; something that is so discredited in the professional practise of history writing that most of you won’t want to be associated with it.

The most fitting appellation for the so-called revisionism is Dictatorship Denial. The craftsmen of negationsim are bent on erasing the common sense of the Guyanese population by engaging in all kind of esoteric and not so esoteric historical gymnastics. Anyone who goes against this negationist dance is accused of engaging in something ethno-national as Hinds did with me a few days ago.

As far back as 1961, Professor E.H. Carr noted that history is a social process. In this process there is a reciprocal relationship between the historian and the facts. The process is also about the present as much as it is about the past. In Carr’s own language it “…is a dialogue not between abstract and isolated individuals, but between the society of today and the society of yesterday (E.H. Carr, 1961, p. 55).”

As we move through these debates I hope our readers would keep this in mind. The project at hand — I repeat — is about Dictatorship Denial. Finally, I have been wondering why it is, and under circumstances, that Dr. Walter Rodney wrote – “People’s Power No Dictator”.

In the new 1984-like history, misguided men and women will run round shouting: “People’s Power Under Burnham; Elected Dictatorship Today.” I assure you, the Guyanese people are wiser, much wiser than the negationists believe.
Dr. Randy Persaud
(Political Affairs, Office of the President)