The necessary foundation toward cohesion is the shattering of age-old political myths

I recently attended Dr. Paloma Mohamed’s professional lecture on December 6, titled ‘The Fear Factor, Race, Oil and Reforming Guyana’ at the UG Lecture Theatre. Dr Mohammed touched fervently on the question of Social Cohesion and its tremendous necessity for the betterment of Guyana that needed all of its human resources to carve its niche of survival in a world of obvious difficult changes.

Of the other speakers, the Vice-Chancellor Dr. Ivelaw Griffith asserted that the challenge of cohesion should begin at the University and referred to graffiti that needed addressing. The culture of politics has been a crucial influence in the conditioning of our population toward its own narrow wants to the detriment of the national benefit.

One of the most intrusive aspects of political mythology is the half-truth of the PNC’s crime of rigged elections, as a mantra conveying subliminal messages of collective ethnic guilt for a crime against an atmosphere of innocent political engagement by another. Even the lazy or clueless editors of media houses comply with this concoction.

Recently on October 23, Stabroek News Ralph Ramkarran was quoted as a reference from that previous Sunday. Then in the Vol. 23 issue No.2 of the Guyana Review, Ralph Ramkarran’s address to the New York Diaspora on October 8, 2017 was published, and the rigging of elections by the PNC was the axis of his address. The fact to all researchers, academics and students that historical references exist in a ‘Timeline’, Ramkarran and the PPP are dishonest in this respect.

The fact is that the only legally proven act of elections impropriety was against the PPP in 1998. Ramkarran is a lawyer, he understands that there are no legal grounds since no court has ever pronounced that the PNC has rigged an election, that allows him to say what he is saying, and that he is thus, perpetrating political propaganda as truth. The timeline of our current political culture pre-Independence to 2017 begins in 1948.

The first myth to be disbanded is that Forbes Burnham left the PPP because of race. Fact: Forbes Burnham did not leave the PPP because he loved power or craved a race platform. Quote: “In 1954 the executive held a secret meeting to consider the whole question. Both Jagan and Burnham were present at the meeting and it was decided that it would be strategically astute to give way to Burnham as the leader of the party.

Jagan actually agreed with this, but it must be noted that his wife Janet was absent from this meeting…A few weeks later [in November 1954] the executive met again and this time Janet was present and Jagan announced that she would not be accepting the earlier decision. At that stage, we realised that there was no way we could prevent the impasse from getting into the open” Jainarine Singh, Guyana: Democracy Betrayed 1948-1993.

Conclusion: “Confusion was made more confounded when Mr Burnham [with the aid of Dr, Lachhmansingh] split the PPP in 1955. The Robertson commission had recommended a period of “marking time“in this country. After an agonising analysis of the situation they came to the conclusion that as long as the leadership and policies of the PPP continued as they were, there was no way in which any real measure of self-government could be restored to the country.”

Ashton Chase,`A History of Trade Unionism in Guyana 1900/61’.
Analysis: The grief directed by the PPP, first began with the physical terror in 1963/64 against the members of the MPCA [Man Power Citizen’s Association] the union that GAWU was struggling to destroy to become the PPP’s union prison of the population that embodied the sugar-workers.

Then the reign of terror that Dr, Jagan had admitted to Eric Williams that the PPP are responsible for, against the PNC and United Force constituency see ‘EVENING POST Tuesday, June 23, 1964, how then in 1968 would the same coalition constituencies that defeated the PPP In 1964 allow regardless of differences the political Bogeyman [that lived up to that reputation from 1996 to 2010] to return to power.

This is the only country where a political party had started a civil war and were not held accountable. From the modern world of Nuremburg 1945, the PNC in 1966/7 acted with leniency toward the PPP that came back to haunt us in the troubled times especially under Bharat Jagdeo.

The address that Ralph Ramkarran should have given has to fit into the timeline from the period 1948 to 2015, when in the 1960’s guns were brought by sea from CUBA by the PPP and semi-literate PPP believers.In 1963 delegates attending their Fourth Annual Congress, were fired when Premier Jagan said: “They say that B.G will be another Cuba; Jagan another Castro, but we shall always be loyal to the Cuban revolution…we shall fight them the way the Cubans did.” See The Communist Martyr Makers published by the Trade Union Congress.

But the mantra of the PPP soon faded from the Cuban Revolution and morphed into a “Racial civil war for Political Power” under the slogan ‘apan jaat’ translated in my childhood as many meanings above all PPP and sinister racism, this slogan was plastered across this country, on sea walls, fences and every place opportunistically available and it resonated from the PPP’s violent rush for power.

I will not relate the horrible assaults that occurred, nor the equal retaliations, except to say that I interviewed friends and persons who experienced this period as children and adults. No children were not spared, except to say that never must it be concluded that what the PPP unleashed in Guyana between 1961 to 64 was supported by the collective Indo-Guyanese community, because many Afro-Guyanese [and also Indo-Guyanese] were saved, including relatives of mine, from impending death by persons who sat in the midst of the political planners but rejected their intentions.

Warning friends and saving lives, those revelations narrowed the guilty ‘Intellectual Authors’ not to any guilty race but to guilty political individuals and their twisted manipulative political ambitions. For a deeper insight to the horrors, I choose not to elaborate on, seek out Eusi Kwayana’s Next Witness- an appeal to world opinion, and get a copy of the DOSSIER compiled by the joint opposition Political Parties Nov 2009.

They constitute the only documented pieces of literature in booklet and bound form that could be collaborated with real events in the context of the twisted nature that was politically unleashed in our modern politics, which Mr Ramkarran cannot dispute have occurred, but choose to purposely conceal, with the intention to deceive and to further the propaganda of innocence to shield the most violent political party to exist in this Nation’s modern history. Should he provide the legal evidence of a rigged election under Burnham he will earn my apology, if not, he should desist from purposely confusing and misguiding another generation.

National cohesion is possible, as long as Guyanese have the courage to confront the propaganda creatures when resurrected and callously contorted to deceive, when that `Timeline’ explored above, should not necessarily intrude on the future as a deceptive political tool of victimhood, but remain material for researchers of history and literature, and not used as fillers in the absence and vacuum of rational and constructive workable ideas that can attend to the needs of all Guyanese.

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