I normally get up early and it is within those hours, I type what I plan to publish the next day. Many times I had to change my mind because of intervening factors.
I had planned today’s column to look at the contemptuous refusal by middle class critics of the government to apologise for the use of language that betrays a eugenic mentality. Given that we are a non-White, post-colonial society that has long gone past the acceptance of colonial narratives, it is completely unacceptable to use such language.
I will have to reserve that commentary for another day. The intervening factor today that caused me to switch to another topic is the Sunday editorial of the Stabroek News (SN). I grew up seeing what the private media, especially under a man named, Peter Taylor did to Guyana’s democracy.
Today, Guyana is seeing the incredible atavistic reversion to Taylor with the journalistic shape of SN, the Kaieteur News, Demerara Waves, the Guyana Press Association, HGPTV and others.

I grew up listening and reading Cheddi Jagan educating Guyana about the role the private press played in American-backed removal of nationalist governments in the Third World, of which the two most notorious cases are Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana and Salvadore Allende in Chile.
I went to university and attended three of them, and by the time I entered the work place to teach at a university, I became a semi-expert on how the press can subvert governments that it doesn’t like.

Look at how the dialectics work. We should forever be grateful to two German philosophers –Marx and Hegel – for their brilliant adumbration of the dialectic. In the very US that funded private newspapers around the world to topple progressive governments, the private press poses a formidable threat to American democracy. And who is advancing that position?
First, Barack Obama made that contention in an interview with CBS, and secondly, a poll done by three institutions found that Americans see the media as a threat to democracy. There is Fox News in the US, and Guyana has about four versions of Fox News.

So back to the Sunday editorial in which something caught my eyes. I quote: “Something else has been emerging, and that is the great conceptual divide about the nature of democracy in this country. It has been underlined by was what was said by both President Irfaan Ali and Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo, ranging them against the opposition as well as independent critics.”

I have spent my entire life (about 55 years) in politics in Guyana within three spheres – human rights activism, academia, and journalism. What have I to conclude about today’s Guyana? Three perspectives I currently embrace. One is there is the crystallisation of class forces infused with ethnic instincts I have never seen before except in the 1960s when the Mulatto/Creole party named the United Force (UF) sought to use the PNC to remove Dr. Jagan’s rule

Not since the birth of the National Democratic Party (NDP) in the 1950s and the UF in the 1960s have I seen the instinctive drive of class assertion as we have been witnessing since the March 2020 election. I will have more to say about the successors of the NDP and UF in part 12 of my series on the Mulatto/Creole class which is coming up shortly.
The second perspective is the degeneration of the private media with a rancor and determination that match the newspapers of the 1960s that sought to topple Cheddi Jagan’s premiership and eventually succeeded. The third perspective is the erasure of the independent sphere in society that I grew up with in the 1970s and 1998s.
Two dimensions stood out brilliantly in that era – an independent press, particularly the Catholic Standard and Caribbean Contact, and an independent civil society group whose work was courageous and admirable.

The dialectic moves with amazing speed in Guyana; it always has. I believe Guyana in the entire world has far more exciting and depressing expressions of the dialectic than most counties.

When that Sunday editorial of SN made reference to the nature of democracy in Guyana, it stimulated me once more to enter into a discussion on what constitutes the core of democracy in this country (I have done several columns on this before). And that core can be easily seen when world press freedom day comes around every year.
The western embassies never fail to remind us that without a free press there can be no democracy. And when the free press becomes degenerate then democracy is in trouble. Thus it would be fair to our young population to enlighten them on what democracy is. Finally, there is no independent sphere in Guyana. If not, tell me who is independent.