THIS is the second part of my response to Dr. Percy Hintzen, a sociologist of Guyanese extraction long gone from Guyana. Dr. Hintzen launched a full-scale attack on my research ability and the integrity of my political articulations. Part 1 was carried on Friday.

Hintzen wrote that: “The violence of oil colonialism is targetting people and organisations who question and oppose oil extraction.” In part one, I showed where this violence is completely absent in Guyana and that, on the contrary, the anti-oil lobby is a very much rampant, protected, privileged genre in Guyana.

In part one, I stopped at the junction where I looked at the huge media coverage the anti-oil lobby gets from two of the three privately-owned newspapers. The Kaieteur News has become the strangest newspaper since newspaper printing began. For the past four years, quite unbelievably, the front page of the newspaper, each day, without exception, features a criticism of the oil company.

The newspaper is a huge receptacle for the relentless attacks on the oil industry from every major oil critic in and out of Guyana. As part of this platform, the newspaper has adopted a policy towards one of the finest financial experts in Guyana, a young academic named Joel Bhagwandin.

This gentleman has become the nemesis of the oil critics with piercing rebuttals to their false claims. The Kaieteur News has refused to carry his analyses. Where is the violence of oil colonialism against this newspaper? Where is the violence of oil colonialism against the major outlet for the propaganda and fallacious doctrines of the anti-oil lobby – the Stabroek News? Here is an amazing revelation. The anti-oil lobby has extensive intimacy with the Western embassies here.

What we have in Guyana is an anti-oil lobby that uses a violent vocabulary against people in this country that analyse the lies, deceit, deception, and intellectual fraud in their output. Personal derogations are directed at Mr. Bhagwandin and Professor Randolph Persaud and this columnist. Dr. Hintzen maybe, cannot see his own hypocrisy when in complaining of attacks against the anti-oil lobby, fires off his own derogatory salvos against people who criticise his political soulmates in the anti-oil lobby.

He stoops lowly in describing the people who exposes the black threads in Red Thread’s motives as misogynists. This is the very man who cries out that the oil critics are being scandalized and to think that he scandalizes critics of Red Thread’s racial and anti-government activism by describing them as misogynists.

What Hintzen has done here is to resort to an old stratagem so overused in Guyana that it lost its cutting edge and now has become comical. It goes like this. If one chastises an organisation or an individual for unbecoming behaviour, the ethnicity of the person making the criticism is invoked and he/she is called a racist. Hintzen now transports that old mischief to gender.
If male academics expose women groups in this country for ignoring the plight of Indian women, for supporting rigged elections or staying silent or for openly protecting men who abuse women, because those men share their political sentiments or for being middle-class snobs, then you are a misogynist.

Several women groups in this country come out like raging bulls if a male offender is Indian or connected to the state. All alleged Indian offenders have been virulently denounced by these groups. You don’t see the same when the offenders are African.

Two examples are brazen. TUC general-secretary, Lincoln Lewis was charged for assaulting a woman. To date, there has been not one word from these women groups. The other is former high-ranking, police officer, Paul Slowe who has been charged with a sexual offence. As in the case of Lewis, there was no comment.

The Stabroek News continues to refer to Charrandass Persaud as disgrace for scatological words directed toward a woman. He assaulted no woman. But the same newspaper featured an interview with Lewis that took up almost a whole page. Many of the women groups in this country are suspected of being racially driven. Many of them have open anti-government agendas and no matter what positive things the Guyana Government does, these women groups will not give credit where credit is due. They are too far gone to be principled activists.

One of the world’s most respected journalists, Carl Bernstein, said that the women in the US that support Trump tend to be homophobic. I agree with Bernstein. Is Bernstein misogynistic for his research findings? I got news for Hintzen. I will continue to criticise these women groups and gay right organizations because I believe they are irrationally anti-government and are racially driven. Part 3 will follow. There may be a part 4.