ONE of the recurring aberrations in polemics, debates, and in the outflow of propaganda in this country is the mental barefacedness of dangerous anti-government figures that whether consciously or at a Freudian level pretend to be what they are not.
What we have in this land are a group of people who have deliberately worked out a strategy of how to win unsuspecting minds. The ploy is ugly and overbearing. It goes like this: Attack the government but resort to language that has a sacred value so you come across as humane and caring.
What these anti-government critics do then is to present themselves as saviours of democracy and social values when they are exactly the opposite. The contradictions in their delivery are so graphic that they end up being less effective, the opposite of what they wanted to achieve.
Leading the list in this genre of hypocrisy is Lincoln Lewis. Don’t take my word for it; read Lewis’s letters. Every one without exception uses the language that Guyanese must pay homage to historical principles of justice and the powers that be must practice inclusion and carry out constitutional obligations.

This is the very man who urged the incumbent that lost the general election of 2020 to cancel the election. Under the laws and constitution of Guyana, only two sources can cancel a national election – the courts or GECOM. An incumbent president has no legal or constitutional power to reject the results of a national election. This very man wrote the ugliest anti-immigrant manifesto this country has produced despite the fact that Guyana, per capita is the largest migrating nation in the world with only Lewis among his family and relatives still in Guyana.
Next is GHK Lall. He assails people using nasty, undignified words and when he gets a dose of his own medicine, he falls back on his supposed superior character by shouting that this is a gutter society. But he is in the gutter just as his critics are. But he feels that if he accuses persons who attack him by describing them as a gutter people, then he elevates himself in the eyes of the nation. In the eyes of the nation, Lall is simply a wannabe.

Next is Stabroek News. This is a newspaper that offers a quotidian dose of vitriol against the government and the stuck record is always the government’s supposed unprofessional, unaccountable, non-transparent behaviour.
But there isn’t anything accountable, professional and transparent about Stabroek News. This is a newspaper that no one knows who are on its board of directors, who has majority shares, and openly tells a presidential adviser that it cannot carry his letters because he questions the bona fides of civil society organisations.

Next is Glen Lall, whose close friends are Chris Ram and GHK Lall. Mr. Lall uses his newspaper, Kaieteur News as his personal vehicle. The newspaper’s matutinal sermon, without missing any morning, is that the oil investor is exploitative. All Guyana knows that Lall is in no position to judge who is exploitative and who is not. There are more complaints in this country against Lall’s exploitative behaviour than EXXON will ever receive.
So we come now to Dr. Bertrand Ramcharran who overnight has become an infamous Guyanese scholar. Let us quote what Ramcharran wrote yesterday (Tuesday). “The army of vituperative reactions in various parts of the media do (sic) a disservice to the government, which should maintain a dignified posture. A classic method of autocracy is to deploy undignified ‘hit-men’ to cow people into fear. The government might wish to think about the image these ‘hit-men’ are giving it.”

Dr. Ramcharran wrote the above as a reaction to his thesis that the Guyana Government is heading in the direction of undemocratic government which he describes as a creeping autocracy. Two aspects of this quote need engagement. One is who is a political hitman and what he does? Does Ramcharan read the editorials of the Stabroek News? A hit job on the government is done almost every day by that newspaper that Ramcharran has a weekly column in. Does he lecture the paper on its image as a hitman?

But Ramcharran himself could be deemed a political hitman. His piece on a creeping autocracy was a hit job. It was more propaganda than social science analysis using as his theoretical foundation, the anti-Third World theories of a raging anti-Third World American propagandist, Anne Applebaum.
Finally, Ramcharran says the government must maintain a dignified posture. But this very advice people are now giving to Ramcharran. For his scholarship and high status, he once had at the UN, he should have maintained a dignified status than jeopardising that status by a nasty, atrocious condemnation of the government that has no factual basis.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.