I DID not know that one of the custodians of the Mulatto/Creole class (MCC) in Guyana, Dr Nigel Westmaas, had written contemptuously of people who defected from the opposition to the ruling party. I have to read everything people like Westmaas write because that’s my job. But I missed that piece by him.
It was last Saturday, during a conversation about the electoral embarrassment facing Nigel Hughes and the future of the MCC, that his name came up. I was told about Westmaas’ dismissal of those who crossed over to the PPP. His piece is the usual anti-PPP insanity.

Westmaas and his brother, who resides in New York, hold extremist anti-PPP views that are disturbingly morbid. What is hardly touched on in Guyana is that the anti-PPP hate among the MCC is far more sickening than any narrative that comes from any locally based opposition party.

Outside of extremists like Burke, Hinds and Ogunseye, the most poisonous anti-PPP denunciations come from members of the MCC. The list includes Westmaas, Janet Bulkan, Clive Thomas, the Guyana Human Rights Association, Alissa Trotz, Red Thread, the Guyana chapter of Transparency International, Stabroek News, among others.

I’ve addressed the factors that have led to this unbearable political and cultural mind-set in about 20 columns, so that analysis need not detain us here.
What needs to be put on paper is an analysis of another type of defection — the once raging, leftist, anti-imperialist activists from the 1970s who have now defected from that ideological school and have become ideological guardians of what Maurice Odle referred to in his recent autobiography as the New Imperialism.

And who are these people? Well, I know them up close and personal because I was part of that raging, leftist, anti-imperialist sea and I am still swimming in it, unapologetically. But they have come out of this Third World, anti-colonial, Marxist water and joined the New Imperialism.

Westmaas should be the last to ridicule defectors from the opposition to the PPP, because he is the most notorious, repugnant, anti-historical defector.
He was one of the most hardline, pro-Cuban, Marxist youths in this country in the 1970s and 1980s, before he left Guyana and defected to the New Imperialism. In fact, I don’t think he had an equal when it came to pro-Castro fanaticism. Today, he is closely associated with a newspaper in Guyana that is a plaything of the Western embassies in Georgetown.

This is a paper that shamelessly takes a pro-Israeli stance in the current Gaza genocidal tragedy. But how can the paper say anything about genocide in Guyana when it is patronised by the Western embassies here? If you want to see how deep class structure runs in Guyana, you only need to compare the Stabroek News (SN) and the Kaieteur News (KN) in their reporting on the genocide in Gaza.

KN is anti-government, but its management has never been part of the MCC and the MCC personalities have nothing but contempt for KN and its ownership.
On one occasion, when there was a media meeting at what was then WaterChris Restaurant at Quamina and Waterloo Streets, SN boss, David DeCaires, refused to shake the hand of KN boss, Glen Lall, a dark-skinned, practising Hindu.

Two things to note about Westmaas; space will not allow further elaboration. First, he agrees with a wayside pastor, Nigel London (who is contesting the 2025 election as an opposition candidate), that neo-colonial powers intervened and shaped the election to give the PPP victory.

The last person who should talk about neo-colonial conspiracy in Guyana is Westmaas. For the past 20 years, he has been teaching at one of the most elitist, all-White private colleges in New York, Hamilton College.

This college is rated as one of the most expensive in the world. Hamilton College is the institution that the offspring of the American super- wealthy rush to attend. I don’t know if the board knows that Westmaas thinks the US rigged the 2020 election to put in the PPP/C.

Finally, Westmaas belongs to a cabal of MCC personalities that have embraced the conspiracy of the New Imperialism, designed to keep the Global South in underdevelopment.
That conspiracy is this: oil is deleterious to the world, and the Third World should keep it in the ground. Westmaas, in a letter published in SN on December 13, 2022, demanded Guyana exit oil production. He noted that oil kills African people. Really? Only African people?

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.