I THANK the relevant people in the Government of Guyana for accepting me as a daily columnist with the Guyana Chronicle after I parted company with the Kaieteur News.
If I didn’t have this avenue on this particular day, I would not have been able to write in the hope of educating Guyanese about the tragic distortions of history that began hundreds of years ago, when European empires dominated the world, and in the process almost destroyed the psyche of billions of people who lived in the colonies.
I have the opportunity, on this particular day, to write about one of those distortions; the real, undiluted, graphic, incontrovertible fact about which country’s decisive role defeated Nazi Germany led by Adolph Hitler. That country at the time was named the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). It now stands as Russia.
The Second World War ended in 1945, and if the historian should go to any nation on Planet Earth, except Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, Algeria, Byelorussia, and ask all the citizens of all countries, except those listed above, how Germany was beaten, they will tell you Great Britain and the United States defeated Germany.
That is absolutely untrue. Before I move on, I do not mean any disrespect to the peoples of Libya, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Nicaragua by not including them, but I am not sure what answer they will give.
The implantation of a steel narrative into the soul (not the mind and psyche but the soul which has its own qualities) of billions of colonial subjects as to what knowledge is and who contributes to the existence and expansion of knowledge is one of the greatest tragedies of human existence and world civilisation.
This tragedy has been ongoing for centuries and centuries, and though it has been profoundly diluted over the past 50 years through deconstruction of epistemology by the post-colonial world, it still continues into the 21st Century.
One of the brilliant achievements of the post-colonial world is how it has successfully confronted that steel narrative. I remember when my daughter was doing CXC, for her Literature course she had to do a novel set in a West Indian ambience named “Green Days by the River”.
In the 1950s, in the colony and shortly after Independence, the Literature curriculum in the schools would have been saturated with English novels. Guyana was saddled with the tragedy that high school students were taught French instead of Spanish and Portuguese. And Guyana was situated in a Spanish-speaking continent and was neigbour to a huge power-house that spoke Portuguese – Brazil.
Russia lost 27 million soldiers and civilians during World War II. The United States suffered 400,000 losses. The United Kingdom had about the same fatalities as the US. Total loss of life between the US and UK was less than one million. The entire continent of Europe endured 15 million lives, including Germany, which invaded Europe. One country alone, Russia, lost 27 million lives.
Do the logical deduction as to the crucial role that Russia played in the routing of Germany. But that tragedy has been gleefully excluded in the textbooks in Europe and the US that schoolchildren and university students have to read. The blanket removal of such a monumental fact of history is one of the saddest episodes in human history.
That distortion in the teaching of the rise and defeat of Nazi Germany in American and European schools and universities will go on forever, because any teacher that dares provide the facts about the decisive role Russia played in destroying the German war machine will be out of a job before the class is over.
I have argued several times on this page of how freer we are in Guyana, and how deeper is our democracy than in the West. No International Relations lecturer at UG will ever suffer even an eye glance by the university officials if he/she instructs students that it was Russia that defeated Nazi Germany. I know this because I taught International Relations at UG, and my students learned two things from me. One is that slavery was the most inhuman and violent aberration of the human mind in world civilisation, and that it was Russia that defeated Nazi Germany and not the US and Great Britain.
I am a kind of introverted person that hardly goes anywhere. But I got an invitation from the Russian Embassy to join the reception tonight in observance of Russia’s defeat of Germany on May 8, 1945. I may go. The world owes Russia a debt that future global generations will never be able to repay.
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.
