propaganda press! state sponsored & negroe free

When Martin Gough, the BBC sports journalist that covered the Guyana leg of CWC 2007, was leaving the country, in his final blog on Guyana he took a parting shot at me. But he didn’t mention me by name, preferring to state that he didn’t want to give me more fame. It was a pathetic excuse.He knew if he had named the Kaieteur News columnist then readers would have gone to the online edition of KN and searched the archives. On doing so, they would have found my critique of Gough.
We see the same hideous excuse by a PPP ideologue and Consul of the Government in Guyana in Barbados , Mr. Norman Faria. He is upset at my frequent critical assessments of the Guyana Government, in particular my theoretical construct that Guyana is an elected dictatorship (see his letter in Tuesday’s edition of KN). But he informs his readers that it is not necessary to cite my name.

He doesn’t even mention the newspaper I write for. The same explanation in the Gough case applies here. Faria doesn’t want to let people know who the Kaieteur News columnist is because they can access my exposure of a ruling party and government that is hell bent on exceeding the record of excesses of Forbes Burnham.

Interestingly enough, Mr. Faria did not tell his readers that he is an employee of the Government of Guyana for the past fifteen years as the Guyanese Consul in Barbados . Neither does he tell his readers that he is an occasional contributor to the PPP’s propaganda rag, the Mirror.

Now here is a glaring case of paramountcy of the party. How can a state employee write for a party newspaper? I guess in Wild West Guyana where the rule of law has been reduced to a party parade, the constitution, a charade, and democratic conventions, a masquerade, anything that obsessive power wants to do with the country, it could.

Now here is the interesting part of Mr. Faria’s letter. After dignifying an American slang word, he applies it to me. Mr. Faria, an avowed communist who sees Cuba as an inspiration worthy of emulation by the world, borrows the appellation “shock journalist” from American parlance and seeks to apply it to Guyana .

It tantalises the mind as to why he didn’t pick a phrase from Cuba to describe me.

He explains that a shock journalist is someone who makes unbecoming remarks so that he or she can shock people in order to increase the circulation of their product. It never occurred to Mr. Faria that you may also have the term, “shock government”.

This could be defined as a government that shocks its people by the dictatorial things it does.

I would like to bring to the attention of Mr. Faria that in Germany under the Nazi regime, there was the term “shock propagandist”. The chief shock propagandist was Joseph Goebbels. Mr. Faria comes in the same category. A shock propagandist is a government employee that puts on a defence of his/her unpopular government.

But the defence is so shocking that people are curious so they read the propaganda to see what it contains. A shock propagandist is also a comical person. Let us examine the shock propaganda of Mr. Faria in his letter on me.

The tipping over point that evokes a propaganda passion in Mr. Faria is my conceptualisation of the Guyana Government as an elected dictatorship. Not being familiar with new concepts in political theory like “failed state” and “elected dictatorship”, Mr. Faria jumped to defend his employee from his cocooned niche in one of the most stable, peaceful and economically sound places in the world, Barbados .

In Barbados , like Jamaica , ruling parties have to behave themselves because they can be voted out as Portia Simpson Miller found out on Tuesday. Never mind people are leaving Guyana at supersonic pace and our human resource base has vanished. Mr. Faria isn’t coming to live in Guyana to help his Marxist comrades as Earl Bousquet from St. Lucia did.

Mr. Faria begins his defence by offering Guyana one of the most rib-tickling jokes for which all Bajans should laugh at him. I do not know how much publicity Mr. Faria’s letter on me was given in Barbados but I am sure the few who have read it will ridicule him.

He explains that when the two parties, the PNC and PPP were born, the latter evolved as a multi-racial group that represented the interests of all the working people of Guyana while the PNC spoke for the African middle class.

This is not only stupidity to the highest degree, but it calls into question the nature of Mr. Faria. Even the people of Iceland know that all of Guyana ’s history is bound up with East Indian support for the PPP and African endorsement of the PNC. Almost the entire African population in Guyana tore down the PPP Government in the sixties. Then a race war took over.

Since 1957, onwards, the national ballot has been determined by racial choice. The exception has been in 2006 when a sizeable percentage of Africans chose a multi-racial party, the Alliance for Change.

There is more nonsense to come from our shock propagandist. He puts the PPP as a party that came out of the tradition of the Enlightenment. What appalling rubbish! Communism emerged out of 19th century European mainstream of ideologies that found the Enlightenment to be a failure.

In other words, communist philosophy was a reaction to what Marxist would have referred to as the bourgeois domination of the Enlightenment that gave birth to liberalism which is a capitalist culture.

A communist would find it shocking if you tell him/her that Marx wrote in the tradition of the Enlightenment. Communist textbooks have dismissed the Enlightenment philosophers as thinkers steeped in metaphysic as opposed to Marxist emphasis on dialectical materialism.

Some of the harshest criticisms of philosophy by Marxist leaders (not even Antonio Gramsci exempted) were directed against the epistemology of the Enlightenment. To say that the PPP, a fanatical communist movement up to the nineties, emerged out of the value system of the Enlightenment is equivalent to saying that Adolf Hitler was a protector of the Jews.

Finally, our shock propagandist from Barbados (where our Consul fails to deal with the Guyana bench at the airport) lauds Fidel Castro, then in the same breath tells us that Pakistan is a dictatorship.

Well if Pakistan that has an independent Supreme Court is a dictatorship and not fascist Cuba , I guess we can say that Saddam Hussein was the teacher of Mother Theresa. Mr. Faria is as shocking as this. Even Goebbels would find Faria too shocking.
======

If you’re interested in reaching shock propagandist Norman Faria, any of these should work

MR. NORMAN FARIA
Honorary Consul
Consulate of Guyana
19 Pearl Drive
Eden Terrace
St. Michael
Barbados Tel. No: 246 417 4027
Fax No: 246 426 0861
Mobile : 246 244 6842
Tel No: 246 424 1623 (Home)
Email: nfaria@caribsurf.com