Comments on: Ravi Dev embraces the PPP and Barack Obama! - Freddie Kissoon

By: Freddie Kissoon performs the duties of an intellectual gadfly - Ravi Dev :: propaganda press! boycott Guyana 2008!

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:42:47 +0000

[...] these are shown to be erroneous, blithely goes on to make other, just as outrageous, allegations. In his Monday (14-04-08) column, referring to my use of the words, “our country (meaning his and mine)”, he asserted: “I need [...]

By: karen

karen — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:10:18 +0000

but Guyana is a wasteland today!
so what’s the argument again?

By: ravi dev

ravi dev — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:41:55 +0000

I write to clarify some points raised in the latest intervention by Mr Frederick Kissoon (Ravi Dev has the temerity to quote Barack Obama) in our colloquy on the nature of the present PPP regime. I break a self-imposed sabbatical from the letters pages in order to get on with my analysis in my Sunday column.
In a letter to the SN, Mr Kissoon had asserted: “I believe the rule of the PPP has degenerated in forms that are worse than under Forbes Burnham.” He buttressed his assertion by referring to four alleged characteristics of the PPP regime: a nexus between drug lords and the political directorate; nepotism; corruption, and racism, which he had developed in his now famous lecture at UG.
In my column, “Dictatorship?” I noted that, “Analyses of social phenomena, by their very nature, suggest strategies of action for the citizenry. In a country where some have launched violent attacks on citizens and state, care should be taken when an analysis may justify such strategies for regime change.”
In his riposte Mr Kissoon did not question my phrase, “to propose that the present regime is “worse” than the PNC of Mr Burnham…” but now claims that he, “never wrote that the PPP cabal is worse than the PNC” and that he simply, “offered four areas of unsavoury state behaviour that have emerged under the PPP after 1992 but were absent (!) under Burnham.” Now, if Mr Kissoon believed that the PPP was not “worse” than the PNC, all he had to do was say so and save us all a lot of newspaper space. It would be useful to obtain a transcript of Mr Kissoon’s lecture at UG. Mr Kissoon now claims that in his first intervention, “This country is crying out for a Barack Obama”, he asked “Which condemnation of mine was unwise to have been published against the backdrop of gunmen attacking citizens and the state?” I have carefully reread his column and can find no such question posed. It would have given me a clue that Mr Kissoon was merely being descriptive and not interested in an overall analytical comparison of the two regimes.
Mr Kissoon’s latest position, however, reinforces my observation that “public intellectuals” ought to “take care” with their public utterances: I, along with several correspondents in the newspapers and in the blogsphere, concluded that Mr Kissoon was making a general conclusion which led to my statement that: “to propose that the present regime is “worse” that the PNC of Mr Burnham suggests (justification for armed struggle against it). The WPA, for instance, in line with its analysis of the nature of the PNC’s regime, had declared in the 70’s that the latter had to be removed by “any means necessary.” Are we really there yet?”
On the issue of my column, Messenger and the Message”, I have pointed out to Mr Kissoon on at least three occasions his mis-statements on the fact that my elaboration of the Ethnic Security Dilemmas as the major underpinnings of political behaviour in Guyana from the very onset in 1988 included the African Dilemma. I repeat a plea from an earlier exchange: (End of Politics? KN 9-09-07) which Mr Kissoon has never addressed: “In reply to Freddy Kisoon’s, “An apology to Ravi Dev, but…”, I want to assure Mr Kissoon that I neither took “umbrage” nor was “furious” that he had elided the coeval African component of the “Ethnic Security Dilemmas” thesis, which I have advocated since the late eighties. I would say I was merely “rueful” that his amnesia on the issue was not a personal idiosyncrasy but rather symptomatic of the mindset of a rather wide swath of Guyanese. I would have hoped Mr Kissoon would have used his extraordinary facility as a public intellectual to comment on the gravamen of my charge, because I think it is partly responsible for our moribund politics.”
Finally, I do wish that Mr Kissoon could check his claims before publishing them; he may be opening himself to charges of libel. I have never had a passport other than a Guyanese one in my entire life, unlike what Mr Kissoon claims so categorically. It has been said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, but I do believe that Mr Kissoon has earned the right to say, “Guyana is my land.” The problem, Mr Kissoon, as I have stated before, is that there are many like you who would deny my right to this land also, simply because I insist on saying that I am an Indian Guyanese.
But rest easy, Mr Kissoon, I will not sue you for libel. I would like you to enjoy your new house, after all the travails you have described so touchingly in your columns.
Ravi Dev

By: Ruel Daniels

Ruel Daniels — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:35:42 +0000

These peeping Toms need to get back to their pastimes of peeping into women’s bedroom during the hours of darkness. These balls-less nocturnal perverts are given lease and license by KN, a paper that can no longer be considered to be independent, to air their stink mouth opinions behind the cover of an alias. A bunch of batty boys, lily livered scum lacking the courage to put their names to their opinions.

These are the kind of people who would pick your pocket and steal your shorts. They sneak around like Heyenas waiting for road kill to feast.

By: Ruel Daniels

Ruel Daniels — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:25:30 +0000

It was Africans who were responsible for the existence of the sugar Industry you jackass Moses. There would be nothing to save if it had not been there in the first place.

If the ancestors of Africans in Guyana could forsee that shunning the sugar plantations would result in their descendants becoming second class citizens today under the rule of a despicable racist regime like the PPP, they probably would have borne a little bit more of the white man’s cruelty. Guyana should serve as an example for African people all over this world.

It is way much easier for Barrack Obama to become President of a nation of a majority of white people than for someone of his ethnicity to become president of a largly brown nation like Guyana. That is what our nation has become under the PPP.

By: peeping tomasina

peeping tomasina — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:22:07 +0000

FREDDIE - THE ULTIMATE EAST INDIAN HERO OF GUYANA

Very few have been spared the wrath of Freddie Kissoon’s pen. He has attacked all and sundry in his long stint as a columnist, first with the Catholic newspaper, then Stabroek News, in his own television programme, and now as a daily feature in the Kaieteur News. In that regard he has been consistent and credible.
But while he has flayed far and wide, his most vicious swipes have been reserved for Indian academics and intellectuals.
He has railed against even his old comrades, including on occasions against Dr. David Hinds, but he has reserved the greatest venom for East Indian intellectuals such as Ravi Dev, Dr Prem Misir, Dr Cheddi Jagan and Dr. Randy Persaud.
He even went emotionally overboard one day and said that, because of the way East Indians voted in the last elections, he was ashamed to be an East Indian.
He should be forgiven for that faux pas, because he is not against any race, much less his own.
No one should make the mistake of concluding that Freddie has anything against his own people. No one should mistakenly assume that Freddie does not identify with his own race. He does, and does so deeply, so much so that the main reason why he reserves his most forceful assaults against East Indian academics is because he wants to be seen as the ultimate Indian hero of Guyana, the number one Indian academic and columnist.
He ensures that no East Indian voice other than his gains prominent recognition locally. Thus, no sooner does any credible East Indian voice attain prominence or threaten to do so, Freddie takes that person apart through his arguments.
Even Vishnu Bisram, who does not fall into the category of an intellectual, has faced the fury of Freddie’s pen. Kissoon would not allow Bisram to gain a valuable foothold as an opinion-maker. No, that place is almost exclusively reserved for Freddie, who wishes to be seen as the ultimate East Indian hero of Guyana.
I have studied this character for some time now, and I am convinced that Freddie is driven by the fear that other East Indians will steal his thunder as the chief opinion-maker.
He would, like he did yesterday, lash out against others whom he sees as threatening his position. In yesterday’s edition he made some sweeping statements about Ravi Dev; and then, as is he prone to do, misrepresented what the man had said some time ago.
Ravi is capable of defending himself against the likes of Kissoon. In fact, he is far more than capable.
Dev, however, continues to engage in fruitless exchanges with the professor, because he does not understand the psychology of the man. Dev sees Kissoon as someone who, unlike himself, is willing to deny his ethnicity.
He is wrong. Kissoon, in attacking East Indian commentators, is merely fulfilling his aspirations as the ultimate East Indian hero of Guyana.
Kissoon patterns himself after his Bollywood hero, Amitabh Bachchan. Most persons believe that Uncle Freddie sports a hippie hairstyle because he has a romantic obsession with the seventies of his radical youth. In fact, his long hairstyle is an imitation of his film-star hero, Bachchan, the man who in movies railed against all injustices.
Freddie used to go to the Empire cinema to see Bachchan, and this is why he has never cut his hair. Deep within his psyche he desires to become a real-life hero, fighting the same sort of injustices as Bachchan did in the movies.
By not understanding the psychology of Kissoon, Dev continues to engage in fruitless intellectual exchanges with a man who will consistently place spin on what you say so as turn it to his advantage; or, like he did recently in accusing Dev of inventing the African ethnic security dilemma, display selective amnesia.
Kissoon ought to have known that, long before anyone else, and way before the PPP came to power, and with remarkable and matchless insight, Ravi Dev was the one who outlined these twin ethnic security dilemmas, a postulation that was formerly spurned but which is now, to Kissoon’s great dismay, gaining widespread acceptance.
Kissoon’s trademark defence is misrepresentation and spin. These must be corrected, because they are often wicked and devious. For example, he says that in 1992 Cheddi assured the Americans that he was no longer a Communist and thus was allowed to rule Guyana.
This is intended to remake Jagan as someone who would trade his beliefs for political power, a view that supports Kissoon’s own theory that both Burnham and Jagan were only interested in power.
Jagan never assured the Americans that he was no longer a communist. Jagan went to his grave as an unrepentant communist. What Jagan did in 1992 was to issue a statement just prior to the elections that the building of socialism in Guyana was not on his agenda.
It could not have been. The world had changed and the splintering of the mighty Soviet Union meant that it would have been impossible for a small country like Guyana to pursue the leftist path.
On Sunday, Freddie also misrepresented Dev by accusing him of saying that, had it not been for Indians, Guyana would have been a wasteland. What Dev said was quite different from the spin that Kissoon places on it.
Dev said that without Indians the coast would have been returned to mangroves. As a historian, Kissoon himself should realize that it was East Indian immigration that saved the sugar industry, which dominates the landscape of Guyana’s coastal plain.
Dev never said that Guyana would have been a wasteland. That is a wicked and devious interpretation by Freddie, the man with ambitions to be the ultimate East Indian hero of Guyana.