Deconstructing the PNC/WPA
by Gokarran Sukhdeo
Don Quixote must have been very schizophrenic to charge head on, attacking windmills, with his not too bright neighbor, Sancho Panza, whom he conned into supporting him, and who tried fervently to win him back to sanity. Poor guy – where the whole world saw windmills as useful instruments, his schizoid perception saw a multi-armed giant.
I cannot rationally take the man of La Mancha to task because the chemical imbalance inside the mind of the schizophrenic makes it impervious to rational reasoning; such people respond only to invasive psychopharmacological treatment, or perhaps blunt trauma treatment.
I am only writing this in answer to the numerous persons who have called me asking, “wha wrang you did dose two guys mek dem crucifying you so?”
Well, my friends, basically what I have done is an attempt to deconstruct, through the use of strategic essentialism, the thesis of the PNCR/1G/WPA and the political structure built on it, and to invoke a process of dialectical thought among them; but instead they apparently perceive my action as tantamount to invading their territory and throwing a bunker-busting bomb at the very foundation of their house, which explains why they are frothing mad at me. You see, like the deconstruction theorist, Gayatri Spivak said, “essentialism is like dynamite, or like a powerful drug which, judiciously applied, can be effective in dismantling unwanted structures or alleviating suffering.”
The real intellectuals would first go back to their drawing board and re-visit their deconstruction theorists Deirida, Foucault, Spivak and others and re-examine if it was true that their thesis was indeed based on an un-established fact before responding, while the not so intelligent ones would shoot from their mouths first, avoid the real issues, run away with the ball in all different directions, and when that doesn’t bring result, they beat themselves up into a frenzy and resort to nasty abuses such as calling me a “prick”. (See Caribbean Daylight, August 11, 2006)
This reminds me of a personality in The Silver Lining by the name of Anil (a zero). Anil could not get anyone to play phagwa with him, so he threw a bucket of water on himself and went home crying to his parents that two boys did it to him. Mr. Kanhai, a few weeks ago, threw more than a bucket of water or abeer on himself; he wrote a three-thousand word diatribe in praise of himself because no one would “play phagwa with him”. I wonder, between him and me, who is the one really parading (false?) credentials?
Mr. Kanhai says I am parading my credentials when I said, “I was an economist…” That phrase he cut out from one context and pasted into a different context and ascribed a different meaning as seen only by a very envious, mischievous or schizophrenic mind. This is called journalistic felony, an offence as many as six con-journalists/con-photographers this year have been indicted for, or lost their jobs with New York Times, Time Magazine and other prestigious publications for doctoring reports and pictures. One of them as recently as last week lost his job for enhancing, by the cut and paste method, a picture about Israel bombing a city in Lebanon.
Let my friends and the reading public know that the full statement was: I was an Economist at the Ministry of Agriculture and was on the job that Saturday morning, September 29, 1986 when the infamous act [a rape] was allegedly committed. The reason I mentioned it is: at the time in Guyana, government was in the process of implementing a five-day work week, and only some officers, I included, were required to work on Saturday mornings. Thus the rest of the buildings were virtually empty, which gave the alleged perpetrator ample opportunity to perform his wicked deed.
I would like my friends to also know that, contrary to Mr. Kanhai’s claim that I am “boasting” that my book was great, actually it is the many readers who have said it, and the five Guyana Prize judges, English professors from five universities, in Guyana, West Indies, UK and Australia; and the Ministry of Education in Guyana that “…examined the publication Sukhdeo, Gokarran, (1998) The Silver Lining with an aim of ascertaining to what extent it can be utilized in schools in Guyana”, and, “Members of the team (of subject specialists from the National Center for Educational Resource Development, NCERD) viewed the publication in relation to plot, dialect, setting, style and characterization and concluded that the publication is extremely suitable for use by students in the upper levels in the Primary Schools and Secondary Schools as escape literature.” (Extracted from letter sent me by Ministry of Education, Guyana, 1999.)
I do not go about boasting about myself. If Mr. Kanhai were really honest, he would have acknowledged that the boast I make was of being too poor to attend high school, of being a cane cutter at the age of fifteen, of finishing my bachelors in three years, and my masters in two while being employed in two other jobs, and of being “the most qualified construction laborer” for ten years.
It would appear that such a person as myself should not challenge the WPA. You see, friends, the leading intellectuals of the WPA have been so deified that every utterance from them is considered gospel and their cult members must swallow everything they say, hook, line and sinker. That I dared to nail an anti-thesis on the door of their sanctimonious cathedral is very sacrilegious and I must be called all manner of names and punished to the full extent of their arrogant ignorance.
All I did was expose a flaw in their thinking like any defense attorney whose job is only to create a doubt in the minds of the jury. The attorney does not have to find and prove who did the crime. Likewise, I do not have to prove that Guyanese are not voting racial; rather it is for them to prove that Guyanese are voting racial since their entire political thesis rests on the supposition.
But racist theorists have their own agenda which Mr. Kanhai fails to see, and I will tell you why later. The racist theorists don’t want to face the electorate direct from where real power originates; they want to obtain power through the back door, like bandits. They must therefore beat the war drums of race at every corner and publish their invectives at every opportunity.
Such practice has been described by Prime Minister Sam Hinds as reckless and politically biased “pavement journalism” and “gutter journalism” aimed at creating division in Guyana rather than fostering unity among Guyanese; and by Dr. Steve Surujballi, Chairman of GECOM, as “publications which are in fact the quintessence of wretchedness and wickedness epitomizing and misrepresenting matters – the zenith or, perhaps, I should say the nadir of reprehensibility.”
That’s the PNC/WPA. The two are one and the same. The backslash is only academic. Atypical of their usual methodology is the contortionist way they magically conjure up equations between totally unrelated variables (such as Gokarran Sukhdeo and Gowkarran Sharma), draw conclusions and analogies from these un-equations, and stretch these analogies to infinite absurdities. That’s the nadir of reprehensibility.
What Mr. Kanhai fails to see is that the original WPA has been reduced only to an idea that once existed and looked good at the time, but the present WPA leadership has now been transformed into a Black Nationalist Movement in full support of the PNCR platform, a platform spelled out by Robert Corbin a week ago in his address to Linderers: “However, the road is difficult, but if our ancestors could have withstood more than a century of slavery, we shall return to ascendancy in our own country.”
This same platform glorifies the Buxton bandits, and baptizes them “freedom fighters”. These are the freedom fighters who were/are responsible for the slaughtering and disappearance off innocent sugar workers and their children, and others, the motive of which could certainly not be robbery; it had to be political or racial.
These are the real hard facts Mr. Kanhai should deal with, and not engage in derogatory and mischievous name calling. Stick to the issues and comply with the rules of the game. For my part, I can only say if he continues to see and poke at giants where there are only windmills, and see ghosts where there are none, my advice to him – stop taking the LSD, PCP or whatever mind distorting pills the racists are feeding him. Get real help.
by Gokarran Sukhdeo
Don Quixote must have been very schizophrenic to charge head on, attacking windmills, with his not too bright neighbor, Sancho Panza, whom he conned into supporting him, and who tried fervently to win him back to sanity. Poor guy – where the whole world saw windmills as useful instruments, his schizoid perception saw a multi-armed giant.
I cannot rationally take the man of La Mancha to task because the chemical imbalance inside the mind of the schizophrenic makes it impervious to rational reasoning; such people respond only to invasive psychopharmacological treatment, or perhaps blunt trauma treatment.
I am only writing this in answer to the numerous persons who have called me asking, “wha wrang you did dose two guys mek dem crucifying you so?”
Well, my friends, basically what I have done is an attempt to deconstruct, through the use of strategic essentialism, the thesis of the PNCR/1G/WPA and the political structure built on it, and to invoke a process of dialectical thought among them; but instead they apparently perceive my action as tantamount to invading their territory and throwing a bunker-busting bomb at the very foundation of their house, which explains why they are frothing mad at me. You see, like the deconstruction theorist, Gayatri Spivak said, “essentialism is like dynamite, or like a powerful drug which, judiciously applied, can be effective in dismantling unwanted structures or alleviating suffering.”
The real intellectuals would first go back to their drawing board and re-visit their deconstruction theorists Deirida, Foucault, Spivak and others and re-examine if it was true that their thesis was indeed based on an un-established fact before responding, while the not so intelligent ones would shoot from their mouths first, avoid the real issues, run away with the ball in all different directions, and when that doesn’t bring result, they beat themselves up into a frenzy and resort to nasty abuses such as calling me a “prick”. (See Caribbean Daylight, August 11, 2006)
This reminds me of a personality in The Silver Lining by the name of Anil (a zero). Anil could not get anyone to play phagwa with him, so he threw a bucket of water on himself and went home crying to his parents that two boys did it to him. Mr. Kanhai, a few weeks ago, threw more than a bucket of water or abeer on himself; he wrote a three-thousand word diatribe in praise of himself because no one would “play phagwa with him”. I wonder, between him and me, who is the one really parading (false?) credentials?
Mr. Kanhai says I am parading my credentials when I said, “I was an economist…” That phrase he cut out from one context and pasted into a different context and ascribed a different meaning as seen only by a very envious, mischievous or schizophrenic mind. This is called journalistic felony, an offence as many as six con-journalists/con-photographers this year have been indicted for, or lost their jobs with New York Times, Time Magazine and other prestigious publications for doctoring reports and pictures. One of them as recently as last week lost his job for enhancing, by the cut and paste method, a picture about Israel bombing a city in Lebanon.
Let my friends and the reading public know that the full statement was: I was an Economist at the Ministry of Agriculture and was on the job that Saturday morning, September 29, 1986 when the infamous act [a rape] was allegedly committed. The reason I mentioned it is: at the time in Guyana, government was in the process of implementing a five-day work week, and only some officers, I included, were required to work on Saturday mornings. Thus the rest of the buildings were virtually empty, which gave the alleged perpetrator ample opportunity to perform his wicked deed.
I would like my friends to also know that, contrary to Mr. Kanhai’s claim that I am “boasting” that my book was great, actually it is the many readers who have said it, and the five Guyana Prize judges, English professors from five universities, in Guyana, West Indies, UK and Australia; and the Ministry of Education in Guyana that “…examined the publication Sukhdeo, Gokarran, (1998) The Silver Lining with an aim of ascertaining to what extent it can be utilized in schools in Guyana”, and, “Members of the team (of subject specialists from the National Center for Educational Resource Development, NCERD) viewed the publication in relation to plot, dialect, setting, style and characterization and concluded that the publication is extremely suitable for use by students in the upper levels in the Primary Schools and Secondary Schools as escape literature.” (Extracted from letter sent me by Ministry of Education, Guyana, 1999.)
I do not go about boasting about myself. If Mr. Kanhai were really honest, he would have acknowledged that the boast I make was of being too poor to attend high school, of being a cane cutter at the age of fifteen, of finishing my bachelors in three years, and my masters in two while being employed in two other jobs, and of being “the most qualified construction laborer” for ten years.
It would appear that such a person as myself should not challenge the WPA. You see, friends, the leading intellectuals of the WPA have been so deified that every utterance from them is considered gospel and their cult members must swallow everything they say, hook, line and sinker. That I dared to nail an anti-thesis on the door of their sanctimonious cathedral is very sacrilegious and I must be called all manner of names and punished to the full extent of their arrogant ignorance.
All I did was expose a flaw in their thinking like any defense attorney whose job is only to create a doubt in the minds of the jury. The attorney does not have to find and prove who did the crime. Likewise, I do not have to prove that Guyanese are not voting racial; rather it is for them to prove that Guyanese are voting racial since their entire political thesis rests on the supposition.
But racist theorists have their own agenda which Mr. Kanhai fails to see, and I will tell you why later. The racist theorists don’t want to face the electorate direct from where real power originates; they want to obtain power through the back door, like bandits. They must therefore beat the war drums of race at every corner and publish their invectives at every opportunity.
Such practice has been described by Prime Minister Sam Hinds as reckless and politically biased “pavement journalism” and “gutter journalism” aimed at creating division in Guyana rather than fostering unity among Guyanese; and by Dr. Steve Surujballi, Chairman of GECOM, as “publications which are in fact the quintessence of wretchedness and wickedness epitomizing and misrepresenting matters – the zenith or, perhaps, I should say the nadir of reprehensibility.”
That’s the PNC/WPA. The two are one and the same. The backslash is only academic. Atypical of their usual methodology is the contortionist way they magically conjure up equations between totally unrelated variables (such as Gokarran Sukhdeo and Gowkarran Sharma), draw conclusions and analogies from these un-equations, and stretch these analogies to infinite absurdities. That’s the nadir of reprehensibility.
What Mr. Kanhai fails to see is that the original WPA has been reduced only to an idea that once existed and looked good at the time, but the present WPA leadership has now been transformed into a Black Nationalist Movement in full support of the PNCR platform, a platform spelled out by Robert Corbin a week ago in his address to Linderers: “However, the road is difficult, but if our ancestors could have withstood more than a century of slavery, we shall return to ascendancy in our own country.”
This same platform glorifies the Buxton bandits, and baptizes them “freedom fighters”. These are the freedom fighters who were/are responsible for the slaughtering and disappearance off innocent sugar workers and their children, and others, the motive of which could certainly not be robbery; it had to be political or racial.
These are the real hard facts Mr. Kanhai should deal with, and not engage in derogatory and mischievous name calling. Stick to the issues and comply with the rules of the game. For my part, I can only say if he continues to see and poke at giants where there are only windmills, and see ghosts where there are none, my advice to him – stop taking the LSD, PCP or whatever mind distorting pills the racists are feeding him. Get real help.
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