Not long after the successful Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917 to form the first successful communist government – Lenin wrote a tract, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder”. He was criticising those outside Russia for criticizing the new government not being radical enough to be a model for their efforts.
Well, here in Guyana, we suffer a ton of overseas Guyanese who hurl infantile criticisms of the Govt’s attempt to get our long-awaited economic take-off into the stratosphere. One of them’s a fella by the name of Percy Hintzen who’s a leftist scholar who used to teach at UG back in the day. Waay back in the day!! He left more than FORTY YEARS ago to lecture in the US and was pretty successful by all accounts – becoming a professor Emeritus and all that!! He’s been given a platform in one of the dailies from where he inspects us from foreign – presumably using a telescope – and offers gloomy, gnomic prognostications on what we’re doing!!
But in a case of “man bites dog” journalism, his latest piece was on the recent elections in his home of forty odd years: “Immigration, Trumpism, and the American Colonial Reality”. The polemic is basically a cri de coeur on his entire existence as an immigrant in America. He was flummoxed by this conclusion: “In Florida, where I reside, support for Trump by Afro-West Indian immigrants was much higher than their counterparts in the rest of the country. This was even more so the case for Indo-West Indians, the majority of whom voted for the Republican ticket. Cuban Americans throughout the country voted overwhelmingly for Trump.”
He then plaintively moaned: “The question to be raised, then, is why would these immigrants vote for Trump in large enough numbers to guarantee his victory? Why would they cast their lot with the majority of white American?” And then confessed, “Since migrating to the United States, I have been troubled by a deeper and even more profound question. What explains the overwhelming desire for people from the Global South to migrate to a country only to become objects of white American racial and xenophobic hostility and rejection?”
And speaking of himself, he notes: “Those who manage to acquire the material trappings of success and the soi disant prestige of professional accomplishment and position still suffer from the American reality of white supremacy and xenophobia, from the country’s pervasive violence, and from its racialized surveillance.”
And this is his answer to your Eyewitness’ even deeper question as to why he doesn’t return to Guyana: “The answer to this seeming anomaly, I believe, rests in an indisputable fact —- we are still colonized!”
So the colonized wants to guide us!!
…and Opposition desperation
Your Eyewitness understand the frustration of the Opposition parties as the PPP juggernaut inexorably eat into their support base as 2025 looms!! He’s already noted their confabulation of excuses on the electoral list and biometrics that they’ll use after their loss to come out into the streets. The question, of course, is who’ll be there with them judging from the embarrassingly paltry turnout at their weekly “protesting” in front of GECOM HQ!! In those protests, some placards invariably demand the resignation of GECOM Chair Justice (rtd) Claudette Singh, who’d been nominated by their own Sanctimonious Gangster, Granger!!
Well, their latest ploy comes from the struggling AFC that’s flailing around like a demented banshee, fighting for relevance. They claim that the fiasco with the three “joinder parties” that’s occupying the one seat in the National Assembly they managed to cobble could be resolved by the Chair. And since she hasn’t done so, she should go!!
What nonsense!! How can the Chair poke her nose into a private agreement??
…and Brooklyn bluster
Pressie had to’ve run into Congressman Henry Jeffries at the Barbados Independence Bash. He’s from the same district as Shirley Chisholm being honoured. As he did in his first encounter, hope Pressie tutored Jeffries on the nuances of our local politics!!
