…authoritarian compulsions
Folks are wondering what in the world “got” into Granger for him to blurt out in front of a large crowd on the campaign trail that he, Granger, has the power to strip any dual citizenship of their Guyanese citizenship!! The fact of the matter, nothing got INTO Granger; the outburst merely revealed the most defining characteristic of his personality – a megalomaniac authoritarian bent!!
Burnham had inserted Art 46 into his 1980 Constitution as part of the constellation of powers that – on paper – made him the most powerful leader on planet earth!! Imagine if he had the wherewithal to exercise it worldwide!! Unfortunately, he didn’t and ended up taking it out on Guyanese – plunging the country to barely hover precariously over Haiti on the misery index!! So Art 46 does, in fact, give the President power to strip Guyanese citizenship from dual citizens. Somehow it escaped the constitutional changes on 1999-2000, which was supposed to reduce some of the more ostentatious Presidential powers.
But back to why Granger opened his mouth and let “story” jump out! After WWII – precipitated by a slew of dictators: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, etc – social scientists were able to distil the “authoritarian personality” into a set of defining characteristics. One of the major ones, paradoxically, was their worship of a “hero figure” on whom to pattern their lives, because basically, the authoritarian leader is completely insecure about himself. For Granger, the hero is Burnham – whose legacy, he’s vowed to “fulfil”. He even gave over his house to the “Burnham Foundation”, to keep Burnham’s half-baked ideas alive.
Another characteristic is a simplistic black and white worldview, with blind allegiance to what is “right and wrong”. It’s this certitude in his “rightness” that made him tell the Chief Justice that her legal judgement on his appointment of Patterson to head GECOM was her “perception” and he was entitled to his!! What we heard at Diamond on dual citizenship exemplifies another characteristic: boosting their egos by boasting to crowds about their “powers” over them!! Have you ever heard North Korea’s Kim Jong Un?? He assures his crowds he can even destroy America!!
Authoritarian personalities cannot accept that they can be wrong and others right – and this is what makes them reflexively opposed to a democratic order. Granger survived in the army, because his blind obedience to Burnham catapulted him upwards, in an authoritarian system where those he bypassed had to go along with Burnham’s orders.
It was for this reason that Granger accepted that he could become leader of the PNC via rigged elections – and will be willing to go that route on March 2.
The authoritarian personality is also obsessed with violence: beware the Ides of March!!
…by Kamau Braithwaite
The poet-philosopher of Afro-centricity in the British Caribbean, Kamau Braithwaite, just passed away. His career, in a sense, was a harbinger of our Walter Rodney’s. Scholarship boy, first degree and then onto Africa – Ghana in Braithwaite’s case – and then back to the Caribbean at UWI and eventually American Ivy league Universities. While Rodney was to utilise the more universal tool of Marxism to guide his praxis; Braithwaite invented his own – Nation’s Language.
He recognised the genius of Rodney’s contribution and when the latter was assassinated, he wrote a long, impassioned poem in tribute, “A poem for Walter Rodney”. It’s as good as any of his works to appreciate what he meant by “Nation’s language”.
“to be blown into fragments: your flesh
like the islands that you loved
like the seawall that you wished to heal
bringing equal rights and justice to the brothers…”
Braithwaite refers to Burnham’s goons murdering Fr Darke: “… the knife ran through the dark…” and to the ‘walkie talkie” that Burnham’s agent used to murder Rodney.
But today, some contracted amnesia!!
…goon squad
Hitler had his “Black Shirts”; Mussolini, his “Brown Shirts” and today, we see Granger’s “Green Shirts”. They serve to intimidate those who don’t accept the leader’s WAY!
Green-shirt RUSAL workers even defying Police clearing the Berbice River!!
