KISSOON ashamed he is Indian

What a pathetic slob is this Kissoon guy! Now, he is exposed by a fellow columnist and by Moses Nagamootoo
Peeping Tom
FREDDIE - THE ULTIMATE HERO


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.