The criminal environment started with our racial battles of the fifties and sixties July 27, 2013 | By KNews | Filed Under Letters Dear Editor, I read Ruel Johnson’s letter titled “The PPP created the criminal environment” (KN, July 19, 2013). Johnson states “The spiraling violent crime in this place has everything to do with the environment that the PPP has created or contributed to over the past two decades.” Johnson is absolutely correct that the PPP has created some evils, but it has also contributed to crime and evils long existent in our society. Beyond listing the negative effects of criminality under the PPP, we need to go deeper and explore the seminal events that magnified criminality in our society. In doing so, we will discover that the dramatic march to criminality in Guyana started with our racial-political warfare and the ethnic conflict it generated in the fifties and sixties. From 1954 when Burnham and Jagan began their tug of war for power and their constituencies lapped up their antagonizing racial rhetoric, we became an immoral nation, which made it easier for us to transform into a criminalized nation. The ethnic mayhem of the fifties and sixties led to horrible governance and despotism which bred all manner of thuggery and the criminality that flows from that fundamental moral degradation. Then there was economic mismanagement and destitution, which criminalized many out of sheer survival and others out of entitlement, bullyism, self-aggrandizement and envy, greed and covetousness. Again, these attributes thrive in highly divided and unequal societies. In the failed PNC and PPP Guyana, the amoral and immoral environment inevitably led to criminality. The PNC and PPP destroyed the moral compass and the rule of law of Guyana and created the criminalized and venal monster we are today as a society. Both of these parties have created the depraved existence, criminalized environment and the destroyed rule of law society their successors will reap. That is how we became criminalized. Out of the ethnic fires of the fifties and sixties and its moral damage, it was inevitable that we would get the PNC and the PPP and all their thieving, corruption, immorality, wrongdoing, malfeasance and their myopia to ‘wutlissness.’ They were born out of a criminalized philosophy of racial destruction, ethnic hatred, group triumphalism and enclave neutralization and the despotism that accompanies that filthiness. From the bitterness of the sixties and its abominable crimes and conveniently justified criminality, we got the PNC and its unelected dictatorship and the PPP and its elected dictatorship. We have always been a society of criminality built upon criminality and moral transgression built upon moral violation. There is no break; our historical progression is just painful accumulation of immorality upon iniquity. Whether House of Israel’s savages or Roger Khan’s phantom philistines or the snuffing out of dissidents like Walter Rodney or Ronald Waddell or the stench of corruption from decrepit electricity barges to missing monies at NCN or the bribes demanded by the police force then and now, the more things change the more they remain the same. When political parties are built on immoral platforms, they will govern in immoral and criminal fashion and criminals will flourish and criminality will reign. The mostly Africans and Indians in our nation who support and vote for the PNC and PPP have also created the very criminality they suffer from. They have built their own demise. They have, with the jubilant ethnic voting ink on their fingers every five years, created this broken rule of law they live under. They continue to vote for morally damaged political parties and ethically degenerate individuals that dominate them. They continue to remain silent when the race parties (PPP and PNC/APNU) get hijacked by the failed and corrupt. By their actions, they have also created the burgeoning banditry, the out of control thievery, the incessant corruption, the inveterate bullyism, the ingrained despotism, the kick-down-door rogues at their door, the victimization, the drug trade, the guns that are increasingly killing them and their families, the money laundering that prices everything out of their reach and so on. Our politics was born out of vileness and criminality and continues to spawn vileness and criminality. This inherent Guyanese immorality, illegality and criminality, is a product of our disastrous ethno-political choices and our broken economic existence. We indirectly vote for the criminals when we vote for political movements (PNC/APNU and PPP) that turn a blind eye to criminality and establish environments conducive to criminality, because in those environments criminals will flourish. Since the mid-fifties, our nation’s metamorphosis has not been geared towards goodness, fairness, equity, truth, justice and decency but towards evil, wrongdoing, injustice, unfairness, inequity and despotism. The PPP is simply carrying on the legacy of abomination. Like any progressive criminalized and corrupt entity, it has advanced beyond the dereliction of its predecessor. It has expanded inequality in staggering fashion. Drug trafficking today dwarfs the small trafficking that occurred under the PNC. Corruption is more rampant under the PPP because of the growth in the economy since 1992, the massive revenue collections from GRA available for the taking and the public contracting/tendering/procurement system created under the PPP that has placed hundreds of billions into the pockets of a favoured few. Most of the personal wealth created in Guyana in the past 20 years has come from criminality, corruption and public contracting largesse and it went to only a few lucky ones. This complicit environment produces criminality and criminals. Those at the bottom who witness the unmitigated theft at the top are emboldened to buy a gun and kill for theirs. The easy target is the masses perpetually exposed and unprotected. If the PNC/APNU gets power tomorrow, it will simply do as the PPP did and build on this dirty legacy of wrongdoing. Like the PPP, it knows nothing else but the politics that invite criminality and court immorality. This is how the PNC and PPP have ghettoized and dehumanized Guyana. Since 1950, we have been on this journey of sin, thuggery, indecency, depravity, wrongdoing, buccaneering and criminality. Since 1950, we have continued to vote for the con artist to rob us, the corrupt crook to steal from us and the killer to kick down our door and blast us into kingdom come. Instead of looking at ourselves in the mirror and at the mistakes we have made as a nation supporting political parties (PPP and PNC/APNU) that either make us criminal or place us at the mercies of goons, we instead resort to ethnic finger pointing and racial labelling of the criminality that invades us. When are we going to point at ourselves and the karmic consequences of our own actions in voting for these parties? Pointing fingers at another ethnic group will not ease the number of guns pointed at us in the here and now. Blaming other ethnicities for crime will not ease the flood of criminals emerging from every ethnic group in our society. It is time to blame ourselves for creating parties and governments that embolden criminals and directly harm us and our families. How many more have to fall into permanent slumber at the end of a gun before we wake up and do the right thing? M. Maxwell
Posted on: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 13:51:38 +0000