What is important here is the use of disproportionate and extreme power to silence [creative] voices of dissent that are deemed as enemies of whatever special interests has access to that extreme power – the men that attacked Charlie Hebdo did with guns what the PPP government does with clandestine e-mails and phone calls to prospective employers, and by signing away of the nation’s airwaves to persons favourable to it, while denying others the same opportunity. It does it with cowardly attack blogs run out of the Office of the President, and in cowardly anonymous columns published in the Times and Chronicle. It does it through Presidential Guards slapping a teacher in an indigenous village, and then pressuring the village council to ostracise the victim. It does it by the hoarding of Amerindian leaders into the national convention centre with the Permanent Secretary of Amerindian Affairs shouting at them to toe the PPP line or else. It does so when a government minister walks into the national radio station and orders the winning calypso to be pulled, and when there is an outcry, the response is the pulling of all the top finalist calypsos from the state-controlled airwaves. It does so by suing journalist Freddie Kissoon for pointing out its institutionalized racism and unjustly denying him employment. The government attacks freedom of expression when it pulls state advertisement from independent newspapers, and uses the Guyana Revenue Authority to target the publisher of Kaieteur News. It did so when Jagdeo, who recently hypocritically lectured the Sri Lankans on abuse of state power during elections, mounted the platform in 2011 and referred to independent journalists as vultures and carrion crows.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 20:14:26 +0000
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