Dear Editor,
Mr Freddie Kissoon writes, “I have seen some pretty inept ‒ or to be kind to Henry Jeffrey ‒ naïve political analyses, one of which was too shocking for me, and I thought my objection should be published so when historians write they could make use of it; thus I replied. Dr Jeffrey stated that he could not believe that some of the backwardness seen in the past could be attributed to the deliberate intentions of the two parties that were in government ‒ the PPP and PNC” (‘Jeffrey has been unkind to Hoyte’ SN, March 14; ‘Three ingredients in the boiling cauldron of power’ KN, March 13).
As the letter below, dated about August 14, 2014, will show, it is now at least some five years since I have been attempting to indicate to Mr Kissoon precisely what I said.
As for the remainder of his letter, it need not detain us for it is essentially begging us to draw unwarranted conclusions from a range of perceived and historically narrow assertions.
“In his column, ‘No-confidence vote and the two-year gamble,’ last Sunday (August 10, 2014), Mr Freddie Kissoon, stated of me:
‘He wrote a few years back in a letter to the Stabroek News that he does not believe that either the PNC or the PPP Government has done an act that was deliberately designed to hurt another section of the population or another group. You can accuse Jeffrey of being naïve. I don’t think he is. It is simply, he cannot bring himself to see government behaving like that, so such a concept he will not apply in his research.’ I believe that I had occasion to correct Mr Kissoon on this point before (‘Dr Henry Jeffrey responds to Freddie Kissoon’ KN, March 29, 2011) and what I actually said was that: ‘I do not believe that our country is in this condition because over the last half a century our politicians have been wicked and intended this kind of backwardness. We simply have a governmental framework, rooted in ethnicity, which is deleterious to any massive improvements in our standard of living.’ (‘Circumstances are what we make of them’ SN, January 29, 2010)
“I like to quote and reference when dealing with what people said, particularly if my interpretation of their position can be construed as critical. Perhaps Mr Kissoon has some other quote/reference of my saying what he claimed I said.”
Yours faithfully,
Henry Jeffrey
