Robert Persaud takes on the great speeches
Wednesday Ramblings
Stabroek News
March 31, 2004
Prize winning Logo We are so excited that the National Communication Network is holding a logo competition. WR's advertising department has been working overtime to come up with a logo that truly reflects the spirit of the corporation.
We know not many of you read the Guyana Chronic so you might have missed Robert Persaud's line-by-line dissection of PNCR leader Robert Corbin's speech at the Square of the Revolution.
Well, we have been looking through various archives to see if Mr Persaud ever critiqued any other famous speeches and the results are astonishing....
The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr
Aug. 28, 1963 Washington DC
"Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. "
Reverend King is being politically dishonest to trumpet this emancipation as some special feat unique to America. The slaves in Guyana won their freedom several decades before that of Reverend King's colleagues and the PPP played an integral part in that process.
"So we have come here today to dramatise an appalling condition. In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check."
That's one check sure to bounce because Reverend King is once again resorting to the tired format of protests instead of using the democratic process restored by the ruling PPP after years of dictatorship. It is disheartening that so many would be fooled into following his folly.
"The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges."
It was the PPP that brought the light of democracy out of the Reverend King's darkness. It is this old King rhetoric with its veiled calls to violence that he skilfully uses to rile up his supporters and cause much anxiety in the country. We call on him to desist from such inflammatory statements for the sake of the nation.
"Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality...
This is the same lie being peddled by the extremist lunatic fringe of the society: We demand that Reverend King show clear evidence of the police brutality he is so quick to raise. His charges are baseless and self-serving and show a man so desperate for power he is willing to drag the good name of the police through the dirt many of whom have lost their lives at the hands of criminal elements.
"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood...
"Reverend King must have been sleeping a lot with all the dreams he is having. Meanwhile it is the PPP which has built schools, roads and hospitals and developed the nation for all the people.
Abraham Lincoln Gettysburg Address November 19, 1863
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
President Lincoln's story telling is not amusing. He is silly to believe that the United States has a monopoly on equality. Our great leader Dr Cheddi Jagan since the early fifties has been making equality a reality, a process continued today by President Jagdeo.
"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war."
This is a most ill-advised statement. It has long been our suspicion that President Lincoln has been conducting a covert civil war but with this declaration he should now stop the pretence of distancing himself from the perpetrators of these heinous acts and understand that the PPP will do whatever necessary to defend its people.
Winston Churchill
(June 4 1940)
"We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrenderā€¦"
These are words of a man who only knows violence and who pays mere lip service to the constructive dialogue he himself stalled. When will Prime Minister Churchill realise that the way forward requires mature and responsible political behaviour?
Too much Passion
Faithful churchgoers who may have spotted that the Metropole Cinema was playing "Passion" might have been mistaken into thinking it was showing the gory Mel Gibson flick about Jesus' last hours. But closer inspection reveals it was twinned with "The Seductress".
Question of the Week
Surely Regent St should be re-christened Desmond Hoyte St given all the violence, looting and arson inspired there?