Saturday June 22, 2013
Kaieteur News
Page 5
Letters... Where your views make the news Letters... Where your views make the news
Rodney’s killers have no moral or legal defence DEAR EDITOR, Minette Bacchus has written many letters criticizing my position that the facts support Burnham played a role in Walter Rodney’s assassination. For some strange reason, Kaieteur News has failed to publish my rebuttal to Bacchus. I wait to see if this letter will be published. Bacchus’ blind zealotry on this issue must be confronted factually and morally. In this letter I will examine the moral danger of Bacchus’ soulless positions. I will present my factual research in a later correspondence. For Bacchus, Burnham had nothing to do with Rodney’s death. She further contends that
Rodney’s death was payback for his revolutionary activities and his murderers are morally and legally absolved because Rodney was plotting to overthrow the PNC with guns. This is morally and legally abominable. It misses the point on proportionality where the self-defence must be proportionate to the force faced. Under the doctrine of proportionality, any proper court will convict a citizen who shoots and kills in cold blood an unarmed attacker who is physically incapable of subduing or harming the citizen. No matter what guns the WPA was allegedly accumulating, the WPA and Rodney never posed a
serious threat to overthrowing the PNC, especially not after Burnham shook up the leadership of the military in July 1979 to install his loyalists in all the top posts. No rational analyst could argue the WPA had the critical mass, weaponry and capacity to wrest power from Burnham or even get close to attacking Burnham. In fact, the PNC had infiltrated the WPA and knew all of Rodney’s plans, so it was never under any threat from the WPA. The PNC had the means to charge, try and convict Rodney of sedition, for it had previously charged and jailed Rodney before. So, the murder of Walter Rodney in cold blood was
egregiously, morally and legally disproportionate, and a gravely sickening act by the PNC. Nothing more absurdly exposes this myopic and nasty intellectual fabrication by Minette Bacchus than the fact that the apartheid regime jailed but did not assassinate Nelson Mandela whose ANC forces killed many apartheid forces, but the PNC regime killed Walter Rodney who was supposedly accumulating weapons. The moral depravity in Bacchus’ reasoning has wider implications. If replicated and applied liberally, it immorally shreds the entire historiography of the struggles of oppressed people. This position would sinfully mean that because
Cuffy, Damon, Quamina, Enmore Martyrs and Devonshire Castle resisters took revolutionary action against their oppressors, their oppressors were justified and morally absolved in killing them in self-defence or retaliation. Using this same shameful moral deceit, if Oliver Tambo or Nelson Mandela was killed by the apartheid regime by a
walkie-talkie bomb, the apartheid regime would have been justified and morally blameless because Tambo or Mandela was nothing but a revolutionary who played with fire and got killed. The same defunct moral transference applies to the killers of the scores of innocent young African men who were killed during the (Continued on page 6)