Dear Editor,
POLITICAL indoctrination is the deliberate process of instilling specific political beliefs, ideologies, or values into individuals, often in a way that discourages critical thinking, questioning, or consideration of alternative viewpoints.
It relies on non-rational persuasion, repetition, and emotional appeals to ensure acceptance of a specific political agenda. Some might argue that this is “informative,” but education aims to teach how to think, encouraging questioning and evidence-based reasoning. Indoctrination, on the other hand, aims to teach what to think, prioritising obedience and adherence to dogma over evidence.
Unlike education, which fosters inquiry, indoctrination demands uncritical acceptance of a specific, often one-sided, political viewpoint.
It presents conspiracies as absolute truths while dismissing or suppressing REAL TRUTHS & FACTS. It often involves a deliberate effort by politicians to impose a worldview, ensuring that their bigoted and divisive agenda is “sown” into the minds of their support base so that it lives on for generations.
We are living this reality in Guyana today, a consequence of decades of political division to maintain influence and power, and no political party plays this game more successfully and publicly in the 21st Century other than the PNC (APNU).
The levels of indoctrination in the PNC camp starts from the early stages of life; often with young, politically unconscious minds, shaping their adult behaviour by reinforcing specific values often littered with racism, arrogance and brainwashing through “information overload” and “emotional stoking.”
The primary objective of this ideological training and divisive rhetoric is to consolidate power, build relevance, and maintain a dedicated support base, particularly within the Afro-Guyanese community.
The result is often extreme, violent protests or “lawless profanity-laced racial profiling,” which they gaslight by misrepresenting and twisting the truth, using their minions in the media to mix their journalism with “strategic opinions” that seek to keep us as Guyanese divided, while they advance their only agenda of “power over the purse.” It’s like a form of “Stockholm Syndrome” among supporters.
They use this psychological phenomenon to force their support base to be provoked and “lash out” against the opposing political leaders, government projects, policies, and systems that actively reduces their success as a viable option for governance.
The party has used propaganda to instill fear by indoctrinating its base with varying fabricated beliefs; however, such drastic and divisive agendas may not serve its long-term policies well, but rather it is designed for short-term political relevance rather than long-term survival.
The endgame of the PNC is to continue a 20th century tactic in a time when access to information, historical records and past events are easily available to disprove their argument.
They have no positive track record (whilst in government) to argue on and they know it! The only thing they can do is claim “racial persecution” by using the alleged plights of Afro Guyanese to attack the government, then create uncertainty around policies implemented by the government to help those same Guyanese they are “fighting for.”
It is a masterclass manoeuvre in the playbook of “dictator-like leadership.” But to the supporters of the PNC, I ask this, do you support your party on your own free will or because you have been told what to support?
And at what point do you morally draw the line between national development for all Guyanese vs the PNC forcing us to believe that we should refuse and reject those same policies meant to help us?
The PNC wants you, their supporters, to remain poor and desolate so they can continue to use their struggles as “clickbait” for scoring cheap political points, and when national development comes along, they create uncertainty around it (The recent debacle over the streets of Georgetown is a classic example), we must ask ourselves why!