THE HORROR! THE HORROR! An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Horrors of Bangladesh

THE HORROR! THE HORROR! An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Horrors of Bangladesh  

 

(click above for article) 

 

The article is dedicated to the memory of two-year-old Meem, who was burnt alive in a hartal, along with 

four passengers on a bus. 

 

Private armies - student thugs and the Rapid Action Battalion - have been responsible for the violence: The state with its monopoly of legitimate violence has ceased to exist. Behind the violence and erosion of rights lie the two ideologies of democracy and “it’s poisonous fruit”, nationalism, that excuse and encourage every iniquity. 

 

Words from a tortured activist follow: 

On September 7 1989, thirty-three-year-old AS (his initials) was picked up from in front of the High Court at 10 am. He belonged to the Chatra Shibir, the student wing of the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami. His captors were from the Jatiyatabadi Chatra Dal (JCD), the student wing of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). The current leader of the opposition, Khaleda Zia, played Bandit Queen to the armed ruffians. 

They took him to Science Bhavan (Science Building) where he was tortured till 1:45. Additional thugs joined the sport. 

 

Golam Farouk Ovi, a student of International Relations and Central Committee Member of JCD, acted as emcee at the Mohsin Hall guest room, scanting on traditional Islamic hospitality.

A monsoon of GI pipes and hockey sticks rained: But the coup de grace was the dismemberment of the nerves on his right ankle, and on his left knee. He would be paralysed seven years later. 

A torrent of chapatti, bricks, blades, blood, broken fingers, amputated earlobe, mouth stoppered with sand, head covered with his Punjabi….testified to the modus operandi of this, and, as we shall see, twenty-eight years later in Hafez’s case, to the secular Inquisition. 10,000 hours of practice have predictably produced prodigies. 

From Mohsin Hall, the cortège proceeded to the venerable TSC (the hallowed Teacher-Student Centre). Suitably enough - with X marks the spot, no doubt - an overgrown vegetable structure prepared him for his quietus. Leaving him for dead, they celebrated their gladiatorial barbarity at Aparajeyo Bangla.

 
 

 

 

Bleeding heavily, consciousness came and left. A police car moseyed down to Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH) - the fuzz knew he had  been beaten, dilly dallying to allow the great escape. At DMCH, he wasn’t treated until a journalist gave 50 takas for the first bandages; he was at DMCH for two to three hours; from there he was taken to Ibn Sina in Dhanmandi.

He was there for two months; for nine months he had no bowel movement; he had to be operated on. Catheter was removed after nine months; doctors celebrated when he was able to sit after sixty days; then they celebrated his first urination…

According to a psychiatrist interviewed for this article, human cruelty surfaces when it is permitted and encouraged. The violence depicted throughout the piece constitutes an indictment, not of the perpetrators alone, but of our society. 

Philosophically disinclined leaders may skip the more abstruse sections of the article. A philosophical analysis was felt essential for what a nation considers good and evil  is a philosophical question.  Nationalism, for instance, is a nineteenth century philosophical idea. Today, here, it assumes the guise of Bengalism. 

Nationalism - right-wing totalitarianism - has employed the personality cult, from Hitler to Mussolini to Franco and Hirohito;  left-wing totalitarianism employed Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. The Kims of North Korea are in their third generation. 

Patriotism - “My country, right or wrong” - requires enforced disappearances, torture, extrajudicial as well as judicial murders. 

Every institution has been politicised: Thus it is in a totalitarian society, both of the left and the right. When the Chief Justice of Bangladesh did a runner, what was appalling was not so much his dash for life, but the utter indifference of the chatterati. 

Nationalism, with its emphasis on emotion at the expense of reason, requires music and song and dance. Artistic people have become part of the government: this is most in evidence in the case of Chayyanaut. The Padma Bridge opening saw an outpouring of musical endorsement from eminent singers. Plays are performed to recall the events of 1971, but none on the famine of 1974 when 1.5 million people starved to death even though there was food in the country and it was hoarded and smuggled to India. The faculty at the Oxford of the Eas backed the government to the hilt when two human rights activists were imprisoned to universal condemnation. Totalitarian tyranny requires the active participation of the intelligentsia, of civil society. 

The susceptible foot soldiers of democracy and nationalism have paid for their enthusiasm with their lives - exploited teens unmourned and unnoticed by our society. 

2000)
YEAR	STUDENT KILLED	POLITICAL AFFILIATION	MURDERED AT	AGE
2000	Zahid	Leader, Bangladesh Chatra League (BCL)	Hostel	Students  graduate  at the age of  18
1999	Sohel	Elected general secretary of students’ union in 1997	Near hostel
1998	Sajal	President, BCL unit	Campus
1996	Riyad	Convener, BCL unit of institute	In front of hostel
1995	Mizanur Rahman	Convener, Jatiyabadi Chatra Dal (JCD)	Within 200 yards of hostel
1992	Shakil Ahmed	General Secretary, JCD unit	Dormitory
1992	Rab	JCD leader	Campus
1992	Shahabuddin	JCD leader	Campus
1987	Sharif Hossain	General secretary, student union	In front of hostel
1985	Miniruzzaman Munir and 5 other activists	Leader and members of Jatiya Chatra Samaj	Campus
Figure 7

The Innocent and The Beautiful (short story)

The Innocent and the Beautiful

(click above for short story)

Zafar Shah encounters both the CIA and jihadis in this story. The murder of nearly two million children through UN sanctions in Iraq may be ignored by collaborators, but not by the resistance. Even the beautiful has been corrupted, and the innocents killed.

Excerpt:

On this fateful day, I spotted her on road 9A, waiting for her usual trishaw. There was traffic on the road, but I stayed focused. She was in a red-and-black shalwar-kameez, her arms bare, revealing teasingly her white shoulders and armpits. Then our eyes met: fortunately I looked away, and watched with horror a man, pillion-riding on a motorcycle, raise a knife towards Maryam.

"Marayam, get down!" I screamed, and ran towards the bike. The knife missed, as she ducked. The bike wove between the vehicles, and disappeared.

"That was close, Maryam," I said, panting, as I reached her crouching figure. She was weeping.

"They tried to kill me!" she repeated. It was as if she couldn't believe that they would try to kill her.

Herbert West wanted in Bangladesh

The opposition wants the government to produce Ilyas Ali, who must be dead and, hopefully, buried by now. We, the people, suffer. How can the government resuscitate a corpse? The only recourse I know of is to enlist the help of 'Herbert West, Reanimator'. As the title implies, he could bring the dead back alive. But the last I heard of him was that he was being pursued by some vengeful zombies he had 'resuscitated'. Will the opposition settle for a zombie? As far as we are concerned, the entire political class can be dead and buried, with no hope of reanimation.

Vercingetorix And Doofus Dignity (essay)

Vercingetorix And Doofus Dignity

(click above for essay)

Vercingetorix was the leader of the Gauls who dared to rebel against the mighty Roman Republic. Irrational? Sure, but also dignified. The pursuit of dignity often entails the irrational. But we in Bangladesh are no "doofuses" like the great Vercingetorix – we are rational, and without an atom of self-respect or dignity.

Excerpt:

"Take my compatriots. Ever since Mir Zafar betrayed the last Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Dawlah, we have been a rational people. At the Battle of Plassey, the former sold his honour, his country and his ruler to the British. A force of 3,000 went on to defeat a force of 50,000, and the Nawab was ferreted out and executed. Now, there's a real doofus for you. If he had supinely allowed the British to go on building their fort in Calcutta, turning a blind eye to the obvious, and selling his loyalty after an agreed-upon interval, well, he would never have found a place in the hearts of the common people, as he has with the superb popular play enacted in the countryside, but he would have died in a silken bed. After all, you can't eat glory and heroism. Posthumous applause is posthumous. "

3,000 nations

There are around three thousand languages in the world, so there should be three thousand nations.

Some may be quite small - the size of a park, say. Some may be just a bedsit, with the residents offering visas at the door to curious tourists. There would be recordings of the language inside and a few trinkets. When the inmates die, the bedsit will become a museum. Or the heirs may wish to inherit it if it pays well. Otherwise patriotism might be squeezed out of such a small accomodation. The children may decide to emigrate en masse. That is, the nation might move out.

As for the parks, they may offer green credentials, a bit of boating and picknicking....Indeed, it is hard to see how these nations can make money. They'll have to be subsidised, of course. This is not as outlandish as it seems: take Bangladesh. It is a highly subsidised nation. Indeed, even today many nations do not earn their keep. Since they don't have the pennies, they don't have the pride, just a lot of hot air.

So I personally see no objections to a UN of 3,000 members. It's perfectly feasible. In fact, it's already happening.

Law and Morality

In Bangladesh, thanks to the donors, we are focussing exclusively on legal measures to improve our society. This is disastrous.

What happens to morality? A society that attempts to rely exclusively on law is already moribund. Law without morality means a dead end. The NGOs have focussed attention on a 'rights-based' society. There's a reason for that. They have a parallel agenda of secularism, and the promotion of 'univeral [western] values'. And this precludes the morality that we have learned from religion. A hatred of religion is prevalent among the intellectuals - instead they import werstern ideas that have no resonance here.

Values such as compassion, empathy, altruism, commiseration are dead or dying. Without these values no society can function as a group of human beings, but as a bunch of animals - for even animals have their natural laws. When Nelson Mandela was faced with the task of nation-building, he went beyond rights and appealed to the Christian value of turning the other cheek. Unfortunately, he also imported secular western values which have devastated his society.

The Ethnocidal Civilisation (essay)

The Ethnocidal Civilisation

(click above for article)

Western civilisation commits ethnocide and menticide, as seen in India and recently in the Middle East.

Ethnocide – culture murder – has been the repeated behaviour pattern of western civilization, as testified by Alexis de Tocqueville. The culture is not content with mere conquest: it must control the very thoughts of those conquered. A recently published book on a Christian mission in Bangladesh retells an old story against the background of both the Muslim and British invasions of India, centering the Garos and the loss of their ancestral religion.

Demoncracy

This installation art from the UAE deserves high praise. Firstly, it is from the UAE, where there's no voting and no protests. Secondly, it is an Arab country, and many misguided Arabs have chosen anarchy over stability. Third, it captures essentially the evil of western civilisation as well as the evil that comes to a democratising country like, say, Bangladesh.

The neon artwork is by Kader Attia and is from from the private collection of Sultan Sooud al-Qassemi, a cousin of Sheikha Hoor al-Qassemi, the daughter of Sharjah's ruler.

The N in 'demoncracy' should no longer be silent.

A Disarticulated Body

A disarticulated body was found in Dhaka, Bangladesh. That was nearly two days ago. In a civilised polity, this would have set off a nation-wide alarum. Nothing of this kind has happened. The incident has been quietly ignored.

Why?

Democracy unleashed violence on a massive scale: by now, we have become inured to decapitations and disrticulations. This is what democracy has done for us.

The nation is agog at the spectacle of the opposition laying 'siege' to the capital tomorrow: dismembered bodies? Who cares?

Yesterday, the decomposed body was found in Kushtia, a small city in Bangladesh. It was reported in the inside pages of a daily. It just barely made the news.

We have become desensitised: indifferent to murder, no matter how gruesome. I have lived through autocracy and democracy, and I have seen the change in human nature.

On Clothes and Modernity

On clothes and 'modernity'

(click above for article)

"For example, I prefer to wear jeans and T-shirt too. Because I need easily to use my legs and arms." My 'modern' Turkish friend pleads efficiency for her attire; oddly, though, efficient farm girls in Turkey wear the shalwar, as they do in Bangladesh, along with the saree. 'Modernity' comes in many covers, and this one conceals less of its sinister side than most.

Permanent News (poetry)

Permanent News

(click above for poems)

A great poet described poetry as news that stays news. I hope these 8 poems on political violence in post-democratic Bangladesh - especially the murder of young politicians by themselves - remain permanent memorials.

Last year, around 38 student politicians killed each other. They have been hailed as the champions of democracy when, in fact, they are mere foot-soldiers of the political parties involved in criminal activity. This is the reality of Bangladeshi democracy that's never revealed.

Horace In the Hills

Horace In The Hills

(click above)

dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: These words of Horace were drilled into European children so that they would die by the millions on the killing fields of France and Germany. One English poet, who had seen action, called it "the old lie". But the lie is alive and well (if that's the word). As reaction to Bengali nationalism, Chakma nationalism reared its head…. But the Franco-German export never travelled well here.

An Elegy For The News

An Elegy For The News

(click above for article)

The murder of 1.7 million Iraqi children through sanctions between 1991 and 2001 has been quietly overlooked by the media. This shows in the glorifying of its author, Bill Clinton. Other examples of media silence are also given.

Excerpt:

As far as I know, only one man has pointed out the holocaust—for that is what it surely is—and he is Norman Finkelstein. “As in the Nazi holocaust, a million children have likely perished,” he observes in his book ‘The Holocaust Industry, (London : Verso, 2000, p 148): “ . . . the United States and Britain forced murderous UN sanction on that hapless country [Iraq] in an attempt to depose him [Saddam Hussein]. As in the Holocaust, a million children have likely perished. [more than a million, as The Economist tells us].” Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s lackey, went on television to say that the ‘price is worth it.’ And his partner in murder, Al Gore, has been rewarded with a Nobel Peace Prize, a rapidly devaluing currency. Mass killers are anointed and beatified.

contempt for intellectuals is healthy

When Hitler strove for power and legitimacy, no group - neither business nor the military - wanted the jumped-up pantry boy.

However, there was one class of Germans who greeted him with open arms: the intellectuals. One must remember the prestige of the German intelligentsia back in those days. German universities were the best in the world. Their research was world-class and Nobel prizes were showered on them. After the war, the American universities displaced the Germans.

And once this clique embraced Hitler, the rest of Germany fell into line, according to Niall Ferguson. German society is characterized by hierarchy and obedience. Stanley Milgram's experiment on obedience and power, when replicated in Germany, showed a compliance rate of 80%, as opposed to a compliance rate of 65% in the United States.

Bangladesh probably has a higher level of compliance to authority. Obedience is part of our culture. It has been suggested that the Rwandan genocide was possible because of a culture of obedience. A genocide in Bangladesh is easy to imagine.

In fact, we came close in January 2007, when the two political parties unleashed murder on the streets. Fortunately, the army stepped in and, thanks to the UN and Kofi Annan, the army remained neutral.

However, on August 23, the intelectuals tried to discredit the army by alleging that a soldier had slapped a young whippersnapper on a campus. One fictitious slap spiralled into nationwide arson and unrest. The reason, of course, for the mythical justification was that both the evil leaders of Bangladesh were in jail. Obedience to them entailed a rebellion against the forces of good.

Obedience to evil, then, was the prospect of the period. Eyewitness account informed me how the thugs gathered on Satmasjid Road in Dhaka. Some yanked a driver out of his car and set it alight near road 8A. The next morning, the denizens of Dhanmandi and Rayerbazaar found that every restaurant on Satmasjid Road had been burnt to cinders.

A healthy contempt for intellectuals is essential for civilised existence. Civilisation, observed G.K.Chesterton, is based on truisms, or it is not based at all. And intellectuals, ever since Socrates, have been making out the worse to be the better cause. It is a truism that murdering people on or off the streets is evil, and those who do so should be shunned. It is a truism that murderers should go to jail. It is a truism that one must not burn vehicles and restaurants.

Our obedience to intellectuals has resulted in our obedience to evil. Where will this take us? To what bestial depths shall we descend? Around 80 people are lynched every year because of the lawlessness encouraged by our intellectuals; around 50 student politicians murder themselves in the service of the two women who claim to be our leaders.

Besides, our intellectuals probably receive cash or other benefits from the Israel lobby - which would explain their strange silence on the Palestinian issue - making them minions of Israel as well as America. They are not on the side of the good, but on the side of the evil.

Democracy Shall Not Win

Democracy is a self-supporting system that delegitimizes all criticisms of the system. In Bangladesh, we never had lynchings under military rule: now, around 80 occur every year.

We have hartals where people are burnt to death: we live in terror of the government, the opposition and the mob that might lynch me on a mere suspicion.

But none of this gets blamed on democracy, where two rival parties, headed by two queens their flunkies obey unconditionally, create anarchy and violence.

Anarchy and violence are themselves seen as legitimate aspects of democracy.

For a well-argued case against democracy, read these lines by a Greek 'terror' group.

Iran's anti-Bangladeshi sentiment

My wife and I applied for tourist visas to Iran. Today we had our applications denied - in just 5 days. Apparently, this is normal for some countries. This shows a clear anti-Bangladeshi policy on behalf of Iran. They don't want tourists to go from Bangladesh to Iran. Perhaps they consider us 'meskin' (poor)?

We are a Muslim country - so Iran should welcome exchanges between brothers and sisters. Or is all that talk of Muslim brotherhood just talk? How can Muslim countries know each others' cultures if we are not allowed to travel freely to Muslim countries?

I hope the current ambassador will persuade the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that they should promote understanding between Muslim countries - including Bangladesh.

The Bad Barrel Of Bangladeshi Democracy

I have just been boning up on 'Political Psychology'. It has answered many of my questions regarding the evil in Bangladesh, but a cultural/historical explanation seems also necessary.

Hierarchies of obedience clearly play a part: our leaders are the wife and daughter of former dictators; they are like queens who must be obeyed; they are not only above the law, but above morality as well.

The Lucifer effect is the most fascinating: western donors, by insisting on democracy, have created a bad barrel. The barrel seems to attract the worst elements of society. Now, Bangladesh is going through a 48-hour hartal: if I drive, my car will be incinerated, probably with me inside. What kind of people incinerate cars and people? The arsonists are members of the opposition: they are 'bad' apples...or are they? It's the barrel that's bad (democracy as 'bad barrel' has had a long history since Thucydides; S.E.Finer notes that in the west democracy used to regarded with 'horror'.}

In 2007 - 2008, the donors had to reinstall military rule because we were headed for civil war: the best elements of society came forward to be our temporary rulers. These men and women were honest. They were respected, and the man in the street was pleased. It was a 'good barrel'.

After the cold war, the western donors enforced democracy on us: fifteen years of military rule were ended. These were the best years for Bangladesh. The military rulers even amended the constitution to give greater power to the judiciary. The barrel was good, and good men served under the administration.

John Mearsheimer was right: we would regret the cold war. I miss it terribly for the sake of Bangladesh.

But why is it that military rule was a 'good barrel'? The answer, I believe, lies in our culture and history. The culture is one of deference and hierarchy: military rule has been the only form of government in the Muslim world. Without a single chain of submission, society collapses. Today, we in effect have two dictators instead of one.