Iftekhar Sayeed

Since our student movement led by post-pubescent lads and lassies, confident they know statecraft and everything else that I couldn’t even imagine at that age, I asked about Socrates:

“According to the account in Plato’s Apology, the Oracle at Delphi proclaimed that no one was wiser than Socrates. This puzzled Socrates, as he believed he possessed no special wisdom. Seeking to understand the oracle’s statement, he embarked on a quest to question those reputed to be wise—politicians, poets, and craftsmen.

Through this process, Socrates discovered that many who claimed to be wise were not; they thought they knew things they did not. In contrast, Socrates recognized the limits of his own knowledge. He concluded that his wisdom lay in this self-awareness: he knew that he did not know.

Thus, the god’s statement could be understood as highlighting the paradoxical wisdom of humility and intellectual honesty, which Socrates exemplified. By acknowledging his ignorance, Socrates was wiser than those who falsely believed themselves knowledgeable.”

…like any propaganda, must level itself at the three elements of our personality.

1. THE SUPEREGO

“Western society is moral, fair, above board (unlike the rest of us).”

2. THE EGO

“Western society is harmonious, orderly.”

3. THE ID

“Western society is powerful.”

Needless to add, for the bulk of humanity - the dregs - it is the appeal to the id that overrides all else.

As for some thinking souls (such as yours truly), the first claim sits completely at odds with history as well as contemporary events. The power that we so admire resulted in wordwide depredations unmatched by the rest of humankind; claims to morality and harmony go by the board when considering even recent havoc perpetrated, for instance, in the Middle East.

But, as we know, propaganda works.

Norman Borlaug’s green revolution was imported into Pakistan by the government of Ayub Khan, the tyrant who filled our bellies in the 1960s. He saved millions.

In the 1970s, we starved by the millions.

The mystery of film noir and the quality of the audience must be resolved.

In 1940-60, American (and some - but not all - European) directors produced masterpieces for viewers barely out of high school, and long before the explosion in tertiary education worldwide in the ‘60s, when brawn paid nearly as well as brain.

We should not be surprised for the scene should immediately recall an earlier one - when illiterate yokels gawked at the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

Herder nailed it when he observed that the greatest art - from Homer to the Old Testament - proceeded from the illiterati.

The oral tradition spans our civilisation, and great messages would not be so great had they been timebound and exclusive to a few.

One has only to think of the religious life of humankind to record the hoary antiquity of the sublime.

In the film “Detour”, we see a man pitted against merciless fate - something that is almost Euripidean - and losing at every turn.

On the other hand, we see the fates pursuing a woman to her own ruin and that of others for overstepping her allotted sphere in life in the noir masterpiece “Too Late for Tears” - terrible retribution awaits her hybris.

Thou shalt neither covet nor kill.

By way of reflection and anticipation, recall Eric Hoffer’s predicted demise in 1951 of the Soviet Union: “It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt. A popular upheaval in Soviet Russia is hardly likely before the people get a real taste of the good life. The most dangerous moment  for  the  regime  of  the  Politburo  will  be  when  a considerable  improvement  in  the  economic  conditions  of  the Russian masses has been achieved and the iron totalitarian rule somewhat  relaxed…..When people revolt in a totalitarian society, they rise not against the wickedness of the regime but its weakness (The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Perennial Classics, 2002),  pp 29, 43).”  David Reynolds today vindicates the stevedore’s  crystal-gazing: “Looser political controls allowed elements of a civil society to emerge outside the state, particularly student and intellectual groups. Their growing audacity was encouraged by evident splits within the party leadership over the nature and limits of reform. In China, as in the Soviet Block, in short, pressure from below could erupt because of rifts at the top (One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945 (New York: W.W.Norton and Co., 2000), p 576).”

In which case, the prospects for a liberal society - with its three separate branches of government - must appear chimerical for Bangladesh, lest wiser heads look back, not in anger, but hope at the happy military periods in our tragic history when the tripartition had not been a fantasy.

A doubting Thomas might be pardoned querying the dramatic ballyhooing of Bangladesh in the Western media: the Guardian’s recent article labelled the country “an economic miracle” undergone “in recent years” - a period coinciding with the “rise and rise” of the anti-Islamic Hasina regime since 2009.

More sober sources, such as the World Bank, display continuity rather than inspiration: “The emergence of an export-oriented garment in Bangladesh - one of the world’s poorest countries with a GNP per capita of only $170 and with 57 percent of its population in poverty - was a great success in the early 1980s.” The country profile shows a secular doubling of income per head  every ten years from 1990 to 2021 - hardly a wunder geschichte. Life expectancy, fertility rate, infant life expectancy all show a similar upward trend over the time period.

Interestingly, the Guardian article focuses exclusively on women in the textile business - completely ignoring the number of migrants to the Middle East and elsewhere, who are mostly male. According to The Economist (“Migration in the Gulf”), a migrant to the Middle East earns 250-350% more than one who stays home. Research shows that  “by letting in so many migrants the GCC countries do more (per head) to reduce global income inequality than richer OECD countries, which send loads of aid but keep their borders relatively closed. Were the OECD countries to open their borders to the same extent as Kuwait, which has two migrants for every native, global inequality could be cut by a quarter.”

Approximately 7.5 million Bangladeshis were migrants in 2010, with 90% working in the Middle East and Malaysia. Between 1976 and 2018, a total of roughly 12 million workers migrated from Bangladesh, starting from a paltry 6,078. The figure compares dramatically with the number of women (4.5 million) employed by the garment sector. According to the World Bank, a 10% increase in the share of international migrants in a country’s population leads to a 2.1% decline in the share of people living on less than $1 per person per day (the poverty level in 2005). 

WHAT GEORGE FLOYD’S DEATH MEANS - OR SHOULD MEAN - IN BANGLADESH

(click above for article)

We had two chances to clear the Augean stables that is Bangladesh.

And we botched them both.

The second time, with the death of Abrar Farhad, it became evident why we failed the first time, over the death of Biswajit Das.

Our conception of justice extends only to those we know, those who are like us. Abrar was like us.

That is to say, we have no conception of justice at all.

Please share.

INFANTS OF BANGLADESH 

I wanted to discuss a matter: our infantilism. You’ve seen the Al Jazeera report: the obvious conclusion to draw is that military rule was much better than civilian rule, even in the 70s. 

MILLION DOLLAR QUESTION: why can’t we draw this simple conclusion? What explains our misology? Elementary, mon ami! Foreign tutelage. Tutelage transmitted through local lackeys. Subeditor Modon Shahu told me, “We know people want martial law, but we can’t print that”. YOUR RIGHT TO KNOW, you know.

Then editor Mahfuz Anam, no less, says our prosperity, such as it is, is due to her highness Hasina, the PM. But we know the garments factories and the migrations to the ME occurred before her tenure, in the ‘80s. Anam, as editor, should know that governments cannot create wealth. When they try - as we did in the ‘70s - we do a bad job.

Then there’s the torrential propaganda from Western media: universal values. Undemocratic people are savages. Ergo, we are savages. Our best minds prefer evil to being tarred and feathered with “military rule”.

In brief, we are infantile: even our finest minds can’t put 2 and 2 together. They come up with 5 or 55, as children are wont to do. Foreign tutelage renders us infantile.

Gerhard Schumann (1911 - 95)

Song 1

I lost my Self and found the Volk, the Reich.

Song 2

And above us, illuminated: the cathedral, the Reich.

Song 3

Thus arose anew, from Blood and Soil, the Reich. 

Song 4

It glows Volk from many, from the Volk: the Reich.

Song 6

Oh Fuhrer! Rule us! Oh Lord set us free!

Song 7 

The sun arose. And with it rose the Reich. 

Playing political football with genocide is something we understand. We do it all the time in Bangladesh. We do it to settle scores and justify current crimes, like murder, disappearances and looting.

But when Biden chose to score points with Turkey, because its leader had bought weapons from Russia, we seemed to plumb new lows.

However, the Armenian lobby was chuffed no end. As if a presidential statement makes an historical fact "more true".

Demonising Islam and Muslims makes this group of people vulnerable to bombs, bullets and missiles.

Afghans, Iraqis, Lybians - many of them children - are perceived as demon-Muslims A good Muslim is a dead Muslim.

Demonising of Islam, for which there is a ready market,  has been carried on by writers ranging from the Somali Ayaan Hirshi Ali to the Bangladeshi Tahmima Anam. 

Our current capo,  masquerading as the legitimate ruler, owes the scant legitimacy to anti-Islamism. 

On either side of the Indo-Bangladesh border, the demonising of Islam shores up the tyranny.

The hanging of the tyrannicides of August 1975 - a family vendetta carried out by means of our public institutions - holds a disquieting lesson:

"tyranny must be unopposed"

What our rulers can demand of us is unconditional obedience.

Unconditional obedience to government was the pre-modern norm, universally accepted, until thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke began to ponder the nature and essence of government. Neither of these two men accepted the tradition of unconditional obedience.

In Bangladesh, the hangings, private vendetta made public, tell us that we are subjects, not citizens. The government can do whatever it chooses, and we must, like sheep, accept our fates.

Seven High Court judges refused to hear the case against the tyrannicides of August 1975.

They said they were "embarrassed", without saying why. They didn't have to.

But we all knew the reason: These upright men of the judiciary refused to sit in on a kangaroo court, where judge, jury and executioner were the same - The Dynasty.

The hangings took place, of course, and that was the end of our hitherto independent judiciary.

The last stand of the seven judges must be inscribed in gold - not golden - letters above the High Court Building.

They were heroes.

Brian Haw’s competition was formidable.

Against him were arrayed the cumulative might of the British parliament in his homeland, and the US Congress across the pond. 

In 1996, Leslie Stahl interviewed Madeleine Albrght, the Secretary of State, on the TV programme “60 Minutes” and stated that more children had died in Iraq through sanctions than had been killed in Hiroshima in 1945. “We think the price is worth it,” responded Albright.

 Nits make lice, no doubt, and in the public imagination the West was up against “Saddam-Hitler”.

Norman Finkelstein, himself a pariah in the Western world, put the figure at 1 million in his book “The Holocaust Industry” published in 2001. 

In its obituary on the recent death of Madeleine Albrght, the Washington Post wrote a glowing eulogy that nowhere mentioned the momentous interview.

Today we look at the background behind Brian Haw’s decade-long encampment at Parliament Square.

Was he an eccentric who had his facts wrong? On the contrary.

As early as 1996, Madeleine Albright, secretary of state, went on record to say that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children had been “worth it”.

Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who had documented the effect of the bombings and sanctions, described the deaths as “one of the great human disasters of history.” 

“It’s been a hell on earth since January of 1991.”

I leave the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about the moral position adopted by Brian, so redolent of the saints we read about in the holy books. 

In fact, his Christianity, I believe, was part of the “problem” in secular Britain, where he was ignored for ten years. 

19 June 2022

On this day, eleven years ago, Brian Haw passed away.

Who was Brian Haw?

You’ve probably never heard of him, and you probably never will. As though he had never existed.

From June, 2001 until his cancer no longer permitted, in 2011, Brian spent 10 years at Parliament Square campaigning against sanctions against Iraq. Nearly 2 million children died. 

This week, I hope you’ll join me in recalling what little we know about  Brian Haw, whom the media studiously ignored, surely the greatest man of this century.

Kindly leave your comments and questions below. 

18 June 2022

Tahmima Anam is the daughter of Mahfuz Anam (that's right; the editor of the ass-wipe Daily Star) and this is one of her finest blowjobs.

Nowhere does she say that the protestors are in contempt of court. They're rejecting the judgement of the highest court in the land, supposedly to be kept above all pressures, whether from the government or a mob of 500,000 savages.

These people are not the illiterate peasants - yet they do not know what a counter-majoritarian institution is supposed to be. These people were out for a lynching - lynching is part of our culture. The government has taken lynching to new heights - disappearing the dead bodies. But lynching is part of our mentality: to hell with courts and the law.

And aiding these pre-modern savages are people like Tahmima Anam - and newspapers like The Guardian.

How would the editors of the Guardian respond to a similar scene in London before the Supreme Court?

They don't have to live here, so they couldn't give a fuck.