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Bangladesh, and the Lucifer Effect - The Allure of Toxicity: A Situationist Explanation of the Evil in Bangladesh

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In a vertical, hierarchic society such as ours in Bangladesh, this observation would be equally true.

Obedience to authority, however, is innate, according to Stanley Milgram. We are born with a disposition to obey, as part of our evolutionary psychology; but there's more to it than that. Our disposition to obey interacts with social structures and specific circumstances - in short, situations - to produce special cases of obedience (Political Psychology, p 52). Hannah Arendt famously coined the expression "the banality of evil". We've noted how Javed and his peers, school-going teenagers, became student thugs. But obedience is obedience to authority, and therefore leadership plays a central role in directing evil.

According to David Reynolds:" But as we shall also see in Yugoslavia, ethnicity is rarely a spontaneous force. It needs to be manipulated by politicians. What mattered in Rwanda was the reaction of Hutu hard-liners in the party and the army to their impending loss of power" (One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945 (New York: W.W.Norton and Co., 2000), pp. 606-607).

The Rwandan genocide was meticulously planned by Hutu army officers and politicians to avoid sharing power with Tutsi rebels after a peace accord to end a civil war. They raised a militia, cranked up the genocidal propaganda and imported hundreds of thousands of machetes in advance. The outside world barely noticed until it was too late. The genocide ended only when a Tutsi army swept in to stop it, led by Rwanda's current president, Paul Kagame.

The lawyer from Kigali continues: "You take a poor, ignorant population, and give them arms, and say, 'It's yours. Kill.' They'll obey. The peasants, who were paid or forced to kill, were looking up to people of higher socio-economic standing to see how to behave. So the people of influence ["] are often the big men in the genocide. They may think that they didn't kill because they didn't take life with their own hands, but the people were looking to them for their orders. And, in Rwanda, an order can be given very quietly."

The allure of toxic leaders can never be explained rationally. The leadership itself may behave rationally, but their cultish followers are hard to fathom. The extra-rational loyalty of student thugs in Bangladesh to their respective leaders is a case in point.

What depths can obedience plumb? That question was answered on November 28, 1978 in the jungles of Guyana. It is one thing to kill your neighbour, but a different thing to kill your own children on command. The command was given by Jim Jones to his 900-plus followers to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. Most of them obeyed willingly. Jim Jones had been a pastor of Peoples Temple in San Francisco and Los Angeles. He set out to create a socialist utopia in the South American country, where brotherhood and tolerance were to replace the materialism and racism of the United States. He became an egomaniacal tyrant and ultimately an Angel of Death (The Lucifer Effect, pp 294 - 295). One is reminded of the worship of Moloch. And if people can follow Jim Jones, they can follow anyone.

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Iftekhar Sayeed teaches English and economics. He was born and lives in Dhaka, à ‚¬Å½Bangladesh. He has contributed to AXIS OF LOGIC, ENTER TEXT, POSTCOLONIAL à ‚¬Å½TEXT, LEFT CURVE, MOBIUS, ERBACCE, THE JOURNAL, and other publications. à ‚¬Å½He (more...)
 
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