The protests are, always, described as "pro-democratic". J.M.Roberts, in his Twentieth Century: A History of the World, 1901 to the Present (London: Penguin, 1999), presents a nuanced view (p 795). He mentions "a plaster figure of a "Goddess of Democracy", deliberately evocative of New York's Statue of Liberty. In another gesture that showed how much they owed to other western myths, students encamped in the square sang the Internationale, the old anthem of the Second International. That suggests both the complexity and the incoherence of the opposition movement."
In a few weeks after the start of the war in October 2001, women's rights and women's rights organisations were recruited for the Afghan war, backed by millions of dollars of reconstruction and development aid. Speaking on national radio, First Lady Laura Bush stated that the "brutal oppression of women is a central goal" of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. They had imposed "poverty, poor health and illiteracy" on the country's women, presaging what they "would like to impose on the rest of us", and, therefore, "the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women". These and similar ideas were held across the political spectrum. Senator Hillary Clinton, writing her opinion piece in Time magazine, welcomed the invasion but denied that the United States was engaged in "cultural imperialism, destined to arouse the animosity of Muslims throughout the region". The Senator inspired the book and the dogma, The Hillary Doctrine. "We, as liberators, have an interest in what follows the Taliban in Afghanistan." Promoting women's rights was "the right thing to do", consistent with the "universal values which we have a responsibility to promote throughout the world, and especially in a place like Afghanistan". "Left unspoken but implied in this argument, as in other international uses of rights as dynamite, was the necessary concomitant of pushing universal values on the country - the destruction of traditional Afghan cultures primarily through explosive outside intervention rather than gradual indigenous processes (Clifford Bob (Rights as Weapons: Instruments of Conflict, Tools of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), pp 139-147)."
Postmodernists have taken the whole of Western civilization to task for the evils of the Western past. They're cloistered academics: hardly household names. Deliberately apolitical, they take a sledgehammer to the icons of the Western mind. The "universal values" espoused by the Enlightenment breed totalizing systems of thought and metanarratives: "These theories are pernicious not merely because they are false but because they effectively impose conformity on other perspectives or discourses, thereby oppressing, marginalizing, or silencing them." Ultimately, universalism is a power game.
The desire to dominate has been blamed by these thinkers on Western philosophy itself: we in Bangladesh have seen how democracy was imposed on us with lies and deceit by the Western donors in cahoots with Western and local intellectuals after the end of the Cold War. The resulting misery has been suppressed by media, government and academia. Misery and democracy together? Perish the thought.
Not a single word appeared in the newspapers of Bangladesh about the findings of Walter Mebane and his team at Cornell reported in The Economist. Mebane and others studied the figures for the three elections in this country in 1991, 1996 and 2001. The first was clean, the second showed that some 2% of results were problematic and the third, a glaring 9%. Yet the elections had been vetted by the Carter Center and the European Union.
More than 80% of hartals since 1947 have occurred after 1990, under democratic rule. Hartals require enormous personnel, that is, a large body of student thugs. People have been burnt alive in these hartals by both the toxic leaders. A hartal is not state violence; it is violence perpetrated by the opposition to overthrow the government.
Hartal is best illustrated by enumerating examples of hartals. Here are a few, gleaned from local newspapers.
"Politicians are not human."
Such was the pronouncement of the brother of Salahuddin (33), a fisherman, who was killed in a skirmish between the two student wings of the political parties in the latest hartal (Prothom Alo, 6th April, 2001). Two rickshaw-pullers - one of them unidentified, the other Badaruddin (32) - were bombed while they were pulling their rickshaws during hartal hours. It took them 24 to 48 hours to die (The Daily Star, April 4th 2001). An auto-rickshaw was burned to ashes, and when the driver, Saidul Islam Shahid (35), tried to put out the flames, he was sprinkled with petrol, and burned to death. It took him more than two days to die (The Daily Star, April 5th 2001) . Truck driver Fayez Ahmed (50), died when a bomb was thrown on his truck (The Daily Star, April 4th 2001). And Ripon Sikder, a sixteen-year-old injured by a bomb, died on 4th May at the Dhaka Medical College Hospital after struggling for his life for eleven days (The Daily Star, May 6 2001).
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