The English Beast Awakens: A Warning from The Second Coming

THE ANTI CHRIST WILLIAM BLAKE 

 

Paul Cochrane

 November 15, 2024
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A lot of people on the planet are praying for the Second Coming – Messianic Christians awaiting Jesus and Muslims for the Mahdi to return. Tariq Mehmood is not among that crowd. Instead he spends a lot of time imagining and discussing possible futures. Some of these fictional futures may be realised – Mehmood teaches a creating writing course, ‘After Zionism – Imagining the Rebirth of Palestine’ at the American University of Beirut – and others – like the setting for his book The Second Coming – hopefully will not be prophetic.

Mehmood’s young adult novel is set in a near future in a fragmenting Britain, with England descending into civil war as far-right militias come to power. It is a dystopian desi mash-up of The Handmaid’s Tale, Clockwork Orange, and V for Vendetta. It warns of the dangers of right-wing nationalism and white supremacy, and imagines where such racism could take England if it is not, somehow, nipped in the bud.

The idea took shape during a “thinking and drinking session” with fellow novelists Peter Kalu and Melvin Burgess, said Mehmood over the phone.

During one session they were trying to imagine a world where the dollar has collapsed and the US empire is falling to bits, and what could rise out of the ashes. “We came up with a terrifying idea and then wrote different novels whose narratives kiss each others story, but are not the same, novels in their own right, although we have the same kind of monsters – the Bloods, a Christian militia that has taken over and are re-writing minds,” said Mehmood. The trio’s output is Kalu’s One Drop, Mehmood’s The Second Coming, and Burgess’ Three Bullets. “One, Two, Three was a conscious act,” he said.

The idea was also sparked by Mehmood’s milieu in Lebanon, being on the pulse of what was happening in Western Asia and its surroundings, with conflict in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Palestine. “I was thinking, what happens if war comes to Britain? Where would we go? Look at the rise of the so-called Islamic State, and the equivalent, the Jewish state; and the rise of the BJP, the ruling Hindutva party in India – what if all the Messianic forces came to England amid the rise of Islamophobia? How would all the simmering contradictions of Britain play out? Nothing comes out of a vacuum, all the contradictions are there in West Asia, in Europe, and the monsters come out, out of existing processes,” he said. “Racism has been around since the Crusaders, and has changed and metamorphised. Islamophobia has deep roots in these islands, and how it was used during the British empire – the ‘blood thirsty’ Afghans, the orientalised Arabs, the ‘savage’ African. That is what they said of the colonised, but who really is the monster?”

In his dystopian England ethnic minorities are being attacked, houses are daubed with paint to be targeted, upside down crosses dot the landscape, and mosques are burned to the ground.

Amid these rising tensions 19-year-old Marah Sultana is struggling to deal with the everyday life of a teenager in suburban London – family, love life, friends, studies. The opening chapter starts with racist comments directed at Marah and her friends on a public bus. Mehmood said a reader had questioned how realistic that scene was. “But that is our experience, a white man suddenly getting aggressive. In my youth [in Bradford, England], if a group of us went out in the wrong area for a drink, the chances of leaving a pub without getting into a punch up were pretty much nil. Some random man would say ‘get out of this country you black bastards’,” said Mehmood.

It is indeed a scene that has occurred innumerable times in recent history and is very much still in occurrence today. For instance in late July, far-right, anti-immigration violence flared across Britain, fuelled by disinformation. Videos of random attacks against ethnic minorities went viral. Communities united to protect themselves and their property. This story is of course playing out in many places worldwide, as people struggle for self-determination and equal rights, and against oppression and structural violence.

For Mehmood, the summer 2024 riots were like a chapter from his own history. In the 1970s, the far-right and reactionary forces were in their ascendency in the UK, while the police were unresponsive to increased calls from ethnic minorities to be protected from racist thugs. At this time, Mehmood had become increasingly active in Asian Youth Movements and anti-racist groups, calling on people to defend themselves. The situation came to a head in 1981 when Mehmood was dragged from his bed one morning and arrested for conspiracy to make explosives. Mehmood and his 11 co-defendants became known as the Bradford 12. During the trial, Mehmood represented himself and argued that they had a right to defend themselves against racists coming into their community. The Bradford 12 were looking at life behind bars if convicted. Following a mass campaign, involving thousands of people in the country and internationally, they were acquitted. The case made legal history, enshrining self-defence into English law, including the right of organised and armed community self defence.

Mehmood wrote about his experiences leading up to his arrest in his first novel, written in prison, and in an upcoming book about the whole legal case. He is currently making a feature length documentary film on the Bradford 12. All his experiences also fed into The Second Coming.

“It draws on my own social background and history of resistance, of the Bradford 12, and facing state injustice, going to prison, and being attacked on the streets, and still dreaming of a fairer world. In the North of England, where I grew up, we saw a very nice side of England, but also a nasty side as well – it is out of this English nationalism is rising,” he said.

The novel starts to heat up once ethnic cleansing begins. Marah’s father, like many others, thinks such a thing could not happen in the UK – echoing Sinclair Lewis’ great American novel It Can’t Happen Here (1935) – but it does, and Marah’s family become refugees – or to use NGO speak, internally displaced persons (IDPs) – as they flee north. Marah becomes increasingly rambunctious, starting to drink booze and smoke weed, but also quickly matures, as she has to financially support her family as her parents’ mental health deteriorates. With law and order in the hands of the militias, and women not safe on the streets, Marah and her friends form a girl gang to protect themselves, the Ginnz. They also organise a rave as a form of protest against the reactionaries. As Mehmood put it, “it is a bit of a Bombay film as well. We like melodrama.”

As in all Mehmood’s novels and children’s stories, whites are not the main characters. This is on purpose, to de-colonise the imperial narrative, but also for ethnic minorities to have characters, role-models, heroes that better reflect their background and ethnicity.

There is a long way to go, as Mehmood has noted teaching creative writing in Beirut. “It is difficult to get my students outside of the white world. It may seem ridiculous, but when they’re trying to write stories the characters would all be white, often American or French, British as well, representing the empire of today, and of the past that has impacted their lives,” he said.

Spoiler alert! As the novel progresses sci-fi comes increasingly into play. The Bloods have morphed the Church of England’s theology into an even nastier brew of religious zealotry and nationalism, and are seeking a second coming for England through the birth of a child, with the mother chosen based on unspecified blood tests. Unexpectedly, Marah is the chosen one, the Mary figure, artificially impregnated by the fruit of the King’s loins, and she becomes a propaganda celebrity.

In the hands of the Bloods, Marah is subjected to mind-altering therapy carried out by a shadowy American that is part-Evangelical, part-mad professor, part-Big Brother and part-Brave New World. And then the counter-offensive against the right-wing militias builds momentum, offering a glimmer of hope for Marah, her friends, the future and the reader.

“The Second Coming is about holding on to your mind, your loves, your dreams. And to endure the brutality knowing you must live. You have to have faith in the coming generation; my generation, we’ve done what we had to contribute. The idea is to give a warning to the youth that the beast isn’t what you think it is, and is far from dead,” warned Mehmood.

Paul Cochrane is an independent journalist covering the Middle East and Africa. He lived in Bilad Al Sham (Cyprus, Palestine and Lebanon) for 24 years, mainly in Beirut. He is also the co-director of a documentary on the political-economy of water in Lebanon, “We Made Every Living Thing from Water”.

 

The End of Liberalism

Trump Regains the Presidency

by Dan Lieberman / November 13th, 2024

Newsweek forecasted Donald Trump’s eventual victory. Its Nov 05, 2024 at 12:06 PM EST headline, “Kamala Harris Predicted to Win By Nearly Every Major Forecaster,” told the story.

As polls open, Vice President Kamala Harris is predicted to win the election by almost every major forecaster. Nate Silver’s latest forecast now gives Harris a slight edge in the Electoral College, projecting her with a 50 percent chance of victory compared to former President Donald Trump’s 49.6 percent. The model shows Harris securing 271 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 267.

Other aggregators echo the close race but similarly give Harris a small advantage. FiveThirtyEight currently projects her with a 50 percent chance of winning, forecasting 270 Electoral College votes for Harris to Trump’s 268.

Meanwhile, U.K. newspaper The Economist predicts that Harris will win 276 votes to Trump’s 262—a scenario also reflected by forecaster Larry Sabato, whose Race to the White House predicts she will win 275 electoral votes.

Just factor in that the polls, which also showed the race would be one of the closest in modern history, have been consistently wrong. After two previous elections, those reading the tea leaves should know that a portion of Trump supporters will not publicly admit they are goings to vote for the once convicted, twice impeached, and three times remaining defendant?

Plenty of afterthoughts of why Harris lost the election. Blame Biden for leaving the race too late. Blame inflation. Blame Harris remaining attached to Biden. Blame Harris remaining unknown. There is nobody to blame, and it’s best to look elsewhere. Caring, clean living, and people loving Vice President Harris had no chance against an electorate disillusioned with an outdated liberalism, and to the rough and tumble campaign of a notorious truth disabler.

The resurrected President of the United States (POTUS), Donald Trump, was the perfect candidate for a new Republican Party. The GOP drew voters who felt the Democrats had given excessive attention to  identity politics and issues that did not favor the white working class — welfare state, international trade agreements, foreign interventions,  human rights, minority rights, LGBT rights, immigration rights, gun rights, climate change, export of democracy, and diverse civil society. The caring programs of the Democrat Party no longer sat well with a non-caring public. Programs had become a repetitious sounding for attracting identity politics constituents, while offering no solutions to the problems. Despite the promises and the rhetoric, Fentanyl distribution, gun proliferation, and climate change continue and remain killers. African-American rights, LJBT rights and immigrant rights remain significant problems. The contrast between Democratic Party strong rhetoric and weak accomplishment bothered voters and left them with an impression of Democrats being hypocrites. Candidate Harris’ flipping on several issues, especially fracking, strengthened the hypocrisy charge.

The Republicans combined the marginal and disaffected voters with a candidate who favored Republican agendas of low taxes, deregulation, corporate protection, and increased isolation from foreign interventions. Mostly, they had a candidate who knew the American pulse and knew how to win.  Together with Trump and his cohorts, Republicans established a political arrangement that was poised for victory.  Salivating and exhilarating, they needed to find a few more votes to assure triumph ─ ballots signed by an uncommitted electorate that usually voted Democrat. The solution came from the Democrat strategists who championed Kamala Harris for Vice President in the 2020 election. By not considering the probability that Joe Biden would be unable to finish his term or stand for reelection, the Democrats failed to recognize they needed a vice-president who had more credentials and name recognition than Kamala Harris, and had the ability to serve as an heir to Joe Biden. Nor is it a coincidence that Trump defeated women candidates and not male candidates in his three election experiences. The sexist electorate is still not willing to have a female defeat a New York cowboy.

Remaining for all to ponder is, “How much did administration subservience to Israel and its military assistance that enabled the genocide contribute to the Democrat defeat? Accompanying the hypocrisy of liberal policies that promised everything and never fulfilled their purposes were larger hypocrisies that infuriated a part of the electorate.

• While urging gun control, the Democratic administration sent deadly military equipment to Israel to enhance the killings of Palestinians.
• While posing peace, the Democratic administration supported Israel’s war against the Palestinians.
• While preaching democracy, the Democratic administration did not oppose Israel’s silencing of its protesting citizens and murder of reporters who exposed Israel’s crimes.
• While clamoring for human rights, the Democratic administration made certain the Israelis denied Gazans the most human right ─ the right to live.
• While proclaiming guardianship of a universal “rules based order,” the Democratic administration brought disorder to the Middle East and subsidized violations of all rules in its “rules based order.”

The United States faces a political system in which its major political Party has lost much of its reason to exist and much of its constituency to maintain its existence. U.S. citizens face a government that is poised to operate from personal directives and eschew the trappings of government. The American people are faced with larger challenges, — demonstrating humanity and remaining human while their government protects the inhuman Israelis and allows them to destroy human existence in Gaza. How much longer will nationalist Americans permit a foreign Zionist lobby to control the mechanisms of their government?  How much longer will humane Americans permit its government to sponsor genocide?

Chillingly, the 2024 Democratic Party resembles the Social Democratic Party of the Weimar Republic, which clung to government power until replaced by the Nazi Party in 1933.Email

Dan Lieberman publishes commentaries on foreign policy, economics, and politic at substack.com.  He is author of the non-fiction books A Third Party Can Succeed in America, Not until They Were Gone, Think Tanks of DC, The Artistry of a Dog, and a novel: The Victory (under a pen name, David L. McWellan). Read other articles by Dan.

 

The Very Definition of Tyranny: A Dictatorship Disguised as Democracy

by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / November 13th, 2024

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

—James Madison

Power corrupts.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom, but concentrated power across all three branches is the very definition of tyranny: a dictatorship disguised as democracy.

When one party dominates all three branches of government—the executive, the legislative, and the judicial—there is even more reason to worry.

There’s no point debating which political party would be more dangerous with these powers.

This is true no matter which party is in power.

This is particularly true in the wake of the 2024 election.

Already, Donald Trump, who promised to be a dictator on “day one,” is advancing plans to further undermine the nation’s already vulnerable system of checks and balances.

To be fair, this is not a state of affairs that can be blamed exclusively on Trump.

America’s founders intended our system of checks and balances to serve as a bulwark against centralized power being abused.

As constitutional scholar Linda Monk explains, “Within the separation of powers, each of the three branches of government has ‘checks and balances’ over the other two. For instance, Congress makes the laws, but the President can veto them, and the Supreme Court can declare them unconstitutional. The President enforces the law, but Congress must approve executive appointments and the Supreme Court rules whether executive action is constitutional. The Supreme Court can strike down actions by both the legislative and executive branches, but the President nominates Supreme Court justices, and the Senate confirms or denies their nominations.”

Unfortunately, our system of checks and balances has been strained to the breaking point for years now, helped along by those across the political spectrum who, in marching in lockstep with the Deep State, have conspired to advance the government’s agenda at the expense of the citizenry’s constitutional rights.

By “government,” I’m not referring to the farce that is the highly partisan, two-party, bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

This is exactly the kind of concentrated, absolute power the founders attempted to guard against by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches.

Yet as law professor William P. Marshall concludes, “The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance. The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”

The outcome of the 2024 elections is not a revolutionary bid to recalibrate a government run amok. Rather, this is a Deep State coup to stay in power, and Donald Trump is the vehicle by which it will do so.

Watch and see.

Remember, it was the Trump Administration that asked Congress to allow it to suspend parts of the Constitution whenever it deemed it necessary during the COVID-19 pandemic and “other” emergencies.

In fact, during Trump’s first term, the Department of Justice quietly trotted out and tested a long laundry list of terrifying powers to override the Constitution. We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die…

Bear in mind, however, that these powers the Trump Administration, acting on orders from the police state, officially asked Congress to recognize and authorize barely scratch the surface of the far-reaching powers the government has unilaterally claimed for itself.

Unofficially, the police state has been riding roughshod over the rule of law for years now without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts, the president, or the citizenry.

This is why the Constitution’s system of checks and balances is so critical.

Those who wrote our Constitution sought to ensure our freedoms by creating a document that protects our God-given rights at all times, even when we are engaged in war, whether that is a so-called war on terrorism, a so-called war on drugs, a so-called war on illegal immigration, or a so-called war on disease.

The attempts by each successive presidential administration to rule by fiat merely plays into the hands of those who would distort the government’s system of checks and balances and its constitutional separation of powers beyond all recognition.

In this way, we have arrived at the dystopian future depicted in the film V for Vendetta, which is no future at all.

Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta (written and produced by the Wachowskis) provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a totalitarian government that knows all, sees all, controls everything, and promises safety and security above all comes to power by capitalizing on the people’s fear.

Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) are established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.

In V for Vendetta, as in my novel The Erik Blair Diaries, the subtext is that authoritarian regimes—through a vicious cycle of manipulation, oppression and fear-mongering—foment violence, manufacture crises, and breed terrorists, thereby giving rise to a recurring cycle of blowback and violence.

Only when the government itself becomes synonymous with the terrorism wreaking havoc in their lives do the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny.

V, a bold, charismatic freedom fighter, urges the British people to rise up and resist the government. In Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, ironically enough the same day that Trump won his landslide return to the White House.

Yet there the comparison ends.

So, while we are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs, this year’s electoral victory for Republicans was no win for the Constitution.

Rather, it was a win for the very entrenched, hawkish, establishment power structure that has exhibited no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the Deep State works best through imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—who rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

John W. Whitehead, constitutional attorney and author, is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He wrote the book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015). He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Read other articles by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

The Conundrums of Bangladeshi Politics

By Vijay Prashad

August 8, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Bangladesh protests. (Photo: Redwoan Ahmed)

On Monday, August 5, former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina boarded a Bangladesh Air Force C-130J military transport in a hurry and fled to Hindon Air Force base, outside Delhi. Her plane was refueled and reports said that she intended to fly on either to the United Kingdom (her niece, Tulip Siddiq is a minister in the new Labor government), Finland (her nephew Radwan Mujib Siddiq is married to a Finnish national), or the United States (her son Sajeeb Wajed Joy is a dual Bangladesh-US national). Army Chief Waker uz-Zaman, who only became Army Chief six weeks ago and was her relative by marriage, informed her earlier in the day that he was taking charge of the situation and would create an interim government to hold future elections.

Sheikh Hasina was the longest-serving prime minister in Bangladesh’s history. She was the prime minister from 1996 to 2001, and then from 2009 to 2024—a total of 20 years. This was a sharp contrast to her father Sheikh Mujib, who was assassinated in 1975 after four years in power, or General Ziaur Rahman who was assassinated in 1981 after six years in power. In a scene reminiscent of the end of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s rule in Sri Lanka, jubilant crowds of thousands crashed the gates of Ganabhaban, the official residence of the prime minister, and jubilantly made off with everything they could find.

Tanzim Wahab, photographer and chief curator of the Bengal Foundation, told me, “When [the masses] storm into the palace and make off with pet swans, elliptical machines, and palatial red sofas, you can feel the level of subaltern class fury that built up against a rapacious regime.” There was widespread celebration across Bangladesh, along with bursts of attacks against buildings identified with the government—private TV channels, and palatial homes of government ministers were a favored target for arson. Several local-level leaders in Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League have already been killed (Mohsin Reza, a local president of the party, was beaten to death in Khulna).

The situation in Bangladesh remains fluid, but it is also settling quickly into a familiar formula of an “interim government” that will hold new elections. Political violence in Bangladesh is not unusual, having been present since the birth of the country in 1971. Indeed, one of the reasons why Sheikh Hasina reacted so strongly to any criticism or protest was her fear that such activity would repeat what she experienced in her youth. Her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1920-1975), the founder of Bangladesh, was assassinated in a coup d’état on August 15, 1975, along with most of his family. Sheikh Hasina and her sister survived because they were in Germany at that time—the two sisters fled Bangladesh together on the same helicopter this week. She has been the victim of multiple assassination attempts, including a grenade attack in 2004 that left her with a hearing problem. Fear of such an attempt on her life made Sheikh Hasina deeply concerned about any opposition to her, which is why up to 45 minutes before her departure she wanted the army to again act with force against the gathering crowds.

However, the army read the atmosphere. It was time for her to leave.

A contest has already begun over who will benefit from the removal of Sheikh Hasina. On the one side are the students, led by the Bangladesh Student Uprising Central Committee of about 158 people and six spokespersons. Lead spokesperson Nahid Islam made the students’ views clear: “Any government other than the one we recommended would not be accepted. We won’t betray the bloodshed by the martyrs for our cause. We will create a new democratic Bangladesh through our promise of security of life, social justice, and a new political landscape.” At the other end are the military and the opposition political forces (including the primary opposition party Bangladesh National Party, the Islamist party Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, and the small left party Ganosamhati Andolan). While the Army’s first meetings were with these opposition parties, a public outcry over the erasure of the student movement forced the Army to meet with the Student Central Committee and listen to their primary demands.

There is a habit called polti khawa or “changing the team jersey midway through a football match” that prevails in Bangladesh, with the military being the referee in charge at all times. This slogan is being used in public discourse now to draw attention to any attempt by the military to impose a mere change of jersey when the students are demanding a wholesale change of the rules of the game. Aware of this, the military has accepted the student demand that the new government be led by economist Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh’s only Nobel Prize winner. Yunus, as the founder of the microcredit movement and promoter of “social business,” used to be seen as primarily a phenomenon in the neoliberal NGO world. However, the Hasina government’s relentless political vendetta against him over the last decade, and his decision to speak up for the student movement, have transformed him into an unlikely “guardian” figure for the protesters. The students see him as a figurehead although his neoliberal politics of austerity might be at odds with their key demand, which is for employment.

Students

Even prior to independence and despite the rural character of the region, the epicenter of Bangladeshi politics has been in urban areas, with a focus on Dhaka. Even as other forces entered the political arena, students remain key political actors in Bangladesh. One of the earliest protests in post-colonial Pakistan was the language movement (bhasha andolan) that emerged out of Dhaka University, where student leaders were killed during an agitation in 1952 (they are memorialized in the Shaheed Minar, or Martyrs’ Pillar, in Dhaka). Students became a key part of the freedom struggle for liberation from Pakistan in 1971, which is why the Pakistani army targeted the universities in Operation Searchlight which led to massacres of student activists. The political parties that emerged in Bangladesh after 1971 grew largely through their student wings—the Awami League’s Bangladesh Chhatra League, the Bangladesh National Party’s Bangladesh Jatiotabadi Chatradal, and the Jamaat-e-Islami’s Bangladesh Islami Chhatra Shibir.

Over the past decade, students in Bangladesh have been infuriated by the growing lack of employment despite the bustling economy, and by what they perceived as a lack of care from the government. The latter was demonstrated to them by the callous comments made by Shajahan Khan, a minister in Sheikh Hasina’s government, who smirked as he dismissed news that a bus had killed two college students on Airport Road, Dhaka, in July 2019. That event led to a massive protest movement by students of all ages for road safety, to which the government responded with arrests (including incarceration for 107 days of the photojournalist Shahidul Alam).

Behind the road safety protests, which earned greater visibility for the issue, was another key theme. Five years previously, in 2013, students who were denied access to the Bangladesh Civil Service began a protest over restrictive quotas for government jobs. In February 2018, this issue returned through the work of students in the Bangladesh Sadharon Chhatra Odhikar Songrokkhon Parishad (Bangladesh General Students’ Rights Protection Forum). When the road safety protests occurred, the students raised the quota issue (as well as the issue of inflation). By law, the government reserved seats in its employment for people in underdeveloped districts (10 percent), women (10 percent), minorities (5 percent), and the disabled (1 percent) as well as for descendants of freedom fighters (30 percent).

It is the latter quota that has been contested since 2013 and which returned as an emotive issue this year for the student protesters—especially after the prime minister’s incendiary comment at a press conference that those protesting the freedom fighter quotas were “rajakarer natni” (grandchildren of war traitors). British journalist David Bergman, who is married to prominent Bangladeshi activist lawyer Sara Hossain and was hounded into exile by the Hasina government, called this comment the “terrible error” that ended the government.

Military Islam

In February 2013, Abdul Quader Mollah of the Jamaat-e-Islami was sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity during Bangladesh’s liberation war (he was known to have killed at least 344 civilians). When he left the court, he made a V sign, whose arrogance inflamed large sections of Bangladesh’s society. Many in Dhaka gathered at Shahbag, where they formed a Gonojagoron Moncho (Mass Awakening Platform). This protest movement pushed the Supreme Court to reassess the verdict, and Mollah was hanged on December 12. The Shahbag movement brought to the surface a long-term tension in Bangladesh regarding the role of religion in politics.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman initially claimed that Bangladesh would be a socialist and secular country. After his assassination by the military, general Ziaur Rahman took over the country and governed it from 1975 to 1981. During this time, Zia brought religion back into public life, welcomed the Jamaat-e-Islami from banishment (which had been due to its participation in the genocide of 1971), and—in 1978—formed the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) on nationalist lines with a strong critical stance toward India. General Hussain Muhammad Ershad, who took control after his own coup in 1982 and ruled until 1990, went further, declaring that Islam was the state’s religion. This provided a political contrast with the views of Mujib, and of his daughter Sheikh Hasina who took the reins of her father’s party, the Awami League, in 1981.

The stage was set for a long-term contest between Sheikh Hasina’s centrist-secular Awami League and the BNP, which was taken over by Zia’s wife Khaleda Zia after the General was assassinated in 1981. Gradually, the military—which had a secular orientation in its early days—began to witness a growing Islamist mood. Political Islam has grown in Bangladesh with the rise of piety in the general population, some of it driven by the Islamization of migrant labor to the Gulf states and to Southeast Asia. The latter has steadily reflected growth in observance of the Islamic faith in the aftermath of the war on terror’s many consequences. One should neither exaggerate this threat nor minimize it.

The relationship of the political Islamists, whose popular influence has grown since 2013, with the military is another factor that requires much more clarity. Given the dent in the fortunes of the Jamaat-e-Islami since the War Crimes Tribunal documented how the group was involved on the side of Pakistan during the liberation struggle, it is likely that this formation of political Islam has a threshold in terms of its legitimacy. However, one complicating factor is that the Hasina government relentlessly used the fear of “political Islam” as a bogeyman to obtain U.S. and Indian silent consent to the two elections in 2018 and 2024. If the interim government holds a fair election on schedule, this will allow Bangladeshi people to find out if political Islam is a dispensation they wish to vote for.

New Cold War

Far away from the captivating issues put forward by the students which led to the ouster of Sheikh Hasina are dangerous currents that are often not discussed during these exciting times. Bangladesh is the eighth-largest country in the world by population, and it has the second highest Gross Domestic Product in South Asia. The role it plays in the region and in the world is not to be discounted.

Over the course of the past decade, South Asia has faced significant challenges as the United States imposed a new cold war against China. Initially, India participated with the United States in the formations around the U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy. But, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, India has begun to distance itself from this U.S. initiative and tried to put its own national agenda at the forefront. This meant that India did not condemn Russia but continued to buy Russian oil. At the same time, China had—through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—built infrastructure in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, India’s neighbors.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that four governments in the region that had begun to collaborate with the BRI have fallen, and that their replacements in three of them are eager for better ties with the United States. This includes Shehbaz Sharif, who came to power in Pakistan in April 2022 with the ouster of Imran Khan (now in prison), Ranil Wickremesinghe, who briefly came to power in Sri Lanka in July 2022 after setting aside a mass uprising that had other ideas than the installation of a party with only one member in parliament (Wickremesinghe himself), and KP Sharma Oli, who came to power in July 2024 in Nepal after a parliamentary shuffle that removed the Maoists from power.

What role the removal of Sheikh Hasina will play in the calculations in the region can only be gauged after elections are held under the interim government. But there is little doubt that these decisions in Dhaka are not without their regional and global implications.

The students rely upon the power of the mass demonstrations for their legitimacy. What they do not have is an agenda for Bangladesh, which is why the old neoliberal technocrats are already swimming like sharks around the interim government. In their ranks are those who favor the BNP and the Islamists. What role they will play is yet to be seen.

If the student committee now formed a bloc with the trade unions, particularly the garment worker unions, there is the possibility that they might indeed form the opening for building a new democratic and people-centered Bangladesh. If they are unable to build this historical bloc, they may be pushed to the side, just like the students and workers in Egypt, and they might have to surrender their efforts to the military and an elite that has merely changed its jersey.


This article was produced by Globetrotter.


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Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. Tings Chak is the art director and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and lead author of the study “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China.” She is also a member of Dongsheng, an international collective of researchers interested in Chinese politics and society.

Constitutional Violations: Julian Assange, Privacy and the CIA

by Binoy Kampmark / December 28th, 2023

As a private citizen, the options for suing an intelligence agency are few and far between.  The US Central Intelligence Agency, as with other members of the secret club, pour scorn on such efforts.  To a degree, such a dismissive sentiment is understandable: Why sue an agency for its bread-and-butter task, which is surveillance?

This matter has cropped up in the US courts in what has become an international affair, namely, the case of WikiLeaks founder and publisher, Julian Assange.  While the US Department of Justice battles to sink its fangs into the Australian national for absurd espionage charges, various offshoots of his case have begun to grow.  The issue of CIA sponsored surveillance during his stint in the Ecuadorian embassy in London has been of particular interest, since it violated both general principles of privacy and more specific ones regarding attorney-client privilege.  Of particular interest to US Constitution watchers was whether such actions violated the reasonable expectation of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment.

Four US citizens took issue with such surveillance, which was executed by the Spanish security firm Undercover (UC) Global and its starry-eyed, impressionable director David Morales under instruction from the CIA.  Civil rights attorney Margaret Ratner Kunstler and media lawyer Deborah Hrbek, and journalists John Goetz and Charles Glass, took the matter to the US District Court of the Southern District of New York in August last year.  They had four targets of litigation: the CIA itself, its former director, Michael R. Pompeo, Morales and his company, UC Global SL.

All four alleged that the US Government had conducted surveillance on them and copied their information during visits to Assange in the embassy, thereby violating the Fourth Amendment.  In doing so, the plaintiffs argued they were entitled to money damages and injunctive relief.  The government moved to dismiss the complaint as amended.

On December 19, District Judge John G. Koeltl delivered a judgment of much interest, granting, in part, the US government’s motion to dismiss but denying other parts of it.  Before turning to the relevant features of Koeltl’s reasons, various observations made in the case bear repeating.  The judge notes, for instance, Pompeo’s April 2017 speech, in which he “‘pledged that his office would embark upon a ‘long term’ campaign against WikiLeaks.’”  He is cognisant of the plaintiffs’ claims “Morales was recruited to conduct surveillance on Assange and his visitors on behalf of the CIA and that this recruitment occurred at a January 2017 private security industry convention at the Las Vegas Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.”

From that meeting, it is claimed that “Morales created an operations unit, improved UC Global’s systems, and set up live streaming from the United States so that surveillance could be accessed instantly by the CIA.”  The data gathered from UC Global “was either personally delivered to Las Vegas; Washington, D.C.; and New York City by Morales (who travelled to these locations more than sixty times in the three years following the Las Vegas convention) or placed on a server that provided external access to the CIA”.

Koeltl preferred to avoid deciding on the claims that Morales and UC Global were, in fact, “acting as agents of Pompeo and the CIA”.  Such matters were questions of fact “that cannot be decided on a motion to dismiss.”

A vital issue in the case was whether the plaintiffs had standing to sue the CIA in the first place.  Citing the case of ACLU v Clapper, which involved a challenge to the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata collection program, Koeltl accepted that they did.  In doing so, he rejected a similar argument made by the government in Clapper – that the injuries alleged were simply “too speculative and generalized” and that the information gathered via surveillance would necessarily even be used against them.  “In this case, the plaintiffs need not allege, as the Government argues, that the Government will imminently use their information collected at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.”   If the search of the conversations and electronic devices along with the seizure of the contents of the electronic devices “were unlawful, the plaintiffs have suffered a concrete and particularized injury fairly traceable to the challenged program and redressable by favorable ruling.”

Less satisfactory for the plaintiffs was the finding they had no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their conversations with the publisher given that “they knew Assange was surveilled even before the CIA’s alleged involvement.”  The judge thought it significant that they did “not allege that they would not have met Assange had they known their conversations would be surveilled.”  Additionally, it “would not be recognized as reasonable by society” to have expected conversations held with Assange at the embassy in London to be protected, given such societal acceptance of, for instance, video surveillance in government buildings.

This reasoning is faulty, given that the visits by the four plaintiffs to the embassy did not take place with their knowledge of the operation being conducted by UC Global with CIA blessing.  In a general sense, anyone visiting the embassy could not help but suspect that Assange might be the object of surveillance, but to suggest something akin to a waiver of privacy rights on the part of attorneys and journalists aiding a persecuted publisher is an odd turn.

The US Government also succeeded on the point that the plaintiffs had no reasonable expectation to privacy regarding their passports or their devices they voluntarily left at the Embassy reception desk.  In doing so, they “assumed the risk that the information may be conveyed to the Government.”  Those visiting embassies must, it would seem, be perennially on guard.

That said, the plaintiffs convinced the judge that they had “sufficient allegations that the CIA and Pompeo, through Morales and UC Global, violated their reasonable expectation to privacy in the contents of their electronic devices.”  The government even went so far as to concede that point.

Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, the biggest fish was let off the hook.  The plaintiffs had attempted to use the 1971 US Supreme Court case of Bivens to argue that the former CIA director be held accountable and liable for violating constitutional rights.  Koeltl thought the effort to extend the application of Bivens inappropriate in terms of the high standing nature of the defendant and the context.  “As a presidential appointee confirmed by Congress […] Defendant Pompeo is in a different category of defendant from a law enforcement agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.”  More’s the pity.

Leaving aside some of the more questionable turns of reasoning in Koeltl’s judgment, public interest litigants and activists can take heart from the prospect that civil trials against the CIA for violations of the US Constitution are no longer unrealistic.  “We are thrilled,” declared Richard Roth, the plaintiffs’ attorney, “that the court rejected the CIA’s efforts to silence the plaintiffs, who merely seek to expose the CIA’s attempt to carry out Pompeo’s vendetta against WikiLeaks.”  The appeals process, however, is bound to be tested.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.