BaKSAL 2.0 The funeral of democracy
Bangladesh is in the labyrinth of an autocratic rule. Some call it Bangladesh Krishak Sramik…..
The Genociders
Maskwaith Ahsan
Everything is apparently as usual in Vampiresia, people waiting in heavy traffic doing Facebook live, detailing the development works around and the lip-soldiers at TV talk shows talking about idealism, vividly narrating the mid-deeds of the colonizers who committed genocide and took a huge toll on human lives.
Yet, every morning young people go missing, sometimes the elite force presents them in court, sometimes not, while furious at public criticism law-makers introduce their ultimate black magic law of silencing dissent.
Once the colonizers were pushed out of the land, two gangs of fortune-makers take turns to rule and claim ownership of the empire. Both recruit foot-soldiers almost the size of an army.
Both gangs try to destroy each other. While their “eye for an eye” gang-war continues, all those farmers, laborers and slaves sent abroad keep working hard and sending back riches. The gang in power claims the success of the economy and on that basis demands additional political-tax from the powerless base.
Commoners do send their children to school but those schools are installed to confine the kids within the dream to become gang-in-power foot soldiers. Ever since the colonizers, the only way to achieve success has been to learn the art of collaboration. Unless someone becomes a collaborator of the ruler, they can’t make a fortune in Vampiresia.
Collaboration is the most welcomed form of art in the field of culture. People die at the hands of transport mafias, elite forces and gang soldiers but poets continue with their effusions of love for the ruler, novelists write about the glory of the ruler, artists keep on churning out portrait after portrait of the ruler and film-makers continue to practice magic realism in their films showering flowers on the ruler’s success.
So any creative person not ready to praise the ruler is branded as an enemy of Vampiresia, with collaborators walking around holding the threat of the black magic law.
This black magic law empowers all kinds of sentiment sellers, especially when religious, patriotic and autocratic sentiments are readily available for both the highest bidder as well as the witch hunters. Keeping common men busy with saving their own lives, the top collaborators comfortably transfer all the looted wealth to the developed parts of the globe.
The art of silencing people and empowering collaborators is cultivated to allow gang-based fortune makers an absolute freehand to loot, shoot and shout.
In a fight for the absolute ownership of Vampiresia, both gangs are ruthless in killing rival foot-soldiers. The lip-soldiers from both sides are out there just to prove the opposition to be worse than them, leaving no slot free for common men to highlight their miseries. Whenever they try to raise basic welfare issues, these lip-soldiers brand them as stooges of the opposition. So not belonging to either gang creates an identity crisis in Vampiresia.
Gang members strongly believe that the only precondition to earning affluence in life is to join a gang. They have no other skill to earn a livelihood, so they freely use their lips and muscles to justify the misdeeds of their gang.
The lip-soldiers are especially masters at justifying extra-judicial killings. Believing that history will cover up the brutality of present rulers, they are deft at taking dissidents on a time machine ride and repeatedly displaying photos and videos of the genocides committed by the colonizers, as if the huge death toll of the present doesn’t matter at all.
The way “native collaborators” used to deny the genocide committed by their colonial masters; “contemporary collaborators” similarly deny the ongoing genocide by their native masters.
The sub-culture of “collaboration-looting-killing-denying-and-justifying” keeps on ruling Vampiresia. From generation to generation, collaborators bite common men, the survivors transform into collaborators, go out to bite common men and so on. The moment an oppressed gets a little power, they turn into the oppressor.
