The Capital Of Suffering : Reflections On The Exploitation of Misery

 Bengali versus Bangladeshi Nationalism

In Europe, the least educated people vote for nationalists; in Bangladesh, the most educated people vote for nationalists. The European elite have learned from history; the Bangladeshi elite are incapable of learning. A wise man learns from the mistake of others; a fool doesn't learn from his own mistake.

Before proceeding, a little background is necessary.Pakistan was created in 1947 by Muhammad Ali Jinnah to give a home to the Muslims of the subcontinent. In a democracy, they would have been a dispriveleged minority. The emergence of Hindu nationalism and Hindutva have more than vindicated Jinnah's vision.

Pakistan had two wings, East and West Pakistan, separated by 1,000 miles of Indian territory. Muslims, of course, were the majority of both wings. While West Pakistan was a polyglot entity, the citizens of East Pakistan spoke Bengali. Bengali nationalism - as antithesis to the Islamic identity of Pakistan - soon reared its head in the fledgling country. Nationalism in Bangladesh is based upon language, the Bengali language; Pakistan's identity was a Muslim identity. Sheikh Mujib turned out to be the champion of Bengali nationalism, and his Awami League party its political vehicle.

To cut a long story short, the culmination of Bengali nationalism was  the civil war between the two wings of Pakistan in 1971, with the West Pakistan army killing an unknown number of civilians. India invaded East Pakistan, routing the Pakistan army, and creating the new country, Bangladesh.

Sheikh Mujib, the country's first prime minister, created a personality cult, rather like the rulers of communist countries, especially  North Korea. Again, as in North Korea, a famine occurred in 1974 in which an estimated 1.5 million people died. Mujib's rule degenerated into despotism, and he along with most of his family were killed by army officers on August 15, 1975.

In November 1975, Major General Ziaur Rahman came to power in a military coup. Although he had been a liberation fighter in 1971, he speedily reversed the secularism and nationalism of Mujib and gave recognition to Islam as the country's national identity. His political vehicle was the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). This was the beginning of an alternative narrative for Bangladesh, one based on Islam, not language, to be known as Bangladeshi nationalism rather than Bengali nationalism (their respective slogans would be 'Allahhu Akbar' and 'Joy Bangla'). Thus, two opposed religions emerged in the country, nationalism and Islam (see The Two Religions Of Bangladesh).  Zia appointed pro-Pakistan members to national office and restored democracy which had been swept aside by Mujib who had created a one-party state called BAKSAL. Zia was assassinated in 1981. In 1982, Lieutenant General Hossain Mohammed Ershad became chief martial law administrator, and finally assumed the presidency.

General Ershad continued Zia's policy of a pivot to America and Western Europe, away from the axis of India and the Soviet Union. The programs of denationalisation and privatisation, begun under Zia who had reversed the socialism of Mujib, continued with the approval of Western countries.

However, a momentous event occurred in 1989: the Berlin Wall collapsed. This had baleful consequences for Bangladesh. Western donors, no longer needing pro-capitalist dictators, swept Ershad aside and ushered in democracy in 1990. A decade of peace and stability came to an end.

Now, there were two major political parties: the BNP headed by Zia's widow, Khaleda Zia, and the Awami League headed by Mujib's daughter, Sheikh Hasina. The two dynasties plunged the country into violence.

The two religions of Bangladesh had now become incarnated in two women and two political parties. Skipping the intervening years, Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League assumed power in 2008 and has continued in power to this day: there seems no way that the party can be replaced for all elections will necessarily be rigged. Khaleda Zia has been imprisoned on trumped-up charges and the opposition has been effectively neutered.

Bengali nationalism, as opposed to Bangladeshi nationalism, had come to stay.

The Mother Of The Muses

In Bangladesh, we exploit the memory of the suffering of people in 1971 exactly the way Zionists exploit the memory of the suffering of the Holocaust. And for the same reason: to promote nationalism. The ruling party, the Awami League (AL), calls any protest, the slightest resistance, an act of the betrayal of the 'spirit' of 1971. The suffering of the people of Bangladesh is an endless reservoir of legitimacy for the nationalists. The opposition, the pro-Muslim Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), dares to query this narrative. No exact figures are known as to how many people perished at the hands of the Pakistan Army. Estimates range from 500,000 to 3 million  - the latter is the preferred figure of the nationalists, who would maximise suffering, and the former is the informed opinion of David Reynolds in his book, One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945 (New York: W.W.Norton and Co., 2000, p 246)

A moment's reflection shows us that the 3 million figure must be absurd.The American military killed 4 million Vietnamese by dropping more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped in the entire Second World War. The Awami League claim would be that the Pakistan had been far more efficient: they killed a similar number in nine months and without any aerial bombardment. Bina D'Costa has pointed out that "an upper figure gave the new country greater legitimacy".

Natasha Chowdhury of the University of Warwick observes: "Since the 1971 conflict, the unsubstantiated, sacrosanct Bangladeshi figure has been three million representing the huge sacrifices of the war to )sic) which M. A. Hasan argues is one 'no one should question.'" David Bergman questioned this narrative in 2014 and he was convicted by a court on the ground that he had "hurt the feelings of the nation". He was given a choice between paying a fine of 5000 takas (around $65) or spending seven days in jail. Extrapolating from studies in one part of Bangladesh, Matlab Thana, gives the figure of about 500,000. Sheikh Mujib gave the figure of 3 million to David Frost, who asked how he had come to that number (some people thought he meant 3 lakhs, the local measure, amounting to 300,000). Mujib replied, “Before my coming, my people had started collecting the information. I have messages coming from all areas where I have a base. We have not finally concluded, it might be more, but definitely it will not be less than three million.” It would appear that the statistic of 3 million was provided by the Soviet Union mouthpiece, Pravda! Studies were commissioned by Sheikh Mujib himself in the early '70s. "However, the government never publicly released the committees’ findings — and it has been suggested that this was because the details of only 57,000 people could be identified," notes David Bergman again.

If we were concerned about the suffering of  Bangladeshis, we would remember and recall every day the death of 1.5 million through starvation in the famine of 1974, and post-famine mortality of more than 450,000. Sheikh Mujib, the so-called father of the nation, was prime minister at the time. He was a democratically elected ruler He didn't lift a finger to save the people who had elected him.

Today, his daughter rules the country. Every newspaper in Bangladesh has sanitised his memory. No one mentions the painful facts associated with the hated reign of Sheikh Mujib. He set up his own private army, the infamous Rakhkhi Bahini. These quasi-soldiers terrorised the country and killed thousands of people.

Lawrence Ziring has written a masterly account of the events leading up to the killing of Mujib in his 'Bangladesh: From Sheikh Mujib to Ershad: An Interpretive Study' (Dhaka, Bangladesh: University Press Limited, 1994).

"Mujib presided over a court corrupted by power. It acted as though it could shelter itself from the realities of Bangladesh. But the license that might have been ignored in some other societies, could not be ignored in a country overrun by self-styled enforcers, gouged by profiteers, and raped by government officials. With literally hundreds and thousands dying from hunger, with millions more threatened, high living in Bangladesh could only be equated with debauchery and hedonism, with irresponsibility and indifference. To anyone with a grudge or a sense of national purpose, the conclusion was the same. Deliberate efforts had to be made to reverse course, and the only option for such a reversal lay with a new team, and the only team capable of making the manoeuvre was the Bangladesh army (p 103)."

The opposition, the BNP, whose leader Khaleda Zia is in prison, was reported in only one newspaper as saying that the people of Bangladesh have forgotten the famine of 1974.

Bengali nationalism cannot afford to remember the famine for it occurred under Sheikh Mujib, and therefore constitutes an antithetical narrative (narrative that blurs into mythology under his daughter, Hasina).  Mujib, and now his daughter Hasina, literally incorporate Bengali nationalism.

A Sleep And A Forgetting

Food availability decline (FAD) cannot explain the famine of 1974. There was enough food in the country. According to one source, food had been exported to India (famine, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition).

However, intellectuals in the country have found another victim card to play: against America. Thus, Rehman Sobhan, a leading economist, claims that "the famine in Bangladesh in 1974 might have had its immediate causes in the withholding of aid by the US".

At university, I would frequently hear of 'American imperialism' as the cause of the famine - Dhaka university in the '80s was a hotbed of Marxists. Indeed, the very conception of Bangladesh economy in the early '70s was that of a socialist economy, with government ownership of the means of production resulting in large-scale nationalisation. Only after the collapse of Communism did local intellectuals turn to capitalism. Rehman Sobhan now heads the free market think-tank, the Centre for Policy Dialogue, with his aide Depapriya Bhattacharya, who did his PhD in Moscow!

Under PL 480 (public law 480), food aid would be curtailed for countries trading, for instance, with Cuba. Bangladesh after independence sold jute to the Communist island. In September 1974 American food aid was suspended until it was agreed that trade with Cuba would cease. The famine had started in March 1974.

Studies have revealed that FAD in 1974 was not considerable. Indeed, in 1970 - 71, there had been much greater loss of agricultural output without a corresponding famine ( 18 % loss of output in 1970-71 against 14 % loss in 1974). American imperialism does not explain the cause of the famine. "As with most famines, the causes of the Bangladesh famine were multiple. These included flooding, rapid population growth, government mismanagement of food grain stocks, legislation restricting movement of food grains between districts, food grain smuggling to neighbouring countries and so called distributional failures. The famine did not occur among all areas and populations but was concentrated in specific areas; particularly those hit by flooding." Indeed, agricultural output in 1974 was at a local 'peak'.

It would appear that this was a monumental case of government failure. The official death toll was the meagre figure of 26,000; the actual number was closer to 1.5 million. "Ultimate responsibility of running a country rests with the government; therefore, the 1974 famine was a failure of the Mujib government" observes Rabiul H. Zaki.

Rise Memory, And Write Its Praise!

The BNP (however much I disprize dynastic politics), must be admired for not touting the number of the dead in the famine under its rival, the Awami League and Sheikh Mujib. Projecting victim numbers for political point-scoring transcends indecency.

Coming to power, Hasina began the National Mourning Day. On August 15th, the country is to go into collective grief for the killing of Hasina's father, Mujib, and her family. On this very day, Khaleda Zia, before her incarceration, celebrated her birthday with pomp and ceremony (some call it a phony birthday). This shows the extent to which the murder of the pater patriae is cause for celebration for a sizeable section of the country.

On Hasina's watch, the government-owned Bangladesh Television spews out a constant lava of footage of the suffering of 1971. However, hardly anybody watches the state channel. Thanks to cable TV, private channels and the internet, BTV's viewership has collapsed: "BTV, at best, is a nostalgic reminder of the past—of the powerful, yet entertaining serials and dramas of the 70s and 80s—when it was the sole broadcaster of the country. (Is BTV Obsolete?)" The sacred year of 1971 has been memorialised in drama, cinema and music, here and abroad. However, between 1975 and 1996 (when the Awami League was in the wilderness) there was collective amnesia.

In the introduction to The Americanization of the Holocaust (Flanzbaum, Hilene, ed., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, p1) the author notes that whenever she observed that Americans, Jews and others, never mentioned the Holocaust after the war, she came up against the example of The Diary Of Anne Frank. Anne Frank was popular: in print, on stage, on film in the '50s. However, the producers of the play "who were themselves Jewish, felt compelled by their own sense of what would sell to 'tone down' the play's Jewishness' (p3)". Indeed, authors say the horrors were sanitised. Lawrence Langer is quoted as saying: "there is little horror in the stage version; there is very little in the Diary itself....They permit the imagination to cope with the idea of the Holocaust without forcing a confrontation with its grim details (p3)". 

Immigrant Jews were too preoccupied with assimilating to Americans to project the Shoah.When Steven Spielberg was asked why Jewish American producers and directors hadn't made a film about the Holocaust, he replied "immigrant Jewish producers were having an identity struggle just wanting to become Americans (p12)".

"In early American cinematic responses to the Holocaust, not only was the Jewish homeland notably absent but so was the Nazi genocide itself," writes Sara R. Horowitz (The Cinematic Triangulation Of Jewish American Identity, ed. Flanzbaum, p 148).  In Gentleman's Agreement (1947), Gregory Peck's character masquerades as a Jew to find out first-hand the anti-Semitism that prevails in the country. In Notorious, Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 film noir, Ingrid Bergman's character has to play lover and wife to a Nazi, among a group of Nazis hiding out in Rio de Janeiro. It turns out that the gang had been trying to produce uranium. In neither film is there any reference to Israel or the Holocaust.

Norman Finkelstein tells us that "'The Holocaust' is an ideological representation of the Nazi holocaust (The Holocaust Industry: Reflections On The Exploitation Of Jewish Suffering, London, Verso, 2001, p3). "Through its deployment, one of the world's most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a 'victim state', and the most successful ethnic group in the United States has likewise acquired victim status." 

He notes the complete silence over the subject of the genocide as he was growing up: his parents were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Yet the young man could never connect his parents with the events in Europe. His friends and their families never inquired about the past "This was not a respectful silence. It was simply indifference (p6)." His parents wondered why he waxed indignant at "the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide". "The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies (pp 7-8)."

People have reasoned that Jews did not talk up the holocaust because they were too traumatised. Finkelstein rejects this explanation. "The problem was that Americans didn't want to listen (p13)." He argues that the real reason behind the silence was the conformist policies of the Jewish American leadership and the political situation of postwar America. American Jewish elites hewed close to US domestic and foreign policy, thereby acquiring power. "American Jewish elites 'forgot' the Holocaust because Germany - west Germany by 1949 - became a crucial postwar ally in the US confrontation with the Soviet Union (p14)." Still another reason was that left-leaning American Jews were opposed to backing Germany against the Soviet Union: the holocaust was deemed a Communist cause. "American Jewish elites did not shrink from sacrificing fellow Jews on the altar of anti-Communism (p15)."

Remembrance came with the June 1967 war. It will be recalled that in 1956, Israel, Britain and France had together launched an attack on Nasser's Egypt for nationalising the Suez Canal. President Eisenhower pulled back the aggressors: Israel had to relinquish Sinai (p18). "In fact, Israel was not important to American Jews (p18)". In a 1957 survey, Nathan Glazer reported that Israel "had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry". Indeed, after Eisenhower's intervention, American public support for Israel fell into "frightening decline" (p27).  

After Israel displayed its military might in 1967, America claimed it as an asset. It was a boon for American Jewry. Now, they would not be secretly charged with dual loyalty; they would, instead, represent western civilization against Arab barbarism. The 1955 and 1965 entries for Israel in the New York Times Index each filled 60 column inches; in 1975, it filled 200 column inches (p22).

The explanation that American Jews' anxiety for the existence of Israel in 1967 roused their memory does not square with facts. Israel's existential crisis occurred in 1948, when the Jewish state well-nigh disappeared under Arab onslaught but for a timely supply of Czech weapons on the intervention of Joseph Stalin ("Israel." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica 2007 Ultimate Reference Suite. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2018.) It was power considerations, not the Nazi Final Solution, that swayed America. Finkelstein quotes Peter Novick: "It was when the Holocaust was freshest in the minds of American leaders - the first twenty-five years after the end of the war - that the United States was the least supportive of Israel....It was not when Israel was perceived as weak and vulnerable, but after it demonstrated its strength, in the Six Day War, that American aid to Israel changed from a trickle to a flood (emphasis in original) (p32)". Finkelstein adds: "The argument applies with equal force to American Jewish elites."

When reading The Americanization Of The Holocaust (a volume to which learned scholars have contributed), I was struck by the absence of any mention of the Gypsies or the handicapped. Americanization has excluded all other victims of the Holocaust. It would appear that the Reich killed approximately 500,000 Gypsies. And not many are aware of the T-4 Program. In fact, the genocide began as an euthanasia program for the mentally ill. Between January and August 1941, 10,000 mentally ill people were gassed to death in the asylum of Hadamar, north-west of Frankfurt (Ferguson, Niall, War of the World, New York: 2006, p 411). Altogether 200,000 mentally ill patients were killed in the T-4 program ( T4 Program." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica 2007 Ultimate Reference Suite. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2018).

The Holocaust was not only perpetrated against Jews, it was also 'unique'. To draw any parallel between suffering and Jewish suffering is to make an "immoral equivalence" (Finkelstein, p 70). Finkelstein notes (p 148) the murder of a million Iraqi children through UN sanctions imposed by America and Britain to punish "Saddam-Hitler" (the actual figure was 1.7 million). Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright blithely announced that "the price is worth it". Norman Finkelstein compares this mass murder of children to the Nazi Holocaust - yet we are precluded from comparing one with the other.

Recollection And Community

Mnemosyne is the Mother of the Muses, including (and she must be her favourite child) Clio, the Muse of History. A nation has a shared memory; or it does not. To the extent that it does not, it fails to be a nation. Thus, nationalism must forever be obsessed with the past.

But, we have seen that the 'past' has no objective reality; in philosophical parlance, it lacks ontological support. We have seen the nationalists of Bangladesh selectively retrieving from the past, and even falsifying it to suit their agenda. In particular, they have perpetually used what I call "the capital of suffering" to promote a parochial interest in the name of the entire people. The figure of 3 million for the deaths of 1971 is sacrosanct while the figure for the deaths in the famine of 1974 must be whittled down to five digits, 26,000! Furthermore, the former is to be celebrated on every occasion and the latter (1.5 million) must be relegated to oblivion.

Happily, not all countries use deaths to celebrate nationalism. The present government of Russia, however jingoistic, does not iterate the number of the the dead outside Stalingrad. Vietnam lost between 4 and 5 million men, women and children in the war against America, yet today they have respectfully put away their past from public gaze and allied themselves with their former enemy.

Tocqueville quotes with admiration the words of George Washington to the people of America: "The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave".

The nation of Bangladesh has been split in two: one party professes an eternal fealty to India, and the other to Pakistan. This opposition has resulted in a perpetual state of internecine violence. The Bengali nationalists have made obscene use of dead bodies.

We have seen how the capital of suffering is used by Zionists to legitimise every action of the state of Israel. There are Jews against Zionism (eg, https://twitter.com/JewishIdentity ), who regard the nationalist enterprise as a golden calf. The worship of our collective self must needs be blind to all injustice and injury we cause.