SACW - 20 April 2017 | Pakistan: Silencing Mashal Khan / Bangladesh: Interview with Rehman Sobhan / India: God’s soldiers; Threats to a Rationalist / Lessons from Hitler’s Rise / interview with Belarusian anarchist Mikola Dedok

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 20 April 2017 - No. 2934 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. India - Pakistan: The Cows Between Us | Mohammed Hanif
2. Pakistan: Silencing Mashal | Zahid Hussain
3. India: A Saffron Republic? | Simran Sodhi
4. India: Behror (Alwar) Killing - A Grave Challenge | V.K. Tripathi
5. The search for new time | Dilip Simeon
6. New Development Bank – Peoples’ Perspectives: New Delhi Declaration by Peoples’ Forum on BRICS
7. India: Hinduism at risk from RSS | Apoorvanand
8. India: Hip - Hop song recalling the demolition of Babri Masjid on December 6 1992, the day we lost our humanity
9. Kathmandu Statement Calls For A South Asia Human Rights Commission (7 April 2017)
10. India: Challenges and Threats in the life of a Rationalist | Narendra Nayak
11. India: An Appeal to Stop Cow Vigilantism - Memo to Chief Minister of Rajasthan by PUCL Rajasthan

12. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - Press Release : Bhumi Adhikar Andolan Demands Justice for Pehlu Khan and Victims of Alwar Terror
 - India - Babri Masjid case: Supreme Court revives criminal conspiracy against LK Advani, Uma Bharti, and other leaders
 - India: Fight Against Treason Call of Hindu Rashtra by BJP ( Rajindar Sachar)
 - Can Great Britain Discipline Caste Supremacists? (A.K. Biswas)
 - For India’s liberals, party is over (Srijana Mitra Das)
 - India: 34 years of Left in Bengal failed to improve the status and representation of muslims of in Bengal (Sharjeel Imam and Saquib Salim)
 - Moral police cops of Hindu Yuva Vahini (Founded By UP chief Minister Adityanath) openly harass couple in Meerut
 - Kashmir: Inspiration for jihadi resistance in the Valley is moving to ever-younger minds (David Devadas)
 - 'Islamophobia' Phobia: Politics of offence and the death sentence for debate culture in JNU (Abhiruchi Ranjan and Chitra Adkar)
 - Hindi Article: Ayodhya Dispute
 - Religious Vigilantism might Hurt India’s Global Stature (Aparna Pande)
 - India: Video of Speech - We will behead those opposed to a Ram Temple at Babri site, says BJP MLA Raja Singh / and New report
 - Is this Hindutva ? (Tavleen Singh)
 - NDTV discussions on cow vigilantism & violence
 - Terrorism in the name of the cow: India's flirtation with anarchy (Samar Halarnkar)

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
13. India: God’s soldiers and gau rakshaks | Dushyant
14. How Repressive Law Enforcement Crushed Minimum Wage Protests in Bangladesh’s Garment Sector | David Bergman and Muktadir Rashid
15. ‘I wanted to be part of a process which … would shape the course of the struggle for self-rule for the Bangalis’ - Interview with Rehman Sobhan
16. India: Clever ruse - Editorial, The Telegraph
17. 'Enemy property': India's answer to Trump wants to raze Pakistan founder's home | Vidhi Doshi
18. Lessons from Hitler’s Rise | Christopher R. Browning	
19. How to make an entire generation apolitical: an interview with Belarusian anarchist Mikola Dedok

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1. INDIA - PAKISTAN: THE COWS BETWEEN US | Mohammed Hanif
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Maybe the world would be a better place if cows ate humans. At least they wouldn’t invoke divine sanction or cultural taboos before having us for lunch. They’d just say: We’re hungry.
http://www.sacw.net/article13208.html

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2. PAKISTAN: SILENCING MASHAL | Zahid Hussain
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MASHAL Khan was neither the first nor is he the last victim of the religious bigotry that has become so pervasive in our society. The gruesome lynching of the young Mardan university student shows how easy it is to inflame a mindless mob in the name of faith.
http://www.sacw.net/article13218.html

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3. INDIA: A SAFFRON REPUBLIC? | Simran Sodhi
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It would be a mistake today for anyone who believes in the separation of the Church and State not to be alarmed by the Saffron wave sweeping this nation
http://www.sacw.net/article13203.html

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4. INDIA: BEHROR (ALWAR) KILLING - A GRAVE CHALLENGE
by V.K. Tripathi
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April 1, 2017 was a dark day when Pehlu Khan, a farmer from Jaysinghpur village in Mewat district, Haryana was thrashed to near death by a mob at 6 PM in Behror town of Alwar District, Rajasthan on Delhi-Jaipur highway.
http://www.sacw.net/article13215.html

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5. THE SEARCH FOR NEW TIME
by Dilip Simeon
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Paper Presented at the Champaran Satyagrah centenary celebrations Patna, April 10, 2017
http://www.sacw.net/article13214.html

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6. NEW DEVELOPMENT BANK – PEOPLES’ PERSPECTIVES: NEW DELHI DECLARATION BY PEOPLES’ FORUM ON BRICS
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The Peoples’ Forum on BRICS, a network of peoples’ movements, trade unions, national networks and civil society organisations addressing a range of economic, environmental and social injustice, gathered in Delhi on 30th March 2017 to raise deep concerns over the fact that the New development Bank promoted by BRICS is no different from other IFI’s such as the World Bank or Asian Development Bank. The Forum reviewed various projects that the fledgling NDB is financing and found that it is promoting a business as usual model, rather than striking a dramatically new path for people-centered development that was promised in the formation of the Bank by the BRICS nations.
http://www.sacw.net/article13213.html

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7. INDIA: HINDUISM AT RISK FROM RSS
by Apoorvanand
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there is a clear threat now of Hinduism being taken over by an organisation called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Hinduism, a religion that is a way of life, as its adherents like it to be known, is now in the hands of organisations and people who want to transform it into an ideology of dominance over populations, which are seen, feared and abhorred as ‘others’.
http://www.sacw.net/article13211.html

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8. INDIA: HIP - HOP SONG RECALLING THE DEMOLITION OF BABRI MASJID ON DECEMBER 6 1992, THE DAY WE LOST OUR HUMANITY
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6th December, I call it day of tragedy, The day we remember, we lost our humanity AListRap (Ashwini Mishra)
http://www.sacw.net/article13210.html

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9. KATHMANDU STATEMENT CALLS FOR A SOUTH ASIA HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION (7 APRIL 2017)
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Need for a South Asia People’s Charter of Human Rights and a SAARC regional human rights body
http://www.sacw.net/article13209.html

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10. INDIA: CHALLENGES AND THREATS IN THE LIFE OF A RATIONALIST | Narendra Nayak
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With the rise of intolerance and attacks on all forms of dissent, it is a difficult task indeed to pursue the calling of one’s conscience, writes Prof. Narendra Nayak
http://www.sacw.net/article13198.html

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11. INDIA: AN APPEAL TO STOP COW VIGILANTISM - MEMO TO CHIEF MINISTER OF RAJASTHAN BY PUCL RAJASTHAN
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It is our appeal that you urgently intervene and stop this lawlessness and free run being given to the cow vigilantes with the support of many people in high places, including the Home Minister, the Mayor of Jaipur and the police.
http://www.sacw.net/article13206.html

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12. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
 - Press Release : Bhumi Adhikar Andolan Demands Justice for Pehlu Khan and Victims of Alwar Terror
 - India - Babri Masjid case: Supreme Court revives criminal conspiracy against LK Advani, Uma Bharti, and other leaders
 - India: Fight Against Treason Call of Hindu Rashtra by BJP ( Rajindar Sachar)
 - Can Great Britain Discipline Caste Supremacists? (A.K. Biswas)
 - For India’s liberals, party is over (Srijana Mitra Das)
 - India: 34 years of Left in Bengal failed to improve the status and representation of muslims of in Bengal (Sharjeel Imam and Saquib Salim)
 - Moral police cops of Hindu Yuva Vahini (Founded By UP chief Minister Adityanath) openly harass couple in Meerut
 - Kashmir: Inspiration for jihadi resistance in the Valley is moving to ever-younger minds (David Devadas)
' - Islamophobia' Phobia: Politics of offence and the death sentence for debate culture in JNU (Abhiruchi Ranjan and Chitra Adkar)
 - Hindi Article: Ayodhya Dispute
 - Religious Vigilantism might Hurt India’s Global Stature (Aparna Pande)
 - Freedom didn’t come riding on a cow, trouble did (Manimugdha S Sharma)
 - India: Video of Speech - We will behead those opposed to a Ram Temple at Babri site, says BJP MLA Raja Singh / and New report
 - Is this Hindutva ? (Tavleen Singh)
 - NDTV discussions on cow vigilantism & violence
 - Terrorism in the name of the cow: India's flirtation with anarchy (Samar Halarnkar)

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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13. INDIA: GOD’S SOLDIERS AND GAU RAKSHAKS | Dushyant
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(Mumbai Mirror - 7 April 2017

4 Dalits were thrashed by gau rakshaks in Una for skinning a dead cow in July last year
The so called protectors of cows are nothing but deranged lunatics - and a clear and present danger to our society.

According to reports in various national dailies, last week a group of men stopped several vehicles carrying cows on National Highway 8, in Rajasthan. They asked all passengers what their names were. The odd one out, a driver named 'Arjun' was allowed to leave. They proceeded to brutally beat up everyone else. One of the passengers, a 55-year- old man named Pehlu Khan, died earlier this week.

One of the victims of this violence has been quoted in a report as saying that a) The cattle had been legally purchased for 75,000 rupees. (Remember, it isn't illegal to buy or sell cows and the cows being carried in these vehicles were alive. An NDTV report says,"Pehlu Khan's son Irshad said their papers were valid, but the police tore them saying those would not work. A senior police officer, Rahul Prakash, said the allegation would be investigated "but for the time being, the victims were also being treated as accused".)

b) The men destroyed their vehicles, and snatched all the money they had. c) They were discriminated against at the hospital as well and did not receive proper treatment and that Pehlu Khan may have been saved if not for this discrimination and negligence.

FIRs have been filed against both the perpetrators as well as the victims of the violence. According to the Times of India, Rajasthan's Home Minister reportedly said the gau rakshaks did good, but broke the law. Union Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, however, said in Parliament that no such incident ever happened.

This is not the first time that violence has been inflicted and murder has been committed out of a so-called desire to protect cows. It happened in Dadri and it happened in Una. It will happen again in all likelihood because as is abundantly clear, the government of the day is encouraging those committing these acts. But are emotions about cows the only reason for this violence? If yes, then why was the chap named Arjun allowed to leave? Were the remaining people beaten up because of something to do with cows, or because their name did not sound anything like 'Arjun'?

Why is it that so many people are having to argue that the meat Akhlaq had in his house was not beef, or that the cows Pehlu Khan was transporting were legally purchased? Does it really take so much for us to find murder repugnant? For the sake of argument let's assume that Pehlu Khan was committing a crime. Have we become comfortable with the idea of a society where any person who believes that the other is committing a crime can murder freely?

Why do some people repeatedly insist on identifying these criminals as gau Rakshaks (protectors of cows)? Is it because that is what they call themselves? Many terrorist groups call themselves 'God's soldiers'. Should we start calling them that? Is it because protection of cows is their stated goal? In which case we should be calling terrorists dharam rakshaks (Protectors of religion). We should call people who burn their wives/daughters-in law patriarchy rakshaks. We should call someone who molests a woman because the clothes she's wearing offends his cultural sensibilities culture rakshak.

Why do we even call them vigilantes? Batman and Superman are vigilantes. The Joker is not a vigilante. The League of Shadows is not a group of vigilantes, even if all they want is to burn down a city and everyone in it because of their belief that everyone is corrupt.

What is the worst case against those beaten up in Rajasthan? That they may have been illegally transporting cattle. What is the obvious case against those who engaged in violence? That they committed murder.

Our failure to identify the latter accurately only operates to whitewash and normalise who they are: petty criminals/serial killers/deranged lunatics/religious fundamentalists/terrorists. If this is an omission by design then the problem on our hands is graver than we realise. If it is a failure arising from incompetence then we ought to ashamed at our dysfunctional moral compass.

I also hope that the government realises that anyone taking up arms (a photograph on Scroll.com shows a 'gau-rakshak' group in Punjab with automatic weapons and bulletproof vests), or engaging in violence poses a challenge to the authority of the state. A challenge that can undermine many things we take for granted- a semi civilized society, democracy, some semblance of law and order. Because if ends (protection of cows, harassment of women) justify means (people taking law in their own hands), then the day that people are beaten to death for crossing a red light is not far away. While some groups of people may love cows, other groups love dogs. How comfortable would you feel about the idea of 'dog rakshaks' taking to the streets and beating up everyone who hits dogs, or everyone who says stray dogs are a menace and should be killed? I hope citizens realise that mobs do not have sound processes and systems to determine innocence and guilt. Their sole guiding factor is sanctimonious rage.

In a different context, Venkiah Naidu said we should avoid eating things prohibited in the Constitution. I am not sure which Constitution is he talking about because the number of edible things prohibited in the Constitution of India is zero.

Nirmala Sitharaman, another Union Minister, said, "Cow protectionism was 'the spirit behind freedom movement'. You know what the biggest 'guiding spirit' behind the freedom movement was? The idea of freedom itself. The hope that mobs and self-proclaimed supremacists will not be allowed to murder. The hope that rule of law will prevail. The government and the courts are supposed to act as the rakshaks of this freedom that has been achieved after centuries. They are miserably failing to do that at the moment.

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14. HOW REPRESSIVE LAW ENFORCEMENT CRUSHED MINIMUM WAGE PROTESTS IN BANGLADESH’S GARMENT SECTOR
by David Bergman and Muktadir Rashid
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(The Wire - 2 February 2017)

Arrests of trade union organisers and workers, along with the suspension by garment manufacturers of as many as 1,500 workers from their jobs, has been a great success for the employers.

Representative image of protestors demanding a hike in minimum wage in Bangladesh. Credit: Reuters/Andrew Biraj

Dhaka: On December 23, 2016, a police officer phoned television and print journalist Nazmul Huda, telling him to come later that day to a press conference concerning the ongoing worker disputes in garment factories in Ashulia, an area on the outskirts of the capital, Dhaka.

Huda had distinguished himself four years earlier as the first journalist to report on the cracks in the wall of the Rana Plaza factory, a day before it collapsed in April 2013, killing more than 1,100 people.

When Huda arrived at Ashulia police station that evening, there was no press conference. Instead, officers bundled him into a vehicle, blindfolded him and then beat him.

“I was taken to different places and threatened with crossfire,” Huda said in a recorded conversation heard by The Wire. The term ‘crossfire’ refers to the term used when police claim that a person was killed during a police gunfight with criminals.

At about 4 am the next morning, Huda was dropped off at the local office of the detective branch of the police, from where he was taken to the Savar government hospital for the treatment of injuries sustained from police beatings.

The next day he was remanded by the magistrates court into police custody after it was alleged that he had committed an offence under section 57 of the Information and Communication Technology Act 2006 by apparently publishing an article for a national newspaper which was ‘false’ and likely to incite the garment workers – a crime that carries a minimum sentence of seven years imprisonment.

Huda – who spent one month in jail before receiving bail last week – is one of at least 21 people who have been arrested since the end of December 2016 as part of the Bangladesh government’s successful crushing of an apparently spontaneous movement of garment workers seeking an increased minimum wage and improved working conditions.

The other 20 people arrested comprise trade union leaders, activists and organisers – many of whose detentions, like that of Huda, were demonstrably illegal, politicised or without merit, with threats of ‘crossfire’ appearing to be part and parcel of police interrogation tactics.

Worker unrest

The dispute in Ashulia, one of the centres of the country’s thriving ready-made garment sector, started on December 11, 2016, when workers at the Windie Apparel factory walked out.

The factory had been a site of simmering discontent after Taslima Akhter, 23, a sewing operator, had died in late October on the shop floor of the factory after managers refused her repeated requests for time off.

In December, the un-unionised workers at the factory approached managers seeking a tripling of minimum wages, set three years ago at $67 per month, along with a list of 15 other demands. After they were rebuffed, the workers walked out and in subsequent days employees from about 20 other factories in the area joined in.

Trade union activists and leaders working in Ashulia say that the walk out by Windie workers and the subsequent stoppages at other factories took them by surprise.

“The issue of the minimum wage was something we all talked about,” said Kalpana Akhter, a former garments worker who is the executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Workers Solidarity and works closely with different unions. “It has been three years since the last minimum wage increased. However, no one had any idea that Windie workers were going to make this kind of demand or that other workers would join them.”

Whether the protests took place without any outside trade union assistance is difficult to say, but in the subsequent days, intense efforts were made to resolve the conflict with meetings between the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) and leaders of the various trade union federations active in the area.

“My response was that they should talk to the workers and factory owners, and negotiate with them,” said Babul Akhter, president of the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation (BGIWF) and one of the leaders involved in discussions with the BGMEA. “I said, if they don’t negotiate then it will be a big problem, as Ashulia workers are very strong, their voice is very strong.”

Very few factories in the Ashulia area have trade unions, so the national federations had limited influence over the factory workers. “We were telling the workers not to go to on the street, but to go to management with their demands,” Kalpana said. “But the workers were not listening to us.”

“But what was interesting about these protests is that they were one of the most peaceful protests garment workers had ever held in Bangladesh. There was no vandalism, no looting and no beating,” she added.

By December 20, the manufacturers had decided to take a confrontational route to resolve the crisis. The BGMEA announced they would close 55 Ashulia-based factories under a provision of the Bangladesh labour law which allows an employer to close a factory “in the event of an illegal strike”. Whilst employers said that this was to stop vandalism, trade unionists saw this as a way to break the strike and stop engaging with the workers’ grievances.

“People talk about workers’ strike, but this was an employers’ strike. Workers only stopped work in 20 factories. But the employers closed over 50 factories,” said Alonzo Suson of the Bangladesh country programme of the Solidarity Centre, an international labour group.

The arrests begin

The BGMEA closure was just the first counter measure by the authorities to deal with the protests.

On the morning of December 21, the industrial police called a meeting of union organisers in the restaurant of Fantasy Kingdom, a children’s theme park in Ashulia.

One of the men who attended the meeting was Ibrahim, who worked for the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity as an organiser and was also a local trade union leader for BGIWF. Both organisations claim they were uninvolved in the protests and had helped the industrial police to encourage workers to go back to work.

“At 9 am, Ibrahim called to say that they were given snacks but the police were not allowing them to leave the restaurant,” said Kalpana. “At about 10:30 am I found his phone turned off.”

Two hours later, Ibrahim along with three other trade union organisers were seen being put into a white microbus outside the theme park and taken away.

“When we spoke to Ibrahim later, he said that all four of the men were blindfolded, taken to the detective branch office in Dhamrai in Savar and questioned about their links to various organisations, and whether they were involved in the wage campaign,” said Kalpana. ‘They were then blindfolded again, separated and taken to a house in the forests for whole night and then threatened with being cross-fired.”

The police filed a case against him and the three other men under the Special Powers Act 1974 for an offence which, remarkably, had years earlier been removed from the statute book.

Subsequently they were each ‘shown arrested’ under eight further cases filed by different garment factories and accused of a total of nine different offences including trespass, criminal intimidation and extortion allegedly committed since the worker dispute began. Significantly, their names did not initially appear as accused in any of the cases.

The same night, two plain clothes police men came to the house of Jehangir, president of the Designer Jeans factory union, who was asleep with his wife and children.

“They first knocked on the door at about 11:20 at night, pretending to be from Polmal Garment where Jehangir’s wife worked,” Kalpana said. “His wife did not recognise the voice so she told them to come in the morning. The police officers then kicked down the door and said he just wanted to take Jehangir away for 30 minutes. He was allowed to change his clothes and put into a waiting van.”

According to colleagues, Jehangir was kept in a ‘dark room’ for two days, before being brought to the court on the evening of December 23 – although the law requires detainees to be brought before the court within 24 hours.

As with the other four trade union activists picked up the previous day, he was also accused by the police of an offence that no longer exists and subsequently of an additional eight cases filed by garment factories.

Arrests in Gazipur

The day after Ibrahim was taken, detective branch officers went to the office of the Bangladesh Independent Garment Workers Union Federation (BIGUF) in Gazipur – over 25 km from Ashulia. Two of the union’s organisers, Azadur Zaman and Md Golam Arif, lived on the fifth floor of the building.

“At about 11:15 pm, the DB (detective branch) police came and asked Azad and Arif what they knew about what was going on in Ashulia,” said Rashadullah Alam Raju, the vice president of the union who subsequently met the two men in jail. “They informed the DB police that the union had no organising activities in Ashulia and BIGUF was not involved. But the police told them that you have to come with us.”

The following day, the authorities denied they knew anything about the detention. “I spoke to the local police and the detective branch officers, including the men whom I subsequently found out had detained the men,” Raju said. ‘They denied they had arrested Azad and Arif.”

Early on the morning of December 24, the police told Raju that the DB had handed over the two men and that he could collect the men from the police station the following morning. However, instead the police showed Zaman and Arif as arrested in a criminal case involving setting fire to a bus two years earlier in January 2015.

This was an old case filed during a period of concerted political conflict between the Awami League government and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Zaman and Arif’s names had never before been linked to these cases and in the two years since the incident the police had shown no interest at all in arresting the two men.

In the subsequent days, three other trade union organisers and 11 workers were also picked up in Ashulia, and along with the other men have been imprisoned and denied bail by the lower courts.

Many trade union activists are currently in hiding, sleeping at different places at night scared of being arrested or worse. “On January 20, detective branch officers came to BIGUF’s Konabari office in Gazipur,” Raju said. ‘They said that they were looking for me and two other union men. None of us were there at the time. The DB officers said that ‘if we catch Raju will we kill him and throw him in the drain’.”

It is, however, the action taken against the journalist Huda which most clearly exposes the police.

The article which provided the justification for his arrest was published in the Bangladesh daily paper Bangladesh Protidin on the morning of December 22, the day after the first arrests of the trade union organisers.

The police claim that there were four sentences in the article that were false and likely to incite workers.

These state that: “long route public buses on the Abdullahpur-Bypile road had been stopped from the previous day”; that “there are more than 600 garments factories in Savar and Ashulia area”; that “the police did not allow any vehicle through the Bypile road” and that “other than the 55 closed factories, workers of other factories came to their workplaces, but did not work”.

Even if these statements were all proven to be false, it is difficult to see how they could have “created a discontent among the garments workers… attempted to break the resolve of the government, and to create chaos in the law enforcement system,” as the police alleged in the FIR.

Intriguingly, the FIR misquoted one of the sentences in the article falsely claiming Najmul had stated that 600 factories in Ashulia were ‘closed’.

Moreover, those close to Huda think that his arrest had little to do with the content of this article but rather his failure to abide by an earlier police request not to report any more on the dispute.

The day before he was picked up, Huda is said to have had an altercation with a police officer. In a recorded conversation heard by The Wire, Huda claimed that this officer had instructed him “not to do any further reports on this issue” alleging that the journalist was “instigating workers”.

Huda says that the police authorities were angry with him as TV stations had a few days earlier broadcast the police using tear gas to break up an assembly of workers.

In the recent years, the government has used law enforcement action to quieten any political opposition. The arrests linked to the worker disputes in Ashulia show how similar tactics, with the police working hand in hand with garment manufacturers, work equally effectively in dealing with other kinds of political challenges.

The arrests of trade union organisers and workers – along with the suspension by garment manufacturers of as many as 1,500 workers from their jobs and the operation of a ‘black-list’ intended to stop alleged troublemakers from working in the garment sector – has been a great success for the employers.

Workers’ rights activists now cannot see how workers will be able to raise the issue of the minimum wage for at least another two years, when the government should set up a new minimum wage board.

“It has crushed the whole minimum wage demand,” says Kalpana. “There is a lot of fear as result of the action by the authorities.”

David Bergman is a writer based in Bangladesh. Muktadir Rashid is a journalist based at the Bangladesh national newspaper, The New Age. Bergman also runs the Bangladesh Politico and Bangladesh War Crimes blogs.

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15. ‘I WANTED TO BE PART OF A PROCESS WHICH … WOULD SHAPE THE COURSE OF THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-RULE FOR THE BANGALIS’ - INTERVIEW WITH REHMAN SOBHAN
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(Dhaka Tribune - March 26, 2017)

by Rifat Munim


This interview is largely based on his memoir, Untranquil Recollections: The Years of Fulfilment, in which he lucidly described how his life got inextricably entwined with the political struggles of the Bangalis. In what follows Sobhan talks about the watershed events of our history as well as the role he and his economist and activist friends had played in providing an intellectual foundation for the case of Bangali nationalism

Rehman Sobhan is a noted Bangladeshi economist and freedom fighter. He was educated at St. Paul’s School, Darjeeling; Aitchison College, Lahore; and the University of Cambridge. He was one of the economists whose ideas influenced the 6-point programme of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, which became the basis for the struggle for self-rule for Bangladesh. He served the first Government of Bangladesh as Envoy Extraordinaire with special responsibility for Economic Affairs, during the Liberation War in 1971. He was a member of the first Bangladesh Planning Commission, and in the 1980s headed the premier development research facility, BIDS. In 1993, he founded and became the Chairman of the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), a civil society think-tank in Bangladesh. He also headed the South Asia Centre for Policy Studies (SACEPS) from 2000 to 2005, one of the leading think-tanks for promoting regional cooperation in South Asia. He has authored numerous books and articles on various developmental issues. The most recent of these, Challenging the Injustice of Poverty: Agendas for Inclusive Development in South Asia, was published by Sage Publishing in 2010.

In your memoir, Untranquil Recollections: The Years of Fulfilment, we see you got deeply involved with the political struggles of the people of Bangladesh, which were taking a new turn in 1969. Is that why you came back from London in 1969, abandoning your PhD thesis?

Yes. I was always a politically oriented person, rather than just an academic. With the imminent downfall of the Ayub dictatorship and the release of Bangabandhu under mass political pressure from the Cantonment jail where he was under trial for the so-called Agartala Conspiracy case, I deduced that the political climate in Pakistan was undergoing a seismic transformation. Having challenged the agenda of the Ayub regime for nearly a decade, I wanted to be part of a process which would emerge after his fall and which would shape the course of the struggle for self-rule for the Bangalis.

In the years preceding the Liberation War, alongside a successful teaching career at Dhaka University, you founded the weekly, Forum, along with Hameeda Hossain and became a journalist. Tell us something about that experience.

I had for many years aspired to establish a journal of ideas. As far back as 1957/58, I had joined hands with one of our more respected journalists, SM Ali, who later founded The Daily Star, and Professor Mosharaff Hossain, to set up a weekly journal, on the lines of the New Statesman, published in London. But this project was frustrated by the declaration of Martial Law under Ayub Khan, in October 1958. With the downfall of Ayub in March 1969 and the re-emergence of Bangabandhu at the vanguard of the struggle for self-rule, the entire environment for independent progressive journalism stood transformed. Hameeda Hossain, Kamal Hossain and I were keen to track this process of political transformation in a publication where we could contribute to the battle of ideas which may help to shape the future of a self-ruling Bangladesh.

We were keen to draw in the best, progressive minds, not just in Bangladesh but in West Pakistan to participate in the debate within our columns. Respected senior journalists such as Mazhar Ali Khan, MB Naqvi, ABM Musa and AL Khatib were our regular contributors. We also drew in a variety of younger political figures from Dhaka, progressive thinkers from around the world such as Amartya Sen, Hamza Alavi, Tariq Ali and Arjun Sengupta, among many others. Forum’s most important role was to provide a forum for discussion by Bangali thinkers, such as Nurul Islam, Anisur Rahman, AR Khan, Professor Muzaffar Ahmed Chowdhury (MAC) the political scientist, Akhlaqur Rahman, Sirajul Islam Chowdhury, Razia Khan Amin, among many others, who fed us with a rich trove of ideas on constitutional, political, economic and cultural issues critical to the shaping of Bangladesh.

The two-economy theory, put forward (at a conference in Curzon Hall of Dhaka University in June 1961) by you and Nurul Islam, among others, was a solid contribution to a scientific understanding of the economic imbalance between West Pakistan and East Pakistan. What was the reaction of Bangali politicians and the military junta to it?

The two-economy theory had many fathers. Bangali economists such as Dr Sadeque, Nurul Islam, Anisur Rahman, Habibur Rahman and Akhlaqur Rahman wrote on this and related issues. I was one of the contributors to this debate but perhaps received more public attention than my colleagues as an advocate of the idea because I wrote on this and related subjects in the newspapers, particularly during a period when Pakistan was experiencing its first Martial Law. At that time all politicians were gagged and few academic economists were inclined to proclaim their views on controversial issues in the public media. In those circumstances my views attracted public attention because newspapers in Bangladesh publicised them. As a result, politicians such as Bangabandhu took notice of my writings and sought me out to learn more about these issues.

One of the many illuminating points you make in the book is: It was from  March 5 that Bangladesh attained self-rule, for the first time since the Battle of Plassey in 1757, when Yahya had concurred with his local Corp Commander that the Pakistan Army be withdrawn into the Cantonments from 1971. Would you elaborate on this point?

The reason why the Pakistan armed forces were withdrawn into the barracks by the Chief Martial Law Administrator and Corps Commander, Lt. General Yakub Khan was explained by him in his letter of resignation to Yahya Khan, sent on March 5, 1971: the control of the administration has passed on to Sheikh Mujib, who was now de facto, head of government and controlled all public life… I am convinced that there is no military situation which can make sense … a military solution would mean large scale killing of unarmed civilians and would achieve no sane aim. It would have disastrous consequences.

This historic message from the commander of the Pakistani force in Bangladesh at that time provides a more eloquent answer to this question than any I could offer. Bangabandhu who initiated the movement on March 1 as a massive programme of non-cooperation, found by March 5, that the programme had graduated well beyond this to one of a pledge of cooperation from all the echelons of governance across Bangladesh. At that time, all administrators, law enforcement personnel, business houses even the judiciary had formally pledged their allegiance and looked to him for orders. Bangabandhu took the movement to a level never before witnessed in any struggle for national liberation, anywhere in the colonised third world.

In the book you discuss at some length the speculation about whether independence could have been achieved “at a lower cost in blood”. Either Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman could have gone for a unilateral declaration of independence or he could have compromised on the six points during the negotiations with Yahya Khan after the landslide victory of his party in the December 1970 elections? Would any of that have ensured a better outcome?

After the massive electoral victory of the Awami League in the December 1970 election to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, where the party commanded an absolute majority, there was no question of Bangabandhu compromising on the 6-point demand which was the core manifesto of his election campaign. However, all such debates, four decades after the event, remain speculative. The answers to these questions remain buried with Bangabandhu and his principal colleagues, all of whom, as far as I know, fully endorsed his strategy of seeking a peaceful resolution to the crisis. Long after such events it is easy for anyone who never had to face any such responsibility at any stage of their lives to assume the mantle of a political sage or a military strategist.

Following the historic March 7 speech of Bangabandhu, the spirit of non-cooperation prevailed among people from all walks of life. However, words got out that an army crackdown was imminent. What was the common people’s reaction to this apprehension before and during March 25?

When the army launched its genocide on March 25, 1971 the common people of Bangladesh, peasants, workers, students, administrators, police and, significantly, those serving in the Pakistan armed forces, prepared to resist the armed might of the Pakistan army. This explains how in many areas across the Meghna river in the east and all areas in the west of the Padma/Jamuna, popular resistance by peasants, workers, students using primitive weapons, could join hands with the trained Bangali soldiers to confront and defeat the Pakistani forces, at least temporarily, and take control of these areas. Most of these mobilisations all round the country were largely spontaneous, inspired by the high level of political conscientisation realised through the election campaign of 1969/71 and taken to its peak during the month of self-rule in March 1971.

You mention seeing some resistance during your journey from Dhaka to Brahmanbaria before crossing into India?

The sort of resistance I witnessed depended on levels of military training of the forces. In the rural areas across the Meghna peasants were prepared to fight for Bangladesh with lathis, daos and sharpened bamboo staves. At Peelkhana and the Police Line in Dhaka, in Brahmanbaria, Chittagong, Joydebpur, Jessore, and Rajshahi, where Bangali members of the armed forces, EPR, and police could take up arms, they could take on — and in some cases defeat — the Pakistani armed forces located there. All such areas, at one stage in April, were part of a liberated Bangaldesh until they were recaptured, often after heavy fighting, by a far better armed Pakistani army using air support in some areas. These same forces of the resistance emerged as the nucleus of the Mukti Bahini which was reinforced through the course of the Liberation War by an unending stream of youth coming forward to seek training and arms to fight the Pakistani army.

After crossing into India, you dedicated yourself to mobilising international support for the cause of Bangladesh’s independence. What are the most remarkable memories from this period that come to your mind?

There are quite a few such occasions. The high points in my campaign would include:

1. Meeting along with Anisur Rahman with PN Hakser, the principal secretary to Indira Gandhi and reportedly the second most powerful figure in India. Our briefing of Haksar, on the evening of April 2, 1971 at his residence in New Delhi, was one of the earliest briefings of an Indian, at the highest level, from a Bangladeshi. Tajuddin Ahmed subsequently met with Indira Gandhi on the evening of April 3 and was in a much better position to provide a definitive briefing to her and seek support for our liberation struggle.

2. Meeting next day with Tajuddin and Barrister Amir-ul-Islam in New Delhi was no less important for me. It was Tajuddin who commissioned me, on behalf of the liberation movement, to go abroad and challenge Pakistan’s international campaign for foreign aid which would underwrite their genocide on Bangladesh. During this encounter I was also privileged to draft Tajuddin’s historic address to the world, delivered on April 11, 1971, explaining the circumstances leading to the emergence of Bangladesh and setting the course of the liberation struggle.

Once abroad some of my more memorable encounters, include:

1. Meetings with some of the senior journalists in Washington DC in May 1971, just prior to the arrival of Pakistan’s principal envoy MM Ahmed, to publicise the Bangladesh case. I had the satisfaction of seeing editorials appear in the leading papers – the Washington Post, the Washington Star, the Baltimore Sun, the New York Times, the Washington edition of the New York Times and the New Republic – demanding that the US government withhold aid to Pakistan till they stopped their genocide in Bangladesh.

2. The lunch hosted for me by Senator Saxby at the US Senate, to explain the Bangladesh case before a gathering of major political figures from both the Democratic and Republican Party such as Senators Church, Fulbright and Scott, the leader of the Republic Party in the Senate.

3. Invitation to address the National Press Club in Washington DC, a privilege offered mostly to visiting heads of state and eminent international political personalities, to explain the Bangladesh case and appeal for stoppage of US aid to Pakistan.

4. Meeting with Robert McNamara, the president of the World Bank, the leader of the Pakistan aid consortium, to present before him the demand of the Bangladesh people for stoppage of aid to Pakistan.

5. Meeting with Dennis Healy, the shadow foreign minister and Judith Hurt, the shadow minister for overseas development for the Labour Party in the UK.

6. Meetings in Paris in June 1971 with key figures of the Pakistan Aid Consortium to persuade them to stop aid to Pakistan and my subsequent briefing by vice president of the World Bank, Peter Cargil, that the Consortium would not pledge new aid to Pakistan till they stopped their genocide in Bangladesh.

7. My participation in the campaign in the US to persuade the US Senate through the Saxby-Church amendment to stop aid to Pakistan and its eventual passage in the US Senate.

8. Secret meeting in Paris in August with my uncle KM Kaiser, then Pakistan’s Ambassador to People Republic of China, who informed me that I should pass on a message to Tajuddin Ahmed that China had refused Pakistan’s request to intervene on their behalf in the event of a war with India.

9. Finally, meeting with French Nobel Laureate, Andre Malrux, in November at his residence outside Paris, where he reaffirmed before me his pledge to lead a group of French resistance fighters to extend support to the Mukti Bahini.

What impressed me at the end of this campaign was the total support across the world of the probashi Bangali community for an independent Bangladesh and the large scale support we received from the democratic opposition, the public and media for the Bangladesh cause in most countries. This support pressured their governments to stop new aid to Pakistan. Most important, it seriously constrained the support of the Nixon administration in the US, to the Yahya government.

How did you feel when you returned to an independent Bangladesh?

A sense of extraordinary exhilaration. It is rare in anyone’s lifetime to be part of a political campaign which culminated in the emergence of an independent nation state. Few Bangladeshis or anyone else expected this dream to be realised anytime soon. That I could arrive in a liberated Bangladesh within nine months from the day I crossed its border, not knowing what the future held for us, is an indescribable emotion. This may explain why I have titled my memoir, Untranquil Recollections: The Years of Fulfilment.

Thank you very much indeed for your time.

Thank you too.

Rifat Munim is literary editor at Dhaka Tribune.

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16. INDIA: CLEVER RUSE - EDITORIAL, THE TELEGRAPH
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(The Telegraph, 20 April 2017)

Shakespeare's Romeo was not a molester. His, and Juliet's, was a consensual love foiled by a feud between two families that divided society. The anti-Romeo squads in Uttar Pradesh, are, in contrast, aiming to divide society. Even though the squads have allegedly been constituted to "reclaim" public spaces - from whom? why Romeo? - and make them safer for women, the police and vigilante groups target 'suspicious' looking pairs, be they tutor and student, as happened in Moradabad, brother and sister or any boy and girl who seem too close for the comfort of the official rescuers of damsels in distress. It all began with the Gujarat model: anti-Romeo dals were set up there as far back as in 2001. Now that anti-Romeo squads are on unchecked rampage in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana has launched Operation Durga, by which 107 people were arrested in two days. Jharkhand has started its own storm troops and Uttarakhand is thinking of doing so. The police, given charge of imparting lessons in morality, are giving up their more conventional duties. In UP, two women were kidnapped in broad daylight in Meerut and Shamli, and a woman was chased into a police post by a group of men and shot dead. But criminals are not harassers, just kidnappers, rapists and killers, hence not on the anti-Romeo squads' horizon. Enforcing the law in a regular way has become less important than vigilantism, official and unofficial. In the name of keeping women secure, the State has sanctioned the surveillance and policing of private domains.

The ideological roots of such protectionism cannot escape notice. Mixed-faith couples are increasingly being heckled. Again in Meerut, the Hindu Yuva Vahini - a brigade Yogi Adityanath formed to fight against what has been labelled love jihad - reportedly barged into a house, beat up a Muslim man and issued a warning to the woman from another religion who was there. The anti-Romeo discourse thus justifies not only infringement on citizens' privacy and the denial of their right to choice but also divisions between faiths. While singling out the Romeos, the squads also deny Juliet any agency in love. This paternalistic vigilance, instead of addressing the real concern about sexual harassment, will further limit women's freedom. Anti-Romeo and similar movements cannily pretend to fight violence against women while quietly reasserting patriarchal mores of protection, control, segregation and dominance.

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17. 'ENEMY PROPERTY': INDIA'S ANSWER TO TRUMP WANTS TO RAZE PAKISTAN FOUNDER'S HOME
Vidhi Doshi
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(The Guardian - 5 April 2017)

Property magnate and politician Mangal Prabhat Lodha, business partner of Donald Trump, reignites tensions over Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s Mumbai house

Donald Trump’s alliance with Lodha complicates hopes of the US acting and a meditator between India and Pakistan Photograph: Hindustan Times/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

Donald Trump’s Indian business partner is leading a campaign to raze a bungalow in Mumbai that was once the home of Pakistan’s founding father, in a dispute threatening to provoke a diplomatic row between Delhi and Islamabad.

The property was the primary residence of Mohammad Ali Jinnah before he moved to Karachi after partition. It has long been a bone of contention between the two nations.

This week, the property magnate and politician Mangal Prabhat Lodha reignited tensions over the house, describing Jinnah House an “enemy property” and calling for it to be demolished.

Lodha, a multi-billionaire property magnate and owner of Lodha Group, which is building Mumbai’s first Trump Tower, said upkeep of the bungalow was costing the government millions of rupees every year and called for it to be replaced with a cultural centre.

“The Jinnah residence in south Mumbai was the place from where the conspiracy of partition was hatched. Jinnah House is a symbol of the partition. Demolishing the property is the only option,” he said, speaking to the state of Maharashtra’s legislative assembly.

Demolishing Jinnah House would cause a major diplomatic row with Pakistan, which has repeatedly claimed ownership of the building and asked India to allow it to house a consulate in the property.

Pakistan foreign office spokesman Nafees Zakria has said in response to the campaign that the property belonged to Pakistan’s founding father and “ownership rights” must be respected.

In Pakistan, Jinnah is celebrated as a hero for creating a nation for Muslims, where they could enjoy self-determination. In India he is depicted as a weak leader who betrayed Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of a secular India, and whose demands for partition led to the loss of between one and two million lives.

Relations between the two countries have declined in the past year, with India blaming Pakistan for a series of terror attacks on Indian soil and retaliating with night-time raids on Pakistan-based terrorists in the contested territory of Kashmir.

Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, said on Monday that the Trump administration was “concerned about the relationship between India and Pakistan” and “very much wants to see how we de-escalate any sort of conflict going forward”.

Soon after his election victory, Trump called Pakistan’s president, Nawaz Sharif, and expressed a desire to strengthen relations. In the surprise phone call, the US president described Pakistan as a “fantastic country” and Pakistanis as “one of the most intelligent people”.

But Trump’s alliance with Lodha complicates hopes of the US acting as a meditator between the two countries, which are still fighting over disputed territory of Kashmir, and of reinstating strong ties with Islamabad.

Lodha still owns a majority stake in the real estate business partnered with the Trump Organisation in Mumbai.

His rise to mogul status in India mirrors Trump’s in the US. Both are known for building glitzy high-rises and golf courses, and both handed over control of their property empires to their sons to pursue political ambitions.

In January, after Trump’s election, Lodha’s political website even carried the slogan “Make Mumbai great again”, echoing Trump’s campaign mantra. The slogan has now been removed.

A member of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata party, Lodha launched his political career in 1994, capitalising on the anti-Muslim sentiment after the Bombay riots of 1992-93 in which Hindus and Muslims clashed after Hindu hardliners demolished an iconic Muslim worship site.

Over the years Lodha has campaigned to imprison Christians and Muslims for converting Hindus, to stop Hindu-Muslim marriages, to lower the volume of the Muslim prayer call in Mumbai, and to demolish a mosque which he argues was illegally constructed.

Capturing anti-Muslim sentiment has also been a keystone of Trump’s political career so far, with verbal attacks against the family of a Muslim-American war veteran and failed efforts to introduce a Muslim travel ban.

For a separate Trump Towers project in Gurgaon, Trump partnered with Lalit Goyal, owner of IREO Realty which was investigated by Indian intelligence authorities for siphoning off funds for the Commonwealth Games through Goyal’s brother-in-law and BJP leader Sudhashnu Mittal. A third Trump Towers project in the western city of Pune is also being investigated for illegally obtaining building permissions.

The White House did not immediately replied to the Guurdian’s request for comment.

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18. LESSONS FROM HITLER’S RISE
Christopher R. Browning	
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(The New York Review of Books, April 20, 2017 Issue)

Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939	
by Volker Ullrich, translated from the German by Jefferson Chase
Knopf, 998 pp., $40.00

Supporters greeting Adolf Hitler as he arrived at the Berghof, his retreat at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, circa 1935

When the original German edition of Volker Ullrich’s new biography, Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939, was published in 2013, the current political situation in the United States was not remotely conceivable. The reception of a book often transcends the author’s intentions and the circumstances in which it was written, of course, but rarely so dramatically as in this case. In early 2017 it is impossible for an American to read the newly published English translation of this book outside the shadow cast by our new president.

To begin I would stipulate emphatically that Trump is not Hitler and the American Republic in the early twenty-first century is not Weimar. There are many stark differences between both the men and the historical conditions in which they ascended to power. Nonetheless there are sufficient areas of similarity in some regards to make the book chilling and insightful reading about not just the past but also the present.

Ullrich establishes that Hitler’s early life was not quite as impoverished or oppressive as he later portrayed it in Mein Kampf. Even after first his father and then his mother died, he lived on various orphan pensions and small inheritances. During periods when these resources were insufficient, Hitler did indeed lead an impoverished existence in men’s hostels, scraping out a bare subsistence by selling his paintings, and even briefly experiencing homelessness. More important was the fact that by the age of twenty-five—lacking education, career training, or job experience—he was still a man completely adrift, without any support network of family or friends, and without any future prospects. Nothing could be more different from Trump’s life of privilege, prestigious and expensive private schools, and hefty financial support from his father to enter the business world.

For Hitler, World War I was a decisive formative experience. He volunteered for the Bavarian army, endured fierce frontline combat in the fall of 1914, and then miraculously survived four years as a courier between regimental headquarters and the trenches. For Hitler the war meant structure, comradeship, and a sense of higher purpose in place of drift, loneliness, and hopelessness; and he embraced it totally. For many veterans who survived the war, it was a tragic and senseless experience never to be repeated. For Hitler the only tragedy was that Germany lost, and the war was to be refought as soon as it was strong enough to win. For Trump the Vietnam War was a minor inconvenience for which he received four deferments for education followed by a medical exemption because of bone spurs, and his self-proclaimed heroic equivalent was avoiding venereal disease despite a vigorous campaign of limitless promiscuity. In war as in childhood, Hitler and Trump could not have had more different experiences.

Ullrich takes a very commonsense approach to Hitler’s sex life, eschewing sensational allegations of highly closeted homosexuality, sexual perversion that caused him to project his self-loathing onto the Jews, asexuality commensurate with his incapacity for normal human relations, or abnormal genitalia that either psychologically or physically impeded normal sex. He surmises that Hitler (having refused to join his comrades on trips to brothels during the war) remained a virgin until at least the immediate aftermath of World War I, and remained intensely private about his relations with women thereafter.

The discreet and undemanding Eva Braun (twenty-two years his junior), consistently hidden from the public, proved to be the perfect match in facilitating Hitler’s desire to maintain the image that his total devotion to the cause transcended any mere physical needs or desires. Once again, the contrast with Trump—parading a sequence of three glamorous wives and boasting about the extent of his sexual conquests, his ability to engage in sexual assault with impunity because of his celebrity, as well as the size of his manhood—could not be starker.

In a March 1936 speech to workers at a Krupp factory in Essen, Hitler proclaimed: “I am probably the only statesman in the world who does not have a bank account. I have no stocks or shares in any company. I don’t draw any dividends.” Just as Hitler cultivated the image of transcending any physical need for the companionship of women, he also cultivated the pose of an ascetic man beyond materialistic needs. In reality he had a large Munich apartment and an expanded and refurbished mountain villa at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, and he loved his Mercedes cars. His royalties from Mein Kampf and access to secret slush funds meant that he would never go wanting.

But these modest luxuries were not flaunted in the face of less-well-off Germans. Usefully for Hitler, the limitless greed and corruption of many of his followers, from the ostentatious Hermann Göring down to the local “little Hitlers” who utilized their newfound power to shamelessly enrich themselves, sharpened the contrast with his public asceticism. This appearance of simple living helped keep the image of the Führer untarnished, while the high living of party leaders and functionaries remained the focal point of popular resentment.

Once again in contrast, virtually no businessman flaunted his wealth and gold-plated name as blatantly as Donald Trump, and his entry into politics only increased the audience for this flaunting. Once elected he openly refused any of the traditional limits on conflict of interest through divestiture of his assets into a blind trust, and has filled his cabinet with fellow billionaires. The emoluments clause of the Constitution, hitherto untested due to commonly accepted axioms of American political culture, may remain so (given the Republican stranglehold on the House of Representatives through at least 2018 and very likely beyond), as Americans experience corruption, kleptocracy, and “bully capitalism” on an unprecedented scale.

If Hitler and Trump are utterly different in their childhoods and wartime experiences on the one hand and attitudes toward women and wealth on the other, the historical circumstances in which they made their political ascents exhibit partial similarities. Within the space of a single generation, German society suffered a series of extraordinary crises: four years of total war that culminated in an unexpected defeat; political revolution that replaced a semiparliamentary/semiautocratic monarchy with a democratic republic; hyperinflation that destroyed middle-class savings and mocked bourgeois values of thrift and deferred gratification while rewarding wild speculation; and finally the Great Depression, in which the unemployment rate at its worst exceeded a staggering 30 percent.

For many Germans these disasters were unnecessarily aggravated by three widespread but false perceptions: that the war had been lost because of a “stab in the back” on the home front rather than the poor decisions and reckless gambles of the military leadership; that the Versailles Treaty was a huge, undeserved, and unprecedented injustice; and that not just Communists but moderate Social Democrats, feckless liberals, and Jews—having delivered Germany to defeat and the “chains” of Versailles—threatened Germany with “Jewish Bolshevism.” According to Ullrich, it was this toxic brew that Hitler imbibed in postwar Munich, much more than his experiences in pre-war Vienna (his portrayal in Mein Kampf notwithstanding), that turned him from a complete nonentity into a rabidly anti-Semitic ideologue and radical politician.

The experience of Americans in recent years has not been one of sequential, nationwide disasters but of uneven suffering. After two protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a barely avoided total economic meltdown in 2008–2009, many Americans have enjoyed a return to comfort, security, and even prosperity, while wealth has continued to concentrate at the top. But for the sector of the population that provides the vast bulk of the recruits to our professional army, the endlessly repeated tours of duty, the inconclusive outcomes of the wars they fought, and the escalating chaos in and threat of terror from the Middle East are disheartening and demoralizing. For industrial workers and miners whose jobs have been lost to automation, globalization, and growing environmental consciousness, the post-2008 economic stagnation has meant an inescapable descent into underemployment, drastically lowered living standards, and little prospect of recovering their lost status and income.

For the first time, the life expectancy of middle-aged white Americans without a college education has significantly shortened, above all because of “diseases of despair,” especially alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide. For social conservatives whose predominately white and Christian milieu and deference to male dominance were both taken for granted and perceived as inherent in shaping American identity, the demographic rise and political activism of nonwhite minorities, the emergence of women’s rights, and the transformation of societal attitudes toward homosexuality, especially among the younger generation, have been surprising and to many dismaying. The division of society into what the ill-fated John Edwards once called the “two Americas” has intensified. One optimistically sees America as functional and progressing, while the other pessimistically sees America as dysfunctional and declining.

However unequal in severity the situations in the two countries were, large numbers of Germans and Americans perceived multiple crises of political gridlock, economic failure, humiliation abroad, and cultural-moral decay at home. Both Hitler and Trump proclaimed their countries to be “losers,” offered themselves as the sole solution to these crises, and pledged a return to the glories of an imagined golden past. Hitler promised a great “renewal” in Germany, Trump to “make America great again.” Both men defied old norms and invented unprecedented ways of waging their political campaigns. Both men developed a charismatic relationship with their “base” that centered on large rallies. Both emphasized their “outsider” status and railed against the establishment, privileged elites, and corrupt special interests. Both voiced grievances against enemies (Hitler’s “November criminals” and “Jewish Bolsheviks,” Trump’s “Mexican rapists,” “radical Islamic terror,” and the “dishonest” press). And both men benefited from being seriously underestimated by experts and rivals.

However, while both men created coalitions of discontent, their constituencies were quite different. The first groups to be taken over by Nazi majorities were student organizations on university campuses. In their electoral breakthrough in 1930, the Nazis won the vast majority of first-time voters, especially the youth vote. Above all, the Nazis vacuumed up the voters of other middle-class parties, and women of different social backgrounds voted in roughly the same proportions for the Nazis as men.

The two groups among whom the Nazis were relatively unsuccessful were Germany’s religious-block voters (in this case Catholics voting for their own Center Party) and blue-collar industrial workers (who more often shifted their votes from the declining moderate Social Democrats to the more radical Communists rather than to the Nazis). Still, the Nazis drew votes much more broadly across German society than any of their rival class- and sectarian-based parties and could boast with some justification to be the only true “people’s party” in the country.

Adolf Hitler; drawing by Pancho

In the end the Nazis built a strong base and won a decisive plurality in Germany’s multiparty system. The party reached 37 percent in the July 1932 elections and declined to 33 percent in November in the last two free elections, before it peaked at 44 percent in the manipulated election of March 1933.

Unlike Hitler, who won voters away from other parties to the Nazis, Trump did not build up his own party organization but captured the Republican Party through the primaries and caucuses. Despite this “hostile takeover” and Trump’s personal flaws, traditional Republicans (including women, whose defection had been wrongly predicted) solidly supported him in the general election, as did evangelicals. In contrast, the Democrats failed both to maintain Obama’s level of voter mobilization among African-Americans and youth and to hold onto blue-collar white male voters in the Great Lakes industrial states (especially in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania) who had voted for Obama in the two previous presidential elections, but had already deserted the Democratic Party in the previous three state elections. Trump’s 46 percent of the vote in a basically two-party race barely exceeded Hitler’s maximum of 44 percent in a multiparty race, but it was strategically distributed and thus sufficient for an electoral college victory despite Hillary Clinton’s receiving nearly three million more votes nationwide.

While Trump attained the presidency through a constitutionally legitimate electoral college victory, Hitler was unable to obtain the chancellorship through electoral triumph and a parliamentary majority. Rather he came to power through a deal brokered by Germany’s nationalist and authoritarian conservative elites and President Paul von Hindenburg. Having mobilized the large popular base that the old elites could not, Hitler was indispensable to their plans to replace the increasingly defunct Weimar democracy with authoritarian rule.

As Ullrich admirably demonstrates, it was not the inexorable rise of the Nazis but rather the first signs of their decline in the November 1932 elections (exhausted, bankrupt, and demoralized from constant campaigning without ultimate victory) that led conservative elites to accept Hitler’s demand for the chancellorship, before his stubborn holdout could ruin his own party and leave the conservatives to face the left without popular support. Many of Hitler’s and the conservatives’ goals overlapped: ending Weimar’s parliamentary democracy; rearming; throwing off the Versailles Treaty and restoring the borders of 1914; crushing the “Marxists” (i.e., Social Democrats and labor unions as well as Communists); and de-emancipating Germany’s Jews. The fundamental assumption of these conservative elites was, of course, that they would control Hitler and use him to realize their agenda, not vice versa.

Trump the populist and the traditional Republicans have likewise made a deal to work together, in part to realize those goals they share: tax “reform” with special emphasis on cuts for the well-off; deregulating business and banking; curtailing environmental protections while denying man-made climate change; appointing a Scalia-like justice to the Supreme Court; repealing Obamacare; increasing military spending; increasing the deportation of undocumented immigrants and “sealing the border”; shifting resources from public to charter schools; expanding the rights of individuals or businesses to discriminate against unprotected groups in the name of religious freedom; ending the right to abortion; and on the state level intensifying voter suppression.

It is highly unlikely, however, that Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and other Republican legislators share Trump’s enthusiasm for a trillion-dollar infrastructure package; his pledge not to cut Social Security and Medicare; the replacement of broad, regional free trade agreements with narrow, bilateral trade treaties; and some economic conjuring trick to reopen closed coal mines, steel mills, and factories. Presumably some of these Trump promises will be set aside (as already appears to be happening to his promise of a health plan that covers more people with better care at less cost, though not sufficiently to the satisfaction of hard-core conservatives), and further conflict looms ahead.

If both Hitler and Trump made deals with conservative political partners on the basis of partially overlapping goals and those partners’ wishful thinking, it is simply not possible for Trump to consolidate absolute power and dispense with his allies with either the speed or totality that Hitler did. One of the most chilling sections of Ullrich’s biography deals with the construction of the Nazi dictatorship. Through emergency decrees of President Hindenburg (not subject to judicial review), freedom of the press, speech, and assembly were suspended within the first week. Due process of law and the autonomy of state governments were gone within the first month, as the government was empowered to intern people indefinitely in concentration camps without charges, trial, or sentence, and to replace non-Nazi state governments with Nazi commissioners. By the sixth week, the Communist Party had been outlawed and the entire constitution had been set aside in favor of Hitler (rather than Hindenburg) ruling through decree.

In the third month equality before the law was abrogated with the first anti-Jewish decrees and the purging of the civil service, and in the fourth month the labor unions and the Social Democratic Party were abolished. The remaining political parties disbanded themselves in month five. In June 1934 Hitler carried out the “Blood Purge.” Among its victims were former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and his wife as well as hundreds of others on Hitler’s enemies list. Former vice chancellor Franz von Papen, who had brokered the deal that brought Hitler to power, was dispatched as ambassador to Austria. It was as if Hillary and Bill Clinton were gunned down in their doorway, and Mike Pence sent off as ambassador to Canada.

Partly because Trump does not have an independent party and paramilitary militia totally committed to him personally and partly because American democracy is in no way as atrophied as was the Weimar Republic, such a whirlwind creation of dictatorship is not a possibility in 2017. Courts continue to exercise judicial review and uphold due process, governors in states like California and Washington are not being deposed and replaced, the exercise of free speech, press, and assembly under the Bill of Rights is still intact, and opposition parties are not being outlawed. Equally important, large numbers of people are frequently and visibly exercising their rights of assembly and speech, and the news media have not sought to ingratiate themselves with the new regime, thereby earning the administration’s reprimand that they are both the real “opposition” and the “enemy of the people.” Whatever the authoritarian tendencies of Trump and some of those around him, they have encountered limits that Hitler did not.

Two factors that Ullrich consistently emphasizes are Hitler’s ideological core on the one hand and the fact that he made no attempt to hide it on the other. On the contrary, knowledge of it was available to anyone who cared enough to look. If Hitler’s first postwar biographer, Alan Bullock, treated him as a tyrant seeking power for its own sake, Ullrich embraces the research of the late 1960s, especially by Eberhard Jäckel,* who laid out how, over the course of the 1920s, Hitler’s worldview crystallized around race as the driving force of history. He believed the Jews constituted the greatest threat to Germany’s racial purity and fighting spirit, and thus to its capacity to wage the eternal struggle for “living space” needed to sustain and expand Germany’s population and vanquish its rivals.

Ullrich also accepts later research that demonstrates that this worldview did not constitute a premeditated program or blueprint, but provided the parameters and guidelines for how Nazi racial, foreign, and military policy evolved and radicalized over the twelve years of the Third Reich. Ascent ends in March 1939, with the occupation of Prague as Hitler’s last bloodless victory. But it is clear to Ullrich that no one should have been surprised that Hitler’s ideologically driven career was destined to culminate in war and genocide.

With Trump, of course, we have neither historical perspective nor discernible ideological core. The overwhelming impression is that his ego and need for adulation, as well as his inability to discern simple reality and tell the truth when his ego is threatened, are his driving forces, not ideology. Among his appointees, however, is the Breitbart faction of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, who embrace a vision of what Bannon euphemistically calls “economic nationalism.” It combines white supremacy; the Leninist “deconstruction” of the New Deal/cold war administrative state; Islamophobia (especially in seeing a titanic and irreconcilable clash of civilizations between Islam and the West); the dismantling of the current international order (UN, EU, NATO, NAFTA, etc.) in favor of a return to unfettered and self-assertive, ethnically homogeneous nation-states; affinity with Putin’s Russia and other ultra-nationalist and increasingly authoritarian movements in Europe; and apocalyptic historical thinking about the end of the current era (a roughly eighty-year cycle that began in the 1930s) and the emergence of a new one in the very near future.

Trump shares these views sufficiently to have made Bannon the chief strategist of his administration, and his easy resort to racist rhetoric—the birther myth, Mexicans as rapists and criminals, the Muslim ban, Lindbergh’s “America First” slogan—makes clear that he is perfectly comfortable stoking racism. But it is not clear if any of this ideological package would have priority over his central agenda of self-aggrandizement. The future direction of the Trump administration depends in no small part on the extent to which the Bannon-Miller faction prevails over the collection of traditionalists, military officers, and billionaires whom Trump has also appointed to important positions.

Ullrich also shows that the phenomenal rise in Hitler’s popularity—his ability to win over the majority of the majority who did not vote for him—crucially resulted from the dual achievement of a string of bloodless foreign policy victories on the one hand and economic recovery (especially the return to full employment) on the other. Full employment was accomplished above all by rearmament through huge deficit spending and enormous trade deficits that resulted from bilateral trade deals. They created an economic house of cards in which the frenetic pace of preparing for a major war planned for 1942–1943 required the gamble of seizing Austrian and Czech resources while avoiding war in 1938–1939. The infrastructure program of building autobahns had a very minor, mostly cosmetic, part in economic recovery.

Trump too has staked his political future on economic promises of 4 percent growth; the reopening of coal mines, steel mills, and factories in regions of economic blight; and the replacement or renegotiation of free trade agreements (that were based on the assumption of mutual benefit) with bilateral trade deals in which America wins and the other side loses. In this regard the goal of his bilateral trade agreements is exactly the opposite of Hitler’s, i.e., he seeks trade surpluses, while Hitler paid for crash rearmament in part through trade deficits that would allegedly be paid off later or preferably canceled through conquest. Trump is tied to a political party that traditionally has favored free trade and abhors deficit spending for any purposes other than providing tax cuts for the wealthy, increasing the military budget, and justifying cuts to the welfare safety net.

It is unclear how Trump’s populist promises on health care, Social Security and Medicare, infrastructure rebuilding, and recovery of blighted industries can be accomplished, particularly in an environment of potential trade war, higher cost of living due to import taxes and diminished competition, possible decline in now relatively prosperous, cutting-edge export industries, and agrobusiness that needs both export markets and cheap immigrant labor. Tax cuts, deregulation, and reckless disregard for the environment are the Republican panaceas for the economy. Will they provide even a temporary boost (before the balloon bursts and the bill comes due as it did for George W. Bush in 2007–2008) sufficient to help Trump escape the economic and political cul de sac into which he has maneuvered himself? Here too the future direction of the Trump administration is unclear.

Hitler and National Socialism should not be seen as the normal historical template for authoritarian rule, risky foreign policy, and persecution of minorities, for they constitute an extreme case of totalitarian dictatorship, limitless aggression, and genocide. They should not be lightly invoked or trivialized through facile comparison. Nonetheless, even if there are many significant differences between Hitler and Trump and their respective historical circumstances, what conclusions can the reader of Volker Ullrich’s new biography reach that offer insight into our current situation?

First, there is a high price to pay for consistently underestimating a charismatic political outsider just because one finds by one’s own standards and assumptions (in my case those of a liberal academic) his character flawed, his ideas repulsive, and his appeal incomprehensible. And that is important not only for the period of his improbable rise to power but even more so once he has attained it. Second, putting economically desperate people back to work by any means will purchase a leader considerable forgiveness for whatever other shortcomings emerge and at least passive support for any other goals he pursues. As James Carville advised the 1992 Clinton campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Third, the assumption that conservative, traditionalist allies—however indispensable initially—will hold such upstart leaders in check is dangerously wishful thinking. If conservatives cannot gain power on their own without the partnership and popular support of such upstarts, their subsequent capacity to control these upstarts is dubious at best.

Fourth, the best line of defense of a democracy must be at the first point of attack. Weimar parliamentary government had been supplanted by presidentially appointed chancellors ruling through the emergency decree powers of an antidemocratic president since 1930. In 1933 Hitler simply used this post-democratic stopgap system to install a totalitarian dictatorship with incredible speed and without serious opposition. If we can still effectively protect American democracy from dictatorship, then certainly one lesson from the study of the demise of Weimar and the ascent of Hitler is how important it is to do it early.

    Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler’s Weltanschauung: A Blueprint for Power (Wesleyan University Press, 1972), originally published in German in 1969. 

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19. HOW TO MAKE AN ENTIRE GENERATION APOLITICAL: AN INTERVIEW WITH BELARUSIAN ANARCHIST MIKOLA DEDOK
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(Open Democracy - 31 March 2017)

In Belarus, anarchists have made a name for themselves during the recent wave of protests which have rocked the country. We speak to Mikola Dedok, an anarchist activist, on apathy, politicisation and the failures of opposition politics. Русский

17 February: protest against "parasite law" in Minsk. CC A-SA 4.0 / Wikipedia. Some rights reserved.After Belarus’ opposition and the movement against the “parasite law” held demonstrations last weekend, dozens of people are in prison in Belarus. The majority of them, including journalists and rights activists, will remain behind bars for another 10-15 days. One of them is Mikola Dedok, an anarchist activist, former political prisoner and author of a new book that describes his experiences inside Belarus’ prison system.

We spoke to Dedok about youth politics, apathy and the relationship between new movements and Belarus’s formal opposition several days prior to the demonstration on 25 March in Minsk, where he was detained and beaten by police, and later transported to hospital with head trauma. A Minsk court sentenced him to 10 days in prison.

Seven years after being sentenced to five years for participation in direct actions, for Dedok, nothing much has changed in Belarus. The economic situation of most citizens has only deteriorated, and the attempts at “liberalisation” have, judging by recent arrests, failed.

The criminal case against you and several other political activists in 2010 was designed to scare people off from activism. Can we call the apathy we saw today among Belarusian young people a direct result of these trials? What measures are taken against anarchists who are actively fighting against the anti-parasite law?

I don’t think our trial had such a big influence on Belarusian society. It stirred up activist circles, no more. Repressive measures have been applied to anarchists everywhere, and this will continue.

But in Belarus, anarchists face particular challenges. They’ll try to crush us, limit us, place us under control. But the state doesn’t have that many means of influencing us — we’re talking about detentions, beatings and prison sentences. What happened on 15 March, where around 40 anarchists were arrested (and received 12-15 days of detention the next day), just confirms this. I think this will continue. In Belarus, anarchists are arrested not because they break a window or get into fights with the police, but simply because they’re anarchists.

After the recent protests, many people are discussing the possibility of a revolution in Belarus, often referring to Ukraine’s Maidan. But Belarusian society, after all, has been living under a dictatorship for a while. What do you think, can people overcome their fear of instability, which is typical of so many citizens?

lead 2012: graffiti in support of Dedok. Source: Facebook.After years of being fed ideas of Belarus as a “social state” and “stability”, the values of consumerism have won out over everything else in the minds of ordinary people. “The state and public life is one thing, and we’re another,” - this narrative dominates many Belarusian families, and this is how children are brought up.

The result is the atomisation of society. An individual’s life becomes like a bubble, which reduces their contacts with other people around them to a minimum. I’ve read so many times how opposition journalists or politicians try to speak to people working at a factory - perhaps they’ve had their wages cut or the conditions have deteriorated. And very often, however paradoxical it might seem, the workers just refuse to speak to them and respond with cliches such as “We’re small people”, “We don’t go in for politics” and so on. Despite the fact that this is an opportunity to articulate their problems. And the reason isn’t just fear of repression, but the example set by their parents that the state is a mighty force, and you should avoid saying anything that could upset it out loud.

In your opinion, how effective are these “soft” and “hard” forms of repression?

The state’s efforts, even without using direct repression, are producing results. Ten years ago, I was studying in the Law Faculty of the Belarus State University. And there were four people from my group (25 people) who regularly went to opposition actions or cultural events. And that’s in a situation where you could be kicked out of university for being detained at a protest. Many of my friends from Minsk went to all the opposition meetings.

Today, when the repression for participating in a street action is a lot less fierce, there’s usually 200-300 people at them, in comparison to several thousand a few years ago, when the climate was more repressive.

An unexpectedly large amount of people turned up on 15 March to protest the “parasite” law. And this in a climate where it’s clear the formal opposition is under significant pressure. Given the large numbers of workers in the public sector and state-owned enterprises, is it not time for Belarus’ opposition to change its message? What opportunities are there for other groups to enter the field here?

March 2017: Mikola Dedok presents his new book in Tver, Russia. Source: Facebook.For Belarusian society, which is mired in the past and requires change, it is critically important to know the answer to the following question: why is it that, with an apparently beneficial turn of circumstances, the opposition and civil society can’t motivate the population, in particular, young people, to fighting the regime and defending their rights?

On the one hand, you can blame the opposition and the issues it concentrates on. Belarus is in a state of permanent economic crisis. Wages are falling, prices are rising. Some enterprises have been transferred to working half the week. Unemployment is rising. And the state is only spending more on its security services, to put down protest movements. The president and the government respond to this situation by introducing a tax on “parasitism”, whereby every citizen who is not officially registered as employed has to pay an annual tax under penalty of fine or a 15-day prison sentence.

The opposition, in its attempt to mobilise people who are dissatisfied with this into fighting for their social and labour rights, could absolutely have had some success. But practically all of the dozens of actions carried out over the past two years have focused exclusively on historical, cultural-ethnic and statist thematics.

The “national” agenda has completely pushed out the social, thereby alienating the significant number of people who aren’t at all interested in fighting for national values

In Belarus, where the level of national identity is low, the opposition — with envious persistence — calls people out to demonstrations in memory of the soldiers who staged the Slutsk Uprising in 1921, a march in memory of the dispersal of the Supreme Council in 1996, and other actions around new ideas for a national flag.

The “national” agenda has completely pushed out the social, thereby alienating the significant number of people who aren’t at all interested in fighting for national values. A typical example of these tactics: the Belarusian National Front, the most recognisable of the opposition parties, at the start of March called on people to mark a day in honour of the Belarusian crest — the country was already experiencing week three of protests against the parasite laws. Such a move clearly talks about their priorities, their level of understanding of the problems the population is facing.

As a result, the opposition and, indeed, all political parties, were represented minimally at the February protests. The only youth group that really made itself known at the protests were the anarchists, who had no organisational structure, nor the support of the big civic organisations. You could call this a failure of Belarus’ traditional opposition — they couldn’t mobilise youth at the one moment it was needed more than ever before.

The result of all this was that opposition groups and all political parties were only minimally represented in February’s protests against the “law on parasitism”. The only youth group which openly declared its official presence at the protest were the anarchists, who have neither an organisational structure, nor the support of large public organisations. This is a clear indicator that the traditional opposition has failed to mobilise young people just when they are most needed.

Nevertheless, even this civic unrest is meeting a kind of “symbolic resistance” from the authorities. For example, not long ago the TV stations broadcast the propaganda film “Call to a Friend”, which raises suspicions that protesters, including the anarchists, are funded from abroad. How effective do you think this propaganda is? And how can it be resisted?

Not very. Firstly, much fewer people than get their news from the TV today then, say, 10 years ago. And in general, they’re from the older generation. Television propaganda looks backward, not forward. The youth has passed it by. As for “Call to a Friend”, the film was made very poorly, and clearly in a hurry. It’s just weak and unconvincing; even in comparison to Russian propaganda. Thirdly, the level of trust in the authorities and what they say has hit an all-time low. That’s why these broadcasts will convince nobody — actually, they may do the exact opposite and enrage people with their flagrant lies.

A still from the propaganda film "Call to a friend". Source: Youtube.On the other hand, the now-infamous video of the president’s statements which caused so much fear were actually publicised by independent media. The authorities could reach their desired audience without resorting to TV propaganda. And due to this particular hysteria, opposition leaders decided to hold their march on 15 March in accordance with the authorities’ demands — instead of marching down Minsk’s central streets, they dutifully followed the route set out for them by the police.

But here it’s worth mentioning that the border between “soft power”, which forms public values directed against the opposition and in favour of the government, and direct propaganda is quite thin.

Many evening newscasts on state TV tell the stories of happy families who’ve found good jobs in state-owned enterprises, bought property with a preferential loan as well as furniture and household appliances, and are now busy raising their children. This discourse is constantly reproduced by president Lukashenka: “democracy is when the state guarantees you a stable and decent standard of living”. Or, when speaking about the opposition: “all they want is to riot! Riot in the parliament, riot on the squares, get into fights, beat each other with sticks, batter down the windows with wood, stab, crush, kill…”

In every news broadcast, in every “expert commentary”, in every presidential speech, the point is made loud and clear: “Not happy with the authorities? Do you want things to end up like in Ukraine?”

Belarusian media report daily on events around the world, as long as they can be used to portray the Belarusian government favourably. Belarus Segodnya — a newspaper with a circulation of 400,000 in a country of 9.5 million, is nearly entirely full of non-political news. Any outrage or any protest in any part of the world is given an entirely negative connotation. It paints a negative picture of the EU’s migration crisis, with a very xenophobic tone — mocking “western tolerance” and waxing lyrical on the collapse of multiculturalism and dangers of the “Islamic threat”. All these negative connotations are meticulously tied into understandings of democracy and liberalism.

Of particular importance here is the truly immense propaganda effort by the Belarusian authorities around the time of the events in Ukraine and EuroMaidan. As the revolution in Ukraine did witness many casualties, television channels did all they could to show that spilt blood and civil war were the logical and inevitable results of any attempts to overthrow the powers that be — that any social instability is tantamount to bloody chaos, and that preserving the status quo is always and better than risking change. In every news broadcast, in every “expert commentary”, in every presidential speech, the point is made loud and clear: “Not happy with the authorities? Do you want things to end up like in Ukraine?”

January 2014: a pro-European Union crowd hold lights while singing the Ukrainian national anthem as they celebrate New Year. (c) Efrem Lukatsky / AP / Press Association Images. All rights reserved.As a result, Belarusians have developed a steady fear of revolutions, which are associated with bombings, shootings and massacres. These days, many average Belarusians, on reflection, would rather suffer new humiliations by the authorities than rise up against them in a Belarusian Maidan.

Does the government ever resort to more open repression?

The government’s arsenal in this area is quite predictable. Young people are threatened with expulsion from university if they’re detained at opposition protests. Older people fear being fired from their jobs. If somebody works for a state enterprise (and there are many of them, for the state controls most of the economy in Belarus), that means there’s been a direct order to her boss from the KGB. If she works in the private sector, then there are other methods of putting pressure on the firm’s director — such as the threat of a thorough tax inspection.

The battle against authoritarianism in Europe is far from over. For the effective treatment of any disease, you need to recognise its symptoms early on — such as those which have flourished in Belarus for the past 23 years

Fines and prison sentences of up to 25 days are actively applied. Activists who “cross the red line” face criminal charges and face prison sentences. While the authorities have many years of experience in dealing with the organised political opposition, they have had to be proactive in learning how to confront politicised youth groups such as antifascists and football hooligans.

As a result of falsified charges or changing administrative cases to criminal ones, dozens of football fans of various Belarusian clubs are now behind bars. Chief among them, of course, are fans whose clubs voiced an explicitly pro-Ukrainian position during Maidan and start of the war in the Donbas.

Belarus is frequently referred to as the “last dictatorship in Europe” — the country is relatively isolated politically and is often seen as an anomaly, cut off from wider European processes. How do you think Belarus fits into the broader global picture?

Today’s triumph of populist, far-right and nationalist forces in several European countries, as well as the election of Donald Trump as US president, all indicate that the danger of losing hard-won freedoms is alive and well. Therefore, dissecting the experience of life under the dictatorship built by Lukashenka, another populist, could be a useful exercise for those living in western countries, long considered bulwarks of democracy.

Among the chatter of politicians and noise of electioneering today, you can already hear the alarm bells ringing, especially in the EU’s eastern member states. Take, for example, the Polish government’s interference with the constitutional court.

The battle against authoritarianism in Europe is far from over. For the effective treatment of any disease, you need to recognise its symptoms early on — such as those which have flourished in Belarus for the past 23 years.

It’s interesting to note that students across the post-Soviet space, who are traditionally catalysts of social change, appear to be suffering from apathy. What’s their situation in Belarus? What are the obstacles to their political activism?

Yes, apathy is typical for the student environment. I’ve heard from student activists that Belarusian students do not fight for their rights for the simple reason that they simply don’t know that they have any to defend.

The desire to get an education and find a good job prevails over all others, and there is no connection in students’ minds between civic activity and a better standard of living. Across higher education, the study of the humanities, which are easily connected to politics, is being reduced. The study and even the mention of political ideologies are cautiously avoided. The higher education system in Belarus strives against the politicisation of students wherever possible, and the emergence of critical thought among the youth.

The pro-government Belarusian Republican Youth Union, which openly declares itself a successor to the Leninist Komsomol, is quite active. They organise events which hail the ruling authorities and the many “achievements” of Lukashenka, as well as massive trolling attacks online. The movement intensifies its work before elections, when it is active in peddling the pro-government media’s line and advertising the president’s speeches.

5 March: BRSM tidies up Kuropaty mass grave site, where thousands of people were shot under Stalin's purges. Source: BRSM.At the same time, the Youth Union tries to dissuade young people from getting involved in protest — by both the carrot and the stick. For example, when the opposition announces a big demonstration, they’ll organise free concerts and discos that same day. Students are often forced to attend such events, on threat of facing problems at university.

The apathy and political passivity of the Belarusian youth are especially visible when compared to students in other eastern European countries, who readily — and successfully — locked horns with both Soviet and post-Soviet dictatorships. For its part, Belarus survived a large-scale political “cleansing” in the 1930s — practically the entire intelligentsia, including critically-minded communists, was annihilated. Nowadays, the Belarusian youth has no positive example of political struggle to look back to — with the exception of “our grandfathers, who won the war.”

The absence of successful examples from the past suppresses the will to resist, and makes it very difficult for opposition movements to attract new supporters.

During the Khrushchev-era thaw in Belarus, there were neither strong dissident movements nor a nationalist underground of any note. Supporters of independence and an anti-Soviet intelligentsia only appeared with perestroika, but even towards the end of the 1990s they were incapable of forming a mass movement along the lines of Poland’s Solidarność or Lithuania’s Sajūdis. Yes, Belarus did have its own “National Front”, but it never gained the same mass support as similar movements in other Soviet republics.

The absence of successful examples from the past suppresses the will to resist, and makes it very difficult for opposition movements to attract new supporters.

At the same time, there are some signs that Belarus’s youth are still trying to find a way into politics. How will they accomplish that?

Of course, it wouldn’t be right to say that the youth has entirely dropped out of civic life, or that it has no desire to change anything in Belarus.

But many young people in Belarus have changed the form of their engagement with political life. Alongside their dwindling participation in street protests over the past few years, there’s been a marked trend towards Belarusification [i.e. actions in support of the Belarusian language], which has political overtones — after all, the language issue in Belarus is very politicised. At first glance, the youth subcultures and public initiatives which are becoming popular have no directly political agenda. One example might be cultural events such as “Vyshyvanka Day” [an embroidered traditional Belarusian shirt] or performances by bands who sing in Belarusian, which attract much larger crowds than in years past.

Here, of course, a key point is that these kind of events are much less likely to face state repression than public protests, pickets and demonstrations — with Lukashenka’s endorsement of a “soft Belarusification” of public life, the nationalist paradigm is in higher demand by the authorities.

20 March: a freemarket at 210 METROV, Minsk. Source: VK.Furthermore, social initiatives continue to develop on a number of agendas — whether ecological, charitable, or even anti-capitalist. The Food not Bombs group, for example, distributes free food to the poor and homeless. Freemarket is an attempt to exchange goods and services on a wholly non-commercial basis. Another example is the Critical Mass movement which began in Minsk, and stands for environmentally-friendly public transport. Yet despite these groups’ formally non-political stance, the state nonetheless keeps a watchful eye on their events.

Whether this primarily cultural struggle is actually effective in resisting a dictatorship is a very controversial question. Still, during perestroika it was exactly these cultural circles of dissidents which laid the foundations of mass political movements. And while opposition political parties, due to their legal status, can easily simply be taken over by the government, it’s more of a headache to exercise control over these informal youth movements. Who knows? Perhaps, one day, their unpredictability, decentralised structures and engagement with the public could even become, under certain conditions, an instrument of change.


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South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web: 
www.sacw.net/

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DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
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