Finally, the Economist says it too

It is said ‘better late than never’. What many of us had known from the time of the January 2014 ‘elections’, when the majority of the parliament was elected without a single ballot being cast, the mandarins of the global elite at London’s Economist have finally concluded as well: Bangladesh has ceased to be even the rudimentary democracy that it was. It did not happen overnight and the consolidation of the dictatorship will also happen in stages like a ‘drip, drip, drip’ process while the the Economist’s counterparts in the United States (WaPo, NYT, WSJ) and Canada (Globe and Mail, National Post) continue to provide space for the Bangladeshi regime’s apologists–official and unofficial–to regale the North American think tank types about how their dictatorship is really just a ‘different’ kind of democracy. In the run up to the farce of the December 2018 ‘elections’, twice did the NYT provide a space for the column of the brother of one of the unelected MPs, so that the said sibling (who owns the regime’s flagship ULAB college) could defend the dictatorship’s tactics. In the post Cold War world, democracies rarely die with a bang; rather they are squelched one breath at a time while the friends of democracy in London, New York, Ottawa, and Brussels are too busy being even handed between the respective narratives of the advocates of dictatorship versus that of the victims of the dictatorship. http://espresso.economist.com/0390aff9c68eeb7b64fbebe21c878de3