If sycophancy was an Olympic sport, the so-called journalists of Bangladesh would certainly be in the running for the top three slots every four years. In the run up to the opening of the controversial Padma Bridge last month, ostensibly respectable journalists left no stone unturned to show their obeisance to the unelected “prime minister”, …
Tag Archives: HasinaWazed
The One party, One family dynasty ruling Bangladesh
A great tragedy of the Bangladeshi people is that their own journalists have simply disappeared into sycophantic oblivion like the Pravda journalists of yore; the very idea that any newspaper or broadcast show would even ask where does the so-called Prime Minister’s uber-nationalistic son live, or who he is married to, or how he makes …
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Punitive sanctions are good; preventive ones are even better
The US sanctions on a few high level leaders of the Bangladeshi dictatorship’s brutal security establishment are not only welcome news but are already having a measurable impact: since the announcement of the sanctions until last night, not a single victim has died in staged encounters with the regime security forces, and no known cases …
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The middle-school apologia for dictatorship: predictable, uniform, unoriginal
Blame the “western media”, blame “conspiracy against us”, blame “lack of patriotism”, blame “colonialism”, blame “but what about..”…that’s in a nutshell the toolbox of every barbaric dictatorship–and its paid and unpaid interlocutors–which is criticized for the horrid treatment of its own citizens. That apologia is pathetically old and worn out; it may impress the usual …
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What NYT, Economist, WaPo won’t admit
It’s a decided surprise when occasionally the once respected Prothom Alo newspaper in Dhaka (a sister concern of the Daily Star of regime pet ‘critic’ Mahfuz Anam) spills out the beans on the nature of the ‘democracy’ that that the graduate interns at the Bangladesh beat at the New York Times or Washington Post or …
Even the sycophants admit rigging
The scale and scope of the night-before stuffing of ballot boxes was so stunning even by the ruling junta’s normal benchmarks, that it’s own ‘front’ ally (all these totalitarian parties of the Eastern European style..be they post WWII Poland or North Korea or Syria have ‘fronts’ which bring the main political machine of the junta …