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 Lefties of the Noam Chomsky and Edward Said kind but is little more than the typical middle school set of excuses of the intellectually unsound, morally compromised, and spiritually bankrupt dumbasses. Nowhere is this state of manufactured apologia so predictable, so uniform, and so standardized as in Bangladesh where the rapacious one party regime of Awami League has astutely used its cronies in what remains of the Bangladeshi intelligentsia to conflate loyalty to the ruling family and ruling party with loyalty to the country. And across Europe and America, younger Bangladeshis whose parents depend on Awami largesse for their businesses and professions at home, have taken up this bizarre unoriginal apologia with gusto. At least such men and women in their 20s and 30s are in ‘respectable’ company: barring a few brave souls in the likes of New Age, the entire English-language press in Bangladesh has proudly donned the mantle of foreign ministry spokesmen for the Awami League dictatorship in a manner that emulates the mannerisms of the “journalists” of the English- and German editions of Pravda and Izvestia of yore.
Dictatorships rot not just a society but the conscience of those associated with them.