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Comment by jamal-kumar | Hacker News Reader

I think it's worth noting why this is happening. The country has been giving out degrees and jobs to people who instead of working and studying hard, to descendants of veterans in the country's war against pakistan, and this level of nepotism has been going on since the 70s which as you can easily imagine is not great for those who see the value in getting these "basic livelihood for hard work" things. So when people started protesting recently, because for anyone with half a brain this is completely wrong, the people without half a brain who benefit from this completely fucked system responded by killing and raping students and now there's no internet.

This is definitely how you drain a country of all its competent people very fast by the way.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Chhatra_League

The ruling party seems to be allied with a student paramilitary to help act as their enforcers.

"Chhatra League distributes dormitory seats at Chittagong University instead of authorities. Only those who join Chhatra League after being enrolled, get the chance to stay in the residential halls."

Slight quibble - the student paramilitary IS part of Hasina's party (BAP).

It's the student wing.

In South Asia, all party student wings are basically paramilitaries and gangs.

It reminds me a lot of the Red Guards - the greatest disaster could come from the party losing control of these groups.

The original Indian and Pakistani founders had Soviet education and influences. Moreover the Comintern was one of the only fora at the time that was openly in support of decolonization. The similarities aren't coincidental.

Father of nation of both India and Pakistan were educated in England under English traditions.

Sorry didn't mean to imply Nehru, Gandhi, or Jinna were educated in the Soviet Union. Just that revolutionaries and early Communist Party leaders who were influential to independence were influenced by or spent time in the Soviet Union.

Basically. Similar ideological (as in anti-authoritarian turned authoritarian) background.

I have a thesis musting somewhere in Cambridge MA about this parallel.

As a layreader of history, i've noticed the more ideological, the more they are prone to authoritarianism. And it makes sense if you think about it. It's why paternalistic revolutions always devolve into authoritarian nonsense.

Reminds me of the summer of 2020 in America

Can you elaborate?

What about it do you not know or understand about the civil unrest that occurred in America?

When I googled “2020 summer of love riots” in the first results are the Wikipedia page and an article from the heritage foundation that both probably give you an idea

I didn't get the connection to the parent post: how and why it reminded you of 2020.

> In South Asia, all party student wings are basically paramilitaries and gangs.

Interesting- that's how it is in Nigeria, another former British colony:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confraternities_in_Nigeria

Though those sound more like militarized cults, while the South Asian ones are more like student orgs of political parties that have street militias.

I don’t think the confraternities in Nigeria are the same. At least they don’t share hostel bed spaces to students and aren’t recognized by school administrations. In most Nigerian schools, you’d actually be expelled if evidence of your membership of any of these secret organizations surface.

Yeah, they’re only superficially similar in that they’re both college-based groups capable of force.

> The general secretary of Bangladesh Chhatra League Jahangirnagar University unit, Jasimuddin Manik and his followers celebrated the rape of 100th girls including at least 20 students of the university in 1998.

Is it poverty that brings out the worst in people? Or something else?

Plenty of rich people celebrating rapes and children being bombed in Gaza, so I doubt it's poverty.

What were they up to on October 6? I wonder what could have happened that might have brought out the retributive side. Surely the broad support for terrorism pushed by Qatari money and slow-burning propaganda couldn't have further inflamed them for the umpteenth time in 3000+ years of suffering and trying to avoid abuse... /shrug

If it was really a response to Saudi Arabia on the verge of signing a peace agreement with Israel, what would that say about the unfortunate aggressors?

Important to note it wasn't just a 'war against Pakistan', but a war for independence from Pakistan [1], which also included a genocide against Bengalis by Pakistan and their allies [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Liberation_War

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_genocide

from that link about the Bangladesh genocide (wow, I never heard of this):

> Pakistan's imams declared Bengali Hindu women to be "war booty”;[11][12] and Pakistani fatwa were issued legitimizing Bengali Hindu women as spoils of war.[12][13] Women who were targeted often died in Pakistani captivity or committed suicide, while others fled to India.

This is based on a non-contextual reading of Quran 4:24, Quran 8:69, Quran 23:5-6:, Quran 33:50 and various hadiths, which continue to be taken literally (when it is convenient to do so) by belligerents, hundreds of years after they were written. I refuse to cite them here because they are offensive to humanitarian/modern ethical worldviews (and because I do not wish to play a game of moral relativism).

I’ll provide the links for the two suras cited above for the curious:

An Nisa (the women) - https://quran.com/4, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/An-Nisa. In dowry and inheritance matters it’s actually quite advanced for its age.

Al Anfal (the spoils of war) - https://quran.com/8, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Anfal. These are, of course, orthogonal to our moral values but not more depraved than bounty customs employed hundreds of years afterwards.

Prophet Mohammed himself took one fifth of the spoils, including taking women as wives, eg see Safiyya bint Huyayy, who was his tenth wife after her tribe was killed (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safiyya_bint_Huyayy).

I’m missing your point about adhering to these “when it’s convenient”. This was standard practice for Muslim armies for hundreds of years afterwards (of course others did the same).

I understand that. It's just that many people still use these passages to the present day to justify bad behavior.

That is what all religious texts and institutions effectively do. Take moral standards of centuries and millennium before and force it on today.

Sure. But only one of them seems to result in a massively disproportionate level of violence. And not just violence due to a difference of religion, but violence done in the very name of the religion

Not just the one. Both old and new testament have lot of violence and mysognistic rhetoric if you read them literally.

It may not seem like it today , Christianity is a bloody religion of conquest throughout most of its history, just the last 500 years had countless genocides conducted all over the world in its name. Gold , Glory and God was the theme of all colonization, before that period we had the another 500 years of religious wars like the crusades.

Islam is hardly the sole or even the largest abuser of faith. It is merely newest major one

Good points. I wonder how Catholicism did away with justifying the Crusades. Although I would add that Islam has been consistently bloody since inception.

I have since learned that the Crusades were actually a direct response to Islamic aggression, so that comparison sort of goes out the window

Degrees as well as jobs? Are Bangladeshi universities diploma mills?

People who run a country into the ground are happy to maintain the status quo as long as they're getting their share? Who knew!?

Conjecture: there is no exit from despotry because more than deriving happiness from the current state, the despot fears dissolution. A counter-example might be post apartheid South Africa or Idi Amin’s exile, but there are sufficient examples of worse personal and family outcomes to rule out simple projections of psychopaths.

I don't know about running a country to the ground. They are economically doing quite well with metrics exceeding those of neighboring countries like India.

Yeah, this is really far from accurate, which is absolutely not to justify Sheikh Hasina's antics. GDP has shot up in the 21st century and the trend growth appears to be accelerating. Bangladesh was a very poor country, but it is getting rich fast. https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDP_RPCH@WEO/BGD?zo... https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/bangladesh-is-the-new-asian-ti...

Country probably entirely underwater in the next 50 years anyways....

So its inhabitants need to be subjected to injustices for another 50 years?

Talking about why it is happening is helpful.

I’m just surprised nobody is talking about the reason the government claims it has limited access to information: preventing disinformation.

Not a single person here has commented about disinformation, but it is the single most applicable part of this article for Americans.

Preventing the spread of disinformation has been the supposed in the last decade reason for the largest censorship campaigns our nation has ever seen.

Which nation are you from?

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