Trying to imagine the future can be tricky business.
Predictions fall flat, bad regimes are replaced by worse regimes, our wells of optimism are bled dry, plans go out the window. When momentum for political change builds up, sometimes it is impossible to not get caught up in the romance, and to believe a better world is at hand.
Few sights are as energizing as the sight of young people ushering in the winds of change, taking to the streets, demanding justice and an end to broken systems. But the longer you live, the more realize that the arrow of history is anything but straightforward, and progress is a chaotic, multi-directional zigzag rather than straight march forward, and nothing is pure good or pure evil -- there are winners and losers to everything.
Don’t define yourself in terms of your enemy
I’m sounding a bit abstract, I know. Let me explain.
Let’s take a trip to Iran: For many years, discontent had been brewing against the Shah -- an autocrat and allegedly an American puppet. There was a tremendous burst of revolutionary energy in the late 70s, and liberal intellectuals around the world started to lend their voices in support of deposing the Shah, voices that included Michel Foucault, that Frenchest of French intellectuals, champion of the marginalized and the erased, advocate of freedom.
To Foucault’s enlightened, Western-but-left-of-the-left eyes, it seemed like a no-brainer that a popular movement in Iran from within, one replacing the tyranny of the American hegemony with Iranian self-determination, was progress.
Idealistic young people, some of them foreign educated, with secular, liberal hearts took to the streets and joined in the “Death to America” chants, siding with Ayatollah Khomeini and his cronies against the Shah (who represented the devilish American empire). In 1979, the Shah was deposed, a theocracy was installed, women were forced into the veil, female professionals and academics were severely restricted, with many losing their jobs, all kinds of punishments such as public floggings were brought back, due process in courts was tossed out of the window, and Iran turned into one of the most horrifyingly backward nations in the world.
The very same young idealists who chanted “Death to America” because they thought it sounded cool or deliciously subversive were now desperate to move to America for a life of social and legal freedoms. Many did, and never looked back. Many of them took years to emotionally process what had happened, that the winds of progress they felt at the time were in fact the manipulations and machinations of a theocracy with its own agenda, and while “American imperialism” truly does have plenty on its conscience and plenty to atone for, playing into the hands of theocratic, or other vested groups will only replace one tyranny with another.
In Iran’s case, it was from frying pan to fire, and while some self-proclaimed liberal academics with cushy academic tenured positions and free speech protected by (Western) law still proclaim the uprising was a good thing for Iran, even they realize that no progressive person actually wants to go live there now.
Freedom should be more than a buzzword
This last factor, “liveability” in all its dimensions -- ie the thing that makes a country worth living in -- to me is an effective way to cut through the fog -- the never-ending discourse over what regime has a higher moral standing, over who is legitimate and who is a usurper. We can rant against the West till our vocal chords bleed, but underneath it all, many harbour a desire to move there, and would pack their bags for the US, or Europe, or Canada given the first chance -- this includes large swathes of Muslims who think the West is a hotpot of Islamophobia. Many Bangladeshi top politicians have children living or studying in the West.
But if life were really so horrible in the West, worldwide migration trends would be different, and the pleas for asylum in the immigration offices of Canada, Sweden, Norway, Germany, or the US would not have such staggering backlogs. But please don’t get me wrong: I realize that foreign policy is a whole other can of worms, and that just because life might be nice in an American suburb for the earner of a white-collar American salary, this does not absolve the United States from various CIA-backed operations all over the world, with wars waged under false pretenses and messes created which America itself later could not contain.
But all that being said, while criticizing US policy, which is all too easy to do, it is important to remember who is pulling the strings of the counter-discourse, and whether they are on the side of the angels. My point: It is easy to define ourselves, and our futures, as against, something, but it is a much taller order to envision a self-determined future which broadens our rights, increases our scope as a nation, and increases the possibility of what we can do with our lives. Any amateur can criticize a foreign government, but it is much harder to come up with a better model for government, one with checks and balances, one where tyrants can’t stay in power till the end of time.
My thoughts have been zig-zagging from the Iranian Revolution to the fall of the Soviet Union to the Arab Spring to the disastrous US-actions in Vietnam, where, by the way, communism did not infect the whole region in some domino effect. Now, Vietnam is a nation rather capitalisty and chummy with the US -- just walk the glitzy streets of Ho Chi Minh City to get an idea. These places headed into futures no one could have predicted, with America starting and then losing an unnecessary war, making a mess, then things reaching their own equilibrium anyway.
Coming home
Now, we return home. Bangladesh is only 51 years old, but already our history is nothing if not tumultuous. We have gone through a bloody and brutal Liberation War, untold economic hardships, bad policies, and so many narratives and counter-narratives in our discourse on history that our academic landscape is a mess, no one sure what is true, and what is political propaganda.
We emerged out of the Ershad years with renewed hopes for democracy, but the political culture quickly turned into a different kind of rotten. There was once great promise that this new nation would truly wash away the muck of the past, and be a new nation, not just because we are a young nation in terms of the number of years we have existed, but a young nation, ie young in thought and policy, in flexibility and imagination, and in our ability to truly envision and create a future. Not to merely rail against our oppressors of the past, not to form ideology bred from resentment, but to reach deep into our soul and create something we can be proud of.
I dare not predict what Bangladesh will look like 20, 10, or even two years from today. In the continuous play of dominations, I dare not speculate on the nature of the forthcoming beast. Many popular movements have happened in our history, as they have in Iran -- significantly, we also got rid of an autocrat back in 1990, and felt the wide open horizons, above us, only sky.
But just like Iran showed us, it’s not enough to get rid of a dictator, we have to build. We have to forge rock solid principles of human rights and justice, and hold the government accountable to its people. We can play politics and uprising-games until the end of time, but what will really matter is to create a nation where people are happy to live, where their rights are protected, where due process matters, where religious and political and sexual minorities can live without fear, where opposition has a voice, where the press is not choked, where elections are free and credible and truly beyond reproach, where democracy is not just a buzzword, but a deeply held foundational tenet that must be protected at all times.
Do these values make a nation “too Western”? I don’t see it that way. No nation, bloc, or party owns basic human ideals -- that would be giving the West too much credit. As Bangladesh moves into the future, I do hope we keep our ego in check, and remember that a country is comprised of its people, that the government exists to serve, and that no one is better than anyone else.
Abak Hussain is a journalist, and former editor of Dhaka Tribune’s opinion pages. He is a Director of Talespeople, a creative start-up, and a winner of the Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award.
