Watching from the sidelines while someone else takes one’s ill-intentioned authoritarian plan, irons out the flaws in its implementation, gives it the appearance of something acceptable, if not palatable, and somehow pulls it off can make the best of people seethe.
The bitter feelings are much worse when the plan was conceived over two decades ago, and failed to be implemented twice by those presently crying crocodile tears and having the audacity to pretend to be for the people. The nation where these mythical best of people are nowhere to be found, nay, the world surely sympathises with the erstwhile opposition.
An endemic combination of ignorance, indifference, and idiocy has seen the country repeatedly buy into lies, some sugar-coated or concealed, others blatant but unchallenged. The only reason members of the ruling class have left for the charade of taking up arms for the people is when they are faced with the ignominy of being unable to pilfer and pillage.
At all other times they busy themselves with making hay. They find themselves in this wonderful position because no one contends their carefully honed brand of capitalism, which, more than others, adheres to John Maynard Keynes’s critique. He said: “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”
In the mad land where a fraction of a percentage of the total population enjoys the indefensibly disproportionate power of having complete control over everyone else, this criticism is reused and recycled as sound logic.
Therefore, any solution to Bangladesh’s ills, the perceived and the real ones, that is devised by the brilliant minds of the chairperson and leaders of the old opposition that first concocted the notion of autocracy veiled as democracy comes from the Tom Perkins school of thought.
The American venture capitalist turned philosopher followed up his significant thesis about the progressive Kristallnacht with a proposal for proportional and representative democracy. The synopsis of this purer democracy is that the rich deserve more votes than the poor, with a direct correlation between the number of votes each person gets and his bank balance, which dictates how much he pays in taxes.
This novel idea, sans the unsavoury issue of taxation, is sure to be championed by the Bangladeshi elites, if not brazenly at first, then certainly wholeheartedly in silence. The eventuality of such a movement is, of course, undeniable.
The poor are a burden on society. Their only use is when they can be abused in sweatshops and fields, on construction sites and roads, at home and abroad. They are a nuisance at all other times, especially when they voice their demands for rights. The misperception that they are human, which can lead to oppression being denoted a negative, undesirable thing, is precisely what the sage Perkins wants to dispel.
Bangladesh agrees, since it takes pride in not allowing the poor to have such delusions of grandeur. They know their place. The risk that they will rise up against those defined as the one percent in a stirring re-enactment of Nazi Germany’s war on its one percent – the Jews – is downright non-existent. It is, thus, the utopia that Perkins desires.
Neither the erstwhile and current oppositions nor the government stand for the people, certainly not when in power, equally so when not. That is because they do not have to in the perfect society of Bangladesh. Even the pretence of being for the people will fade away very soon.
It is already beginning to sound as tired as the US’s contrived phrases about lines that should not be crossed and people deciding the fate of their respective countries in matters of international affairs and diplomacy.
Every time a politician speaks for the people, it is an unforgivable affront to the masses. The leaders and the rich, increasingly one and the same, are too far removed – and forever pulling further away – from the people to ever dare speak for them.
The only thing they achieve by screaming themselves hoarse, by levelling accusations at one another because the sun only shines on them most of the time, all in the name of being for the people echoes the teachings of philosopher Tom Perkins.
That there are members of the ruling class who have a right to be aggrieved is not preposterous at all. The poor ruling class, they truly have been wronged, they really are handicapped. They only ever want what is best for the people, honest.
