We didn't start the fire

In the last few weeks, I have felt like someone watching history in the (re)making in Dhaka, rather than someone participating in life in Dhaka.  It’s been a reminder of how much collective memory and experience matters in the present; there are things you can’t learn and pick up just by being here for a few years.  Lived history is one of them.

Recently, there have been several individuals on trial for their actions during the bloody war for independence in 1971.  Many have been given the death sentence.  When one of the notorious leaders (known as the “butcher of Mirpur”) was given a life sentence instead of the death penalty, Dhaka exploded into a full-fledged demonstration, symbolically centered in Shahbag, near Dhaka University, the birthplace of most movements in Bangladesh.  Since February 4^th, there have been people gathered there at night and many days to demand “justice,” which in their eyes means the death penalty.  I can’t speak for the motivations of all the protesters, but it does seem pertinent to mention is that many fear that if he just gets a life sentence, when the opposition party comes into power (which could occur in 2014 during the next elections), he’ll be pardoned and released.  Death is a more secure and permanent form of punishment.

While certainly this activism has been led by truly dedicated believers, this movement has certainly gained a certain trendy vibe.  As with most movements, part of why people are going is that it’s something to do.  Celebrities are there, musicians are there, artists are there.  It’s a social movement—a place to see and been seen.  It’s also largely led by young people in Bangladesh, too young to remember 1971, a fact that the older generation often invoke to dismiss your opinion on just about anything.  It’s a chance to earn the right to participate in the high-level dialog, to get a seat at the table, to also show the old political guards that a new day may be dawning.  But the innocence and beauty of the movement has been struck down; fundamentalist groups have labeled the demonstrations as anti-Muslim and mobilized student groups and religious groups against them.  Last week a political blogger was brutally murdered.  Yesterday journalists and police officers were attacked.  A nationwide strike has been called for tomorrow.  It’s hard to know what is yet to come—there is a lot at stake and no one wants to back down.

I have not been to the protests at Shahbag.  Much of me would really like to.  But the core issue is about demanding someone’s death.  From the outside, it looks a bit like a mob mentality.  I’m reminded of the Nietszche quote, “He who fights with monsters must be careful not to become one.”  This is not a judgment of the activists—if I had a lifetime of experience in Bangladesh, I might have a very different perspective.  My family did not suffer in the war, nor did we have to live through the regimes that followed, the enforced silences about the atrocities of the war, the writing and rewriting of history.  We cannot help but look at the present circumstances without a lens colored by the past. Karl Marx wrote,

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.  The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. 

I wouldn’t dare claim moral authority or high ground on an issue like this.  But it seems important that I think through the issues involved and have my own stance, albeit silently.  I can’t stand in the crowd just because so many around me are doing so, and think it’s the right thing to do.   Increasingly though, the situation becomes more and more gray.  But as the protests evolve to be more about the right to speak out, the right to organize, democratic principles, and peaceful protest, they begin to embody values that are quite important to me, and should resonate with a lot of other Americans.  We hold these truths to be self evident, do we not?

But frankly, even with my limited knowledge of history, I know that movements and social revolutions have a way of coming full circle, or at least further than one may have initially hoped for.  Reading Tina Rosenberg’s The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts after Communism about how different social/political strategies for moving forward had consequences over time, also really made me think about Bangladesh and the ongoing importance of finding “truth” around 1971.  She quotes Adam Michnik, an influential Polish writer and former dissident, whose words seem eerily relevant to what’s going on here now.

Every revolution, bloody or not, has two phases.  The first phase is defined by the struggle for freedom, the second by the struggle for power and revenge for the votaries of the ancient regime.  Anyone who has taken part in this struggle has felt, almost physically, how everything that is best and most precious with him was awakened.  Revenge as a different psychology.  Its logic is implacable.  First there is a purge of yesterday’s adversaries, the partisans of the old regime.  Then comes the purge of yesterday’s fellow oppositionists who now oppose the idea o fervent.  Finally there is a purge of those who defend them.  A psychology of vengeance and hatred develops.

I am worried about vengeance and hatred—to me these are some of the most dangerous things in the world, especially when they come at a massive scale.  They lead to justifications for new crimes against humanity.  How can we hold onto empathy in the midst of such a heated trial and surrounding violence?  I don’t know, but I think we all have to try.  Otherwise we run the risk of becoming the monsters we wanted to control.

I think that at the core, this Shahbag movement is about creating a shared and formalized sense of truth about the past, which with the necessary processes of social reconciliation, peacemaking, and moving forward begin.  An insistence that the some lines are drawn around the past, so that as a nation, Bangladesh can look forward.

But like I said, so far I have simply watched this movement from afar, so take my sweeping interpretation with more than a few grains of salt.  What I have realized though is that social movements, as big and loud as they are, are not all encompassing.  Everyday life also has to go on—most people go to work, manage their life at home, and add this in as an extracurricular.  Things don’t stop, and that’s what is jarring; everyone’s going through the motions that everything is both changing but yet it all looks the same. Real change is slow, and there’s a lot of waiting.  You can’t stop everything to make way for change, but it’s a delicate balance between holding onto a sense of order, and demanding something new.