Not yet a revolution, the Resistance to the Hasina regime’s tyranny of  institutional unequal power in keeping jobs within the elite military caste of descendants of soldiers of the War of Independence, has in the past several days achieved a number of victories since the seizure, liberation, and burning of the political prison in a stunning reprise of the Storming of the Bastille and the battles with police and military forces which followed, and forced the regime to reverse its policy.

     As Guillermo del Toro teaches us in Carnival Row; “Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”

     Let us enact reversals of order, play tricks which open the gates of our prisons to paths of transformational change, pursue the sacred calling of the truth teller, perform the four duties of a citizen; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority, and let us bring the Chaos.

     Live with grandeur; so Jean Genet teaches us, and prescribes the embrace of our own darkness as a path of liberation in the discovery and performance of our true and best selves.

     We all of us who in refusal to submit to Authority become Unconquered and bring the chaos as Living Autonomous Zones must question everything, ourselves most of all, if we are to dream new possibilities of becoming human.

     A maker of mischief, I; who sabotages authority and systems of unequal power in any ways I can imagine and whenever possible as part of a sacred calling in pursuit of truth.

    Once as a prank while teaching American History in high school I switched the textbook, a compendium of national memory, identity, and authorized truth, with the alternative American history trilogy by William S. Burroughs; Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands.  I was hoping someone would call me on it, but no one ever did, so I went right on teaching the whole semester how insectoid aliens from Venus secretly rule earth through the Algebra of Need and our addiction to wealth and power. I think we had more fun in American History class that year than is usual.

    If games of transgression, unauthorized identities, and transformation you would play, I invite you to play a game of chance with me. Write down six characters you would like to play, traditionally in chaos magic this would be three male and three female characters though clearly here as in life all rules are arbitrary and I encourage you to create your own and change them at random, and throw a six sided dice to choose who you will be today. No matter who you live as today, you will have five other possible selves in reserve, and tomorrow is another day and another throw of the dice. All identity is theatrical performance.

    Celebrate with me April Fool’s Day as a liminal and transformative time of exploring unknowns beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, the defiance of authority, the sabotage of elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, seizures of power from systems of oppression and carceral states of force and control, the violation of norms, and liberation from other people’s ideas of virtue.

     By such acts we do give answer to the terror of our nothingness with the joy of total freedom.

      Let us run amok and be ungovernable.

     As I wrote in my post of November 25 2020, Using Chaos and Transgression as Revolutionary Acts to Transform Law and Order Into Liberty and Equality; I am against law and order because law serves power, order appropriates and divides us into hierarchies of elite belonging and categories of exclusionary otherness, whereas Chaos autonomizes and transgression empowers liberation struggle, delegitimation of authority, and seizures of power.

    Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.

    Let us restore the balance to systems of unequal power and unjust authority; for no inequality is fair, and there is no just authority.

     Rejoice with me in this time of reversals of order through the performance of Acts of Transgression and Chaos. Let us dance our best and secret selves on the stage of the world, forge new truths, destroy and create ourselves anew in the ways we ourselves have chosen, and transform the systems and structures of oppression and tyranny, patriarchy and white supremacist terror, forces of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, into a diverse and inclusive free society of equals.

    Dance with us in joy, revolution, and the frightening of the horses.

    As I wrote in my post of April 1 2020, There Is No Return To Normal; There is no return to normal if and when the Doom of Man pandemic ends. Normal doesn’t live here anymore.

    Once there was an illusion of mirrors, echoes, distorted surfaces without meaning, hollow and beautiful like a gossamer web of lies and irresistible as a gingerbread house.

     It calls to us, this thing of no escape, this American Dream, with promises of wealth and the power to choose the condition of our own lives. Our songs are of meritocracy, upward mobility, and an inclusive society, but concealed within are harsh realities of unequal power and opportunity limited by authorized identities and divisions of caste or class, race, gender, faith, and nationality.

     We are lured with belonging and membership, but offered only identitarian tribalization and exclusionary boundaries of otherness.

     We are seduced with the guarantee of our right to the pursuit of happiness, but our society can produce only material diversions which commodify and dehumanize us.

     We are offered security from intrusive forces at the price of our freedom and equality, and submission to authority and tyrannies of force and control. And security is an illusion, often one manufactured through fear by those who would enslave us as a pretext for the centralization of power to tyranny.

     Throughout American history since our founding we have ever been a free society of equals, co-owners of our own government, each of us a king of his own life, but only on paper. The American Revolution has yet to be achieved; it is an ongoing process in which each of us must negotiate the alignment and boundaries between the ideal and the real.

     In this struggle we are the prize; our agency or enslavement, our authenticity or the capture and limitation of the possibilities of our identity, our liberty both as individuals and as interdependent members of humankind.

     And we must act now to save ourselves and our civilization, for we are running out of time. We are in a contest of survival against plutocratic corporate greed and our extinction as a species on one hand and against fascist tyranny and the fall of democracy and global civilization on the other.

     Let us free ourselves from the illusions of our normality.

     As I wrote in my post of October 30 2023 A Hymn to Chaos

    Tonight a window opens beyond our universe, letting angels through, or devils; and I welcome them both, figures of the twin sides of our nature and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, forces trapped within our flesh in titanic struggle or truths written in our flesh as transformative harmony.

    Herein is a liminal time in which we may shape ourselves anew, reimagine our lives and grow beyond the boundaries and limits of our horizon, explore unknowns in the unclaimed empty spaces of our topologies of human being, meaning, and value marked Here Be Dragons, discover new Best Selves and be reborn, become enraptured and exalted beyond ourselves as we ascend through the gaps of the heavens to embrace the wonder and terror of our total freedom in a universe bound by no Law and without any being, meaning, or value other than our own which we ourselves create.

     On this night in 2020 I put a curse on Donald Trump and all who voted for him in that election after four years of subversion of democracy and sabotage of America as a Russian agent and figurehead of the Fourth Reich, of white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, robber baron capitalism and ecological disaster which may include the extinction of humankind for the ephemeral profit of elites, tyranny and state terror in the brutal and criminal police repression of the Black Lives Matter protests, and a relentless multifront campaign against our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, and the institutions which serve them including a secular state, an independent and impartial judiciary, a free press and a press free from propaganda and disinformation, especially that of authorities and their carceral states of force and control, free from hate speech, conspiracy theories, rewritten histories, alternate realities; an open public forum of debate free from identitarian politics as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and of fear and division weaponized in service to power, and an education system which produces citizens rather than slaves as a precondition of democracy.

     Curses and wishes give form and direction to vast imaginal forces of poetic vision as reimagination and transformation, and may change the balance of power in the world and the fate of humankind as an unfolding of our intention and the will to become. This one has been reasonably successful from my point of view; presaging the Restoration of America in the Biden Presidency and the exposure and purging of our betrayers from among us in the largest manhunt in our nation’s history as we bring a Reckoning to the fascist infiltrators of the January 6 Insurrection and their financiers and puppetmasters, and to all those who would enslave us.

    This year as I did last, and on every Halloween to come, for evermore, I shall perform the rituals of Cursing the Tyrants and the Casting Out of the Unclean Fascists that it may become final and eternal, propagating outwards into infinity as a wave of change and gathering force as it grows, like revolutionary struggle unstoppable as the tides; but I will balance it as well with a wish of blessing, protection, and good luck for all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and those champions who stand with them in solidarity and for a free society of equals.

     In this moment, with half the thousands dead in Gaza being women and children as well as civilians helpless before the bombs of vengeance as blood sacrifices to fear, rage, and hate, I know who my people are, and with whom I stand even if it is only to die with them.

     No one should have to die alone, abandoned and erased from history by a fallen civilization for whom our universal human rights and solidarity as each other’s guarantors of our humanity no longer has meaning or value.

     No Band of Brothers, we, but complicit in all evils we do not oppose or remain silent in witness of; especially we Americans whose taxes purchased the bombs of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

     Herein I claim both the peoples of Palestine and of Israel, versus the theocratic tyrants and terrorists on both sides who seek to subjugate them through fascist divisions of blood, faith, and soil and through fear weaponized in service to power. For the alt-right regime of Netanyahu has conspired with elements of Hamas in the October 7 attack for three purposes; first to stop the growing interdependence and mutual aid of the anticolonial Palestinian Independence movement with the Israeli democracy and peace movements which threatens authority in both Gaza and Israel and may yet emerge as a united and nonsectarian democracy, second to create a casus belli for Netanyahu’s conquest of the region including areas of Lebanon and Syria as a Second War of Independence, and third to delegitimize democracy as a guarantor of universal human rights by making its guarantor states complicit in unforgiveable war crimes in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians by America’s client state of Israel.

     If America sends military aid to Israel rather than humanitarian aid to Palestine, the enemy regimes of Netanyahu and Hamas win, and the peoples of both states and our own lose.

     To refuse to submit is to become Unconquered, and this is a victory and a kind of power which cannot be taken from us, and through which we may find the will to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand.

     How do we create ourselves anew and emerge from the legacies of our histories?

      As I wrote in my post of May 28 2023, The True and False Crows: a Fable; A crow confronts his image in a pool of water, and as Nietzsche warned the darkness looks back. Of this I have written a paragraph on the Nietzschean idea of the Abyss, and of tragedy as failure to embrace our monstrosity and those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh; the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.

      As Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil goes.; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”

      It is also an origin of evil as the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; written in the tyrannies and systems of unequal power which hold humankind in their iron grip of force and control as Kristevan abjection and learned helplessness, and the ecological catastrophe which threatens our species extinction as disconnection from nature, control of nature as capitalist exploitation of resources and theft of the commons, carceral states of force and control as embodied violence, and our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the Wilderness of Mirrors.

     All of this requires the renouncement of love, as Wagner’s figure of tyranny Alberich the Dwarf must do to seize the Ring of power and dominion, a story more familiar to us as Tolkien’s retelling of the Nibelungenlied in his trilogy of novels which recast World War Two as an allegory of the abandonment of addiction to power. This has a corollary; the redemptive power of love, like the power of poetic vision to reimagine and transform ourselves, can free us from the Ring of Power and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.

     As written by Jean Genet in Miracle of the Rose; “A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”

     Here follows the paragraph of my thoughts on seeing this image, which if considered as a poem I now think of as the True and False Crows: a fable.

     Who is this imposter? If he is me, where now am I? Avaunt, my nemesis, for I shall pursue retribution for this theft of myself beyond all wrath now remembered, through death and hell and the terrors of our nightmares. Come and let us grapple for the truth of ourselves in this place where angels fear, and end not in silence but in exaltation and fire, with roars of defiance hurled against the chasms of our nothingness, supernal and magnificent as the Morningstar, and illuminate for all humankind the path of escape from this prison of illusions and lies. 

     To this my sister replied, Such poetry!

    This is as direct as I can be, o my sister. Should I merit some kind of monument one day, an absurd fantasy as I mean nothing to history and will vanish from the world without a trace, and nothing to anyone beyond yourself as the remnants of family, Dolly as my partner, and those few friends and allies who know my true identity, inscribe this therein.

     I have tried to salvage something of our humanity and to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world these past forty years since I was sworn to the oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet, and often failed, but this is not what is important.

     What is important is to refuse to submit.

     And one thing more; to act with solidarity in revolutionary struggle. As the Oath of the Resistance created in Paris 1940 by Jean Genet from the oath of the Foreign Legion in which he once served, and given to me in Beirut 1982 in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand beyond hope of victory or survival, and which I offer to all of you as a tradition to bear forward into the future; “We swear ourselves to each other, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”

     In this my chosen life mission I have held true, for if each and every one of us stands in solidarity with others regardless of how different they may be from ourselves, we will become liberators and guarantors of each other’s uniqueness, and in refusal to submit will be victorious and free.

     He said it was the finest thing he ever stole, the Oath of the Resistance, but I often think of this in terms of a definition of the beauty of human beings; to become Unconquered and free as self created beings in refusal to submit to authority and its instruments of violence, force and control, and the repression of dissent, to refuse our dehumanization and the theft of our souls and autonomy and to do all of this in solidarity and absolute loyalty to each other.

    As he once said to me; “Is this not the beauty of men, to resist and never yield, to cede nothing to the enemy, not love nor hope, not our history nor the chance for a future of our own choosing, neither our monstrosity nor our grandeur, nothing of our humanity nor of any human being whose life is in our power to harm or help, to live beyond all limits and all laws and to risk everything to do this for each other?”

    I dream of a future something like the future envisioned by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations; the idea first put forth in the episode Is There In Truth No Beauty?, described in the first issue of the fanzine Inside Star Trek as; “that beauty, growth, progress — all result from the union of the unlike. Concord, as much as discord, requires the presence of at least two different notes. The brotherhood of man is an ideal based on learning to delight in our essential differences, as well as learning to recognize our similarities.” As stated in the episode The Savage Curtain; “I am pleased to see that we have differences. May we together become greater than the sum of both of us.”

     Liberty as freedom from authorized identities and truths, and equality and its corollary solidarity; these are the personal and social preconditions of democracy as a free society of equals.

    With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions  as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did last spring in Mariupol and in the year of the fall of Afghanistan, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.

     In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must embrace our darkness and claim our truths, and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.

     Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self  which is truly ours.

      My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, causes lost and won, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a wilderness of mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.

     We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.

     Love is crucial both to poetic vision and as solidarity in action as processes of self-construal and becoming human; Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling; plus it contains a marvelous re-enactment of the myth of Persephone.

     Let us always take the risks of our humanity, and place our lives in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.

     In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.

     My friends, please feel free to perform and enact this spell with me; A Hymn to Chaos and Transgression:

     I invoke Chaos, freedom, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human against Order, Authority, and the boundaries of the Forbidden.

    I perform acts of transgression by which to break the chains of law and illusion woven by those who would enslave us, to seize our power and our autonomy from hierarchies of elite wealth, power, and privilege, from authorized identities and divisions of exclusionary otherness, to create myself in the image of my own imagination and no other, and to shape human being, meaning, and value to the forms of my desires.

     In this time of the turning of the tides I refuse and resist subjugation by force and control, I become Unconquered and free, I run amok and am ungovernable, and to Authority I reply with the Four Sacred Acts in pursuit of Liberty and Truth; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.

     By these invocations of Chaos and Transgression (Herein be free to make wishes, and to consecrate acts of defiance of tyranny, disruptions and subversions of good order and discipline, violations of normality, seizures of power, and celebrations of autonomy and living beyond all limits in the glorious embrace of our monstrosity, of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves) I curse all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, patriarchy, state terror and tyranny, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and inequalities of power.

     On this night of the renewal of the world in which the old order is consumed in fire and the spirit world moves among us and is unified with our own in its reimagination and transformation, I name to my brothers and sisters of Chaos these enemies of humankind as rightful prey; first, upon all tyrants and their forces of repression of dissent and enforcement of the Law, for order appropriates, law serves power, and there is no just authority; second upon Donald Trump (herein please feel free to name tyrants whom you oppose and seek to cast down from their thrones; mine include Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and many others) and all who serve and support him and the cause of fascism, and all those who in voting for him in the Presidential election of November 3 2020 have signed the confession of their treason and allegiance to white supremacist terror, Gideonite patriarchal sexual terror,  and to the tyranny and terror of a police state.

     So upon Trump, his puppetmaster Vladimir Putin, and all who claim him as their own do I place my curse and invoke ruin upon their fortunes and their lives and destruction upon their cause. May they be forgotten and become nothing.

     This I balance with equal blessing, protection, and good luck upon the lives, fortunes, and causes of liberty and equality upon all who are powerless and dispossessed, marginalized by exclusionary otherness, falsified, commodified, dehumanized, silenced and erased, and those who place their lives in the balance with them in solidarity as champions and bearers of the Torch of Liberty and a free society of equals.

     Tonight our wildness will eat the moon and set it free.

     As written by Hannah Ellis-Petersen in The Guardian, in an article entitled National curfew imposed in Bangladesh after student protesters storm prison:

Army to be deployed to keep order after demonstrators free hundreds of prisoners and country is hit by serious unrest; “The Bangladeshi government has declared a national curfew and announced plans to deploy the army to tackle the country’s worst unrest in a decade, after student protesters stormed a prison and freed hundreds of inmates.

     “The government has decided to impose a curfew and deploy the military in aid of the civilian authorities,” a government spokesperson said late on Friday.

     AFP reported that at least 105 people have died in the unrest, which poses an unprecedented challenge to the government of Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister, after her 15 years in office.

     Earlier on Friday, a communications blackout was imposed across the country, with mobile internet access and social media blocked by the government.

     TV news channels were off air after the state broadcaster’s headquarters in Dhaka was stormed and set alight by protesters, and several news websites were down.

     A group of protesters stormed a jail in Narsingdi, a district just north of the capital, and freed its inmates before setting the facility on fire. According to Agence France-Presse, hundreds of inmates were released.

     Key government websites, including that of the central bank, the police and the prime minister’s office, also appeared to have been hacked by a group calling itself “THE R3SISTANC3”. A message posted across the prime minister’s office website on Friday called for an end to the killing of students, saying: “It’s not a protest any more. It’s a war now.”

     Another message posted on the website read: “The government has shut down the internet to silence us and hide their actions. We need to stay informed about what is happening on the ground.”

     The protests began this month on university campuses as students demanded an end to a quota system that reserves 30% of government jobs for family members of veterans who fought in Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971.

     Those protesting have argued that the policy is unfair and discriminatory as young people struggle for jobs during an economic downturn and instead benefits members of the ruling Awami League party, which is led by the Hasina.

     Pro-government student groups have been accused of attacking the protesters, and police have routinely fired teargas and rubber bullets into the crowds, leaving thousands injured and dozens killed.

     Despite the ban on public rallies and gatherings, student groups still took to the streets on Friday. The sounds of gunfire and stun grenades could be heard coming from areas close to universities in Dhaka. According to reports, police were seen firing live ammunition to break up demonstrations and protesters accused police of being responsible for a large proportion of the fatalities.

     Witnesses said the protests had begun to take on a much broader anti-government tone against Hasina and her party, with slogans calling her an “authoritarian dictator” and demanding her resignation.

     Hasina has ruled since 2009 and overseen a vast and severe crackdown on political opponents and critics while corruption has flourished. Critical figures are routinely picked up in “enforced disappearances” by paramilitary forces and tens of thousands of political opponents have been jailed. She won a fifth term in January in an election widely documented as being heavily rigged.

     Clashes between heavily armed riot police and protesters, many wielding batons and bricks, have spread across the country, with vehicles set ablaze in the streets and thousands left injured. On Thursday protesters stormed the headquarters of the state broadcaster, Bangladesh Television, and set it on fire. Authorities said the building was safely evacuated.

     The Dhaka Times said one of its reporters, Mehedi Hasan, was killed while covering clashes in the capital.

     Access to social media was restricted after the telecommunications minister, Zunaid Ahmed Palak, said it had been “weaponised as a tool to spread rumours, lies and disinformation”.

     Hasina, 76, ordered that all universities and colleges be shut indefinitely after the clashes. In a speech on Wednesday night, she had condemned the “murder” of students killed in the protests and promised justice, telling students to wait for an supreme court order on the quota system, but it did little to quell the unrest.

     The prime minister was earlier accused of inflaming tensions after she defended the quotas and appeared to refer to protesters as “razakars”, a derogatory slur meaning those who betrayed the country by collaborating with the enemy, Pakistan, during the war of independence.

    The quotas that sparked the protests were abolished in 2018 but brought back last month after a court ruling, prompting outrage among students. About 40% of young people in Bangladesh are unemployed as the economy has foundered post-Covid, and government jobs are seen as one of the few means of secure employment. Young people say the quotas make it very difficult to get the jobs on merit.

     Hasina’s party, which was set up by her father, who led the independence fight for Bangladesh, is accused of disproportionately benefiting from the system.

    Pierre Prakash, the Asia director of the International Crisis Group, said the protests were a reflection of growing frustration on the streets at the erosion of democracy and the country’s economic distress, which has led to high inflation and rising unemployment.

     “The protests reflect deep political and economic tensions in Bangladesh. For several years Bangladesh’s economy has been struggling and youth unemployment is a serious problem,” he said. “With no real alternative at the ballot box, discontented Bangladeshis have few options besides street protests to make their voices heard.”

     Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesperson for the UN secretary general, said they were following developments in Bangladesh and urged restraint on all sides.”

     All of this is wonderful, but there remain deeper and more profound underlying causes of inequality, and the Hasina regime’s creation and enforcement of a de facto aristocracy as an inherited military elite was only the most hideous example.

     The Revolution in Bangladesh has only just begun.

     As I wrote in my post of January 23 2023, Tyranny, Terror, and Resistance in Bangladesh; Mass elections and democracy protests against a tyrannical regime of brutal police repression have been gathering tidal momentum in Bangladesh for some while now, made ambiguous and complex by the pervasive terror of ISIS and its affiliates and ideological factions and their relationship with a regime which both fights against them and uses them as deniable assets in the centralization of power and subversion of democracy.

    In Bangladesh, those who would enslave us have no need to invent bogeymen, for the perpetrators of sectarian terror demonize themselves gladly. A truly aberrant and despicable enemy which is an alien intrusive force is a great gift to a police state.

     It is also extremely dangerous; the probabilities of such a scheme rebounding on its instigator in hideous ways approaches one hundred percent.

     To anyone who wishes to play the Great Game, I give this caution; those who ride whirlwinds cannot know where they may arrive in the end.

     A splendid truth from my perspective and for all revolutionaries and those who love liberty and hunger to be free, for if authority in its madness of power and need for control unleashes the Chaos as a space of free creative play and a window of opportunity for change, undoing itself as a mechanical failure from its own internal contradictions, all things become possible.

     Hasina’s puppetmastering of ISIS has linked the state to an implacable enemy it cannot control, and when it begins to wag the dog one of them will fall.

      In that Defining Moment of a nation and Rashomon Event of transformative change, we must be ready to balance the nightmare of theocratic tyranny and terror with the dream of a free society of equals.

     So for internal destabilization and subversion; Bangladesh also faces external threats, mainly from China as imperial conquest and dominion.

      China whispers of power to the Hasina regime, offering to underwrite its transformation into a totalitarian state with the poison pill of its gifts, a Trojan Horse strategy of soft conquest of the Indian subcontinent and its nations, among other targets of the Belt and Roads plan. China conquered Nepal and now rules it as a client state, seeks opportunity throughout the Central Asian nations of the old Silk Road, and currently controls a third of India itself through the Naxalite rebellion; the capture of Bangladesh would be pivotal to its long range imperial plans to conquer all of Central and South Asia and the Pacific Rim. This is the pull force at work in this arena.

     Then we have the push forces; the de facto hegemony of ISIS and sectarian fundamentalism which is now a law unto itself and answerable to none, and the example of the Rohingya as an existential threat weaponized in service to power, both that of ISIS and the carceral state of force and control which is Bangladesh.

     Here as always, everywhere, we must free ourselves from the legacies of our history in order to seize our power and be free.

     As written of the December election protests by Deutsche Welle in MSN, in an article entitled Thousands protest in Bangladesh against the ruling party; “Saturday’s protests come after a group of Western embassies called on the government to respect freedom of expression. Protests called for by the opposition party have been ongoing for weeks. Thousands of opposition protesters took to the streets in Bangladesh’s capita Dhaka on Saturday, calling for the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to resign and install a caretaker government until elections are held in 2024.

     Protesters mostly support the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which is headed by the country’s former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia.

     Seven BNP members of parliament announced their resignations during the protest.

     Protesters made it to Golapbagh in Dhaka on Friday night despite tight security. Opposition activists chanted slogans including “Down with Hasina” and “We want a fair election,” the AP reported.

     Why are the protests taking place?

     Protests have been on the rise in recent months across Bangladesh, with protesters decrying power outages and the rise in energy prices.

     Saturday’s protests are essentially against Hasina and her ruling Awami League party, the BNP’s biggest archrival. The Awami League party was voted into power for the third consecutive time in 2018.

     However, the BNP challenged the results of the elections, accusing the Awami League party of rigging the vote.

     Zahiruddin Swapan, a former two-time opposition lawmaker and party spokesman, told AP, “We want a free and fair election. To facilitate that, this repressive government must go, parliament must be dissolved, and a new election commission should be installed.”

     He added, “They came to power through vote rigging and intimidation.”

    What do we know about the politics behind the protests?

     Saturday’s protests were further ignited by the arrest of two BNP figures the day before.

     The opposition party also accuses the authorities of arresting around 2,000 of its members and supporters since November 30.

      The rally on Saturday was the 10th since the BNP announced the launch of protests in 10 big cities across the country in September. Previous rallies have drawn significant numbers as well.

     BNP officials have claimed over a million supporters joined the rally, whereas police told the AP that the venue could not host more than 30,000 individuals.

     Eyewitnesses reported around 100,000 individuals in attendance.

     The ruling party and Hasina have repeatedly dismissed the BNP’s demand to install a caretaker government, saying it is against the state’s constitution.

     The BNP accused the government of orchestrating a transport strike to impact the protest turnout.

     A question of allegiances

     Historically allied with the US, the rule of Hasina has seen Bangladesh align with China more in recent years.

     China is funding several infrastructure projects in the country, worth billions of dollars, as part of China’s Belt and Roads Initiative. Critics charge the program is a debt trap for nations that sign on.

     Last Tuesday, the embassies of 15 Western countries, including the US and the UK in a joint statement, called on the government of Bangladesh to respect freedom of expression and the right to assembly, and to allow fair elections.”

     As written by Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Shaikh Azizur Rahman in the Guardian, in an article entitled “They beat me with sticks’: Bangladesh opposition reels under crackdown as thousands arrested: Police accused of shooting at activists and leaders of growing street protests against Sheikh Hasina’s draconian government: “It was a warm afternoon in May 2020 when Ahmed Kabir Kishore, dozing lazily, awoke to 20 men breaking down the door of his apartment in Dhaka, Bangladesh. With guns waved in his face, he was dragged to a van outside. “Move away, we have arrested a terrorist,” he heard them shout at the crowds.

     Kishore was not a terrorist. He was a cartoonist whose political drawings, published in prominent Bangladesh newspapers and magazines, took a critical view of the alleged corruption, human rights abuses and mishandling of the Covid pandemic by the government, led by prime minister Sheikh Hasina.

     For three days, he was kept blindfolded and handcuffed in a tiny room. Then the interrogation and torture began. “They beat me all across my body using sticks,” said Kishore. “They made me lie down and beat my feet.”

     The plainclothes officers questioned him about his connections to several journalists, hitting him so hard that his eardrum ruptured and he could barely walk.

     When the blindfold was removed, Kishore understood with dread that he was in the hands of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), the elite anti-terrorism unit of the Bangladesh police, which has become notorious as a “death squad” and has been sanctioned internationally for its involvement in extrajudicial abductions, abuses and killings.

     On 5 May 2020, Kishore, whose wounds had begun to go septic, was handed to police and sent to Dhaka central jail. Alongside 11 others, including journalists and activists, he was charged under the Digital Security Act, ostensibly for spreading misinformation about Covid. Human rights groups claimed the law was a brazen attempt to silence government critics and criminalise dissent.

     For almost a year, Kishore remained behind bars, growing weaker from his injuries. But after a fellow detainee, journalist Mustaq Ahmed, died in prison nine months later – allegedly from his torture wounds – and global outrage followed, Kishore was granted bail in March 2021.

     After attempts were made to detain him again, Kishore fled to Nepal and on to Sweden, where he has lived in exile ever since. “I still cannot walk properly due to my injuries and I have lost hearing in the right ear,” he said.

     The ordeal endured by Kishore, Ahmed and countless activists, writers, artists, opposition politicians and lawyers since Hasina came to power in 2009 has formed the basis of the anti-government protest movement that is swelling in Bangladesh’s biggest cities.

     Economic hardship and rising fuel and food prices caused by the Covid pandemic and Ukraine war, coupled with frustration at a decade of alleged corruption, human rights abuses and rigging of elections, have driven hundreds of thousands to the streets for protests organised by the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and allies.

     Critics of Hasina and her Awami League government fear that elections due at the end of the year will be neither free nor fair – polls in 2014 and 2018 were marred by opposition boycotts and credible allegations of vote stuffing. They are demanding she resign and make way for a caretaker government. The BNP says it won’t take part in another election under Hasina.

     The response from Hasina, daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who led the country to independence in 1971, has been draconian. While the Awami League is free to hold vast gatherings, BNP rallies have been denied permission and transport strikes have been imposed to stop people attending.

     Police are accused of a coordinated campaign of violence against the opposition. Officers have fired on peaceful protests, killing eight BNP activists and injuring more than 200 protesters in the past five months. At least 20,000 cases have been filed against BNP supporters, while more than 7,000 BNP members and activists have been arrested, including prominent party leaders, including more than 1,000 detained just in the last month.

     “In the past, they used to carry out extrajudicial killings in staged gunfights at night; now they are killing in broad daylight. No one can hope for a free and fair election in this situation, under this government,” said AKM Wahiduzzaman, a BNP leader.

     During Hasina’s 13 years in power, Bangladesh has thrived as one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia, becoming the main supplier of garments to the west. However, the period has also seen authoritarianism and human rights abuses at the hands of the state, particularly by the RAB. Last year, the US sanctioned six RAB commanders for alleged extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances.

     Zakir Hossain, 37, a former army major, was among those “disappeared” by the RAB in December 2011. After more than 50 officers seized him from his home, he was interrogated, tortured and accused of planning a coup against Hasina’s government.

     “During the detention I received inhuman treatment that can only be compared to those horrifying stories of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay,” he said. He was kept in solitary confinement for almost three years, and for 11 months in jail before he was finally released, never having faced a courtroom for his alleged crimes. In 2021, he fled to the UK. “I am thankful to God that I am still alive,” he said.

     Despite the US sanctions a year ago, human rights groups say the RAB is still involved in such abuses, and at least 16 people were forcibly disappeared in Bangladesh. “The human rights situation in Bangladesh is appalling,” said Ali Riaz, professor of political science at Illinois State University. “The number of extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances are blatant testimony to this.”

     As international pressure from the US, UK and others has increased on Hasina’s government, foreign minister AK Abdul Momen has rejected accusations of a crackdown on the political opposition. “Our government has always come to power through the fair electoral process,” he said, adding that forthcoming polls will offer “a free and fair election which will be acceptable to all”.

     However, Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman, liaison officer of the Asian Legal Resource Centre in Hong Kong, said that, in the current situation, “a fair and credible election is unimaginable”.

     “Bangladesh does not have an independent institution to hold the ruling party accountable,” he said. “The judiciary, the election commission, intelligence agencies, and the law-enforcement agencies all collaborate with each other to rig elections for the ruling party and hide the crimes of the regime.”

      As written by Emma Graham-Harrison and Saad Hammadi in the Guardian, in an article entitled Inside Bangladesh’s killing fields: bloggers and outsiders targeted by fanatics; “First they came for the bloggers, the atheists, the secular intellectuals. Then the three-year murder spree spread to aid workers, minority religions and Muslims who did not want their country reshaped by extremist Islam.

     The attack on Professor Rezaul Karim Siddiquee was so frenzied that its traces remain more than a month later, arcs of dried blood spattered up a pink wall and a pile of sand covering bloodstains that had pooled on the ground where the softly spoken lecturer was all but beheaded.

     He was killed on his way to work in the city of Rajshahi by four men who knew their target and his routines well. At least one of the killers was a former student who had a reputation for barracking the professor in class about the “immorality” of the English literature he taught, police believe.

    Neighbours in the narrow alley where Siddiquee was murdered overheard him greet someone moments before his death. “You’re here?” he asked his killer. His final words were spoken in surprise but not fear, because Siddiquee never imagined that he would be a target for extremists, his family says.

     The murder fitted into a pattern laid down over a gruesome three-year killing spree by extremist groups in Bangladesh: a bloody but brutal attack in broad daylight with the most basic of weapons, and later a claim of responsibility from Islamic State (Isis) or al-Qaida.

     But it was also a warning of the way the killers have expanded their campaign, from a focused assault on secular activists into a wider war to reshape Bangladeshi society along lines determined by Islamist extremists.

     Siddiquee was an observant believer who regularly attended prayers and even paid for the renovation of the mosque in his ancestral village – his was the most anodyne of public profiles. If he was a target, surely millions of other Bangladeshis are too.

     “What he was, we all are. If a person like him who loves to read, recite literature and play music at home can be killed, all of us are liable to be next,” said one of Siddiquee’s colleagues, asking not to be named for fear it could push him up a list of possible targets.

     Foreigners, religious minorities from Hindus to Christians, Muslims from other sects and even Sunnis who subscribe to a more generous vision of faith than their attackers, are all now at risk.

     Since 2013, 30 people have been murdered. They were from all faiths and social backgrounds, linked above all by the manner of their deaths, at the hands of men wielding machetes, knives and even swords. At least three others barely escaped assassination attempts, surviving with scars on their faces and necks that look like medieval battle injuries.

     One, Ahmed Rahim Tutul (pictured on page 15), survived only because he fell between a table and chair as a militant slashed at his head with a sword in an attack that left terrible scars across his face.

     The toll is tiny in absolute terms for a country of around 160 million people, and authorities insist they have the upper hand in the battle against what they describe as a relatively small, unprofessional band of fanatics, pointing to dozens of arrests. On Saturday, after the latest killing, security forces rounded up 1,600 people in a show of strength, although they admitted that only 37 of the detained were suspected Islamist militants, and the rest were petty criminals, AP reported.

     “If they think they could turn Bangladesh upside down, they are wrong,” prime minister Sheikh Hasina told parliament before the raids.

     But the brutality has thrown daily life out of kilter in disturbing ways, pushing the country towards the conservatism and religious monoculture that the attackers apparently seek.

     At the country’s second-largest university, where Siddiquee taught, professors are curtailing classes out of fear of their own students. Authorities have received a hit list of around 40 professors, and some have received threats by phone and letter.

     A week after Siddiquee’s killing, three men on a motorbike roared into the village of a Hindu tailor, Nikhil Joarder, hacked him to death and threw his body in a ditch. Again, they struck in the middle of the day, on a main road lined with shops and homes, but his former friends and neighbours all insist that no one saw the faces of his killers.

      The murder put an end not just to Joarder’s life, but to a long history of religious diversity in the village. Joarder’s wife and his brother’s family fled after the killing, and now the courtyard of corrugated iron homes that was the tiny Hindu enclave is locked and empty.

     “I came here for my security. I have nothing now,” said his widow Aruti Rani Joarder, weeping at a relative’s home in a nearby town. “This is not a safe country for the Hindu community.”

     Despite the government’s promise of swift justice and a string of arrests such attacks have, if anything, gathered pace. So far in June, four people have been murdered: two Hindus, a Christian trader and the wife of a senior police officer tasked with stopping militants, a cross-section of Bangladeshi society. As the list of victims has lengthened, so has the sense of menace across the country.

     The first attacks targeted only prominent secular intellectuals, a tiny and easily identified group. Few people are ready to take a prominent public stand against religion in a country where Islamist groups have deep roots and where there is a devout Muslim majority.

     After killers circulated the bloggers’ work beyond its original audience, outrage dimmed to apathy among many people, who considered the attacks reasonable punishment for what conservative Islam deems a capital crime. The nominally secular government did little to dispel the impression that the killings were disturbing but a minority concern. Hasina’s government is waging a bitter political battle against Islamist and conservative opposition groups, and is apparently unwilling to risk popular support with a fierce defence of unpopular radicals.

     Her government’s muted response to killings has been laced with insinuations that the bloggers contributed at least in part to their murders. “These attacks are not acceptable, but at the same time we expect people to stop criticising the prophet Muhammad,” said Shahriar Alam, one of the country’s junior foreign ministers, told the Observer.

     But the bloggers are now a minority among the dead, rendering pointless the calls for self-censorship. Spiritual leaders, foreign aid workers and ordinary members of minority religions appear to have been targeted more for what they represent than anything they have done, making the murders impossible to predict or prevent.

     One of the peculiarities of the killings in Bangladesh is that none has been claimed by a local operation. There have been no demands or ultimatums, or any explanation for why victims were targeted.

     That vacuum has been filled only by statements from Isis and al-Qaida, claiming responsibility for killings thousands of miles from their nearest known base, and made in Arabic, a language not widely spoken in Bangladesh except by religious scholars. A recent Isis propaganda magazine boasted an interview with a man whom they claimed was head of operations in Bangladesh.

     Analysts say it is extremely unlikely that Isis has set up a cell in Bangladesh. “It’s physically impossible for an organisation that is Iraq- or Syria-based to go somewhere so far away and launch operations,” said Kamran Bokhari, a fellow at George Washington University’s programme on extremism and an expert on South Asia.

     But the consistency and speed of the statements suggest there is an Isis link with killers in Bangladesh, perhaps through a member of the diaspora, turning the attacks into a propaganda tool for both parties.

     For local organisations, even a basic link-up with Isis brings extra publicity and possibly recruits, as well as the potential of hard cash. “You go from relative obscurity to an influx of tradecraft, maybe cash.”

     Such a connection may be deepened if the government cannot stop the attacks, as local groups gain a reputation and improve their operational skills. “If this cell doesn’t die down, how long are they just going to use machetes? They are going to get more confident, more emboldened,” Bokhari said.

     Hasina, who has insisted that the killings are part of a political campaign by local terror groups and fiercely rejects the possibility that al-Qaida or Isis have a foothold in Bangladesh, promised a stronger response after the latest attack.

     The man charged with responding will be police commissioner Monirul Islam, who broke up the cell behind some of the earliest attacks on bloggers and now heads a 600-man counter-terror police unit and says he is chasing two groups. The first is a sophisticated and well-financed operation that targets bloggers and secular activists in carefully planned attacks – a group once known as Ansarullah Bangla Team but recently renamed Ansar al Islam.

     Members arrested in connection with attacks include the son of a top banking executive, the nephew of a deputy minister, and a man who worked for multinationals including Coca-Cola. Commissioner Islam believes the group is still dangerous, and considers cracking it one of his biggest tasks. “They are the real extremist group: they follow the ideology of some global outfit, like al-Qaida, though they don’t have direct connections with them,” he said.

     The second network is responsible for most of the recent killings, Islam believes. A re-formed wing of local terror group Jaamat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), which set off bombs around Bangladesh a decade ago before being largely dismantled, it is now targeting Hindus, Christans, foreigners and Buddhists to send a political message.

     They are less sophisticated and less well-financed than the group pursuing bloggers, Islam says, which should make the killings easier to stop. At present, he believes, the group has just a few dozen members, and many have been rounded up already, or are on a “most-wanted” list.

     Among them are the men behind Professor Siddiquee’s murder, former students frustrated by classes on literature which they considered transgressive.

     “Two of his students were involved in this killing, former honours students,” said Islam. “One was very vocal in class, sometimes used to oppose the professor’s views, particularly during discussions on fiction and non-fiction. Eventually, he dropped out.”

     Even those most desperate for police to find the killers are unsure if the people they are arresting are the right ones. Siddiquee’s family and former colleagues say they want real justice, not simply detentions with few details and a legal process so glacially slow that the men accused of killing another professor in 2004 only came to trial this year.

     Analysts say there is a risk that police, who were criticised for brutality in the past, and who are relatively unfamiliar with tackling extremist cells, could resort to indiscriminate tactics. “They go around shopping people, beating people up – and they create further resentment in society by targeting the wrong people – there are lots of ideological extremists who aren’t terrorists,” said Bokhari.

     There is already concern about the death of a young student in custody, after he was arrested in connection with Siddiquee’s murder. Shortly after the killing, officers swooped on a working-class home near the murder site and picked up Mohammad Hafizur Rahman. He died in jail a few weeks later, and the family is still waiting for his death certificate.

     The first person in his family to go to university, Rahman was a second-year student in public administration, whose parents say he was devout but not militant. “He was the big hope of our family,” said Halima Begum, his mother, as she leafed tearfully through his graduation certificates from schools and madrassas, all boasting top grades.

     They believe that neighbours falsely accused him of a role in the killing as part of a feud, and they say Rahman was ready to wait out a process which he assured them would end with his innocence being vindicated.

    He suffered from the blood disorder thalassaemia, and police said he died from natural causes, although officers struggled to explain the lack of a death certificate.

     “It’s not what people say, a death in police custody; he was well taken care of by the doctors in the jail hospital,” said local police chief Sardar Tamizuddin Ahmed, who added that Rahman had not been a key suspect. “It’s not that he was involved, but there are sometimes many sorts of information that help investigating the case.”

     His relatives are careful to say that they do not blame the police for his death,    but they insist he had all the medicines he needed for his condition. They also say there were large unexplained welts on his waist when his body was returned to the family, and they question why they are still waiting for a death certificate.

     “Each day we ask for it and they give us a different reason not to issue it. They know my brother is innocent, he has no crimes committed, that’s why they are delaying,” said Habib Rahman. In an indication of official attitudes to police brutality, minister Alam said he had no concerns about either the death, or the potential loss of a key witness.

     Tensions are now so high in Rajshahi that police wait at the airport to offer permanent armed escorts to any foreigners flying into town.

     On a sunset stroll beside the river Padma, Rajashi hardly seems a threatening place: friends, families and couples gather to gossip and take endless selfies, watching river dolphins tumble through the muddy waters and snacking on fruit.

     But barely a kilometre away, the blood stains in the alley where Professor Siddiquee was murdered are testament to a much darker side of the city – and a disturbing history of extremism – that authorities have been unable or unwilling to tackle.

     Its activists are so committed, according to police and other officials, that decades ago they ensured that they married into families based near the university to secure a long-term base.

     Such historical allegations are difficult to verify, but one of the many unsettling facts about Siddiquee’s death is that it was not the first such killing: he was the fourth faculty member of Rajshahi university, one of the most prestigious in Bangladesh, to be murdered by extremists within a decade. In at least two other cases, student suspects were caught.

     “When they choose a victim, they choose always a person who is involved in a large community, [who is] educated and has a strong conscience,” said Ahmed, the Rajshahi police commissioner. “A teacher is an easy target for them, and when a teacher is killed there is a very big outcry.”

     Although individual terror raids or mass shootings have claimed more lives at schools and colleges in other countries over that period, and universities often become battlegrounds when nations go to war, for a country at peace, the rate of extremist assassinations – and authorities’ failure to stop them – is staggering.

     However, at the university there is widespread denial about the networks of radicalisation woven into campus life. Several professors insisted to the Observer that some of the earlier killings had been about personal and professional disputes, even as they admitted that they had altered their own behaviour and routines to guard against becoming a target.

    It is a form of self-protection for more than 1,000 lecturers who face an almost unimaginable risk but have received little support from security forces beyond a warning to be careful.

     Instead, they are watching their words even more closely than usual, and fear that fanatics who consider the education they offer to be too broad have made the first steps towards curtailing it.

     “I have become much more self-conscious in our classes, being sure not to offend any groups, and all the time repressing myself, my own free will,” said a second colleague of Siddiquee’s, who asked not to be named. “I take care again and again not to identify myself with the views in class, saying that this is the author’s view, not mine.”

     That creeping sense of oppression bothers most in the faculty even more than the threats to their lives. In response, they are demanding not greater security for academics, but greater police efforts to catch Siddiquee’s killers and dismantle the radical networks that fostered them.

     The roads through the university have been painted with demands for justice in English and Bengali, a giant noose because students and colleagues alike want the perpetrators hanged, and clenched fists of those who have vowed to fight for Siddiquee.

     The nervous university has banned his colleagues from setting up a platform in the gardens outside, which they hoped would serve as a memorial and focal point for weekly protests they plan to hold until his killers are found and brought to trial.

     However, authorities fear this would set a precedent. Too many professors have been killed for all of them to be given a rallying point.”

      As written by Saad Mamadi in The Guardian, in an article entitled Anyone could become a target: wave of Islamist killings hits Bangladesh. Spate of attacks on country’s prominent atheist and gay activists, bloggers and academics engulfs Dhaka; “There is an eerie feeling out on the streets of Bangladesh. To some of the city’s academics, activists and gay community, Dhaka now feels more dangerous than a war zone, after a spate of machete attacks by Islamist groups, including the murder last week of the founder of Bangladesh’s first magazine for the gay community.

     At least 16 people have died in such attacks in the past three years, among them six secular bloggers, two university professors, an Italian priest, two other foreigners working in the development sector, and a prominent gay activist.

     On Saturday a Hindu man, Nikhil Joarder, was hacked to death in the district of Tangail, central Bangladesh, with police suggesting his killing might be connected to a 2012 complaint claiming that he had made comments against the prophet Muhammad.

     Other targets have included high-profile cultural and intellectual figures, but also very private individuals, apparently murdered simply because Islamists objected to their lifestyle. The diversity of the victims, and the authorities’ sluggish response to the killing spree, have spread fear among anyone who identifies with those who have been killed.

     “I am more worried now here than I ever was in Afghanistan, where the threats were more of an existential nature,” says a gay American who has spent time in the war-torn country and now lives in Bangladesh. He asked not to be named.

     Among his friends to have died were Xulhaz Mannan, a prominent activist – founder of Roopbaan, the country’s only magazine for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community – and Mannan’s friend, Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy. Six to seven assailants pretending to be from a courier company forced their way into Mannan’s apartment and hacked the two men to death last week.

     Homosexuality is illegal in Bangladesh and many members of the gay community were already living in fear of being identified. Now they also have to fear for their lives – and the murders have in effect outed many young people by forcing them to change their daily routine.

     “The news of Xulhaz and Tonoy’s deaths has exposed many young gays and lesbians to their families before they were ready,” says a close friend of Mannan’s, who lives in the US and also did not want to be named. “I know of people not going to work for seven days, who have no hope of going back now.”

     Shockwaves from the killings went far beyond the gay or activist communities, reaching diplomatic and development workers. Mannan was a former employee of the US embassy and before his death worked at the US government’s development agency USAid.

     “They [militants] are really trying to get attention by striking against the people whose deaths would get [wide publicity],” says another US expatriate from within the gay community. “It makes me think twice about certain things,” he told the Observer.The attackers are also striking at Bangladeshi cultural and intellectual life far beyond the capital. Two days before Mannan and Tonoy were killed, two men on a motorbike drew up to a bus stop in the northwestern city of Rajshahi and hacked Rezaul Karim Siddique to death. Islamic State said that he had been killed for “calling to atheism”.

     Siddique was an English professor at Rajshahi University, a musician and a devout Muslim who had no political affiliation. An aficionado of the sitar, he donated to the mosque in his home village and had helped students at its madrasa, or religious school, according to Muhammad Shahiduzzaman, a professor of international relations at the University of Dhaka.

     “Anybody could become a target,” Shahiduzzaman says.

     Many of those now living in fear think that this was exactly the intention of the killers. Five grisly murders within a month have had a chilling effect across Bangladeshi society. “I have had to cut down on my presence in the civil liberty protests. It was not this frightening even a few days ago,” says Imran H Sarkar, the leader of secular activist group Ganajagaran Mancha.

     Responsibility for all of the attacks has been claimed either by Islamic State or Ansar al-Islam, a chapter of al-Qaida in the subcontinent, but Bangladeshi authorities have denied the existence of international jihadi groups in the country. They say the attacks are being carried out by homegrown militants with links to the main opposition party, who are seeking to destabilise the government.

     Regardless of who is behind the killings, they are a worrying sign of weakening political and security institutions, in a country of 160 million that until now has proved relatively successful in battling extremism.

     Bangladesh’s majority Bengali Muslim population has historically had relatively liberal values, says Afsan Chowdhury, a political analyst, but those traditions are now under threat. “Islamic militancy has been growing for the last 10 to 15 years as political institutions have weakened,” he adds.

     After the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, held on to power in a 2014 election boycotted by the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist party and its allies, authorities arrested senior opposition leaders on charges of instigating violence.

     “The government has very effectively punished the opposition to the point they are not really a political force any more,” says Chowdhury. The vacuum of a strong opposition has made the atmosphere unpredictable.

     The spate of killings started in February 2013 after activists demanded that the government hang everyone convicted of collaborating with the Pakistan army during the country’s war of independence from Pakistan in 1971.

      Many of those brought to trial, in proceedings widely criticised by human rights groups for not meeting international standards, were linked to the opposition and its Islamist allies. One Islamist group, Hefazat-e-Islam, responded by drawing up a list of 84 atheist bloggers and demanding that the government take action against them for publishing blasphemous content online. At least five of the victims since 2013 were named on that list.

     But there has been little official support for others who appear on it, and families of victims and those at risk fear police investigations are too slow and ineffective. So far at least 46 people have been arrested, but only two have been found guilty; they were given the death penalty for their role in the killing of the blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider.

     “An arrest is not an assurance of justice,” said Sarkar, the secular campaigner.

     There is also frustration that some killers of Avijit Roy, a murdered American blogger of Bangladeshi origin, have been able to escape the country.

     Concerns about security are mounting from international quarters after the killing of Mannan. “The government will try to hunt down possible suspects [in Mannan’s killing] but whether they can really get at the actual culprit, there is a great deal of doubt,” Shahiduzzaman told the Observer.

     Survivors feel forgotten. Asha Mone’s husband, the blogger Niladry Chattopadhya, was hacked to death in front of her, but police have not contacted her in five months, she told the Observer. Officers said they had arrested five suspects in relation to the case.

     Many are also concerned that authorities who should be chasing the killers are instead blaming the victims. They point to a statement by Bangladesh’s police chief after the killing of Mannan, asking citizens to be aware of their security, and other comments by officials blaming blogger victims for writing about religion. “What upsets me most is how [the] government is now going out of their way to find other motives behind the murder,” says Mannan’s friend who lives in the US.

     Even if the authorities do step up efforts to find and prosecute the killers, the fear that has been created will linger.

     “I walk in the park every morning, and today a man came towards me carrying a knife. When he walked past me, I turned my head so I could check he was walking away,” says a gay expatriate living in the diplomats’ area of Dhaka.

     He could not shake off his fear, even when he later found out that the man was there to cut the grass.’

    And all of this sectarian religious terror and state terror is shadowed by the pathos of the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, twice victimized; both driven from their homes in a wave of ruthless ethnic cleaning and anti-Islamic hysteria by the Buddhist fascist military junta of Myanmar, then exploited by criminal syndicates protected by the government of Bangladesh to whom they had fled for safety and the solidarity of Islamic peoples under threat from intrusive and reactionary forces who do not consider them fellow human beings. The horrific example of the Rohingya are a push force driving both radicalization and the centralization of power to a carceral state in Bangladesh.

     As written by Ruma Paul, Sudipto Ganguly and Krishna N. Das in The International Business Times, in an article entitled Surging Crime, Bleak Future Push Rohingya In Bangladesh To Risk Lives At Sea; “Mohammed Ismail says four of his relatives were killed by gunmen at the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh between April and October last year. He recalls the September night when, he says, he almost met the same fate: masked men kidnapped him, cut off parts of his left arm and leg and dumped him in a canal.

     “They repeatedly asked me why I gave their personal details to the police,” Ismail, seated on a plastic mat with his left limbs covered in white bandage and cloth, told Reuters at the Kutupalong refugee camp. “I kept telling them I didn’t know anything about them and had not provided any information.”

     About 730,000 Rohingya, a mostly Muslim minority present in Myanmar for centuries but denied citizenship in the Buddhist-majority nation since 1982, fled to Bangladesh in 2017 to escape a military crackdown. Including others who migrated in prior waves, nearly 1 million live near the border in tens of thousands of huts made of bamboo and thin plastic sheets.

     An increasing number of Rohingya are now leaving Bangladesh for countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia via perilous boat journeys, as rising crime in the camps adds to longstanding troubles like a lack of educational and work opportunities and bleak prospects of returning to military-ruled Myanmar.

    Crimes recorded in the camps – including murder, kidnapping, rape, robbery, human trafficking and narcotics trade – have soared in recent years, according to data that Bangladesh police shared exclusively with Reuters. Murders rose to 31 in 2022, the highest in at least five years.

     “A series of murders of Rohingya men, including some leaders, at the camps have sparked fear and concern about militant groups gaining power, and local authorities failing to curb increasing violence,” said Dil Mohammed, a Rohingya community leader in the camps.

     “That’s one of the main reasons behind the surge in Rohingya undertaking dangerous sea voyages.”

    Police declined to comment on questions about Ismail or the issues at the camps beyond the data they shared.

     Data from UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency, show that about 348 Rohingya are thought to have died at sea in 2022, including in the possible sinking late last year of a boat carrying 180 people, making it one of the deadliest years since 2014. Some 3,545 Rohingya made or attempted the crossing of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea to Southeast Asian countries last year, up from about 700 in 2021, the UNHCR said.

     Ismail, 23, said he believes insurgents targeted him and his relatives, who were aged between 26 and 40, after his cousins rejected repeated approaches over the preceding three or four years to join a militant outfit, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA). The group has fought against Myanmar’s security forces and some Rohingya say it has been recruiting fighters, often through coercion, in the Bangladesh camps.

     In letters to the UNHCR in November and this month seen by Reuters, Ismail said he witnessed the killings of two of his cousins on Oct. 27.

     Reuters could not independently verify the deaths of Ismail’s relatives, but his account was corroborated by his brother, Mohammed Arif Ullah, 18. The UNHCR declined to comment on Ismail’s case, citing safety and privacy risks.

     About a dozen Rohingya men in the camps, who spoke to Reuters on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said that ARSA militants, whose stated goal is to fight for and restore the rights and freedom of the Rohingya in their ancestral homeland, were involved in criminal activities in the camps, including human and drug trafficking.

     An ARSA spokesperson did not respond to questions Reuters sent by email and Twitter about the fates of Ismail and his family, and its alleged involvement in trafficking and attempts to recruit fighters in the camps. The group said on Twitter in December that its activities were confined to Myanmar.

     “Any crimes and incidents happening in the camps… in all such happenings, most of the time innocent Rohingya refugees from the camps are labelled as ARSA members and extra-judicially arrested by the authorities,” it said.

    The UNHCR acknowledged concerns about crime in the camps, saying it had increased its presence so that refugees could access protection and support.

     “Among the serious protection incidents reported to UNHCR are abductions, disappearances, threats or physical attacks by armed groups and criminal gangs involved in illegal activities,” said Regina de la Portilla, the agency’s communications officer in Bangladesh.

     Reuters could not independently obtain evidence of drug trafficking by ARSA, though previous Reuters reporting described how refugees had been drawn into the trade out of desperation.

     Accounts of violent crime in the overcrowded refugee settlements are adding to pressure on densely populated Bangladesh, which has struggled to support the Rohingya and has called for Myanmar to take them back.

     Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, Bangladesh’s Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner based in Cox’s Bazar, said the government was trying to control crime, including through a separate police battalion posted to the camps, but that “criminals just flee across borders when we run an operation”.

     “For me, ARSA are thugs, hoodlums, hopeless people who now depend on drug peddling and extortion,” he said. “They don’t have a country, society, and nobody recognises them. That is why they are involved in crimes and life is meaningless to them.”

      Human Rights Watch said this month, in a report based on interviews with more than 40 refugees, that Bangladesh police’s Armed Police Battalion, which took over security in the camps in 2020, was committing extortion, arbitrary arrests, and harassment of Rohingya refugees. The battalion did not respond to emails seeking comment.

     Rahman said returning the Rohingya to Myanmar was the “only solution” to their problems. But Myanmar’s military junta, which took power in a coup two years ago, has shown little inclination to take them back. A Myanmar government spokesman could not be reached for comment.

     Ismail, who lives with his parents, wife and brother, says he fears for his life and understands why some Rohingya are fleeing Bangladesh.

     “It’s better to die at sea than being killed by terrorists or dying every day living in fear,” he said.

     The police data show that crimes in the camps and the number of Rohingya arrested in Bangladesh last year were 16 times the levels of 2017 – a significant jump even after accounting for the influx of refugees. Police arrested 2,531 Rohingya and registered 1,220 cases last year, up from 1,628 arrests and 666 cases in 2021.

     About 90% of cases last year, and a similar proportion of arrests, involved murder, illegal use of weapons, trade in narcotics, robbery, rape, kidnapping, attacks on police and human trafficking. Reuters could not determine how many of these resulted in convictions.

     The murders of 31 Rohingya marked an increase from a previous high of 27 in 2021. Related arrests reached 290, from 97 a year earlier. Drug-related cases and arrests also soared.

     Khair Ullah, a senior Burmese language instructor at the Development Research and Action Group, an NGO, said that besides concern about crime, the refugees were frustrated because about 90% of them had no education or employment.

     “They are worried about their future. They can’t support their old parents,” said Ullah, 25, who is Rohingya and lives in the camps. “What will happen when they have kids? The other big issue is that there’s no hope of repatriation from here, so they’re trying to leave the camps illegally.”

     Reuters spoke with several refugees who returned to the Bangladesh camps after abandoning journeys to Malaysia, via Myanmar, out of trepidation.

     Enayet Ullah, 20, who is not related to Khair Ullah, arrived in Bangladesh in 2017 with his family. In December, he said, he saw the bodies of two Rohingya men who had been killed in the area of the camps where he lives.

     “When I saw their bodies, I was traumatised,” he said. “I thought I could have died this way. Then I decided to leave the camp for Malaysia.”

     Taking a boat from Teknaf in Bangladesh with nine others on the night of Dec. 13, Ullah said he reached the Myanmar town of Sittwe the next day. He had arranged for traffickers to take him to Malaysia for 450,000 taka (about $4,300).

     “More Rohingya were supposed to join us and then a bigger boat would sail for Malaysia,” Ullah said. “They were waiting for a green signal to start the voyage. But my gut feeling was that the journey wouldn’t be safe.”

     He got cold feet and asked the traffickers to send him back to Bangladesh for 100,000 taka.

     Ullah laments that after more than five years in the camps, his homeland seems as far away as ever.

     “No education, no jobs. The situation will only deteriorate as time passes by,” he said.

     Those who reach Malaysia – where there are about 100,000 Rohingya – often find their situation similarly dire. Deemed illegal immigrants, many are jobless and complain of harassment by police. And the deteriorating political situation in Myanmar since the coup has dashed any hopes of repatriation in the near term.

     Mohammed Aziz, 21, said he pulled out of a sea trip to Southeast Asia after he saw pictures of boats that traffickers were using, and felt they were too small. He said he had to pay 80,000 taka for the trip to the Myanmar coast from Bangladesh and back.

     “People are risking their lives on sea journeys as there is no future here and criminal activities are rising,” Aziz said. “But I’ll beg them not to take this dangerous sea route. You can end up dying at sea.”

Walk Through the Fire, song from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episode Once More With Feeling

A Crow Confronts His Image

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10160502756145941&set=gm.3446505235624849&idorvanity=1464145827194143

Ring of Power: Symbols and Themes Love Vs. Power in Wagner’s Ring Circle and in Us: A Jungian-Feminist Perspective, Jean Shinoda Bolen

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/451808.Ring_of_Power?ref=nav_sb_ss_2_13

Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva

http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/touchyfeelingsmaliciousobjects/Kristevapowersofhorrorabjection.pdf

Miracle of the Rose, Jean Genet

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/266034.Miracle_of_the_Rose?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=GYwP2xLhA8&rank=1

One of Us scene in the 1932 film Freaks

The American Trilogy, William S. Burroughs

https://www.goodreads.com/series/65214-the-red-night-trilogy

The Dice Man, Luke Rhinehart

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/70912.The_Dice_Man?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=yyNxxfsDMY&rank=

Bangladesh’s top court cuts job quotas that led to deadly student-led protests

Court overturns ruling reserving 30% of government jobs for independence war veterans and their relatives

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/21/bangladesh-court-scraps-job-quotas-student-led-protests

National curfew imposed in Bangladesh after student protesters storm prison:

Army to be deployed to keep order after demonstrators free hundreds of prisoners and country is hit by serious unrest

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/19/bangladesh-imposes-communications-blackout-as-protest-violence-continues

Bangladesh police given ‘shoot-on-sight’ orders amid national curfew

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/20/bangladesh-police-given-shoot-on-sight-orders-amid-national-curfew?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1sM4RirSRt35z21p4cDawrkiyDp_eEhbVAsFYmpITVd0p5xIYCrLMfzJk_aem_OiKX4tOQ_XR6bboldSyzvg

Two die and thousands hurt in crackdown on Bangladesh student protests

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/16/two-dead-and-thousands-injured-as-bangladesh-police-crack-down-on-anti-quota-protests

One of Us scene in the 1932 film Freaks

The American Trilogy, William S. Burroughs

https://www.goodreads.com/series/65214-the-red-night-trilogy

The Dice Man, Luke Rhinehart

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/70912.The_Dice_Man?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=yyNxxfsDMY&rank=

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/thousands-protest-in-bangladesh-against-the-ruling-party/ar-AA157yUk

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/22/bangladesh-opposition-crackdown-thousands-arrested

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/11/bangladesh-murders-bloggers-foreigners-religion

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/30/bangladesh-islamist-attacks-murder-gay-atheist-activists-dhaka

https://www.ibtimes.com/surging-crime-bleak-future-push-rohingya-bangladesh-risk-lives-sea-3660196