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

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



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

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

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


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

It's the student wing.

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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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


Reminds me of the summer of 2020 in America


Can you elaborate?


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

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


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


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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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


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


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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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Though I like your humbleness, there are more countries and visitors on HN from other countries than the USA and Bangladesh.


Well... the UKs Tories have been a corrupt shitshow for the last decade. Germany's President Steinmeier was involved in the Murat Kurnaz mess (an Afghani dude wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo), the Chancellor in the Cum Ex tax-cheating scandal, and the opposition parties are taking lessons from Trump in rhetoric tactics. Italy's government is composed of a literal post-fascist party whose youth openly glorifies Mussolini, and then you got the legacy of Europe's most corrupt and creepy politician (Berlusconi).

No matter where you look, corruption and unpunished scandals galore in the West. And the general public doesn't care.


>And the general public doesn't care.

The general public doesn't care about corruption if it doesn't affect them directly and if their basic needs are met. As long as the valuation of their housing keeps going up and so is their pension, they don't care what corrupt shit those in power are doing. It's the "fuck you I got mine" human mentality.


"It's the "fuck you I got mine" human mentality."

I would argue that it is more of learned helplessness.

My experience from 35 years of democracy in my country is that either you vote for corrupt old crooks, or you vote for outsider rebels who promise to uproot corruption only to become corrupt crooks themselves once they got to the levers of power.

Once you witness the same process iterating itself five or six times, you start regarding corruption as approximately as inevitable as aging or bad weather.


And this comparable to Bangladesh? And these are all countries in the West?


It can happen to any country. I do not suggest Bangladesh is special.


>I know here in the US, we can take one look at our own presidential candidates

Yeah, the US presidential candidates are either an old senile man and an old xenofobic liar, either not great options, but none of them have run the country into the ground no matter how shit they are. I mean Trump spews complete nonsense and Biden can barely string a coherent sentence together or remember what he said 30 seconds ago, let alone run a country and yet the US seems to be doing fine.

Part of me thinks that the US still functions so well no matter the president or political situation is that F500 actually run the US and the president is just for show.


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"Culture eats strategy for breakfast."


People will admit that for a country, but not a nation.


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Can you name a first world country that gives out 40% of the public sector jobs to veterans or their children?


The UK House of Lords has a quota of 92 hereditary peers, descendants of Norman conquerors.


The House of Lords isn't that powerful, but it's still an embarrassment to have this sort of hereditary system.


If that's 40%, the public sector's a lot smaller than I thought.


Sure. In Romania, a lot of public sector jobs (the easy, influential or well paying ones) are given out only via nepotism and political connections, usually to descendants and connections of the former communist party high-ups and former members of the military/intelligence services who now own and run lucrative businesses (monopolies for the state) and their kids are usually in charge of the business or in politics cutting the deals to enable them.

There's just no explicit quota system like in Bangladesh, but everything is done in the shadows under the table, and the economy and freedom is good enough that people won't bother revolting over it (again), but everyone knows it's happening. I think it's similar all over the Balkans, Former Yugoslav and former USSR countries.


What you described is nepotism, which is not made into a law, but it happens because of a captured state.


Not to be that guy but Romania isn't "first world" (yet).

It's still very much developing imo.


"First world" doesn't mean developed, it means aligned with the US.


IIRC, a couple of years ago it passed into the developed nations club.


It's HDI is still well below those of other "developed" countries (0.900 and above), and despite the GDP per Capita increase, average household (EDIT: individual, not household) income is still below $6,000/yr [0] so comparable to Mexico, Thailand, and Turkiye (edit: comparable to Mexico and Turkiye, not Thailand which is at $6,000 still)

In 10-15 it will become a developed country but right now it isn't.

I am a big Romania booster though so I'm not trying to put it down

[0] - https://insse.ro/cms/en/content/household-income-and-expendi...


Fine, how about Ursula v.d. Leyen? It's not a quota system, but politicians in developed EU countries too get groomed and put in high leadership positions due to their family connections. It's more rare here since the wealthy elite tend to fund political candidates to do their bidding and not get involved into politic personally but it's the same kind of buying influence just with extra steps.

>average household income is still below $6,000/yr

WAHT?! That smells like bullshit. Average NET monthly salary in Romania is around 1000 Euros[1] now meaning roughly 12000/year.

Did you check your link you posted? According to that average household income in Romania is 1334 Euros per month or 1600 Euros per year. Where the hell did you get 6000 USD/year? Did you ask a hallucinating LLM and didn't bother to fact check it? Romania is poor but is not that poor.

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


Good question!

There absolutely is nepotism in the political sphere in every political system - but that's not what students are opposed about alone.

Basically, every government job (teacher, doctor, tax collector, bureaucrat, bus driver, etc), government funded service (college, hospital, etc), and PSU (eg. govt owned banks, energy companies, factories) will have a quota in favor of those who are the descendants of martyrs from the 1971 Liberation War.

It's the equivalent of party apparatchiks and elite in Ceceascu era Romania who had the pick of the litter for high paying civil service and public sector jobs.

This does not happen in developed countries, and in situations where biased hiring is found, you have a slam dunk corruption case.

There's a reason Leyen became a party politician and not a nameless civil servant.

> Where the hell did you get 6000 USD/year

From the Romanian government press release I linked - "The total monthly average income*) was, in nominal terms, 6634 lei per household and 2648 lei per person in quarter IV 2022."

Multiply that number by 4 (because it's quarters not month) and that the yearly average income.

Edit:

Good catch - I misread the data. Average income PER PERSON is around $6,000. Average HOUSEHOLD is around $12,000.

I still stand by my assertion though, because Mexico's average household income is around $12,000-15,000.

Can't reply to you OP (I think the flame war detector got a false positive) but yea you are right that the numbers I gave were wrong so I've added edit comments.

I don't use LLMs btw. I inherently distrust them. I just have these numbers imprinted in my mind because I have no life.


>This does not happen in developed countries

Yeah it does.

>and in situations where biased hiring is found, you have a slam dunk corruption case.

Except when you don't because that's what corruption does. Should I start listing every major German and Austrian corruption scandal where nobody got punished off the top of my head?

>From the Romanian government press release I linked - The total monthly average income) was, in nominal terms, 6634 lei per household and 2648 lei per person in quarter IV 2022.*

That's not at all what that document says. It explicitly and clearly says those numbers are for monthly wages with info gathered in a quarter. Are you using a LLM for this? Because you're wrong, I show you that you're wrong, yet keep doubling down on your mistakes. Check other sources too and you'll see.


Can reply to you now (or maybe actually working on a Friday helps).

I edited my response to take your VALID critiques into account. I appreciate it - we need to keep all of us internet commentators honest.


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


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


Talking about why it is happening is helpful.

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

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

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


Which nation are you from?




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