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Of the FUA-MUA government

September 19, 2007
By Sushanta Das Gupta

[Saleem Samad, Canada.]

kodu1.gif

What ’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

7 Responses to “ Of the FUA-MUA government ”

  1. Iconus.Clustus on September 20, 2007 at 9:30 am

    The fact that the cartoon created an antagonistic feeling among the religionists is not surprising. It is not surprising that ulema-ekrams got together and burnt copies of Prothom Alo. The surprising aspect is/was CTG’s reaction to the complaints. Mainul Hosein’s explanations aside, which themselves can be written down and sold as jokes (like Bushisms are sold in US), my question is — WHY? Why would CTG give in to the demands of IOJ and other Islamists — and that too so promptly?

    Yeah, yeah, — we all know the answer to that… They didn’t want to take the risk of having another DU incident in their hands to deal with! Asinine… simply ridiculous! But, if this explanation is ridiculous, what could be a better one? We all know Mainul Hosein’s connection with Shibir and Jamaat, right? I saw an video clip of him sitting on a panel of distinguished Jamaati leaders during a mohashammelon of Shibir in China-Bangla Moitri Shommelon Kendro…

    So, there, a link can be established between some of the advisors and these religionists (I am sure there are more than just him). The influence of these extreme-right wingers within the fold of BD army is also well-documented and well-known… interesting, to say the least. The theoretical underpinning — right-winged powers flock together… nationalists and religionists flock together… simple.

    Now… CTG is not ALL Jamaat, as some would like to believe that. As I have written elsewhere, I believe, the 1/11 coup de tat occured through a triangular power balancing act, with one pole being the big brothers, the other two represented by the elite-petit bourgeosie oligarchs and fire-power (army).

    Now… not all that much have been said or written about the second element in the mix… the elites. Who are they? Who were involved in the present mix-match of people? One think for sure, whoever they were, they are not consistently part of it… but, have remained influential this way or the other. Let me name a few names…

    1. Motiur Rahman
    2. Mahfuz Anam
    3. Sirajul Alam Khan
    4. Mainul Hosein
    5. Muhammed Yunus
    5. Fakruddin Ahmed

    and so on and so forth…

    Like it or not, these people are who brought about the so-called revolution. Please provide your comments and take on this matter.

    If my conjecture has any truth in it, then Motiur Rahman is no shotter shondhani… he is as opportunistic as the next person (ref. Mahfuz Anam). They both have been able to capture the pulse of American media coup and learned the tactics of freedom and democracy on one hand, and opportunist journalism favoring the anti-left, pro-American forces.

    So — this is where we needed to be the most surprised (though I wasn’t since I believe in what I am writing… :) . The seemingly secular and free press of Prothom Alo turned their back on the editor of the magazine Alpin! Motiur Rahman didn’t give the agitators the slightest of chances to say anything any further — he promptly, more promptly than the CTG itself — took the issue off the internet archive, apologized to the nation, and worst of all — instead of protesting (which some gullible readers expected) the arrest of his freelance cartoonist, he FIRED his editor!

    Yeah! Motiur… BRAVO… that is good journalistic move… a long time ago a friend of mine told me, a rhetorician can not be expected to say the truth… s/he is busy making things looking good — it doesn’t matter if those things are expressive of truth or not… and MR — is definitely a rhetorician per excellence.

  2. Rayan on September 20, 2007 at 1:19 pm

    Why can

  3. Zafa on September 20, 2007 at 1:42 pm

    Law suits have been filed against the editor and publisher of Prothom Alo by some Madrassa admins in Chittagong and Comilla. One of them even cited “elements of sedition”! Islamic clerics however have announced that they will not go for any Friday protest program against Prothom Alo. Did they realize that a procession will mean direct violation of emergency rules, or did they realize their double standards on when to appreciate a joke and when to not?

  4. Syed Zillani on September 21, 2007 at 5:44 pm

    FUA & MUA is ruining Bangladesh. FUA & MUA and their cronies including the religious fanatics should be shred into pieces once their terrible experiment results in a mass uprising.

    This is the most undemocratic totalitarian regime backed by JamaateIslami party in Bangladesh’s history.

    DOWN WITH FUA-MUA DUO!

  5. Mirza Ghalib on September 23, 2007 at 7:12 pm

    This article by Noami Wolf should be read by all concerned especially the educated masses and politicians of Bangladesh to get an excellent primer on the evolution of fascism.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2064157,00.html

    Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

      From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.

    Tuesday April 24, 2007. The Guardian

    Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody. They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy — but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

    As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

    Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree — domestically — as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government — the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens’ ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors — we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don’t learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of “homeland” security — remember who else was keen on the word “homeland” — didn’t raise the alarm bells it might have.

    It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable — as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

    Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

    1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

    After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a “war footing”; we were in a “global war” against a “global caliphate” intending to “wipe out civilisation”. There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space — the globe itself is the battlefield. “This time,” Fein says, “there will be no defined end.”

    Creating a terrifying threat — hydra-like, secretive, evil — is an old trick. It can, like Hitler’s invocation of a communist threat to the nation’s security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the “global conspiracy of world Jewry”, on myth.

    It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain — which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks — than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

    2. Create a gulag

    Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guant

  6. mo cat protests on September 28, 2007 at 9:33 pm

    [...] initially learned of it at E-Bangladesh. Of the FUA-MUA government Now that we know the history of the cartoon published in Prothom Alo, can we anticipate the FUA-MUA [...]

  7. Bangladesh: Cartoon Blashphemy? on March 30, 2008 at 8:49 pm

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