I’d like to alert you to a short piece written recently on Bangladesh.
The piece was published in the Japan Times a little more than a month ago. The author Gwynn Dyer expertly runs through the last three decades in the running gag of an internecine conflict in Bangladesh between two powerful families:
As Dyer writes:
“If a Shakespeare should ever arise in Bangladesh, he would have plenty of tragedies around which to weave his history plays. The country is only 38 years old, but the vendettas among leading families have been just as tangled and bloody as the ones in 14th- and 15th- century England that gave the great playwright so much of his material.”
Of course Shakespeare-like talent has grown and died in Bangladesh– more properly, in Bengal. The poets Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam, though both born in Kolkata, considered all of Bengal their native inspiration. Neither could have foreseen the plague the Begums have blighted on our houses. The piece is too optimistic–by half–but hews close to the facts and makes the connections that are necessary to thread through to properly understand the familial politics that has long roiled policy-making in Bangladesh.
A few months ago, I wrote about the early stages of the conflict in Ukraine through the lens of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. While it appears likely that the war will carry on into the foreseeable future, enough time has passed for us to make an honest assessment of each side’s relative […]
The Ukrainian Army has made dramatic strides in the last few weeks. Ukraine’s tactical commanders have outfoxed their Russian counterparts, and by issuing a feint towards the south the UA has been able to earn substantial gains in the north of their country. The impact of these efforts have been compounded by the steady stream […]
In mid-May the Irish political party, Sinn Féin, won the plurality of seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Many American readers might not fully understand the significance of Sinn Féin’s political victory- but rest assured that subjects of the United Kingdom and a wide range of political movements the world over have heard the message […]
The first wave of the Russian offensive in Ukraine has fallen short of Russian autocrat Vladmir Putin’s ambitions. Most analysts deduced that Putin had hoped to achieve a decapitation strike of the Ukrainian government- taking Kiev and replacing Ukrainian President Vladimir Zolinski with a pro-Kremlin voice. Kiev has been threatened repeatedly through the course of […]
On the weekend of March 26th, the notorious MS-13 gang went on a massive killing spree in El Salvador which left more than 70 people dead by Sunday. Even for a country where powerful gangs hold massive sway, this recent tragedy stands out considering that it was the bloodiest day on record since the civil […]
