UNTITLED PROSE – 4

The powerful is always fearful about losing power. Once power is abused, the powerful realize that the abused if they ever get a taste of power, will use that to get back at their abusers. A regime holding absolute power tries to keep their grip on power by feeding ideology (even dogma) to the masses; they use all the arsenal at their disposal: the administration, the law enforcers, the media, the money of the state coffers and a warped version of history. If the power-holders are unable to feed the masses what they consider as would allow them to quash dissent and make people amenable to the rage of their power, they resort to coercion. When they try to enforce their will by any means possible lawlessness becomes inevitable and then rampant, the justice system suffers and a culture of impunity develops. Because the powerful will never accept any legal sanction for their misdeeds, thus, "they dine on the most rarefied delicacy of all: impunity."

"The fact that a crime might have been committed with impunity in the past may make it seem more familiar and less gruesome, but surely does not give it any greater legitimacy."

Fascism does not always come like a sudden electric storm of Boishakh, it may often be like a slow-cooking stew and one day, voila! it’s here and now and served to you in a plate. As Margaret Atwood points out in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, it is only in flashbacks that Offred looks back at her life before Gilead that there were points in her immediate past when there were instances, happenstances, incidents that were the forebodings for things to come. It is only in flashbacks, often, that we see the warning signs of the total disintegration of the state into a soup of totalitarianism.

Back to Atwood’s novel: Offred was able to look into her past and see how such a regime came into being. She describes how in slowly warming water, one would be boiled to death before one becomes aware of the heat.

The scary part is when we talk of the people who have no memories of living in a ‘free state’, a life before fascism took over. These individuals have nothing in their collective memory to look back at times before the ‘current regime’ took over, no abilities left to make comparisons, no other state but within the totalitarianism that they live. They will be ‘illiterate’, unprepared to rebel, unwilling, even. That is frightening.

Dhaka, 6th July 2018.