Thomas Friedman has what Edward Said (Village Voice, 10/17/89) called “the special combination of disarming incoherence and unearned egoism.”

It is not often that I check the New York Times Opinion page to see what the paper’s three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning and mansion-dwelling foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman is up to. After all, I feel I’ve already exceeded my quota for masochism by wasting a full year of my life writing a book about the man, source of such ideas as that McDonald’s is the key to world peace, and that Iraqis needed to “Suck. On. This” as punishment for the 9/11 attacks—an event Friedman himself admitted Iraq had nothing to do with.

Employed in various posts at the United States’ newspaper of record since 1981—including as bureau chief in both Beirut and Jerusalem—Friedman has just entered his 30th year as foreign affairs columnist. His imperial imperiousness and pompous dedication to Orientalism came under fire from the get-go from none other than Edward Said, who remarked in a 1989 Village Voice intervention (10/17/89), titled “The Orientalist Express”:

It is not just the comic philistinism of Friedman’s ideas that I find so remarkably jejune, or his sassy and unbeguiling manner…. It is rather the special combination of disarming incoherence and unearned egoism that gives him his cockily alarming plausibility.

Noting that Friedman had “internalized the norms, if not the powers, of the secretary of state not just of the United States, but of all humanity,” Said called our journalist out on his habit of offering “advice to everyone about how much better they could be doing if they paid attention to him.” Had everyone been paying attention, they would have learned Friedman’s “moronic and hopelessly false dictum”—Said’s words—according to which “the Arab political tradition has produced only two types: the merchant and the messiah.”

Just for the hell of it, I checked up on Friedman on January 21, the day after Donald Trump’s reinauguration. Sure enough, there was his very first column of 2025, headlined: “President Trump, You Can Remake the Middle East if You Dare.” In other words, it was the latest version of how much better everyone could be doing if they paid attention to the self-appointed secretary of humanity.

‘Reborn as a strong region’

Friedman (New York Times, 1/21/25) counsels Trump: “The more credibly we threaten” Iran, the more likely you will get a Nobel Peace Prize.

You couldn’t ask for a more Orientalist ambition than “remaking” the Middle East, and Friedman has various suggestions for Trump on that front. First, he instructs the president that “your interest is to bring Israel and Saudi Arabia into a US-led alliance with our other Arab partners”—which basically boils down to rewarding the party that has since October 2023 been conducting straight-up genocide in the Gaza Strip with a normalization of relations with Arab countries led by Saudi Arabia, whose bloodthirsty ruler Mohammed bin Salman has long occupied a special place in Friedman’s heart.

Friedman continues with his roadmap:

Gaza, like the West Bank under the Oslo agreement, should be divided into Areas A and B for a four-year transition period. Eighty percent would be Area A (under the international force/Palestinian control), and 20% (basically the perimeter) would remain under Israeli military control until Israel’s security is assured.

Never mind how the old Oslo Accords panned out—the 1993 US-brokered agreement that was supposedly designed to pave the way for Israeli/Palestinian peace and Palestinian self-governance, i.e. a two-state solution. Friedman might do well to revisit his own assessment in 2000 that “the Israeli propaganda that the Palestinians mostly rule themselves in the West Bank is fatuous nonsense,” and that “Israeli confiscation of Palestinian land for more settlements is going on to this day—seven years into Oslo.”

Friedman warns Trump that

the Middle East is either going to be reborn as a strong region where normalized relations, trade and cooperation are defining objectives, or disintegrate into a few solid nation-states surrounded by vast zones of disorder, warlordism and terrorists who are chillingly expert at using drones.

Lest anyone jump to the conclusion that Friedman has at last gotten something right, rest assured that the drone-happy terrorists to which he is referring are not in fact the Israelis—despite the Israeli military’s established chilling expertise in said field.

‘Birth pangs of a new Middle East’

Friedman claimed that in Iraq, the US was “a well-armed external midwife, whom everyone on the ground both fears and trusts” (Jacobin, 7/26/12).

As for the alleged necessity that the Middle East “be reborn,” murderous obstetrics have long factored into the United States’ Orientalist approach to Arab and Muslim regions of the world; just recall then–Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s favorable assessment of Israel’s summer 2006 slaughter-fest in Lebanon as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.”

That particular assault, which killed approximately 1,200 people in 34 days, was subsequently invoked by Friedman in 2009 as a positive precedent when Israel was once again ravaging the Gaza Strip. Declaring that Israel’s decision in 2006 to “exact enough pain on the civilians” of Lebanon was “not pretty, but it was logical,” Friedman prescribed the same “logical” approach to Gaza—to hell with the pesky Geneva Conventions, as well as Friedman’s own ostensible opposition to, um, terrorism.

Of a piece with the whole rebirth-by-mass-killing theme is the Orientalist exploitation of infantilizing terminology. And in that realm, too, Friedman has long excelled, including in his repeated references to Afghanistan—a nation decimated by the US with Friedman’s enthusiastic encouragement—as a “special needs baby.” Then there was the time he complained that the US was “babysitting a civil war” in Iraq—a baby-sitting job that, mind you, happened to have been unleashed by the very 2003 US invasion extensively cheer-led by Friedman, who in 2002 argued that such a war was the “most important task worth doing.”

As I note in my book, Friedman’s reliance on childish condescension is

merely one manifestation of a tradition of unabashed Orientalism that discredits Arabs and Muslims as agents capable of managing their own destinies and sets up a power scheme in which the United States and its military simultaneously occupy the positions of killer/torturer, liberator, educator and parent/babysitter.

As is the case with the 2006 “birth pangs” and the current Middle East that Trump has now been tasked with rebirthing, the Arab/Muslim world is often portrayed as having not even yet made it into infant form, instead awaiting violent expulsion from the imperial womb—as in Friedman’s eloquently cogent 2012 proclamation that Syria was in need of a “well-armed external midwife.”

‘Animal Planet’

As FAIR (2/6/24) noted, “The comparison of official enemies to vermin is a hallmark of propaganda in defense of genocide.”

Of course, Friedman’s Orientalist repertoire goes beyond infantilizing rhetoric and fetal fantasies. There was that time in 1988 that he decided that Palestinians could be collectively referred to as Ahmed—“I believe that as soon as Ahmed has a seat in the bus, he will limit his demands”—after which Noam Chomsky questioned whether journalists could also be promoted to chief diplomatic correspondent at the New York Times by suggesting that Hymie or Sambo be given a seat in the bus.

And just last year in the midst of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Friedman undertook to outdo himself with a column headlined “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom,” which as I observed at the time would have already been sufficiently grotesquely bonkers had the Israeli military establishment not taken the liberty of classifying its Palestinian victims as “human animals.”

The column hosted some nonsensical babble about parasitoid wasps and sifaka lemurs, along with the following information about our columnist’s investigative modus operandi: “Sometimes I contemplate the Middle East by watching CNN. Other times, I prefer Animal Planet.”

Anyway, Friedman is now clearly the best candidate to help Trump “Remake the Middle East if You Dare.” No matter that Friedman purports to be at odds with Trump’s nasty worldview; the two conveniently share a haughty and snotty antagonism vis-à-vis those “animal planet” parts of the world that need a “well-armed external midwife” as a mission civilisatrice.

If only Friedman himself could be rebirthed into something more human.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Belén Fernández.

The physical organisation of the Bengalee is feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in a constant vapour bath. His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more hardy breeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitution and his situation are equally unfavourable. His mind bears a singular analogy to his body. It is weak even to helplessness for purposes of manly resistance…

— Macaulay (1841)

Chhayanaut, the premier cultural institution of the country, employs what one scholar of fascism, Roger Griffin, has termed palingenesis, “a framing device to emphasise cultural and national renewal” (Zac Gershbergh and Sean Illing. The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media and Perilous Persuasion, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2022), p 126).  Gershberg and Illing cite D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, the modern medium of the cinema for a mass audience: the Lost Cause of a heroic South, reinvigorated by the Ku Klux Klan.

“Pakistan’s rulers, since its inception in 1947, tried to use religion to rupture the plural cultural identity of Muslim Bengalis; this was reflected in their onslaught on Bangla language and culture,” announces the Chhayanaut website. We will see below that this does not fact-check. “Chhayanaut created a landmark national tradition by launching the celebration of Bengali seasons. The musical welcome on the first dawn of Baisakh [the opening month of the Bengali year] under the banyan tree in Ramna, begun in 1967, brought back the Bengali new year into the consciousness of city dwellers. Thus, Chhayanaut has become a partner in the glory of the Bengali passage that began with a cultural renaissance and led to the war for independence. During the liberation war, Chhayanaut singers organised performances to inspire freedom fighters and refugees. After independence, Chhayanaut has been involved in seeking creative ways to broaden and intensify the practice of music and, more broadly, the celebration of Bangla culture…Chhayanaut believes the nation will find its path to development through this cultural renaissance (italics added).” In fact, the “Bengali calendar” issued from the court of the Mughal Emperor Akbar. “Celebrations of Pahela Baishakh started from Akbar’s reign (1556 – 1605).”

Needless to add, Bengali consciousness played no role in these celebrations. An imperial edict, for purposes of tax collection, constituted the new calendar: such top-down, supine payment of taxes prompted the expression for Asians as a whole: “born taxpayers”: “The nascent absolutist states of Europe had to struggle long and hard before they established fiscal absolutism; of the Asian populations it can fairly be said, in the light of their 2,000-year-old histories, that they were “born taxpayers” (S. E. Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p 1303)”.

According to a former student, Chhayanaut begins its Victory Day musical at precisely 3:45 pm – when the Pakistan army surrendered to the Indian army on December 16 1971. Apart from the singing and dancing, “Chhayanaut has a dress code for people who want to sit in the audience. The audience must wear something in green or red”, the colours of the flag — reminding one of the indoctrination scene in Stalag 17 (1953).

Whatever their goals, their one achievement stands out: subordinating the individual to the group. And this group, far from including all Bengalis actually excludes most: the illiterate, and their taste in music and dance. When the author questioned three exponents of Bengali culture, they were unanimous in condemning the movie item dances of Naila Nayem, a sex symbol in Bangladesh (pictured). “Indecency” must be ruled out, commented one of the trio. The puritanism of the Bengali middle class appears unclothed.

We are not surprised: the imperative of cohesion trumps all others. As history has shown, the boot-in-the-face is a Freudian need of the herd:

Since a group is in no doubt as to what constitutes truth or error, and is conscious, moreover, of its own great strength, it is as intolerant as it is obedient to authority. It respects force and can only be slightly influenced by kindness, which it regards merely as a form of weakness. What it demands of its heroes is strength, or even violence. It wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters. Fundamentally it is entirely conservative, and it has a deep aversion from all innovations and advances and an unbounded respect for tradition…

And so Chhayanaut believes “that if people come together in singing songs of loving the motherland and its people, those divisions will dissolve. Chhayanaut believes that Bangalees can be united once again through culture…Chhayanaut hopes that their new initiative to bring people together in the spirit of patriotism will be successful (italics supplied).”

Patriotism: the last refuge?

The Soft Power

Chhayanaut promotes the arts on behalf of the ruling party. Its founders earned their nationalist spurs by singing songs – discouraged by the Pakistan government before and during the second Indo-Pak war over Kashmir –  by Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nobel laureate, on his hundredth birth anniversary, a lot like  the Boston Symphony Orchestra not playing Beethoven on the eve of the Great War. By cocking a snook at the authorities of a country founded on Islamic unity, Chhayanaut’s defiance earned merit for heroic anti-Islamism.

Which brings us to Rabindranath Tagore and his songs.

The songs of Nobel-Prize-winning Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) — one of which constitutes the national anthem of Bangladesh — betrays the elitism of our nationalism. Demotic Bengali is sharply different from hieratic Bengali — the latter only spoken by the uber-elite, the self-consciously nationalist. Education is the national cosmetic, concealing all wrinkles of the particular. Rabindranath belongs among the educated.

Rabindranath Tagore symbolised anti-Islamism, Bengalism and pan-Bengalism, all of which makes him a prophet-like personality in the salons of Dhaka, Bangladesh. None of this would have been possible but for the Nobel Prize in literature. Sanjida Khatun observes that his protean output “has made Tagore songs an essential part of life of the Bengalis who sing them in happiness, in distress, and at work”. The mythology around Rabindranath’s songs suggests a less innocent explanation.

Ian Jack, writing on the god-man’s hundred-and-fiftieth birth anniversary, observes: “Then again, love of literature can slide into fetishism, and from there, obscenity. When Tagore died in 1941, the huge crowd around his funeral cortege plucked hairs from his head. At the cremation pyre, mourners burst through the cordon before the body had been completely consumed by fire, searching for bones and keepsakes.” That’s not love of literature; that’s love of divinity. And godmen tend to proliferate in the “mystical” Orient: recall the Beatles’ guru, Maharishi Maheshi Yogi, father of Transcendental Meditation (TM), in whose dishonour a disillusioned John Lennon composed Sexy Sadie.  His genuflecting devotees must be reciting mantras to avert a similar fate for god-man Tagore (although a highly popular lampoon of one of the guru’s songs by Roddur Roy on YouTube manages to shock and amuse) .

Art has long been co-opted here for the purpose of propaganda. After the division of Bengal in 1905, the Hindu Bengali elite agitated for restored unity. One of these agitators was Rabindranath Tagore. He composed Banglar mati Banglar jal (“The soil of Bengal, the water of Bengal”). Dwijendralal wrote Banga amar janani amar (“Bengal is my land and my mother”); Atulprasad wrote Balo balo balo sabe (“Say, say, say everyone”). “Among others who contributed to the nationalistic movement was Mukundas, whose jatras [village plays], Desher Gan (patriotic song) and Matrpuja (Worship of the Mother), motivated the Bangalis to fight for their rights and against the despotic rule of the English.” These worked: As Percival Spear remarks, “It had been shown that the despised bourgeois might on occasion get a popular backing” (A History of India, Volume 2 (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1990), p 177).

“Bande Mataram” (“Hail to Thee Mother”) became the Congress’s national anthem, its words taken from Anandamath, a popular  – and “virulently anti-Muslim” – Bengali novel by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, and its music composed by Rabindranath Tagore (the observation on the nature of the novel comes from Ian Stephens, Pakistan: Old Country/New Nation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p 86).

Chaterjee’s slogans – bande mataram, matribhumi (motherland), janmabhumi (birth land), swaraj (self rule), mantra, and so on – were used by militant Hindu nationalists, mostly from Bengal, and many of these words continue to resonate powerfully in Bangladesh today. Moderate leaders of the Indian National Congress did not take immediately to Chaterjee’s Hindu nationalist slogans, but were won over by their appeal to the youth during the swadeshi movement. Fuller, the Lieutenant-Governor of East Bengal and Assam, forbade the chanting of bande mataram in public.  Congress’s continued emphasis on aspects of militant Hindu nationalism – such as the replacement of Urdu by Hindi, and the singing of bande mataram in schools and on public occasions –  was resented by Muslims (Hugh Tinker, South Asia: A Short History (London: Pall Mall Press, 1966), pp 195, 220).

“Mother-goddess-worshipping Bengali Hindus believed that partition was nothing less than the vivisection of their ‘mother province’, and mass protest rallies before and after Bengal’s division on October 16, 1905, attracted millions of people theretofore untouched by politics of any variety,” according to the Britannica. The swadeshi movement, as it was known, inspired terrorists who believed it a sacred duty to offer human sacrifices to the goddess Kali (Spear, p 176). What in actuality had been a purely administrative measure served to catapult national consciousness among the Hindu Bengalis. However, British officials made it clear that one consequence of the partition would be to give Muslims of Bengal a province where they would be dominant: it was a forerunner of Pakistan (Tinker, p 195). According to the Banglapedia article on the swadeshi movement, “The Swadeshi movement indirectly alienated the general Muslim public from national politics. They followed a separate course that culminated in the formation of the Muslim League (1906) in Dacca.” During the first meeting of the Muslim League, convened in Dacca in December 1906, the Agha Khan’s deputation issued a call “to protect and advance the political rights and interests of Mussalmans of India.” Other resolutions moved at the meeting expressed Muslim “loyalty to the British government,” support for the Bengal partition, and condemnation of the boycott movement.

Thus, an all-too-frequently heard Bengali song here goes: “The queen of all countries is my birth land (janmabhumi)”. The land figures prominently in the superabundance of deshattobodhok — patriotic — songs. “O the land of my country, my head touches you/You have commingled with my body….” Again: “You [martyrs] will be the beacon for the new swadesh….” While bhumi unequivocally means land, desh is more ambiguous: it can mean village or country. Since the transition from the former to the latter is far from complete, the word attempts to transfer emotions from the particular to the general, from the concrete to the abstract, mirroring inadequately the (far more successful) transition from pays to patrie, from Gesselschaft to Gemeinschaft (Finer, pp 143-4). The pejorative chasha (literally, farmer, but connotes the gauche, the uncultivated) tars all rural inhabitants (and even more in its stronger version, chasha-bhusha), and thereby the entire country, with the same brush. Patriotic songs may be seen as an heroic effort at restoration of self-esteem through imagined restoration of the physical unity of the two Bengals.  The portability of song makes it a potent cultural artefact: emigres sing and hear these jingoistic songs in their new countries (typically America, Canada or Australia) where faux nationalism survives in the first generation, fortunately endowed with considerable human capital, the highly literate and numerate. The less fortunate are exhorted to love the motherland (matribhumi/janmabhumi) instead of voting with their feet. A single Youtube video, for instance, plays fifteen chauvinistic lays.

Mother, hail!…

Though seventy million voices through thy mouth sonorous shout,

Though twice seventy million hands hold trenchant sword-blades out,

Yet with all this power now,

Mother, wherefore powerless thou?

According to Bengali writer Nirad C. Chaudhury, “It was not the liberal political thought of the organisers of the Indian National Congress, but the Hindu revivalism of the last quarter of the nineteenth century — a movement which previously had been wholly confined to the field of religion — which was the driving force behind the anti-partition agitation of 1905 and subsequent years.” (Bande Mattaram lines, and Chaudhury, quoted, Tinker, pp 192-3). Rabindranath must be regarded as a pioneer of pan-Bengalism, and the successful reunion of Bengal as our Anschluss.

After Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League came to power in 1996, the state comfortably — and permanently — ensconced Chhayanaut headquarters in a tony part of town, “in recognition of it’s (sic) significant contributions for [the] last four decades to the Bangali cultural development”. “Virtually, the Chhayanaut operates unofficially as the apex body in the realm of music and dance.” The organisation, and others like it, provide psychic ammo for the government’s more muscular anti-Islamism – the soft power behind the hard power.

Death by a Thousand Mudras

The hard power went on display when, in 2021, Sheikh Hasina’s government invited Narendra Modi to the hundredth birth anniversary of her father Sheikh Mujib, the pater patriae and fifty years of national independence, announced by said pater on 26 March, 1971. The Islamist group, Hefazat–e-Islami, asked the government to cancel the invitation, thereby ‘showing respect to the sentiment of [the[ majority [of] people in Bangladesh”. In a written statement, they labeled Modi, not inaccurately, as ‘anti-Muslim and a butcher of Gujarat”. Members of the ruling party, and, predictably enough, its student wing, the Chatra League, attacked worshippers at the national mosque on 26 March after the Friday prayer to stymie the planned protest, leading to a nationwide fracas the next two days. At least fourteen Hefazat members were shot dead by police. “The Bangladeshi authorities must conduct prompt, thorough, impartial, and independent investigations into the death of at least 14 protesters across the country between 26 and 28 March,” insisted Amnesty International, “and respect the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, said 11 human rights organisations in a joint statement today. The organisations also called on the international community to urge Bangladeshi authorities to put an end to the practice of torturing and forcibly disappearing opposition activists.”

The Bangladesh Nrityashilpi Sangstha, “a welfare organisation of dance artistes” established in 1978, similarly serves up propaganda as dance. According to noted dance-teacher and impresario Laila Hassan: “It [Bangladesh Nrityashilpi Sangstha] believes that dance not only provides entertainment, it also speaks about the life, society, and culture of the country and its people, and that the liberation war and the country’s history and tradition can be presented through it”.

The Bulbul Lalitakala Academy serves a similar function: in addition to ministering to Terpsichore, the academy “plays a pivotal role in the cultural field through its regular observances of shaheed dibash [literally, “martyr’s day”, February 21, when young people were gunned down in a language protest in 1952] and independence day and celebrations of pahela baishakh and the spring festival….” On February 1 2024, a mega cultural event across the nation commemorated the shaheed dibash. The chief of the government-run cultural organisation, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy mused: ‘We need culture-friendly political parties in the country in order to further the nation”. “Over 300 troupes are staging street plays at 21 venues in eight divisions at the festival,” announced the newspaper. “Twenty eight Dhaka-based troupes will stage plays at the Central Shaheed Minar till February 7.”

Gershberg and Illing note how the proto-fascist D’Aunzia, Commandante of Fiume and the first Il Duce, “established music as the state’s central purpose” (p 134). The authors quote Robert A. Paxton: fascism is “full of exciting political festival and clever publicity techniques” as well as “the propagandist manipulation of public opinion [to] replace debate about complicated issues” (p 136).  Song-and-dance takes the place of tepid discussions of inflation and the current account deficit – although inflation eats away at the welfare of the poor. Hardly noticed, the Left Democratic Alliance, a group of left-leaning parties, held a protest rally on 20 March accusing the government of sponsoring “syndicates” that manipulate prices: “They said that the Awami League government had failed to control the price hike of essential commodities which increased sufferings of the common people of the country.”  Not surprisingly, the only party to use the F-word is the socialist Jatiya Samajtantrk Dal (JSD) who observe “anti-fascism democracy day” on March 18 when several members were killed by the private army of Sheikh Mujb in 1974.

In the article “Dance Groups” of the Banglapedia, the writer observes, “Dance as an art form was seldom practised by Muslims before Gauhar Jamil set up a dance institution called Shilpakala Bhaban in 1948. After partition in 1947, despite the conservative tradition of the Bavgali (sic) society, a number of performers…contributed to removing old ways of thinking and entertainment.” The article on Bulbul Lalitakala Academy mentions “conservative Bengali Muslims”; and Chayyanaut “encountered many obstacles from [the] government of the time, because music and dance, especially of secular genre, were not much in consistence with the ideology of the Pakistani regime”. (Never mind that Ayub Khan removed Islam from the constitution (Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia, A Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p 58) and passed the Muslim Family Law Ordinance, that the government set up the East Pakistan Film Development Corporation in 1957, that the Iranian singer Googoosh appeared regularly on TV in West Pakistan in the ‘60s, that the dance program Nritter Tale Tale aired every week, as the author recalls….) However, the article on “Classical Dance” observes: “…it appears that, like other classical dances, Kathak developed in the courtyards of Hindu temples and got a fresh lease of life under the patronage of the Mughal rulers”. The Britannnica concurs: Kathak, born of the marriage of Hindu and Muslim cultures, flourished in North India under Mughal influence.

“Classical Dance” also states: “During British rule, Indian classical dancing was patronised by the ruling classes, such as, rajas, maharajas, nawabs and zamindars as well as by British high officials who held ‘nautches’ in their private chambers.” And Bulbul Chowdhury, according to the same encyclopaedia, succeeded with dance precisely “by showing that dance was part of the Muslim-Mughal tradition”.  Disinformation, or, not to put too fine a point on it, lying, conduces to incoherence. Another article in the Banglapedia observes that Khaleda Manzoor-e Khuda, a regular singer on Dacca Radio from 1951 to 1955, sang Tagore songs. “At that time as a Rabindra singer she was popularly known as Khaleda Fency Khanam.”

In an interview with the author, Benazir Salam, an expert in Indian classical dance with an MA from Rabindra Bharati, Kolkata and a teacher of dance at Dhaka University, observed of Kathak that it developed under Muslim rule, and, precisely for that reason, Chhayanaut allows its performance only at festivals, and relegates it to the tail-end.

The Men of Words, the Women of Song

We would do well to tarry a while and take note of Erich Hoffer on the subject, which will recur: “It is the deep-seated craving of the man of words for an exalted status which makes him oversensitive to any humiliation imposed on the class or community (racial, lingual or religious) to which he belongs however loosely. It was Napoleon’s humiliation of the Germans, particularly the Prussians, which drove Fichte and the German intellectuals to call on the German masses to unite into a mighty nation which would dominate Europe (The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Perennial Classics, 2002), p 138)”. Hoffer uses the expression “the unwanted self” (p12). Macaulay’s attitude seems to have penetrated generations of this Delta, so much so that in Sheikh Mujb’s battle cry Joy Bangla  [Long live Bengal/Bengali language] they feel wanted again.

Hoffer explains the intelligentsia’s solid support for the despotic dynasty of Bangladesh: During the upheavals of 2018, when student thugs of the ruling party beat up harmless child protesters demanding safer roads, Mehdi Hasan went head to head with a former Harvard professor, Gawhar Rizvi, who shamelessly defended every criminality perpetrated by the government; this author has spoken with men (and women) of words, and found the same resistance to criticism. When a bridge opened recently, the men and women of words and song galvanised themselves to create musical paeans to the dynasty (click here for the album Bangladesh: Despotic Dynasty, pictures taken by the author of the images of the ruling family plastered throughout the capital, a superb example of persuasive advertising designed to perpetuate our founding myth of the Father of the Nation). Intellectuals, “ a herd of independent minds”, in Chomsky’s words, appease our collective self-loathing by glorifying and exonerating thuggery.

In all fairness, it must be conceded that Bangladeshis are not uniquely prone to assuaging collective self-loathing through megaprojects: According to development economists Hla Myint and Anne O. Krueger, less developed countries’ resentment of developed economies stem, not only from measurable differences in income, but from less rational factors such as a reaction against the colonial past and their complex drives to achieve parity. “Thus, it is not uncommon to find their governments using a considerable proportion of their resources in prestige projects, ranging from steel mills, hydroelectric dams, universities, and defence expenditure to international athletics. These symbols of modernization may contribute a nationally shared satisfaction and pride but may or may not contribute to an increase in the measurable national income.” A picture of the Aswan Dam accompanies their article.

Peace is War

In 1928, Arthur Ponsonby, a British Member of Parliament, published his tell-all book on British propaganda which he called Falsehood in War-time: Containing An Assortment Of Lies Circulated Throughout The Nations During The Great War. In time of war, he observes with acerbity, “the stimulus of indignation, horror, and hatred must be assiduously and continuously pumped into the public mind by means of ‘propaganda’.

“A good deal depends on the quality of the lie. You must have intellectual lies for intellectual people and crude lies for popular consumption….

“Perhaps nothing did more to impress the public mind – and this is true in all countries – than the assistance given in propaganda by intellectuals and literary notables.” In short, the men of words.

The items italicised by the present author could be supplemented with and at all times. In Bangladesh today, the intelligentsia provides the context for a mindset suitable to a wartime situation: Fifty-two years after the third Indo-Pak war, seventy-two after Ekushey February Pakistan is still the enemy, and Islamists are fair game. George Orwell appreciated well the need for a state of permanent hostility against a fictive enemy to keep the citizenry loyal to the Party – a world  dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states. Emmanuel Goldstein, however, stars in the daily Two-Minute Hate – the equivalent of the propaganda by scribes, terpsichores and thespians in our country against the minuscule mullahs.

“He [Goldstein] was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were—in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less.” How like the Islamsts of Bangladesh he sounds.

As Gershberg and Illing observe: “Fascism also promulgates the myth of sinister internal enemies that are simultaneously weak and devious (p 126)”.

“Nothing to report,” the lieutenant said with contempt. 

“The Governor was at me again today,” the chief complained.

“Liquor?”

“No, a priest.”

“The last was shot weeks ago.”

“He doesn’t think so.”

“In the world of Graham Greene’s 1940 novel, The Power and the Glory,” muses a reviewer, “it’s a bad time to be a Catholic.” In the 2020s Bangladesh, it’s a bad time to be an Islamist, or even quasi-Islamist. (The quoted lines are from Vintage Books, London, 2002, p 32).

In 2017, Hafez (an Islamic scholar, not his real name) was, along with other religious students at Dhaka University dorms, beaten within an inch of their lives for being alleged Islamists. This routine torture of perceived “traitors” finally resulted two years later in the murder of Abrar Fahad, a straight-A student at the elite Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) by his classmates who beat him for hours for his Facebook post criticising the prime minister: automatically, this made him an enemy, an Islamist (the BBC report leaves something to be desired: the murderous students belonged to the student wing of the ruling Awami League, the Bangladesh Chatra League (BCL), not the youth wing as reported; this is significant.). The second event caused a firestorm, the first, that of Hafez, went ignored: it’s open season on Islamists.

A highly abridged interview of Hafez conducted by this author several weeks ago appears below (this sort of news, being par for the course, hardly travels; hence, the delay in interviewing Hafez. Indeed, had Abrar Fahad not been an engineering student of elite stock, his murder, like that of the tailor, Biswajit Das (pictured), though highly publicised on TV channels and newspapers in his blood-stained shirt, vainly warding blows from the ruling party student thugs,  might as well have been invisible. For the author’s observations on this selective attention, please click on What George Floyd’s Death Means – Or Should Mean – In Bangladesh ).

2017 August 13 11:30 pm 

Interrogations begin –  he’s forced to talk. It’s all pre-planned: the hall president and sidekicks are present

“Got him, Bhai [brother].”

Hafeez kneeled, salaamed.

The president is on the bed. The president’s room is on the 2nd floor; Hafez’s on the 5th floor

“Do you do Shibir [Islamist student wing of the main Islamist party]?”

Hafez is astounded. “No, Bhaiya [brother], I don’t.”

(Louder) “Do you do Shibir? Why do you do Shibir?”

“Bhaiya, I don’t.”

Slapping begins.

A friend who was an Islamic scholar, and similarly attired, is later brought in.

Heavier beating, kicking, ensue. A wooden stick is produced: they start hitting him on the back. Rods and water pipes are brought out from inside the president’s room. The hall secretary hits him on the thigh, right above the knee with pipes. The slaps are mostly on the eyes, ears and front face.

“Confess; we can burst your nose. Hey, who’s good at bursting noses?”

Bestiality of the above variety stems from nationalism, as documented by John Keane: “At the heart of nationalism – and among the most peculiar feature of its ‘grammar’ – is its simultaneous treatment of the Other as everything and nothing. The Other is seen as the knife at the throat of the nation. Nationalists are panicky and driven by friend-foe calculations; they suffer from a judgement disorder that convinces them that the Other nation lives at its own expense (Civil Society, (London: Polity Press, 1998), p. 96).” “…sinister internal enemies that are simultaneously weak and devious,” according to Gershberg and Illing.

A characteristic of collectivist organisations involves the use of children, such as the Chatra League of the ruling party. Interest in the child, and youth in general, arose in the early twentieth century, with such innocent bodies as the Boy Scouts.  But it was followed by the “much more sinister and deliberately exploitative youth organisations of the totalitarian states of the 1920s and 1930s”, according to J.M. Roberts (Twentieth Century: A History of the World, 1901 to the Present (London: Penguin, 1999, p 642). “Young Pioneers in the USSR, the Hitler Youth in Germany, the balilla, Picolli Italiani and Figli della Lupa in Italy.”  These countries vigorously excluded the Boy Scouts. The post-war youth market and culture never emerged in the east, where Mao’s Red Guards wreaked havoc in the 1960s. “Young Stalinists worshipped Stalin as an individual,” observes Richard Vinen. “Teenagers swelled the ranks of the party’s youth organisations….” They formed the most committed warriors against imperialism. “Astonishing as it seems in retrospect, the period when communist rule in Eastern Europe was at its most brutal was also the period during which many intelligent and well-meaning individuals thought it was a good thing” (A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century (Da Capo Press, 2001), p 339, 344). Astonishing, indeed, except to someone domiciled in Bangladesh today.  And Chhayanaut works its spell on children.

A Disappearing Act

When all eyes — those of the young and the old — are focussed on events several decades ago, thanks to Chhayanaut and the men of words, contemporary evils, as noted by Robert Paxton, such as the hounding of the Chief Justice, or the burning alive of innocent bystanders, enforced disappearances, state thuggery, extrajudicial killings, rapes by student politicians, appear remote and ephemeral. The stimulus of indignation, horror, and hatred is assiduously and continuously pumped into the public mind by means of “propaganda” — by the government and its handmaidens, the intelligentsia, “the men of words”, “the women of song and dance”.

Dhaka University, the quondam Oxford of the East, where alleged Islamists, as we have seen, receive considerable corporal suffering,  earns the infamy of “concentration camp” , from the victims of its illustrious sons, mindful, no doubt, of the spirit of learning, albeit delivered, not in lectures, but in more tactile form. “It (Chhayanaut) believes that our celebration of fraternity and creativity under the broad rubric of an inclusive humanist culture will triumph, leaving behind religious bigotry, fundamentalism and xenophobia.” Read: getting rid of the Islamists, “simultaneously devious and weak”, by whatever means available to the state.

“Against this, there are other competing conceptions of art that are never fully suppressed, such as the archaic view that places art in the same general sphere of activity as ritual (a view with which I acknowledge considerable sympathy), and the conception of art as a vehicle of moral uplift or social progress, as is common in totalitarian societies where the creation of art becomes co-opted for the purpose of propaganda (for which, by contrast, I avow a proportional antipathy).” Most of us would go along with Justin E. H. Smith in his aptly-titled book Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp 22-23); we share his conceptions of art, and our sympathies lie with him. The Russian love story, “Boy meets tractor”, finds a creepy analogy: “Men and women meet bridge”.

The conception of Muslim civilisation as hopelessly philistine, if not proto-Khomeinist, persists in Bangladesh (as elsewhere). The following from Ronald Segal’s Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora would come as a shock to teenagers and adults alike: “Female slaves were required in considerable numbers, for a variety of purposes. Some were musicians, singers and dancers – neither the status nor the style of a great house could do without a sitara, or chamber-orchestra – reciters and even composers of poetry. There were celebrated schools in Baghdad, Cordoba, and Medina that supplied tuition and training in both musical and literary skills. Such slaves were highly prized and costly (London: Atlantic Books, 2002, p 38).”

Show Me the Money

The above description of our cultural hanky panky may not appear more than children on a playful rampage, or inmates running the asylum (not counting the dead and disappeared for now). But the twang of the sitar and the thump of the tabla conceal the tinkle of coins and the thud of dosh. Gunnar Myrdal observed of South Asia in The Challenge of World Poverty: A World Anti-Poverty Programme in Outline: “…changes of government, or even of form of government, occur high over the heads of the masses of  people and mainly imply merely a shift of the groups of persons in the upper strata who monopolise power (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p 212).” The transition from East Pakistan to Bangladesh, from military rule to democracy, occasioned changes of personnel at the top.

Albert Reynolds’ figures tell a disquieting story: “For countries at the early stages of development, primary education has the lowest unit costs and highest rates of economic return….Most South Asian governments (backed by self-interested elites) invested disproportionately in higher education: India had one of the highest growth rates in Asia for university students and the lowest for primary enrollments. In the 1970s, Bangladesh and Pakistan were increasing spending on higher education at the expense of primary schools, whose share in Bangladesh fell from 60 percent in 1973 to 44 percent in 1981 (One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945 (New York: W.W.Norton and Co., 2000), p 302, 307, emphases added).” We see these statistics clearly bearing out Myrdal’s observation regarding elite-churning.

For what prevails in the political economy of Bangladesh is an oligarchy in cahoots with the ruling party; the Center for Policy Dialogue, a think tank, went on record as saying: “The current practice of recruiting Board of Directors [to state-owned commercial banks, or SCBs] on political grounds has to be discontinued. Studies have shown that financial reporting fraud in banks is more likely if the Board of Directors is dominated by insiders”. The level of non-performing loans (NPLs) has increased steadily since 2008, when the current government returned to power: between 2008 and 2018, the level of dud loans soared 297%. Syed Yusuf Saadat, research associate of the think-tank, observed, “In 2017, a single business group gained control of more than seven private banks.” The IMF observed that “important and connected borrowers default because they can”.

The case study of Islami Bank provides a detailed picture, not only of the government’s anti-Islamism, but also the paw-in-the-public-till syndrome that promotes loyalty to the dynasty. “Established in 1983 as Bangladesh’s first bank run on Islamic principles, Islami thrived by handling a large share of remittances from emigrant workers and by lending to the booming garment industry. Its troubles stem from its links with Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, which allied with Pakistan during the war of succession of 1971.” One of the first acts by the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, on coming to power in 2009 was to try “war criminals” in kangaroo courts. “Leading figures from the Jamaat were sentenced to imprisonment or hanging.” Then came the asset-seizure. In 2017, the prime minister sent government intelligence operatives to oust senior executives and put in place her cronies: a boardroom coup. The cronies swiftly turned a healthy bank sick.

While Chhayanaut greets the new Bengali year under a banyan, and grandmothers in the vernacular, its members and devotees don colour-coded sarees (white with a red border for Baisakh, yellow for Falgun, blue for Ashar, red and gold for Victory Day), hog watered rice rural-style, sing Tagore in soirees…the wonga wends its way….

As Don Fabrizio’s nephew observes in Giuseppe Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. D’you understand (trans. Archibald Colquhoun, (New York:Random House, 1960), p 40)?”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Iftekhar Sayeed.

Image by Cole Keister.

Those unfamiliar with Gaza and its history are likely to always associate Gaza with destruction, rubble and Israeli genocide.

And they can hardly be blamed. On November 3, the UN Development Programme and the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) announced that 45 percent of Gaza’s housing units have been destroyed or damaged since the beginning of the Latest Israeli aggression on Gaza.

But the history of Gaza is also a history of great civilizations, as well as a history of revival, rebirth.

Shortly before the war, specifically September 23, archaeologists in Gaza announced that four Roman-era tombs had been unearthed in Gaza City. They include “two lead coffins, one delicately carved with harvest motifs and the other with dolphins gliding through water,” ARTNews reported.

According to Palestinian and French archaeologists, these are Roman-era tombs dating back 2,000 years.

The finding was preceded, two months earlier, in July, by something even more astonishing: a major archaeological discovery, of at least 125 tombs, most with skeletons still largely intact, along with two extremely rare lead sarcophaguses.

In case you assume that the great archaeological finds were isolated events, think again.

Indeed, Gaza has existed not only hundreds of years, but even thousands of years before the destruction of the modern Palestinian homeland during the Nakba, the subsequent wars and all the headline news that associate Gaza with nothing but violence.

I grew up in the Nuseirat refugee camp located in central Gaza. As a child, I knew that something great had taken place in Nuseirat without fully appreciating its grandeur and deep historical roots.

For years, I climbed the Tell el-Ajjul – The Calves Hill – located to the north-east of Nuseirat, tucked between the beach and the Gaza Valley – to look for Sahatit, a term we used in reference to any ancient currency.

We would collect the rusty and often scratched pieces of metal and take them home, knowing little about the value of these peculiar finds. I always gifted my treasures to my Mom, who kept them in a small wooden drawer built within her Singer sewing machine.

I still think about that treasure that must have been tossed away following my mother’s untimely death. Only now do I realize that they were Hyksos, Roman and Byzantine currencies.

Once Mom would diligently scrub the Sahatit with lemon juice and vinegar, the mysterious Latin and other writings and symbols would appear, along with the crowned heads of the great kings of the past. I knew that these old pieces were used by our people who dwelled upon this land since time immemorial.

The region upon which Nuseirat was built was inhabited by ancient Canaanites, whose presence can be felt through the numerous archeological discoveries throughout historic Palestine.

What made Nuseirat particularly unique was its geographical centrality in the Gaza region, its strategic position by the Gaza coast, and its unique topography. The relatively hilly areas west of Nuseirat and the fact that it encompasses the Gaza Valley have made Nuseirat inhabitable since ancient times to the present.

Evidence of Hyksos, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic and other civilizations which dwelled in that region for thousands of years, is a testimony to the historical significance of the area.

When the Hyksos ruled over Palestine during the Middle Bronze Age II period (ca. 2000-1500 BC), they built a great civilization, which extended from Egypt to Syria.

So powerful was the Hyksos Dynasty that they extended their jurisdiction into Ancient Egypt, remaining there until they were driven out by the Sea Peoples. Though the Hyksos were eventually defeated, they left behind palaces, temples, defense trenches and various monuments, the largest of which can be found in the central Gaza region, specifically at the starting point of the Gaza Valley.

Like the Calves Hill, Tell Umm el-’Amr – or Umm el-’Amr’s Hill – was the location of an ancient Christian town, with a large monastery complex, containing five churches, homes, baths, geometric mosaics, a large crypt and more.

The discoveries of Tell Umm el-’Amr were recent. According to the World’s Monuments Fund (WMF), this Christian town was abandoned after a major earthquake struck the region sometime in the seventh century. The excavation process began in 1999, and a more serious preservation campaign began in earnest in 2010.

In 2018, the restoration of the monastery itself started. The discovery of the St. Hilarion Monastery is one of the most precious archeological finds, not only in Gaza’s southern coastal region, but in the entire Middle East in recent years.

There is also the Shobani Graveyard, tucked by the sea and located near the western entrance of Nuseirat, the Tell Abu-Hussein in the north-west part of the camp, also close to the sea, along with other sites, which are of great significance to Nuseirat’s past.

A Gaza historian told me that it is almost certain that Tell Abu Hussein was of some connection to Sultan Salah ad-Din al-Ayyubi’s military campaign in Palestine, which ultimately defeated and expelled the Crusaders from the region in 1187.

The history of my old refugee camp is essentially the history of all of Gaza, a place that played a significant role in shaping ancient and modern history, its geopolitics as well as its tragic and triumphant moments.

What is taking place in Gaza now is but an episode, a traumatic and a defining one, but nonetheless, a mere chapter in the history of a people who proved to be as durable and resilient as history itself.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

Still from Birth of a Nation.

Since many high school students across the country will be back to learning their history of the US from Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, it’s perhaps instructive to recall that when Birth of a Nation premiered at Clune’s Auditorium in LA, to large protests by the NAACP, it was still called The Clansman, the title of the racist novel by Thomas Dixon it was based on. In fact, it’s possible that the print that was shown at the White House, which generated such a frenzied reaction from Woodrow Wilson, was still called The Clansman. Dixon was a pal of Wilson’s and had arranged the showing, the first film ever screened at the White House.

Apparently, the film hit Wilson with a kind of cinematic gestalt, liberating his inner racist, which, of course, was never too deeply submerged in his twisted psyche to begin with. After emerging from Griffith’s three hours of depraved melodrama, which rewrote American history as a story of white grievance and retribution, Wilson pronounced: “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

DW Griffith was a southerner, raised in Kentucky on the myth of the Lost Cause. Did he really believe it? Who knows? Griffith was an educated man, but he knew the allure of myth, the desire to right history’s wrongs and make them feel like your own, as in the novels of Walter Scott. Griffith took the most modern medium and technology and used it to look back, not forward. The camera lens became a kind of time machine, a deeply reactionary one in his hands.

Intertitle from Birth of a Nation.

Birth of a Nation doesn’t present a particularly coherent narrative. The film unfolds as a sequence of disjointed episodes, with a cliffhanger every 15 minutes or so. Dixon got a big payday, maybe the biggest of any writer ever in Hollywood, but he didn’t write the script. There wasn’t really a screenplay. Despite his grandiosity and repeated mining of historical and biblical subjects, Griffith’s about words or facts or story or even plot. It’s about the manipulation of feelings and buried anxieties and prejudices. It’s about using images to pull emotional and psychological triggers.

This was American history viewed through a distorting lens, where the players were projected in reverse: the victims became villains, the villains became villains, the terrorized became terrorists, and terrorists became avengers. There it was up on the screen. Who was a teacher or a book to tell you any different?

Thus Birth of a Nation set the template for modern advertising, public relations and politics. Forget what the books and newspapers say, trust your eyes and your gut.

When the lights went down in the theater, what did those audiences think? Were they watching history or were they living it? Did they thrill to torch-lit rides of the Klan or feel motivated to light a torch themselves? Did the film vindicate bigotry or inflame it?

How persuasive was this cinematic myth-making, this re-birthing of American history. Well, consider that Erich von Stroheim, who went on to direct Greed, that mangled indictment of American capitalism, was Griffith’s top assistant on Birth of a Nation. Though eccentric, Von Stroheim was a smart, if not brilliant, man. Did he understand the kind of film he was making and the kind of demons it would spawn?

Consider also that DW Griffith, the neo-confederate, and Charlie Chaplin, the communist, were not only pals but business partners. They founded, along with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, their own production company, United Artists. Chaplin was later chased out of the country by the kind of hysterical politics Griffith let loose on the Republic, the kind of politics that needs a constant stream of new villains–if the new villains are old friends, so much the better, it increases the tension of the melodrama.

Lift the hood from one of the Klan nightriders in Birth of a Nation and you’ll find the face of John (Jack) Ford, who in a couple of years would start making his own revisionist films about the history of conquest and colonization in the American West: Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande, Hondo and The Searchers.

Even more intriguing is the way Griffith’s work was embraced by the early Soviet film-makers, like Vsevold Pudovkin (Storm Over Asia) and Lev Kuleshov (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks) who saw in Birth of a Nation and Intolerance a method of making historical melodramas that also served political purposes. It was, however, Sergei Eisenstein who absorbed Griffith’s lessons about how film can be used to remake popular history the most deeply. In 1925, Eisenstein made his masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin. It was commissioned by the Soviet government to commemorate the 1905 revolution. Billed as the cinematic chronicle of a mutiny against the repressive Tsarist navy, the most powerful scene in Eisenstein’s film, the massacre on the Odesa Steps, was entirely invented for its dramatic and propaganda effect, which proved so overwhelming that the screening of the film was banned for prolonged periods in the UK, France, the US and eventually the Soviet Union itself. Most governments–regardless of their political brand–would tremble at the rebellious sentiments those scenes aroused in the audience.

Still, Battleship Potemkin found one official admirer in Joseph Goebbels, who raved about Potemkin as “a marvelous film without equal in the cinema. Anyone who had no firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing the film. When it came time to assemble the final print of October, his film on the Bolshevik Revolution, for Stalin’s approval, Eisenstein left all traces of Trotsky and Zinoviev on the cutting room floor. Two years later, Eisenstein was in Hollywood pitching a screenplay about an all-glass city, whose inhabitants are under 24-hour surveillance. Wonder where he got that idea?

Odessa Steps massacre scene in Battleship Potemkin.

Birth of a Nation was the first blockbuster. It played to packed movie houses across the country and Europe. People cried, screamed at the rape scenes, jeered the white actors in blackface and cheered as the Klan rode to the rescue, their white sheets unfurling like banners of triumph across the screen. From Atlanta to Chicago, crowds gave the film standing ovations and returned to be inflamed by its reactionary thrills again and again. And the film also did exactly what the NAACP predicted, it revived the KKK from its zombie-like repose with the imprimatur of the nascent Hollywood and a Democratic president. There were 700 hundred lynchings in the year following its release. They haven’t stopped yet, although most are now done by police and filmed by their own bodycams.

Birth of a Nation was also a story of the commodification of racism. The film built fortunes. In fact, it many ways it built Hollywood. Thomas Dixon, the writer of the novel, earned 25% of the profits of the film, which was enormous. By one account, Birth of a Nation amassed a global box office of $50 million in 1915 ($1.3 billion in today’s dollars), as Europe was at war with itself. And Louis B. Mayer, then the owner of movie theaters in Boston, somehow wrangled the distribution rights for all of New England. He pocketed a million from the deal and soon moved to Hollywood himself and became one of the first moguls. By 1927, Mayer was earning a higher salary ($800,000 a year) than any other executive in the country, even the CEOs of Standard Oil and US Steel. But he never forgot the themes and tropes of the picture that made him rich.

Fortunes are to be made in the promotion of racism, which is probably the lesson that will be taught in economics classes across the New (i.e., no longer restricted by the Mason-Dixon Line) South. Of course, they’ve been teaching the same thing using different terms at the University of Chicago for decades.

The post Rebirth of a Nation: US History According to DW Griffith appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

Still from Birth of a Nation.

Since many high school students across the country will be back to learning their history of the US from Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, it’s perhaps instructive to recall that when Birth of a Nation premiered at Clune’s Auditorium in LA, to large protests by the NAACP, it was still called The Clansman, the title of the racist novel by Thomas Dixon it was based on. In fact, it’s possible that the print that was shown at the White House, which generated such a frenzied reaction from Woodrow Wilson, was still called The Clansman. Dixon was a pal of Wilson’s and had arranged the showing, the first film ever screened at the White House.

Apparently, the film hit Wilson with a kind of cinematic gestalt, liberating his inner racist, which, of course, was never too deeply submerged in his twisted psyche to begin with. After emerging from Griffith’s three hours of depraved melodrama, which rewrote American history as a story of white grievance and retribution, Wilson pronounced: “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

DW Griffith was a southerner, raised in Kentucky on the myth of the Lost Cause. Did he really believe it? Who knows? Griffith was an educated man, but he knew the allure of myth, the desire to right history’s wrongs and make them feel like your own, as in the novels of Walter Scott. Griffith took the most modern medium and technology and used it to look back, not forward. The camera lens became a kind of time machine, a deeply reactionary one in his hands.

Intertitle from Birth of a Nation.

Birth of a Nation doesn’t present a particularly coherent narrative. The film unfolds as a sequence of disjointed episodes, with a cliffhanger every 15 minutes or so. Dixon got a big payday, maybe the biggest of any writer ever in Hollywood, but he didn’t write the script. There wasn’t really a screenplay. Despite his grandiosity and repeated mining of historical and biblical subjects, Griffith’s about words or facts or story or even plot. It’s about the manipulation of feelings and buried anxieties and prejudices. It’s about using images to pull emotional and psychological triggers.

This was American history viewed through a distorting lens, where the players were projected in reverse: the victims became villains, the villains became villains, the terrorized became terrorists, and terrorists became avengers. There it was up on the screen. Who was a teacher or a book to tell you any different?

Thus Birth of a Nation set the template for modern advertising, public relations and politics. Forget what the books and newspapers say, trust your eyes and your gut.

When the lights went down in the theater, what did those audiences think? Were they watching history or were they living it? Did they thrill to torch-lit rides of the Klan or feel motivated to light a torch themselves? Did the film vindicate bigotry or inflame it?

How persuasive was this cinematic myth-making, this re-birthing of American history. Well, consider that Erich von Stroheim, who went on to direct Greed, that mangled indictment of American capitalism, was Griffith’s top assistant on Birth of a Nation. Though eccentric, Von Stroheim was a smart, if not brilliant, man. Did he understand the kind of film he was making and the kind of demons it would spawn?

Consider also that DW Griffith, the neo-confederate, and Charlie Chaplin, the communist, were not only pals but business partners. They founded, along with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, their own production company, United Artists. Chaplin was later chased out of the country by the kind of hysterical politics Griffith let loose on the Republic, the kind of politics that needs a constant stream of new villains–if the new villains are old friends, so much the better, it increases the tension of the melodrama.

Lift the hood from one of the Klan nightriders in Birth of a Nation and you’ll find the face of John (Jack) Ford, who in a couple of years would start making his own revisionist films about the history of conquest and colonization in the American West: Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande, Hondo and The Searchers.

Even more intriguing is the way Griffith’s work was embraced by the early Soviet film-makers, like Vsevold Pudovkin (Storm Over Asia) and Lev Kuleshov (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks) who saw in Birth of a Nation and Intolerance a method of making historical melodramas that also served political purposes. It was, however, Sergei Eisenstein who absorbed Griffith’s lessons about how film can be used to remake popular history the most deeply. In 1925, Eisenstein made his masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin. It was commissioned by the Soviet government to commemorate the 1905 revolution. Billed as the cinematic chronicle of a mutiny against the repressive Tsarist navy, the most powerful scene in Eisenstein’s film, the massacre on the Odesa Steps, was entirely invented for its dramatic and propaganda effect, which proved so overwhelming that the screening of the film was banned for prolonged periods in the UK, France, the US and eventually the Soviet Union itself. Most governments–regardless of their political brand–would tremble at the rebellious sentiments those scenes aroused in the audience.

Still, Battleship Potemkin found one official admirer in Joseph Goebbels, who raved about Potemkin as “a marvelous film without equal in the cinema. Anyone who had no firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing the film. When it came time to assemble the final print of October, his film on the Bolshevik Revolution, for Stalin’s approval, Eisenstein left all traces of Trotsky and Zinoviev on the cutting room floor. Two years later, Eisenstein was in Hollywood pitching a screenplay about an all-glass city, whose inhabitants are under 24-hour surveillance. Wonder where he got that idea?

Odessa Steps massacre scene in Battleship Potemkin.

Birth of a Nation was the first blockbuster. It played to packed movie houses across the country and Europe. People cried, screamed at the rape scenes, jeered the white actors in blackface and cheered as the Klan rode to the rescue, their white sheets unfurling like banners of triumph across the screen. From Atlanta to Chicago, crowds gave the film standing ovations and returned to be inflamed by its reactionary thrills again and again. And the film also did exactly what the NAACP predicted, it revived the KKK from its zombie-like repose with the imprimatur of the nascent Hollywood and a Democratic president. There were 700 hundred lynchings in the year following its release. They haven’t stopped yet, although most are now done by police and filmed by their own bodycams.

Birth of a Nation was also a story of the commodification of racism. The film built fortunes. In fact, it many ways it built Hollywood. Thomas Dixon, the writer of the novel, earned 25% of the profits of the film, which was enormous. By one account, Birth of a Nation amassed a global box office of $50 million in 1915 ($1.3 billion in today’s dollars), as Europe was at war with itself. And Louis B. Mayer, then the owner of movie theaters in Boston, somehow wrangled the distribution rights for all of New England. He pocketed a million from the deal and soon moved to Hollywood himself and became one of the first moguls. By 1927, Mayer was earning a higher salary ($800,000 a year) than any other executive in the country, even the CEOs of Standard Oil and US Steel. But he never forgot the themes and tropes of the picture that made him rich.

Fortunes are to be made in the promotion of racism, which is probably the lesson that will be taught in economics classes across the New (i.e., no longer restricted by the Mason-Dixon Line) South. Of course, they’ve been teaching the same thing using different terms at the University of Chicago for decades.

The post Rebirth of a Nation: US History According to DW Griffith appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

It is the month of December, and yet the city is at this very moment in a sweat. License is given to the general merrymaking. Everything resounds with mighty preparations–as if the Saturnalia differed at all from the usual business day!
— Roman philosopher Seneca, ca. 64 C.E.¹

Sol Invictus in marble

Late December was a time of rejoicing and celebration in ancient Rome, the Saturnalia (December 17-23) being a time of festivities, gift-giving, and carnival-esque reversal of roles. In this brief rebellion against the regularity of social norms and roles, Romans reveled in a brief period of dis-order: masters, for instance, adopted the role of slaves and served them at table. Yet this brief reversal only served to legitimate the cyclical return of the cosmically-sanctified social order at the winter solstice.

The Greek historian Plutarch (ca. 46-120 C.E.) tells us that the cult of Mithras, an Indo-Iranian god identified with the Sun, was thriving in Rome before the early Christians had attained any significant following. Mithras was soon assimilated into, or syncretically fused with, the cult of Sol Invictus, whose cyclical rebirth, like that of Mithras, was venerated on–December 25. In the Roman iconography of the time, Mithras is often depicted as sharing the offering of a slain bull with Sol Invictus. This date of rebirth, within their imperfect calculation of seasonal cycles, was joyously affirmed as the “(Re)birth of the Unconquerable Sun.”

After the late autumn harvests, the Sun of course would noticeably begin to wane, decreasing in power and duration as Saturn consumed the remaining weeks of the annual cycle. (Saturn also consumed every week; thus, even today, the final day is of course “Saturday.”) The long winter months meant hardship: cold, illness, and sporadic food shortages. But the Roman astronomers, in their crude calculation of the endless, inexorable cycle of Nature’s regenerative return, heralded December 25 as a rebirth. In a sense, Time was merely cyclical, not linear; the celebration of Natalis Invicti was the renewed birth, not of a Christian “messiah,” but of the life-giving forces of Nature itself.

The veneration of the Sun, as the endlessly regenerative source of all life, was of course much older than the early Roman empire. Possibly the first monotheistic ruler, the visionary pharaoh Akhnaten (reigning ca. 1353-1336 B.C.E) abolished all rival gods and celebrated the solar disc Aten as the source of all life and renewed fertility in his poetic “Hymn to the Sun.” (The elderly Freud, in his final book Moses and Monotheism (1938), even maintained, probably inaccurately, that Moses was actually an Egyptian who brought a revised monotheism–more ethnic-nationalist with an exclusive tribal god–to the subjugated Hebrew people.)

The Roman emperor Aurelian, as late as 274 C.E., proclaimed Sol Invictus as his primal state-god. But the cult of the Christians, after having suffered terrible persecution and torture for three centuries, finally attained a decisive triumph when the Emperor Constantine, around 313 C.E., officially announced his own conversion to the rapidly growing Christian creed, and mandated tolerance toward the religion and its followers. Ironically, within decades the newly-sanctified and officially supported Christians began a campaign of persecution against the now-fading Mithraic cult.

What was lost? A sanctified awareness, and daily affirmation, of the endlessly regenerative cycle of life-giving power, originating from the Sun. In that sense, despite the invalid Ptolemaic model of the motions of sun-and-earth, daily experience was grounded in a pre-scientific recognition of human dependence upon the life-giving Sun and its seasonal cycle of fertility and abundant flora and fauna, all of which co-existed interdependently. In short: an ecological consciousness.

Image credit: Mythology.net.

1. “On Festivals and Fasting.” In: Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic (p. 40). Dover Publications.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by William Manson.

As a young boy in the 1970s, Vishwanath Thange knew hunger. He usually lived on one meal a day, not enough when you’re working construction. But Thange had to take the work — or starve. He was born in Hiware Bazar, a village tucked deep inside the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Back then, the hamlet was a crime-ridden backwater, desperately poor and largely abandoned by government agencies. Thange’s family owned seven acres, but chronic drought prevented them from growing food to eat or sell. So Thange left, when he was 15, to look for work in nearby cities. About 20 years ago, he returned to Hiware Bazar, and today he is one of the 89 farmers there who have assets worth more than a million Indian rupees — a fortune in a country where 90 percent of the population makes less than 300,000 rupees a year. In the past 25 years, every farmer in Hiware Bazar has prospered, says Thange. “Today,” he says, “not a single person goes to bed hungry.”

Thange recently earned around 2 million rupees from his farm, the equivalent of a bit more than $25,000. The average agricultural household in India, meanwhile, earns the equivalent of $800 as farm income annually. Thange’s income has paid for a good education for his two sons — a significant feat in rural India, where virtually no one can afford education. It also meant a sturdy, comfortable home for his family, and an increase in his land holdings, from seven acres to 25 acres. The average size of a farm in India is just 2.6 acres.

Although Thange’s story is not an exception in Hiware Bazar, it is exceptional for India. Sixty-five percent of the country’s population resides in villages, where farming is the principal occupation. Farming, however, has been unprofitable in recent decades due to drought, a lack of direct integration with markets, high input costs, and low market prices. 

Vishwanath Thange holds a flower while standing in an irrigated field in Hiware Bazar. Chirodeep Chaudhuri

A motorcycle and car drive by the sign for Hiware Bazar, left. Right, painted rocks sit in a village field. Chirodeep Chaudhuri

The failure of the agriculture sector is blamed for the epidemic of farmer suicides in the country, which claimed the lives of more than 300,000 people between 1995 and 2014. According to the latest government figures, more than one agricultural worker dies by suicide every hour in the country. Maharashtra, the state where Hiware Bazar is located, reports the highest number of such suicides in the country. Last year, Maharashtra recorded more than 4000 farmer suicides, or over 11 each day.

Climate change has exacerbated India’s agrarian crisis. Last year, the country lost more than 12 million acres of cropland to extreme weather. As droughts worsen, the resurrection of Hiware Bazar holds lessons for villages across the country. 

Popularly known as the “village of millionaires,” Hiware Bazar’s model is now being replicated in thousands of villages across India. Through effective watershed management, the rebuilding of natural resources, and a shift to more sustainable, less water-intensive crops — all of which hinged on the participation of residents — the village turned itself into a national “model of development.” The agricultural success has driven progress across the rest of the community, including in healthcare and education. 

But Hiware Bazar’s salvation took years of hard work. No one knows this better than Popatrao Pawar, the sarpanch, or head of the village, who spearheaded the village’s transformation. “When we started, it seemed impossible,” he says. “For us, it’s paradise regained.”

Hiware Bazar lies in the drought-prone Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra, and according to the most recent government data, receives less than half of the national average of rainfall each year. Agriculture there was largely rain-fed, but villagers had traditionally produced enough to feed themselves. Every home had cattle or goats, and dairy production was the primary source of income. But in the decade starting in 1972, the village faced three severe droughts, rendering the land barren, or banjar in local parlance. Wells went dry, fodder to feed livestock disappeared, and villagers turned to the forests on surrounding hills, stripping away the trees for firewood to produce liquor, both for sale and to ease the pain as their livelihoods collapsed.

By the 1980s, Hiware Bazar had lost most of its natural assets. Only a fraction of the land could be cultivated, the soil was exhausted, and there was no electricity. At first, people left the village, thinking it would be temporary. Eventually, they just stayed away. Those who remained worked on farms or at construction sites in nearby villages for low wages.

“When contractors came looking for workers in Hiware Bazar, villagers would fight for the jobs, beat each other up,” says Arjun Pawar, who was the head of the village between 1972 and 1977. 

According to Arjun, alcohol production and sale became the primary source of income. Locals mixed black jaggery, a coarse sugar made from sugarcane juice, with ammonium chloride powder and rotten fruit, like orange and sweet lime, to produce a potent brand of desi daru, Hindi for “country liquor.” An increase in crime followed. Villagers would also assault government officers, such as the forestry officials who prohibited cattle grazing on what remained of the forested hills surrounding Hiware Bazar.

“People would tie up the forest officials to trees, and soon our village became a ‘punishment posting,’ where government policemen, teachers, and health officials were posted only if they had to be punished,” says Arjun.

Men got drunk in the local school’s empty classrooms, recollects Deepak Thange, who was a student in the 1980s. At the time, every child in his village, including him, dreamed of growing up and building a future far from the village.

“There was no hope for Hiware Bazar,” he says. “There was no hope for any of us.”

When Habib Sayyed, a 48-year-old farmer, was a child, he would spend most Saturdays during the monsoons gathering cow dung. He and other children in the village would use the dung to patch the school’s mud floor. Before lessons resumed on Monday, the dung would dry, holding the floor together until the following weekend, when it would have again turned to muck from rain seeping in from the ceiling. 

The school was a small, dilapidated structure with a tin ceiling and two rooms that ran only through fourth grade. Today, a new school, Yashwant Vidyalaya, sits at the village entrance, a prominent symbol of Hiware Bazar’s progress. It was revamped in the early ‘90s after Popatrao Pawar, the village head, convinced 18 families to donate parts of their land for its construction. The new school was the first glimmer of hope in the village, says Subhash Thange, who as a young man donated his labor to help rebuild the village. “It promised a better future for the children and built faith in the new administration.”

And the school has delivered. The literacy rate in Hiware Bazar is 95 percent, compared to 30 percent in 1990. “Our school runs classes up to the 10th grade, and also hosts students from neighboring villages,” Sayyed says. “During the pandemic, even as schools were shut across the country, ours continued after putting a COVID-19 prevention system in place.”

Pawar was initially skeptical about running for village sarpanch. As a boy, he had moved away after fourth grade to complete his schooling; in 1987, he earned a postgraduate degree in commerce. He was not only the most educated person in Hiware Bazar, but he also had a promising career as a professional cricket player if he chose to pursue it. His achievements had earned him the respect and admiration of other villagers. 

“He had played cricket with some of the top players in the country at the time, and yet he was humble, always kind and soft-spoken,” says Sakharam Padir, a teacher and one of the first to volunteer with Hiware Bazar’s new village council. Pawar’s success story, he says, gave people hope.

In 1989, some residents asked Pawar to run for office. His family, however, advised him to abandon the village and use his education to secure a white-collar job. As he considered what to do, Pawar’s mother left the village in protest, living at her father’s place for eight days. “She was adamant that I should worry about my own future, as the village did not have one,” says Pawar. 

But residents kept pleading with him to help, and Pawar says their persistence, as well as a genuine concern for the place where he grew up, eventually persuaded him to stay. In late 1989, he was unanimously elected to a five-year term as sarpanch. 

One of the first things Pawar did was invite villagers to share their concerns. The conversations left him wondering how he would raise the money necessary to begin solving the many problems. The village had all but collapsed; it lacked basic amenities like water, roads, sturdy homes, medical facilities, and toilets. 

“It took us four days to prepare this list and it left me overwhelmed,” says Pawar. “All I knew then was that if we were going to emerge from this situation, the entire village would have to work together.”

Together with the new village council, Pawar embraced the idea of shramdaan, or “labor donation,” as a way to get villagers invested in building a better future. He went door to door, trying to convince people to contribute. If most of the villagers were inspired by Pawar and eager to work with him, there were some who resisted. After the village council built fences around its tamarind orchards, for instance, some residents unleashed their goats inside the fences to chew up the leaves and tender branches. 

The council prepared a five-year development plan with education as the priority. Using donated land and labor, the village rebuilt the school. The council then started asking state agencies — like forestry, agriculture and animal husbandry — for help, using the school as evidence that Hiware Bazar was serious about changing its fortunes. The officials, still wary of the clashes they’d had with villagers over the years, were not easily convinced.

“I pleaded with them,” says Pawar. 

His persistence eventually paid off. In 1992, the forest department added Hiware Bazar to the Joint Forest Management program. Begun in India in 1988, the national program helped forest communities develop and manage degraded forestland in ways that helped them meet their subsistence needs. Residents replanted 170 acres in the hills around the village, sowing tamarind, mango, arjun, and Indian gooseberry trees, all of which have economic and environmental as well as social and cultural value. The bark and fruit of the arjun tree, for instance, are widely used in ayurveda, the alternative medicine practice with deep roots in India. They started rituals, like gifting plants to newlyweds and organizing tree-planting campaigns for kids. They built water holes for the wildlife and replaced firewood with biogas generated from cattle dung.

Next, the villagers restored the depleted watershed. In 1994, Hiware Bazar joined the state government’s Ideal Village program. The idea was to build resiliency and sustainability by providing safe drinking water, creating jobs, and strengthening education and health care. 

Watershed development was central to the program. Years of cattle grazing and clear-cutting in the hills had eroded the soil and depleted the groundwater. Now, with reforestation and a ban on cattle grazing, the soil began to improve. The tree cover slowed the rainwater runoff, holding the soil in place and allowing the water to percolate into the soil. 

Villagers built small dams along the natural drainage lines on the hills to trap rainwater, increasing the groundwater and holding the excess as surface water. The same technique was used to trap rainwater within the farmers’ fields. “With the watershed infrastructure, the water table rose almost immediately and the area under irrigation increased,” says Pawar.

Farmers in Hiware Bazar had traditionally grown sorghum and pearl millet, and would often plant water-intensive crops like sugarcane and banana. They extracted groundwater for irrigation through deep wells, depleting the aquifers. Now, the village council started planning crops according to water availability, while also promoting dryland crops, like pulses, and less water-intensive crops, like vegetables. They abandoned wasteful flood irrigation in favor of micro-irrigation, which efficiently delivers water to crops through drip pipes and sprinklers.

Before long, farming was working again in Hiware Bazar. By the mid-aughts, the number of trees had increased from 30,000 to 900,000. The amount of irrigated land went from 154 acres in 1994 to 642 acres in 2006. The village council helped farmers get bank loans for tractors, and secured some genetically modified seeds to boost yield, use less water, and resist pests. Farming evolved from subsistence to commercial, with villagers growing and selling wheat, oilseeds, pulses, vegetables, fruits, flowers, and fodder. Incomes rose sharply, and in 1998 the government declared Hiware Bazar to be an “ideal village.”

In the quarter century since this work began, Hiware Bazar has built on its water harvesting and watershed management initiatives. It has introduced “water budgeting,” which considers the total available water in the village from rainfall and conservation efforts, and then makes allocations for drinking, domestic use, and irrigation, while banking 30 percent each year for future use. Crops are planned according to the water budget, and villagers have continued to donate their labor to maintain the infrastructure.

A direct benefit of the village’s agricultural revolution is dairy farming, which is once again integral to Hiware Bazar’s economy. The increased income enabled many farmers to buy more cattle. In 2003, villagers constructed a veterinary clinic to ensure animal health and provide services like artificial insemination. The efforts, in turn, have increased the village’s milk production from 39 gallons a day in 1990 to more than 1,300 gallons today. 

With farming revitalized, the wealth spread throughout the community. Every home is made of concrete, as opposed to just two in 1990. The village has 87 tractors, compared to none in 1990; 368 motorcycles, compared to 10 in 1990; and 28 cars, compared to none in 1990. To ensure that the village’s development benefited its poorest citizens, most of whom did not own farmland, the village council leveraged government programs to allot land to these families, and served as guarantors for their agricultural loans.

“I think what worked was that whatever plans and schemes were implemented in Hiware Bazar, villagers did not think of them as government schemes or village council schemes,” says Sakharam Padir. “They thought them to be programs for their own development, for their own family’s welfare.”

Over the past two decades, Hiware Bazar has helped thousands of villages in India replicate its development model. According to a 2019 report by the national government’s policy think tank, India is suffering from the worst water crisis in its history, with 600 million people facing significant water stress and some 200,000 dying every year due to inadequate access to safe water. Agriculture accounts for 90 percent of water usage in India, and most of the irrigated land depends on groundwater sources, which are rapidly being depleted. Hiware Bazar’s development model, with watershed management and water conservation at its core, holds substantial relevance for Indian agriculture.

Within three years of the implementation of Hiware Bazar’s model in Bhalwani, another drought-prone village in Maharashtra, the average income of the village’s farmers rose from 100,000 rupees in 2018 to 500,000 in 2021. In 2018, the village lost two farmers to suicide, but none in the years since.

Ajay Dandekar, a professor with the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, calls Popatrao Pawar’s contribution to Indian agriculture “immense.” But he says India’s agrarian crisis is complex, and solving it will require fundamental changes in how agricultural commodities are priced as well as in cropping patterns, which are not in line with the rainfall patterns in the country.  

“Many things can be learnt from Hiware Bazar,” says Dandekar, who in a 2017 study investigated the reasons behind farmer suicides in two of India’s hardest-hit districts. “But more importantly, along with it, the government must create macroeconomic structures within the agrarian economy that will regulate the prices and benefit farmers.”

In 2020, Pawar was awarded the Padma Shri, one of the highest civilian honors in India, for his work in Hiware Bazar. Today, he is the executive director of the Maharashtra government’s Model Village Program, working to transform a thousand of the state’s most depressed villages into self-sufficient communities. Meanwhile, activists, bureaucrats, and policymakers from across the country — as well as from countries like Germany, South Africa, Bangladesh, and others — have visited Hiware Bazar to study its success.

“In Hiware Bazar, we’ve seen every type of scarcity,” says Pawar. “We know the pain that walks in with scarcity, but we have also tasted the fruits of unity and cooperation. And now, we’re sharing our lessons with the world.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The rebirth of Hiware Bazar on Sep 26, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Puja Changoiwala.

For one thing, he was born in China and lived there for most of his life. For another, he has a very checkered past in the business world, tainted by bribery scandals over a copper mine in Zambia and a state-run bank in China for which he was detained and an associate was sentenced to life in prison.

But following a path well-trodden by other Chinese tycoons with reputational problems, Wang used connections among the Cambodian elite to land himself a new nationality, a new name and a new career. Using his adopted Khmer name, Wan Sokha, he rapidly became an “advisor” to Prime Minister Hun Sen and landed a plum post at Cambodia’s embassy in Singapore, a position he still holds.

That diplomatic posting has not prevented him from furthering his business interests. Untangling the web of those interests which stretch from Asia to Europe is no easy task. Wang has gone to great lengths to conceal his enormous but undeclared commercial footprint.

A key piece in this complex puzzle are the Singaporean holdings of a Cambodian power couple: Sen. Lau Ming Kan and his wife Choeung Sopheap, who has been instrumental in Wang’s progress. This story explores those ties, using documentary evidence and also flight manifests from aircraft owned by Wang. It is part of a wide-ranging RFA investigation into more than $230 million in financial and property interests that figures linked to Cambodia’s ruling party have in the prosperous city state of Singapore.

The documents not only show how Sopheap helped transform Wang from a fugitive to an accredited Cambodian diplomat. They also show how Wang has become the apparent beneficial owner of an energy company granted an exclusive 10-year license to import liquified natural gas by the Cambodian government.

The documents also show that Wang has concealed from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and the English Football League his substantial stake in a major English soccer team, Birmingham City Football Club. That is potentially a criminal offence, punishable by up to two years in prison.

Additionally, the documents shed light on how Sopheap has been embroiled in a real estate deal in Cyprus involving Wang that is the subject of a European police investigation.

Mired in mining scandal

That’s in stark contrast to the dynamics of Wang’s adult life which associates say has been spent in single-minded pursuit of money.

From the late 1990s onwards, his zest for profits saw him invest in everything from African mining operations to the Chinese art market and he did so with gusto. By the end of each venture, however, his business partners almost invariably felt that they had been wronged.

Economy and Levi recount how in 2011 Zhonghui “began building the mine without conducting an environmental impact assessment, violating Zambia’s 1997 EIA regulations.” The year also saw a new party take power in Zambia, which set about scrutinizing land and mining deals overseen by its predecessors.

While the move was viewed by the government’s supporters as a marker of improved governance, others “believed that the new administration simply wanted to nullify previous deals to reap its own payments and bribes as the various concessions were sold anew.”

Zhonghui was ordered to stop work immediately pending its production of an EIA. The company failed to do so and was charged alongside Zambia’s former minister of mines and minerals with corruption.

The government alleged that Zhonghui had paid close to $60,000 of Zambian customs duties for 5,000 bicycles the minister had imported from China in 2011. Reuters reported that prosecution witnesses, “testified that with the minister’s influence, the Chinese firm was awarded the licenses within three days when such a process normally lasted months.”

The minister was found guilty in 2015 and sentenced to one year in jail with hard labor (although in 2019 he received a presidential pardon). The court ruled Zhonghui had no case to answer. But by that time, Wang had bigger problems closer to home.

A bribes for loans scandal

In June 2012, the South China Morning Post reported that Wang had been detained late the previous month in Beijing by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Chinese Communist Party’s anti-corruption watchdog. Citing unnamed sources, the newspaper claimed the party was investigating allegations of “bribery and money laundering” within a “complex network run by low-profile but well-connected businessman Wang Yaohui.”

In particular, the authorities were examining Wang’s relationship with Yang Kun, the vice-president of the state-owned Agricultural Bank of China. Sources told the South China Morning Post that together Wang and Yang had “lost several hundred million yuan during their gambling trips to Macau.” Moreover, the sources added, Yang had overseen loans from the bank to one of Wang’s companies, putatively intended to support property development, but which, “may have been misused to cover gambling losses in Macau.”

Yang was eventually hit with corruption charges, among them that he took 4.138 million yuan ($630,000) in bribes from Wang between 2008 and 2010 and that in return he facilitated 1.45 billion yuan ($220 million) in loans from Agricultural Bank of China to Wang’s company. Yang contended at trial that the loans were offered on merit, but nonetheless pled guilty to all charges and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

A new life – and name – in Cambodia

Wang, meanwhile, went uncharged. By the time Yang was handed his punishment in February 2015, Wang had been a naturalized Cambodian citizen for 11 months. He took a Khmer name, Wan Sokha, set up myriad businesses, and by July of the same year had been appointed a personal advisor to Prime Minister Hun Sen.

The role came with a diplomatic passport. Issued in August 2015, the document describes Wang as an “Advisor to the Prime Minister” and gives his emergency contact as Cheung Sopheap, a frequently used alternative spelling of the name of senator’s wife, prime minister’s confidante, and business tycoon in her own right, Choeung Sopheap.

How an individual with as checkered a past as Wang’s found himself an advisor to Hun Sen is unclear. So, too, is the question of how Sopheap came to be listed as the emergency contact on his diplomatic passport. However, Wang and the tycoon were soon to have overlapping interests both in Cambodia and as far afield as Europe.

In May 2015, as Yang Kun would have been entering his third month of imprisonment, a new company was incorporated on the European island nation of Cyprus. Named JWPegasus Ltd, the company was established as an investment vehicle for the construction of a Radisson Blu hotel in the coastal city of Larnaca.

A 2019 investigation by Reuters revealed that among the shareholders were Sopheap, two of her children, and Im Paulika, the wife of Cambodian Finance Minister Aun Pornmoniroth. The news agency also obtained Cypriot Interior Ministry documents showing that all four were granted Cypriot citizenship following the investment, as were Finance Minister Pornmoniroth and Sen. Lau Ming Kan.

Three out of the first four investors in JWPegasus, who joined the project in August 2016, were associates of Wang. Lay Virak was born in China and known as Yu Teng until he became a naturalized Cambodian citizen in February 2015. Cambodian business records show he shares a residential address with other individuals involved in the management of companies linked to Wang. Another investor, Tang Yuhong, was Wang’s longtime romantic partner and the co-owner of mansions he owns in California. The third investor, Li Xiaohua, has since 2014 been a minority shareholder and co-director of a Singaporean company majority owned by Wang’s partner Tang.

The following month, in September 2016, Sopheap and her daughter Lau Sok Huy took shares in JWPegasus. The same month a set of notices appeared in the Haravgi  newspaper in Cyprus announcing that several individuals had submitted their applications for Cypriot citizenship to the Interior Ministry. Among the names listed were: Li Xiaohua, Wang Yaohui, Lay Virak, Lau Sok Huy, Choeung Sopheap, Pich Aphirak (Lau Sok Huy’s husband), Tang Yuhong, and Lau Ming Kan. All were either investors in JWPegasus or the spouse of an investor.

RFA has been able to independently confirm that Wang, Tang, Sopheap and Lau Ming Kan had all received Cypriot passports by February 2017. Flight manifests obtained by RFA show that Sopheap and Ming Kan were passengers on planes owned by Wang at least five times in 2017 and 2018, variously using both their Cambodian and Cypriot passports.

By this point, Wang was no longer merely an advisor to Hun Sen. In January 2016 he had been issued a new diplomatic passport. This one no longer bore Sopheap’s name and phone number, but it did announce a new job for Wang: minister-counselor at the Cambodian embassy in Singapore.

Diplomatic immunity and corporate disguises

In 2017, Wang took an unusual step for a diplomat – he caused at least two companies to be established in Singapore. While not expressly forbidden by international law, it is generally frowned upon for diplomats to have private commercial interests in their host country.

Wang’s name does not appear anywhere on the documents lodged with the Singaporean business registry in connection with the companies. However, documents obtained by RFA show that he is the outright – if undeclared – owner of one (Gold Star Aviation Pte Ltd) and has a significant, likely controlling, interest in the other – Asia Pacific Energy Holdings (Singapore) Pte Ltd.

Gold Star Aviation is the owner and operator of private jets. Its sole shareholder is a British Virgin Islands company called Dragon Villa Limited and its only director is a Singaporean citizen named Leong Chee Kong, or Ben. However, affidavits lodged with the Singapore High Court reveal that the true owner of Dragon Villa is in fact Wang.

One of the affidavits was submitted by Jenny Shao, a Taiwanese-American dual citizen who describes herself as Dragon Villa’s “authorized signatory.” (Shao was also identified by Wang’s lawyers as his attorney-in-fact – meaning a person authorized to act by a power of attorney - during a 2010 court battle between Wang and Farro Essalat, a prestigious Californian architect who had sued for unpaid fees after he was hired to design one of Wang and Tang’s two luxury homes on the outskirts of San Francisco).

In her affidavit, dated October 2020, Shao writes that Dragon Villa “is beneficially owned by Mr. Wang.” A beneficial owner is a person who enjoys the benefits of owning a company which is in someone else’s name.

The claim is echoed in affidavits submitted by a former Gold Star Aviation employee named Mohideen Abdul Kader, who recounted Shao claiming that “she handled all his business matters under a company called Dragon Villa.”

Gianluca Zanigni, a former Gold Star Aviation pilot, also submitted an affidavit suggesting that the company was run by Shao on behalf of Wang. Both his and Kader’s affidavits described Kong – the company’s sole listed director – as Wang’s personal driver.

The second company that Wang is linked to in Singapore, Asia Pacific Energy Holdings, acts as corporate parent to Cambodian Natural Gas Corp Ltd, a Phnom Penh-registered company that, according to its website, has been granted a 10-year monopoly on the import and distribution of liquified natural gas in Cambodia.

“One of the company's shareholders has a deep Cambodian government background,” the company’s website notes. “With this strong shareholder protection provides even a stronger guarantee for the company to obtain various policy support.”

That shareholder would appear to Sopheap, who owns 40 percent of Asia Pacific Energy Holdings’ shares. The remaining 60 percent are held by an anonymous British Virgin Islands shell company called Smart City Investments Ltd.

While the beneficial owner of Smart City Investments has not been publicly disclosed, there are several indications that Wang has an interest in it. For one, his alleged chauffeur Kong is listed as a director of Asia Pacific Energy Holdings. Kong also signed Asia Pacific Energy Holdings official minutes in his capacity as “a joint corporate representative of Smart City Investment Ltd.” His Gold Star Aviation email address was also given as the contact information for Sopheap as a shareholder in Asia Pacific Energy Holdings.

Asia Pacific Energy Holdings’ accounts also provide clues to Wang’s involvement. They record two loans to the company totaling $22.8 million. The first loan, of $3.2 million, comes from a Cambodian company, Graticity Real Estate Development Co Ltd, whose sole shareholder and director was Wang (using his Khmer name Wan Sokha) from June 2014 until two days after Asia Pacific Energy Holdings was established in May 2017.

The second loan, valued at $19.6 million, came from a British Virgin Islands company called Well Faith Shipping Co Ltd. Well Faith Shipping is the owner of a $23.6 million London home, whose address is listed in Cypriot corporate filings by JWPegasus as that of Wang’s partner Tang, and that a source familiar with the matter has described as Wang’s primary residence in the United Kingdom.

Cambodian Natural Gas Corp’s primary supplier is the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation. In 2019, CNOOC issued a press release identifying Wang as a “senior executive” with Cambodian Natural Gas Corp representing the company in a meeting with Communist Party officials in Beijing to discuss potential projects in Cambodia’s nascent natural gas sector.

The press release appears to suggest not only that Wang is associated with Cambodian Natural Gas Corp, but that whatever tensions the Yang Kun case might have produced between Wang and his homeland’s government have thawed.

Taking a slice of the beautiful game

It is unclear precisely how Wang went from seemingly being persona non grata in his homeland to becoming a guest and business partner of a Chinese state-owned corporation. He had, however, covertly acquired himself a slice of the president’s favorite sport.

Since his elevation in 2009, Chinese President Xi Jinping has made no secret of his dream of a world-class Chinese national soccer team. In 2014, self-professed Manchester United fan Xi announced a 50-point plan for Chinese soccer greatness, including the construction of tens of thousands of soccer schools across the country. Well-heeled Chinese entrepreneurs took their cue and set about buying up top-flight European clubs.

The shopping spree lasted until mid-2017, according to a 2021 report by sports business news site Sportico, when the Chinese government “decided the country’s domestic football program wasn’t reaping enough benefits from all of the investment,” and set about encouraging the repatriation of investments in overseas clubs.

Wang was clearly undeterred, however, and in late 2017 set about acquiring a stake in Birmingham City Football Club, a soccer club in the English Football League’s Championship, the country’s second-highest tier. True to form, though, he did so in such a way that his name appeared nowhere in connection with it.

The club is majority-owned by a company registered in the Cayman Islands called Birmingham Sports Holdings Ltd, whose shares are traded on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

On the morning of Sept. 27, 2017, RFA has learned that Birmingham Sports Holdings CEO Huang Dongfeng and Wang boarded the latter’s private jet at Phnom Penh airport, touching down in Hong Kong three and a half hours later.

Exactly two months later, on Nov. 27, a company registered in the British Virgin Islands called Ever Depot Limited bought $39 million of shares in the club’s Hong Kong-listed parent company, Birmingham Sports Holdings Ltd, giving it control of 24.9 percent of its stock.

A filing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange announcing the purchase states Ever Depot is owned by Graticity Real Estate Development – the Cambodian company that loaned Asia Pacific Energy Holdings $3.2 million. The filing describes Graticity Real Estate Development’s beneficial owner as Vong Pech, who took control of the company when Wang resigned his directorship and disposed of his shareholding in May 2017.

Born in China in 1976, Vong was known as Wang Dong prior to becoming a naturalized Cambodian citizen in 2015, according to a notice in the Cambodian Royal Gazette. Two sources familiar with the matter described Vong as a close relative of Wang Yaohui who frequently fronts ownership of companies and assets for him.

The next month, on Dec. 14, Dragon Villa Limited spent $12.7 million on shares representing 8.54 percent of Birmingham Sports Holdings’ total stock. The following day, a man with the same name, age and nationality as Birmingham Sports Holdings executive director Hsiao Charng-Geng hitched a ride on Wang’s private jet from Hanoi, Vietnam, to Phnom Penh, according to a copy of the flight manifest obtained by RFA. Also on the flight was Vong Pech. The following March, flight records show Hsiao and Wang flew aboard the same plane from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh.

A notice to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange announcing the sale identified a man named Lei Sutong as Dragon Villa’s beneficial owner. However, Lei would appear to be a nominee owner acting on behalf of Wang. Not only does Wang’s attorney-in-fact Shao’s 2020 affidavit identify Wang as the beneficial owner of Dragon Villa; it also identifies him as the beneficial owner of a Samoan company called Peace Crown Limited. A document signed and sealed by Peace Crown’s resident agents in Samoa dated April 2017 identifies Lei as the sole director and shareholder of Peace Crown.

The recurring discrepancy between the stated ownership and beneficial ownership of companies connected to Wang gives credence to a claim made repeatedly to RFA by sources familiar with his business practices. Namely, that he habitually appoints others to represent his interests in companies he controls but does not want to be linked to in official records.

Proxy directors and shareholders are viewed as legitimate corporate tools in many jurisdictions. However, it appears that on this occasion Wang’s use of them may have strayed into the realm of illegality.

The Hong Kong Stock Exchange requires anybody with an interest in five percent or more in a listed company to declare that interest publicly. It is possible – although unlikely – that Lei was indeed the beneficial owner of Dragon Villa when in December 2017 it acquired 8.54 percent of Birmingham Sports Holdings. But we know from the affidavit of Shao – Wang’s attorney-in-fact for at least the past 13 years – that by 2020 the true owner was Wang. Even if Wang was not the beneficial owner in 2017, he was legally obliged to publicly announce his interest in Birmingham Sports Holdings within three days of becoming Dragon Villa’s owner.

Under Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Ordinance, it is a criminal offence to provide a false or misleading statement to the city’s stock exchange, punishable by up to two years in prison.

As of publication, Dragon Villa and Graticity Real Estate Development respectively owned 17.08 and 25.53 percent of Birmingham City Holdings, making Wang and his family the single largest ownership bloc among shareholders in the club’s holding company.

Comment was sought from Birmingham Sports Holdings on its apparent failure to comply with Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Ordinance by failing to disclose Wang's status as a substantial shareholder in the company. A company representative responded with an email that did not address any of the issues raised by RFA.

"We appreciate your support to our Group and Birmingham City Football Club," the representative wrote in a somewhat unusual response to allegations of what could potentially amount to criminal misconduct.

Police on trail of ‘Power Couple’

Meanwhile, in Cyprus, Wang’s Cambodian co-investors in JWPegasus -- the company set up as an investment vehicle for a Radisson Blu hotel construction project -- have legal problems of their own.

Police are investigating the circumstances surrounding Sopheap and her senator husband’s obtaining citizenship of the island nation, which is an EU member state.

A March 10 judgement of the Supreme Court of Cyprus contains details of an affidavit lodged by the police in support of an application for a warrant to search a lawyer’s office in connection with the investigation. While the judgement only makes use of the initials “SC,” other identifying details within the text indicate that those letters stand for “Sopheap Choeung.”

“It was found that a person from Cambodia, SC, secured naturalization with false representations as an investor, as well as her husband as a dependent family member,” the judgement reads.

In 2016, it continued, “SC” made the investment underlying their citizenship application through 25 bank card payments totaling 3.2 million euros ($3.5 million), noting that: “According to a statement from a Central Bank official, the use of bank cards for the transfer to Cyprus of amounts of € 2,000,000 and € 3,000,000 within a few minutes indicates a suspicious transaction.”

In essence, the police believe that Sopheap moved the money via credit card rather than wire transfer so as to avoid the scrutiny that a Cypriot bank would be legally required to perform on a transaction of that size.

“In submitting their application, these persons concealed a substantial fact, such as that their business activities in Cambodia resulted in the suspension of funding for their country by the World Bank,” it added, in an obvious reference to the couple’s Shukaku property development firm, whose filling in of Phnom Penh’s Boeung Kok Lake and –often violent – eviction of nearby residents drew international ire and the World Bank blacklisting.

In a curious coincidence, Graticity Real Estate Development – the firm formerly chaired by Wang, and which owns 25.53 percent of Birmingham Sports Holdings – was the first company to begin construction in 2015 on the land cleared by Shukaku. In a further twist, Graticity Real Estate Development has leased 1,200 meters[MP2]  of the development to Birmingham Sports Holdings.

While the nesting layers of transactions and shell companies may be confusing, they add up to a few simple facts. Firstly, that Wang’s fortunes are intimately bound up with those of Sopheap and her family. Secondly, that Wang has a vast, undeclared commercial footprint, not only in Cambodia but across Asia and Europe.

Wang’s aversion to transparency coupled with his being linked to at least two major corruption scandals raises important questions about the openness of Cambodia’s leadership to mysterious men bearing money of opaque origin, and the influence it allows those men to buy in the Kingdom.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jack Adamović Davies.