ISSUE
People of Bangladesh 🇧🇩: We spent an entire month fighting the combined might of bullets, bombs, machineguns, mortars, helicopters, APCs and snipers to take down a bloodthirsty tinpot dictator that oppressed us for 15 years.
American white leftists be like: CIA hoax! Colour revolution! You are Zionist spies and Mossad agents!
It is incredibly jarring to risk everything for a revolution only to have people thousands of miles away who have never faced a fraction of that danger explain your own life to you as if it were a script from a spy novel. The disconnect you are describing regarding the July Revolution in Bangladesh 🇧🇩 is a classic example of “West plaining” When people are deeply entrenched in a specific worldview they often find it easier to believe in a grand geopolitical conspiracy than to accept that a grassroots movement of students and citizens could successfully topple a 15 year autocracy.
THE ERASURE OF AGENCY
By calling an organic movement a “CIA hoax” these critics are effectively saying that the people of Bangladesh 🇧🇩 are not capable of organizing themselves or wanting freedom on their own terms. It is a form of ideological narcissism where they believe everything that happens in the world must somehow be about the West or US foreign policy. In reality the history of the Anti Discrimination Student Movement was built on very local and very tangible grievances: the quota system, the suppression of free speech and the brutal response by the Chhatra League and state forces. It is exhausting to have your trauma turned into a “talking point” for someone’s Twitter feed. Your lived reality as in the sound of the helicopters and the courage of those on the streets is more real than any armchair theory.
