[This was published in Dhaka Courier on 28 November 2013]
There are some issues which do not loose importance and necessity immediately after their application. Rather their recurrence is just a call of time, space and dimension. This article is actually a sort of elaboration of the same theme under the same title published in Dhaka Courier on 15 November 2013. Ambits of politics are, to speak the truth, speckled, shaman and bewildering and plays and counter-plays of the actors, widely called politicians and statesmen, in the field of politics are sometimes beyond the reach of comprehension, simple or difficult. Nevertheless, more or less all are backed by necessary logic, arts and mathematics. In politics what is told and what is heard that should never be taken as bible since at times same it is made for achieving the goals not expressed readily. In politics such exercise get unfolded through the means of fiction, myth and lie in politics and statecraft, which denote in common a say about a thing/issue/event that does not exist in reality but it bears importance to reap benefit politically depending on time, space and dimension and they are well documented and well placed in politics, statecraft and political science.
Logically and relevantly enough, a careful visit to the zones dealing with understanding of political fiction, myths and lies is necessarily called for in this regard.
Political fiction is a subgenre of fiction that deals with political affairs. Political fiction has often used narrative to provide commentary on political events, systems and theories. Works of political fiction often "directly criticize an existing society or present an alternative, sometimes fantastic, reality.
Prominent pieces of political fiction have included the totalitarian dystopias of the early 20th century such as Jack London's The Iron Heel and Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. Equally influential, if not more so, however, have been earlier pieces of political fiction such as Gulliver's Travels (1726), Candide (1759) and Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Political fiction frequently employs the literary modes of satire, often in the genres of Utopian and dystopian fiction, or social science fiction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_fiction).
Popular Political Fiction Books, which deserve to be noted here as ready reference are Animal Farm (Paperback) by George Orwell (shelved 36 times as political fiction), Atlas Shrugged (Paperback) by Ayn Rand (shelved 17 times as political fiction), Executive Orders (Jack Ryan) by Tom Clancy (shelved 5 times as political fiction), All the King's Men (Paperback) by Robert Penn Warren (shelved 5 times as political fiction), V for Vendetta (Hardcover) by Alan Moore (shelved 4 times as political fiction), Transfer of Power (Mitch Rapp #3)
by Vince Flynn (shelved 8 times as political fiction), Hidden Order: A Thriller by Brad Thor , The Last Man: A Novel by Vince Flynn , Separation of Power (Mitch Rapp Novels) by Vince Flynn, THE FIRST WITNESS: A CIA/spy Conspira...by Todd Easterling etc.
A political myth is an ideological explanation for a political phenomenon that is believed by a social group. In 1975, Henry Tudor defined it in Political Myth published by Macmillan. He said ‘A myth is an interpretation of what the myth-maker (rightly or wrongly) takes to be hard fact. It is a device men adopt in order to come to grips with reality; and we can tell that a given account is a myth, not by the amount of truth it contains, but by the fact that it is believed to be true, and above all, by the dramatic form into which it is cast ... What marks a myth as being political is its subject matter ... [P]political myths deal with politics ... A political myth is always the myth of a particular group. It has a hero or protagonist, not an individual, but a tribe, a nation, a race, a class ... [and] it is always the group which acts as the protagonist in a political myth’
In 2001, Christopher G. Flood described a working definition of a political myth as ‘an ideologically marked narrative which purports to give a true account of a set of past, present, or predicted political events and which is accepted as valid in its essentials by a social group’.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_myth#Examples]
“
Political lies stand opposed to political truth. The former aims at wining the very mind of the people/electorate anyhow while the latter bears testimony what it is in reality.
‘The reasons politicians lie is because the public doesn't want to hear the truth. People want to hear what they want to hear. When two candidates are running and one of them tells the truth and the other says what the public wants to hear, the one who says what the public wants to hear wins the election. Thus and there are exceptions to this, if you want to win an election, you better start lying, because the guy who's telling you the truth doesn't have a chance.
The 1988 presidential election is an example of this. You will recall the famous lie, "Rezaabad myyy llliiipsss, nnoooo neeewww taaaxxxeeesss" was the famous lie that Bush told over and over again. Maybe Bush could say that the public misunderstood him and he was saying "Know new Taxes". I caught it at the time. I don't know why everyone else didn't see through it.
But Bush had to tell that lie because Dukakas said that in order to reverse the Reagan deficit, there's going to have to be a tax increase. But that's not what the public wanted to hear. The public wanted to be lied to. So Bush gave the public what they wanted. But had Bush told the truth, he would have lost the election to someone who would lie. In 1988 the public didn't want to hear that the Reagan debt was real and had to be paid back.
By 1992 the situation had changed. The deficit was growing exponentially and Bush didn't have a plan. "Read my lips" wasn't going to work twice. In 1992 the voters were ready for the truth about the deficit and wanted a man with a plan on how to fix it. In this case Clinton told the truth, but the public wanted to hear the truth and the Clinton plan had merit. Clinton run and one on the issue of fixing the economy and taking fiscal responsibility. But had Clinton run in 1988 and told the truth he would have lost. In 1992, the truth worked’
[http://www.perkel.com/politics/lies.htm]
Numbers of sayings are available on political lies some of which are rightly quotable here.
“There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
― Benjamin Disraeli
“If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”
― Adolf Hitler
“History is a set of lies agreed upon.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte
“I guess sometimes you have to lie to find the truth.”
― Scott Westerfeld
And, factually noting, a political party or government, single or alliance, communist or non-communist, in a single party polity or a multi-party democracy, may opportunistically nurture one or two or all of these missile-like weapons from time to time and garner so to suit the very purposes in understanding. They may be of strong or weak nature and reputation having penchant for local, national, regional or international facet and gravity. In common parleys and usages fiction in politics and political fiction are mostly used synonymously and interchangeably. But there exists a clear line of demarcation with a concrete connotation and these must not be taken and understood as one since ‘political fiction’ is, in fact, a subgenre of fiction that deals with political affairs and its works often directly criticize an existing society or present an alternative, sometimes fantastic reality.
Goebbels’ propaganda (Paul Joseph Goebbels (29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945) was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous orations and deep and virulent anti-Semitism, which led him to support the extermination of the Jews and to be one of the mentors of the Final Solution.
Goebbels rose to power in 1933 along with Hitler and the Nazi Party and he was appointed Propaganda Minister. One of his first acts was the burning of books. Goebbels exerted totalitarian control over the media, arts and information in Germany. He used modern propaganda techniques to prepare the German people ideologically for aggressive warfare.
From the beginning of his tenure, Goebbels organized attacks on German Jews, commencing with the one-day boycott of Jewish businessmen, doctors, and lawyers on 1 April 1933. His attacks on the Jewish population culminated in the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) assault of 1938, an open and unrestrained pogrom unleashed by the Nazis across Germany, in which scores of synagogues were burned and hundreds of Jews were assaulted and murdered. Further, he produced a series of anti-Semitic films (most notably Jud Süß).
During World War II, Goebbels increased his power and influence through shifting alliances with other Nazi leaders. By late 1943, the tide of the war was turning against the Axis powers, but this only spurred Goebbels to intensify the propaganda by urging the Germans to accept the idea of total war and mobilization. Goebbels remained with Hitler in Berlin to the end. Before committing suicide, Hitler named Goebbels his successor as Chancellor in his will. Goebbels along with his wife Magda killed their six young children, and then committed suicide. The couple's bodies were burned in a shell crater, but owing to the lack of petrol, the burning was only partly effective) during the World war two in support of Hitler administration (that finally came to be untrue making it a mere fiction/lie) and Saddam’s information minister Mohammed Said al-Sahhaf’s, nicknamed "Comical Ali", (Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf is a former Iraqi diplomat and politician. He came to wide prominence under Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, acting as the spokesperson for the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party and Saddam's regime. He is best known for his grandiose and grossly unrealistic propaganda broadcasts before and during the war, extolling the invincibility of the Iraqi Army and the permanence of Saddam's rule. His announcements were intended for an Iraqi domestic audience subject to Saddam's cult of personality and total state censorship, and were met with widespread derision and amusement by Western nationals and others with access to up-to-date information from international media organizations. In the US he was popularly known as Baghdad Bob, in the UK as Comical Ali, and in Italy as Alì il Comical), so-called projections of Iraq’s military strengths to face heroically the attack of the US-led multi-national forces on Iraq in March 2003 (very soon it came to light that the minister told a lie or made a fiction about Iraq’s arms strength before the world),against US and its allies’ avowed-claim, before the attack, that ‘Iraq had made, collected and stored a pile of mass-destructive weapons including chemical one’, which Saddam might use against mankind’(later it was proved baseless), Pakistan’s propaganda that ‘Our Nuclear bomb is Islamic bomb’(here Islam has viciously been used by the regimes in Pakistan so that members of OIC feel free to stand by her on the mission’ are illustrative enough. Furthermore, India card in Pakistan and Pakistan card in India have been being used in the most negative manner and node since their independence from the yoke of the British rule in 1947. Likewise, fiction, myth or lie in local context relates to local political point while use of the same in national perspective speaks of national political purpose(s).
Sometimes, generation of over expectations in the mind of the people in issue presenting an over ambitious program as a means to achieve immediate goals tantamount, or is close to political lie and these are very much practiced in the politics and statecraft of the developing countries. And these draw a visible qualitative and quantitative line of differences between political systems of developed and developed states. More interesting is that even the political system in a state is not immune from such differences because a political system of a state is necessarily a product of a number of sub-systems within it. Reality shows that each and every sub-system carries some specialties that need to be addressed in tune with the mood and manner of the population there. From these standpoints, political lie, myth and fiction in local contexts may be conflicting with other sub-systems in the national political I a state whereas at national level such devices and practices are one and same.
This opportunistic nursing may again be intentional or reckless or inadvertent. When it is intentional, target is well-set, when it is reckless, target remains within the zone of probability (may or may not be) but when it is inadvertent, target is hazy, undecided and uncertain. Therefore, proper use of such tactics presupposes statesmanlike vision, mission and penetration coupled with determination of goal, specificity and certainty. Under all the circumstances, riding on the horse of the moment is the central point keeping a precautious eye on national standing, image, interests and unity. Further reality is that too much use of such devices carries the risk of being counter-productive as these happened in case of Germany and Iraq.
These were practiced in the past and they are being played today more or less in every political system whether it is developed or developing or underdeveloped. Interesting enough, political parties in Bangladesh are not lagging behind in using and applying these weapons necessarily or unnecessarily to pimple each other and one another even without taking guarded note of national image, unity and interests.
In Bangladesh, statements from the rightist bloc by and large under the cap of BNP, otherwise called anti-AL plunk, made from time to time such as ‘by signing the Chittagong Hill Tracks Peace Treaty in 1997’, ‘MOU in 2010 Hasina government virtually sold Bangladesh to India( well, changed stand of BNP through Khaleda Zia’s visit to India from 28 October to 03 November 2012 has finally put an end to this fiction)’, ‘If AL is voted to power Islam shall immediately be eliminated from the soil of Bangladesh (Islam has rather been consolidated and strengthened by the ruling AL with the reassertion and continuance of Islam as the state religion of Bangladesh through the Constitution(Fifteenth Amendment) Act of 2011)’, ‘China shall come forward and stand by Bangladesh in case of a war between Bangladesh and India’, an oft-quoted belief in the rightist bloc including BNP (in fact, China never do this to suit the very purpose of Bangladesh unless her interests and territorial integrity are challenged due to such war) frequently fall, depending on their very nature, within the ambit of political fiction, myth and lie.
From anti-BNP camp mostly denoting Al-led alliance, it is held that ‘BNP is committed to Pakistan, not to the people of Bangladesh’, ‘BNP sees Bangladesh’s interests and relations with India through the glasses of Pakistan’, ‘Begum Khaleda Zia, during her week-long visit to India from 28 October to 03 November 2012 at the invitation of the government of India, had secret talks also with the extremists in India (this was applied and played by the ruling AL Minister for Forests and Environments Dr. Hasan Mahamud with a view to passing a message that Khaleda Zia has close links with anti-Congress forces even in India). These are few burning examples of ‘political fiction’, ‘political myth’ and ‘political lie from the box of this bloc.
But as ill luck would have it, political fiction(in the sense of fiction in politics), political myth and political lie, whatever it is from single or collective standpoint, are being played today so disappointingly in Bangladesh that are not at all in tune with our national standing, image, interests and unity. All these happen because the central points in politics, external and internal, are broadly missing in practice. Sheikh Hasina’s continuous affront on Khaleda Zia and vice versa do not fall within the hemispheres of political fictions, myths and lies. Rather a kind of aversion and indignation are spreading everywhere without cheeks and balances. Let there be light, more and more light in this hemisphere without a delay, I am sensing, sensing the arrival of promising generations anointed duly with the knowledge of religion, science and technology who shall be strategic and suave as much as necessary while dealing with such discovery and application of fiction, myth and lie.
Before penning off let me take a privilege to recall the great saying of Abraham Lincoln consciously who noted ‘My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right’. This is in fact a kind of negation to the so-called political fictions, myths and lies in politics and statecraft, which favors the vested interests instead of the interests of the nation as a whole.
There are some issues which do not loose importance and necessity immediately after their application. Rather their recurrence is just a call of time, space and dimension. This article is actually a sort of elaboration of the same theme under the same title published in Dhaka Courier on 15 November 2013. Ambits of politics are, to speak the truth, speckled, shaman and bewildering and plays and counter-plays of the actors, widely called politicians and statesmen, in the field of politics are sometimes beyond the reach of comprehension, simple or difficult. Nevertheless, more or less all are backed by necessary logic, arts and mathematics. In politics what is told and what is heard that should never be taken as bible since at times same it is made for achieving the goals not expressed readily. In politics such exercise get unfolded through the means of fiction, myth and lie in politics and statecraft, which denote in common a say about a thing/issue/event that does not exist in reality but it bears importance to reap benefit politically depending on time, space and dimension and they are well documented and well placed in politics, statecraft and political science.
Logically and relevantly enough, a careful visit to the zones dealing with understanding of political fiction, myths and lies is necessarily called for in this regard.
Political fiction is a subgenre of fiction that deals with political affairs. Political fiction has often used narrative to provide commentary on political events, systems and theories. Works of political fiction often "directly criticize an existing society or present an alternative, sometimes fantastic, reality.
Prominent pieces of political fiction have included the totalitarian dystopias of the early 20th century such as Jack London's The Iron Heel and Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. Equally influential, if not more so, however, have been earlier pieces of political fiction such as Gulliver's Travels (1726), Candide (1759) and Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Political fiction frequently employs the literary modes of satire, often in the genres of Utopian and dystopian fiction, or social science fiction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_fiction).
Popular Political Fiction Books, which deserve to be noted here as ready reference are Animal Farm (Paperback) by George Orwell (shelved 36 times as political fiction), Atlas Shrugged (Paperback) by Ayn Rand (shelved 17 times as political fiction), Executive Orders (Jack Ryan) by Tom Clancy (shelved 5 times as political fiction), All the King's Men (Paperback) by Robert Penn Warren (shelved 5 times as political fiction), V for Vendetta (Hardcover) by Alan Moore (shelved 4 times as political fiction), Transfer of Power (Mitch Rapp #3)
by Vince Flynn (shelved 8 times as political fiction), Hidden Order: A Thriller by Brad Thor , The Last Man: A Novel by Vince Flynn , Separation of Power (Mitch Rapp Novels) by Vince Flynn, THE FIRST WITNESS: A CIA/spy Conspira...by Todd Easterling etc.
A political myth is an ideological explanation for a political phenomenon that is believed by a social group. In 1975, Henry Tudor defined it in Political Myth published by Macmillan. He said ‘A myth is an interpretation of what the myth-maker (rightly or wrongly) takes to be hard fact. It is a device men adopt in order to come to grips with reality; and we can tell that a given account is a myth, not by the amount of truth it contains, but by the fact that it is believed to be true, and above all, by the dramatic form into which it is cast ... What marks a myth as being political is its subject matter ... [P]political myths deal with politics ... A political myth is always the myth of a particular group. It has a hero or protagonist, not an individual, but a tribe, a nation, a race, a class ... [and] it is always the group which acts as the protagonist in a political myth’
In 2001, Christopher G. Flood described a working definition of a political myth as ‘an ideologically marked narrative which purports to give a true account of a set of past, present, or predicted political events and which is accepted as valid in its essentials by a social group’.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_myth#Examples]
“
Political lies stand opposed to political truth. The former aims at wining the very mind of the people/electorate anyhow while the latter bears testimony what it is in reality.
‘The reasons politicians lie is because the public doesn't want to hear the truth. People want to hear what they want to hear. When two candidates are running and one of them tells the truth and the other says what the public wants to hear, the one who says what the public wants to hear wins the election. Thus and there are exceptions to this, if you want to win an election, you better start lying, because the guy who's telling you the truth doesn't have a chance.
The 1988 presidential election is an example of this. You will recall the famous lie, "Rezaabad myyy llliiipsss, nnoooo neeewww taaaxxxeeesss" was the famous lie that Bush told over and over again. Maybe Bush could say that the public misunderstood him and he was saying "Know new Taxes". I caught it at the time. I don't know why everyone else didn't see through it.
But Bush had to tell that lie because Dukakas said that in order to reverse the Reagan deficit, there's going to have to be a tax increase. But that's not what the public wanted to hear. The public wanted to be lied to. So Bush gave the public what they wanted. But had Bush told the truth, he would have lost the election to someone who would lie. In 1988 the public didn't want to hear that the Reagan debt was real and had to be paid back.
By 1992 the situation had changed. The deficit was growing exponentially and Bush didn't have a plan. "Read my lips" wasn't going to work twice. In 1992 the voters were ready for the truth about the deficit and wanted a man with a plan on how to fix it. In this case Clinton told the truth, but the public wanted to hear the truth and the Clinton plan had merit. Clinton run and one on the issue of fixing the economy and taking fiscal responsibility. But had Clinton run in 1988 and told the truth he would have lost. In 1992, the truth worked’
[http://www.perkel.com/politics/lies.htm]
Numbers of sayings are available on political lies some of which are rightly quotable here.
“There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
― Benjamin Disraeli
“If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”
― Adolf Hitler
“History is a set of lies agreed upon.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte
“I guess sometimes you have to lie to find the truth.”
― Scott Westerfeld
And, factually noting, a political party or government, single or alliance, communist or non-communist, in a single party polity or a multi-party democracy, may opportunistically nurture one or two or all of these missile-like weapons from time to time and garner so to suit the very purposes in understanding. They may be of strong or weak nature and reputation having penchant for local, national, regional or international facet and gravity. In common parleys and usages fiction in politics and political fiction are mostly used synonymously and interchangeably. But there exists a clear line of demarcation with a concrete connotation and these must not be taken and understood as one since ‘political fiction’ is, in fact, a subgenre of fiction that deals with political affairs and its works often directly criticize an existing society or present an alternative, sometimes fantastic reality.
Goebbels’ propaganda (Paul Joseph Goebbels (29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945) was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous orations and deep and virulent anti-Semitism, which led him to support the extermination of the Jews and to be one of the mentors of the Final Solution.
Goebbels rose to power in 1933 along with Hitler and the Nazi Party and he was appointed Propaganda Minister. One of his first acts was the burning of books. Goebbels exerted totalitarian control over the media, arts and information in Germany. He used modern propaganda techniques to prepare the German people ideologically for aggressive warfare.
From the beginning of his tenure, Goebbels organized attacks on German Jews, commencing with the one-day boycott of Jewish businessmen, doctors, and lawyers on 1 April 1933. His attacks on the Jewish population culminated in the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) assault of 1938, an open and unrestrained pogrom unleashed by the Nazis across Germany, in which scores of synagogues were burned and hundreds of Jews were assaulted and murdered. Further, he produced a series of anti-Semitic films (most notably Jud Süß).
During World War II, Goebbels increased his power and influence through shifting alliances with other Nazi leaders. By late 1943, the tide of the war was turning against the Axis powers, but this only spurred Goebbels to intensify the propaganda by urging the Germans to accept the idea of total war and mobilization. Goebbels remained with Hitler in Berlin to the end. Before committing suicide, Hitler named Goebbels his successor as Chancellor in his will. Goebbels along with his wife Magda killed their six young children, and then committed suicide. The couple's bodies were burned in a shell crater, but owing to the lack of petrol, the burning was only partly effective) during the World war two in support of Hitler administration (that finally came to be untrue making it a mere fiction/lie) and Saddam’s information minister Mohammed Said al-Sahhaf’s, nicknamed "Comical Ali", (Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf is a former Iraqi diplomat and politician. He came to wide prominence under Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, acting as the spokesperson for the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party and Saddam's regime. He is best known for his grandiose and grossly unrealistic propaganda broadcasts before and during the war, extolling the invincibility of the Iraqi Army and the permanence of Saddam's rule. His announcements were intended for an Iraqi domestic audience subject to Saddam's cult of personality and total state censorship, and were met with widespread derision and amusement by Western nationals and others with access to up-to-date information from international media organizations. In the US he was popularly known as Baghdad Bob, in the UK as Comical Ali, and in Italy as Alì il Comical), so-called projections of Iraq’s military strengths to face heroically the attack of the US-led multi-national forces on Iraq in March 2003 (very soon it came to light that the minister told a lie or made a fiction about Iraq’s arms strength before the world),against US and its allies’ avowed-claim, before the attack, that ‘Iraq had made, collected and stored a pile of mass-destructive weapons including chemical one’, which Saddam might use against mankind’(later it was proved baseless), Pakistan’s propaganda that ‘Our Nuclear bomb is Islamic bomb’(here Islam has viciously been used by the regimes in Pakistan so that members of OIC feel free to stand by her on the mission’ are illustrative enough. Furthermore, India card in Pakistan and Pakistan card in India have been being used in the most negative manner and node since their independence from the yoke of the British rule in 1947. Likewise, fiction, myth or lie in local context relates to local political point while use of the same in national perspective speaks of national political purpose(s).
Sometimes, generation of over expectations in the mind of the people in issue presenting an over ambitious program as a means to achieve immediate goals tantamount, or is close to political lie and these are very much practiced in the politics and statecraft of the developing countries. And these draw a visible qualitative and quantitative line of differences between political systems of developed and developed states. More interesting is that even the political system in a state is not immune from such differences because a political system of a state is necessarily a product of a number of sub-systems within it. Reality shows that each and every sub-system carries some specialties that need to be addressed in tune with the mood and manner of the population there. From these standpoints, political lie, myth and fiction in local contexts may be conflicting with other sub-systems in the national political I a state whereas at national level such devices and practices are one and same.
This opportunistic nursing may again be intentional or reckless or inadvertent. When it is intentional, target is well-set, when it is reckless, target remains within the zone of probability (may or may not be) but when it is inadvertent, target is hazy, undecided and uncertain. Therefore, proper use of such tactics presupposes statesmanlike vision, mission and penetration coupled with determination of goal, specificity and certainty. Under all the circumstances, riding on the horse of the moment is the central point keeping a precautious eye on national standing, image, interests and unity. Further reality is that too much use of such devices carries the risk of being counter-productive as these happened in case of Germany and Iraq.
These were practiced in the past and they are being played today more or less in every political system whether it is developed or developing or underdeveloped. Interesting enough, political parties in Bangladesh are not lagging behind in using and applying these weapons necessarily or unnecessarily to pimple each other and one another even without taking guarded note of national image, unity and interests.
In Bangladesh, statements from the rightist bloc by and large under the cap of BNP, otherwise called anti-AL plunk, made from time to time such as ‘by signing the Chittagong Hill Tracks Peace Treaty in 1997’, ‘MOU in 2010 Hasina government virtually sold Bangladesh to India( well, changed stand of BNP through Khaleda Zia’s visit to India from 28 October to 03 November 2012 has finally put an end to this fiction)’, ‘If AL is voted to power Islam shall immediately be eliminated from the soil of Bangladesh (Islam has rather been consolidated and strengthened by the ruling AL with the reassertion and continuance of Islam as the state religion of Bangladesh through the Constitution(Fifteenth Amendment) Act of 2011)’, ‘China shall come forward and stand by Bangladesh in case of a war between Bangladesh and India’, an oft-quoted belief in the rightist bloc including BNP (in fact, China never do this to suit the very purpose of Bangladesh unless her interests and territorial integrity are challenged due to such war) frequently fall, depending on their very nature, within the ambit of political fiction, myth and lie.
From anti-BNP camp mostly denoting Al-led alliance, it is held that ‘BNP is committed to Pakistan, not to the people of Bangladesh’, ‘BNP sees Bangladesh’s interests and relations with India through the glasses of Pakistan’, ‘Begum Khaleda Zia, during her week-long visit to India from 28 October to 03 November 2012 at the invitation of the government of India, had secret talks also with the extremists in India (this was applied and played by the ruling AL Minister for Forests and Environments Dr. Hasan Mahamud with a view to passing a message that Khaleda Zia has close links with anti-Congress forces even in India). These are few burning examples of ‘political fiction’, ‘political myth’ and ‘political lie from the box of this bloc.
But as ill luck would have it, political fiction(in the sense of fiction in politics), political myth and political lie, whatever it is from single or collective standpoint, are being played today so disappointingly in Bangladesh that are not at all in tune with our national standing, image, interests and unity. All these happen because the central points in politics, external and internal, are broadly missing in practice. Sheikh Hasina’s continuous affront on Khaleda Zia and vice versa do not fall within the hemispheres of political fictions, myths and lies. Rather a kind of aversion and indignation are spreading everywhere without cheeks and balances. Let there be light, more and more light in this hemisphere without a delay, I am sensing, sensing the arrival of promising generations anointed duly with the knowledge of religion, science and technology who shall be strategic and suave as much as necessary while dealing with such discovery and application of fiction, myth and lie.
Before penning off let me take a privilege to recall the great saying of Abraham Lincoln consciously who noted ‘My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right’. This is in fact a kind of negation to the so-called political fictions, myths and lies in politics and statecraft, which favors the vested interests instead of the interests of the nation as a whole.
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