From whatever I have pieced together, it appears that adequate funding has been provided to the Jamaat-linked individuals operating in Bengal since at least last year and there had been some speculation that the US had funded a number of Islamist politicians who stood (and mostly won) during the Indian elections, opposing the candidates of India’s ruling BJP.

Honestly maybe it is a CIA coup, I guess time will tell. As I stated in the last thread about this, I just don't trust non-leftist authors making such unsourced judgements about things.

[–] pooh@hexbear.net 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I don’t think you’re going to find a smoking gun here, but there are plenty of signs and also a larger pattern in the region for this sort of thing. This is from a great Vijay Prishad article posted elsewhere here:

Over the course of the past decade, South Asia has faced significant challenges as the United States imposed a new cold war against China. Initially, India participated with the United States in the formations around the US Indo-Pacific Strategy. But, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, India has begun to distance itself from this US initiative and tried to put its own national agenda at the forefront. This meant that India did not condemn Russia but continued to buy Russian oil. At the same time, China had—through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—built infrastructure in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, India’s neighbors.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that four governments in the region that had begun to collaborate with the BRI have fallen, and that their replacements in three of them are eager for better ties with the United States. This includes Shehbaz Sharif, who came to power in Pakistan in April 2022 with the ouster of Imran Khan (now in prison), Ranil Wickremesinghe, who briefly came to power in Sri Lanka in July 2022 after setting aside a mass uprising that had other ideas than the installation of a party with only one member in parliament (Wickremesinghe himself), and KP Sharma Oli, who came to power in July 2024 in Nepal after a parliamentary shuffle that removed the Maoists from power.

[–] ButtBidet@hexbear.net 3 points 3 months ago

Seems reasonable enough. (sorry for the brief reply, I'm a bit busy atm)

[+] jadelord@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 3 months ago (4 children)

[removed by mod]

[–] Barx@hexbear.net 27 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The term is often used for all semis clandestine for operations of the US government. The CIA itself has had various open spinoffs that continue to operate. For example, the National Endowment for Democracy, to which a few interim government functionaries have ties, is a CIA cutout.

The backgrounds of those in the interim government body are... conspicuous. One must ask why those people and not others. Why no trade unions. Why those students. The military leaders responsible for the coup, leveraging the student and labor protests to do it, are of course proximally making these decisions, but their absurdly pro-American appointments mean taking orders from the US. Those connections would not be new.

It has the trappings of a color revolution, which is proper CIA territory. The title of the article uses this term.

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[–] pooh@hexbear.net 19 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I take it you’re not familiar with what color revolutions really are. Which part of the US government do you think would be involved in pushing regime change like this?

[–] EmmaGoldman@hexbear.net 3 points 3 months ago

A field trip for the kids at Camp Dropshot, a counterrevolution themed CIA childrens outreach program jointly funded by generous donations from Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorganChase that focuses primarily on teaching children how to be compradors and to spin civil unrest into regime change.

[–] PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml 16 points 3 months ago (1 children)

There's always CIA there when a govt is couped and new one immediately ask for US base.

[–] sinstrium@hexbear.net 4 points 3 months ago

It helps that Myanmar is full of CIA armed goons.

[–] ped_xing@hexbear.net 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

PIGPOOPBALLS

[–] ButtBidet@hexbear.net 17 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I don't think this is a fair response. @jadelord@discuss.tchncs.de's statement was correct. We don't need to read non-leftist authors so unskeptically.

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[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 34 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

The current favored carekeeper leader is a guy who got the Nobel Peace Prize for microloans. Make of that what you will.

[–] Dirt_Owl@hexbear.net 31 points 3 months ago (3 children)

HOW DOES THAT GET YOU A PEACE PRIZE WTF

[–] YoungSheldonAdelson@hexbear.net 28 points 3 months ago (1 children)

die-motherfucker

[–] GenderIsOpSec@hexbear.net 12 points 3 months ago

dead-motherfucker

[–] PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml 15 points 3 months ago

Obama got one for waging 13 wars and wałęsa for completely fucking up his country, microloans seems peaceful in comparison.

[–] Tomorrow_Farewell@hexbear.net 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

You introduce a measure of economically preying on the poor even harder than before, and that is what Nobel Peace Prize is all about.

[–] GayTuckerCarlson@hexbear.net 21 points 3 months ago

They should give me a Nobel peace prize for not posting my micropenis

[–] Commiejones@hexbear.net 30 points 3 months ago

The new government will almost assuredly be worse than the old one but the old one sucked pretty bad too. I give them 5 years tops before there is another coup and that one won't be used to install neo-liberals

[–] ButtBidet@hexbear.net 24 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The only thing that I've read anywhere that I respect is from Vijay Prashard. A super tldr is that it's mixed.

[–] Frogmanfromlake@hexbear.net 25 points 3 months ago (2 children)

China really needs to be more proactive in its foreign policy. Losing three south Asian Ally’s to US proxies is not a good look.

[+] shipwreck@hexbear.net 18 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (6 children)

[deleted]

[–] shitholeislander@hexbear.net 16 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

If the USSR is too strong, side with the US to weaken the USSR.

this policy is probably the thing most singularly responsible for the coming collapse of global civilisation btw

[–] freagle@lemmygrad.ml 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Really though? By the time this policy emerged, Kruschev the revisionist had risen to power and was preparing the way for the USSR to liberalize. Mao was correct in preventing the integration of China into the USSR or it would have been subject to the same devastation as Russia once the Republic was dissolved. By maintaining a balance of powers, China was able to resist being absorbed into the USSR and avoid being couped and dominated by the West. The USSR destroyed itself.

[–] sinstrium@hexbear.net 6 points 3 months ago (10 children)

The issue was more Cambodia, Vietnam, Afghanistan and where ever else they undermined local socialist forces. But the USSR did create its own hangmen, when they reintroduced liberalism and did de-kolkhoziation

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[–] shitholeislander@hexbear.net 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

yeah very fair points and it's not materialist of me to engage in historical counter-factualising, just really upsetting how subjectively "good" things looked for international socialism in the mid 20th century and how badly we've fallen.

[–] freagle@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think the problem is that in the mid 1900s, things actually weren't good for international socialism, it's just that it wasn't widely understood. The USSR was struggling to propagate it's own internal revolution. Remember, Lenin didn't want Stalin to take over but there was literally no one better for the job. Stalin, for all the good he did, went on a purging spree and STILL failed to secure the revolution against the counter revolutionaries. That means that by the mid 1900s the vanguard of the first successful revolution was already falling apart, and China not only saw it but called it out.

The USSR vanguard also made a ton of mistakes that hadn't been fully understood by the 1950s including religious persecution and economic bloc isolation. China's revolution was an incredible advance in not just Leninist vanguardism but in elucidating dialectical materialism itself. And China made huge mistakes that needed to be analyzed and corrected. And by that time we're talking the end of the mid 1900s.

Meanwhile the USA was for the first time seeing an ascendant Black Power movement and American Indian Movement, which they promptly crushed and co-opted.

Meanwhile Europe was busy doing Social Democracy to pull the wind from the sails of workers movements and the die hard communists were still confused about materialism, dialectics, and the like. European communist movements, including the Cuban revolution (as it was led by European colonists, albeit true revolutionaries and traitors to their European heritage), were arguing that all forms of queerness were liberal bourgeois perversions.

And in Africa, while the decolonization movement was energized, it was clearly wrong in its strategy and tactics because by the beginning of the end of the 1900s Europe had reasserted its neocolonial hold over the continent.

I guess what I'm saying is that maybe their was revolutionary zeal in mid 20th century but things were not actually good. And we're now in a situation where the revolutionary zeal is way more subdued, but the periphery is once again reasserting itself. This time, however, it seems like the European war machine is floundering in ways never before thought possible and its racking up loss after loss without much to show for it. And that, to me, feels more hopeful than anything else. Instead of the Soviet perspective of building a better system to compete with the imperialists, China has shown us that it's possible to participate exploit the contradictions in imperialism to create conditions that imperialism simply cannot resolve and, thus, cause it to self-destruct.

[–] shitholeislander@hexbear.net 4 points 3 months ago

this is really well argued im too drunk to give a proper response but i appreciate it

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[–] freagle@lemmygrad.ml 12 points 3 months ago

The question is really whether this kind of long-term strategy is even realistic when you have a global empire that is aggressively trying to start wars and create chaos everywhere.

While this remains an open question, the theory is relatively strong. Wars destroy productive forces. That's not just what they do, it's a major component of their purpose. The USA military destroys productive forces. However, China's productive forces were built using USian and European capital, and the outputs of China's productive forces are the foundation of the West's economy. Destroying China's productive forces destroys the West's capital and destroys the West's commodity sources.

This is relatively new in history. It remains to be seen if these conditions will stop a war. If a war starts, it remains to be seen if these conditions will change the revolutionary conditions in the West sufficiently to bring about revolutionary defeatism at a large scale.

[–] ClimateChangeAnxiety@hexbear.net 3 points 3 months ago

TLDR: China is more naive when it comes to the US empire and its desires than the USSR

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[–] sinstrium@hexbear.net 3 points 3 months ago

The Chinese government knows that a offensive political strategy will have american carriers arriving at their shores in two days max, so they try to "uphold international law" to give the americans less leeway to attack and possible have more cards to deal with the taiwan issue.

[–] Collatz_problem@hexbear.net 20 points 3 months ago

Bad government replaced with an even worse one, as far as I understand.

[–] infuziSporg@hexbear.net 10 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Since 1981 you've had power going back and forth between Sheikh Hasina's Awami League party (social democrats who figured prominently in the war for independence but have been thoroughly compromised by neoliberalism) and Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh National Party.

The recent student protests could probably be characterized as Sheikh Hasina being left holding the bag when the chickens of corruption came home to roost, and then doubling down on an unpopular but not very consequential policy. After ~250 died at the hands of police and the protest movement kept growing to a point where it could threaten the operation of the political apparatus, the army did a coup- for the first time in 45 years or so. Then they installed an interim head of state who was a pioneer of microfinance, and were in talks with "all the opposition parties" to form a new government.

There's plenty more going on underneath the surface that our bulletin bears can embellish.

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[–] DancingBear@midwest.social 8 points 3 months ago

In general if the United States is excited about a coup they caused it, which is bad

[–] CommCat@hexbear.net 8 points 3 months ago

I read the new PN Yunus was a regular visitor to the US embassy. I would not be surprised if this was a way of the USA getting at India, for Modi paying his first visit to Russia. Same way they got rid of Khan in Pakistan when he didn't cancel his visit with Putin right after the start of the Ukraine war. India had huge influence in Bangladesh with Hasina. USA couldn't meddle too directly with India, since India is still a big part of their strategy against China.

[–] jadelord@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

What I understand is Sheikh Hasina was turning into an authoritarian leader, having ruled from 1996-2001 and then from 2009 onwards. A combined 20 years in total!

She did some good things

In power, she won admiration for stabilising the country, tackling jihadist groups and growing the economy, largely through the garment manufacturing boom. The rate of extreme poverty halved.

some bad

But her rule became increasingly oppressive, with extrajudicial killings and the jailing of political opponents and journalists. There was growing anger about corruption, especially as the economy foundered and living costs soared in the wake of the pandemic.

and really sketchy things

With youth unemployment at 40%, the reintroduction of government job quotas for descendants of those who fought in the Bangladesh independence war in 1971 – seen as a bung to party supporters – brought students out in protest.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/07/the-guardian-view-on-bangladeshs-uprising-a-fresh-but-fragile-opportunity-to-renew-democracy