Russia Today: Afshin Rattansi
Dreadful conditions for workers in factories producing goods for the West, and plans for the US Seventh Fleet’s relocation make fertile ground for anti-Americanism in Bangladesh, which may see the country falling into the hands of radical Islamists.
The death toll has been rising in the world’s worst garment industry tragedy. I’ve been thinking about the last time I was in Bangladesh, a nation that is now the world’s second-largest clothing producer after China and one also in the news for deadly Islamist protests.
Back then, I witnessed something that had seemed emblematic of the neo-colonial status of Bangladesh. After a harrowing journey to the countryside where the poverty was sub-Sub-Saharan, I found myself on the top of an office building in the capital, Dacca. Garish U.S. pop music was blaring out of the nightclub’s speakers and the lounge area was packed with U.S. military servicemen, mostly U.S. Navy. As a private went to get a Long Island Iced Tea, two giggling Bangladeshi teenagers swiped the military walkie-talkie he left on the sofa and ran off to the bathroom. Later they regaled me with the story that they had screamed “All soldiers back to base!” into the communication device, before dismantling it, piece by piece. They may have liked the U.S. dollar injection into the local economy but they didn’t like the presence of U.S. servicemen. Americans have never really ever left Bangladesh whether their presence be through crippling Bretton Woods institutions based in Washington, multinational garment brands or covert killing.
AR- is a journalist, author of “The Dream of the Decade – the London Novels” and an RT Contributor. He can be reached at afshinrattansi@hotmail.com.
Categories: Anti Islam act by Muslims, Awareness, Behaviour, Double Standard, Europe, Hypocrisy