In total, between 2019 and 2020, “IRI issued 11 advocacy grants to artists, musicians, performers or organizations that created 225 art products addressing political and social issues,” which it claimed were “viewed nearly 400,000 times.” Additionally, the Institute bragged that it “supported three civil society organizations (CSOs) from LGBTI, Bihari and ethnic communities to train 77 activists and engage 326 citizens to develop 43 specific policy demands,” which were apparently “proposed before 65 government officials.”
Between October and December of 2020, the IRI hosted three separate “transgender dance performances” across the country. Per the report, “the goal of the performance was to build self-esteem in the transgender community and raise awareness on transgender issues among the local community and government officials.” At the final performance, in Dhaka City, the US Embassy sent its “deputy consul general and deputy director of the Office for Democracy, Rights and Governance” to participate.
Finally, the IRI also carried out “community-specific quantitative and qualitative research,” which included “three focus group reports” and what it called “the largest published survey of LGBTI people in Bangladesh.”
In sum: “IRI’s program raised public awareness on social and political issues in Bangladesh and supported the public to challenge the status quo, which ultimately aims for power shift [sic] inside Bangladesh.”
In the US, Republican Party politicians have traditionally scorned government support for visual artists, transgender dancers, and rappers. But when an opportunity to install a more US-friendly government arose, the GOP’s in-house regime change organ eagerly transformed its domestic cultural enemies into political foot soldiers.
This is incredible. This is such a prime and opaque example of Rainbow Imperialism. It’s like this example was cooked up in a lab. Here you have, the most vile supporters of the erasure of queer life in America doing queer activism in Bangladesh, funding queer artists and organizations to bring awareness to queer struggles within Bangladesh, for the explicit goal of creating political unrest in the country so that its leadership can be removed and replaced with a Compradore Dictator.
If this was an organization being run by the Democratic Party, you would be hard-pressed to get any liberal to look at this critically. All they would see is their chosen saviors doing savior shit in Bangladesh. They would conclude that the change in leadership is justifiable because they’re “saving” queer people.
So how do they square this circle now? How do you reconcile the notion that the GOP is doing Trans Rights in Bangladesh to topple the government, but also trying to genocide Trans people through stochastic terror campaigns here in the homeland? What could the conclusion be for these liberals?
Damn it’s not like in the picture anymore, now it’s almost instanteous
And yet still when the news first broke that this happened there were some communists who insisted that this was an organic event. When will people ever learn that the US (or one of their proxies) is always behind shit like this?
This highlights just how infantile the idea of a spontaneous revolution is. Large portions of the western left think that you just need to have a big rally, throw out the government you don’t like, and build some sort of anarcho utopia. And of course, any actually organic protests quickly fizzle the way we saw with the occupy movement and George Floyd protests. These were absolutely massive in scale, but they had no staying power. People came out shouted some slogans, and then went to back home after a few days.
The big irony here is that the US has effectively adopted a vanguardist approach to running color revolutions where they groom and fund an ideologically aligned vanguard for many years, and then use it to create an ideologically aligned movement that is able to topple the government.
It is as though the capitalists intuitively understand dialectical materialism and its inherent graduality when it comes to building up movements.
Oh yeah, the ruling class understands Marxism quite well in my opinion, and they’re fighting the class war with both eyes open.
They know how the class war goes, and they know to never admit it too loudly, as that might let the working class know they should be fighting too
precisely
i always felt like the occupy thing was totally manufactured as well
It might’ve been organic initially, but it quickly turned into a roach motel for leftists.
