Today we have a seemingly bland headline in The Daily Star,¹ Bangladesh-China ties enter a ‘new era’. This is actually quite dramatic news, if you're aware of trail of dominoes tracing back to 1971. Dead bodies and dominoes, I suppose.
The salient Wikipedia article is simply titled, Bangladesh Genocide.² And that title is itself a sort of political declaration. Some people say that 3,000,000 died. Some say 300,000. Some say 30,000. But we all say genocide. And we all blame Nixon and Mao —who were engaged in negotiations, at the time, and who both felt they needed Pakistan (or, rather, "West Pakistan") to continue to be their ally —partly but not entirely because of those negotiations.
This article reflects "the state of the art" in anonymous authors counterposing contradictory sources —and it is a dying art form. In 2026, this tapestry of many patches (and many tailors) is now being replaced by the A.I. synopsis of unseen sources. Here's a telling excerpt:
Australian Doctor Geoffrey Davis was brought to Bangladesh by the United Nations and International Planned Parenthood Federation to carry out late term abortions on rape victims. He was of the opinion that the 200,000 to 400,000 rape victims were an underestimation. On the actions of [the] Pakistan army he said "They'd keep the infantry back and put artillery ahead and they would shell the hospitals and schools. And that caused absolute chaos in the town. And then the infantry would go in and begin to segregate the women. Apart from little children, all those were (sic) sexually matured would be segregated. And then the women would be put in the compound under guard and made available to the troops ... Some of the stories they told were appalling. Being raped again and again and again. A lot of them died in those [rape] camps. There was an air of disbelief about the whole thing. Nobody could credit that it really happened! But the evidence clearly showed that it did happen." [better source needed]
In October 2005, Sarmila Bose published a paper suggesting that the casualties and rape allegations in the war have been greatly exaggerated for political purposes. Whilst she received praise from many quarters, a number of researchers have shown inaccuracies in Bose's work, including flawed methodology of statistical analysis, misrepresentation of referenced sources, and disproportionate weight to Pakistani Army testimonies.
Historian Christian Gerlach states that "a systematic collection of statistical data was aborted, possibly because the tentative data did not substantiate the claim that three million had died and at least 200,000 women had been raped."
Is it possible, now, for Bangladesh and China to become allies instead of enemies? The political elite in India still bitterly resents the decisions Americans made circa 1971 —although, of course, there would be more utterly immoral decisions to come. It is difficult to imagine that the political elite in Bangladesh would blame the Chinese less.
All of this, of course, is connected to Cambodia. I cannot say the two are parallel, nor that they are intersecting: they are two points on one and the same straight line.
Justin Trudeau and the Khalistani phenomenon are linked to a relatively minuscule massacre from 1984 with a Wikipedia article merely titled Operation Blue Star to describe it, utterly lacking the word genocide, you will observe, although there's a similarly bizarre range of estimates as to how many died (from a few dozen to a few hundred to more than five thousand, etc.) with a similar struggle on the part of the anonymous authors contrasting ostensibly respectable sources raising their eyebrows at one another. My point here is merely that this "minor massacre" is enough to put Canada in a position of permanent and perpetual hatred, although Justin Trudeau's connection to it is far more tangential than the connection between Nixon (and Mao) and East Pakistan in 1971.
I have purchased a copy of Joe Sacco's (relatively recent) book, the Once and Future Riot. Whether or not it was the intention of the author, this book will doubtless make an important political myth out of an even smaller massacre, the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013. Although this is certainly a massacre important enough to be remembered within India, it was never remembered outside of India for long enough to be forgotten before Joe Sacco's book made this myth out of it.
I have always heard socialists say that we must learn the lessons of history. But there are no lessons of history. There is only history.
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Footnote 1: https://www.thedailystar.net/news/bangladesh/diplomacy/news/bangladesh-china-ties-enter-new-era-4209866
Footnote 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_genocide
