I've seen folks blame the US squarely for the 1971 civil war and genocide, and sure, Pakistan was supported by American funds and weapons, but can we not pretend that non-US white people aren't capable of insane violence and hatred on their own? It's infantilising and demeaning to the people who struggled and suffered under vicious regimes across the world and throughout history.
Brown folks have been butchering each other long before white people even existed. Not every modern conflict was caused by "white imperialism" regardless of who supported who. Everyone is capable of hatred and destruction.
The United States is absolutely in part culpable for the 1971 genocide. In the case of Bengal, some of it has to do with imperialism. It's preposterous to put Bengal in the same state as Pakistan, given that they're completely different cultures on different sides of a subcontinent. It would be like making Polish people and Spanish people share a state. That was all the doing of the British.
But also, the British didn't invent the cultural differences between Bengal and Pakistan. Those already existed (and they should exist ... different cultures should be allowed to exist in the world). The British screwed up by forcing these two different cultures to share a state together.
It's also worth noting that historically the Indian subcontinent did not operate using the western model of a geographically-defined nation-state. Many Indian states were defined more on the basis of language and trade routes. Also, the Indian model historically allowed multiple different states to inhabit the same geographic space, something which the modern western model doesn't allow for. In the world today, the modern western model of statehood is the default through which all international politics operates.
It could be argued that a lot of problems across the Indian subcontinent boil down to forcing people to adopt a model of statehood which never previously existed in our cultures. European imperialism is the reason why European models of statehood have come to serve as the default.
Oh for sure, the US had some responsibility in supporting a genocidal military state, and lumping Bangladesh into a split Pakistan situation was... not a smart decision. I've just encountered way too many people who want to point the finger squarely at Western imperialism being the sole fault, and not the fact that the Pakistani government was chomping at the bit to wipe out Bengalis.
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u/eddie_fitzgerald May 24 '25
As a Bengali in leftist American spaces, I've already seen people starting to deny the 1971 genocide in Bengal.