The death toll in the garment-factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh has now reportedly exceeded 700 -- and yet this is the big protest movement in Bangladesh right now:
Violence erupted across Bangladesh on Monday as Islamist fundamentalists demanding passage of an anti-blasphemy law clashed with security forces, leaving a trail of property damage and at least 22 people dead after a second day of unrest....I know little or nothing about Bangladesh. I don't really know for sure how these issues interact.
The skirmishes began Sunday when thousands of Islamic activists staged a march on Dhaka, the capital, followed by speeches and a mass demonstration. The authorities say several hundred shops were vandalized, and local television channels showed fires in the central part of the city....
The confrontations escalated on Monday....
The march was organized by Hefajat-e-Islam, a group of Islamic hard-liners who have called for Bangladesh's Constitution to be drastically amended with a 13-point program that would ban intermingling between men and women and punish by execution Bangladeshi bloggers accused of blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad....
But it seems to me that we have a global economic system that isn't meeting the needs of the vast majority of the world's citizens, and is really shafting much of the world's population, the underpaid dead in that factory building being just one egregious example. And yet the response is not to fight capitalism, but to find some other explanation for why the world is out of joint.
I don't think there's anything inherently violent or repressive about Muslims. Moderate Islam has thrived across the globe over the centuries. It's just that right now repression-loving hardline Islamists are doing a bang-up job of providing an alternate explanation for the world's troubles in their sphere of influence.
And meanwhile the capitalist system goes happily about its business, largely untargeted and unblamed.
Here in America we've had a global financial collapse, and what's our biggest, loudest, most influential movement? A movement to repeal universal health care, reduce regulation of business, lower the taxes of the rich, and permit wider access to guns. So we're no better.
