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I first considered calling this essay Political Zionism. But what matters more than terminology is the kind of politics that has taken root since last July in Bangladesh, and how, a year later, we are using that event as a tool of partisan gain in the name of history. Once again, the politics of memory is dividing the small South Asian nation with a massive population.

Political Zionism is not confined to Jews. It is a political tendency that anyone can practise, regardless of religion or even belief. It is more of a strategy than a theology, and its most insidious form emerges when history itself is weaponised.

Take the latest example. Some people in Bangladesh who once dismissed or downplayed Bangladesh’s July uprising of last year are now being accused of running a ‘July Denial Project.’

The accusation is that while the party leader remains silent, others are tasked with planting doubt, waiting until after the election to fully engage in the politics of denial. The phrase, seductive in its clarity, is dangerous in its consequences.

On the surface, the argument feels justified. After all, certain statements made by these leaders about July Uprising were objectionable and offensive. But to inflate an individual’s flawed remark into an entire party’s platform, to stigmatise all dissent as part of an orchestrated campaign of ‘denial’, is to play with political fire.

What is really being created here is a label designed to de-legitimise and isolate, not just individuals, but entire communities.

The term ‘July Denial’ is no accident. It is a Bengali replica of ‘Holocaust Denial.’ The problem is not the borrowing of language; it is the political project embedded in it. Zionism turned the Holocaust into a permanent instrument of political capital. In Bangladesh, we are now watching a similar manoeuvre.

Those who sanctify July today are not protecting history; they are instrumentalising it. Their strategy is eerily familiar. The Awami League long treated 1971 as its own private war rather than the people’s war. Anyone who did not accept its narrative was branded guilty of ‘1971 denial’ — even those born after the war, who simply refused to inherit the party’s version of events.

Through this tactic, opponents were de-legitimised and cast as enemies of the people.

That same playbook is being opened with July. A new generation of political actors is positioning themselves as the sole custodians of memory, the most authentic interpreters, the most compassionate heirs.

They present themselves as the guardians of the July uprising while reducing others to caricatures of betrayal. What emerges is the cynical use of history as a weapon, an inheritance less of memory than of manipulation.

What we are witnessing now is essentially not resistance to the Awami League’s politics but its replication. The so-called intellectuals who posture as opponents of the Awami League are, in fact, practising the League’s very method under a different party’s banner.

They have become what I call Awami League-opposing Leaguers. Their vision of history is impoverished: they treat a single event as though it were the entirety of history itself.

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History is never the property of a party or an individual. It has a collective agency. The spirit of July 2024 belongs to many, not to one narrative, one ideology, or one faction. Yet those now branding others as ‘July deniers’ forget that some of the very people they malign were among July’s most committed fighters. What they are really engaged in is narrative-mongering — appropriating history to serve a partisan cause, just as the League once did with 1971.

The danger is not merely semantic. By narrowing history to a single faction’s claim, they reduce society into friends and enemies. They mistake ideology for truth. And in doing so, they launder a party’s worldview as if it were neutral, as if it were the voice of the people. That is propaganda disguised as intellectualism.

The Greeks had a name for such figures: Sophists. They are not truth-seekers but truth-replicators. They craft ‘political truths’ by blending fact and falsehood until the distinction collapses. The result is far more dangerous than a lie.

It is the kind of seductive half-truth that once gave intellectual cover to atrocities. In Bangladesh, we saw how the Awami League turned the people’s war of 1971 into an Awami war, erasing others from the record. The same deceit now hovers over July.

And who are today’s loudest preachers of July? Not the people who risked their lives in the streets. Not the youth who braved the tear gas or the police batons. No — the loudest voices are the self-appointed intellectuals who had no role in the uprising.

These are the armchair historians who now worship July with the greatest zeal, weaponising memory to grant their chosen party the mantle of sole legitimacy. The tragedy is that they mistake distortion for conviction. In the name of history, they are paving the way for its betrayal.

The party for which these pseudo-intellectuals craft their narrative will not be liberating us from the Awami League’s legacy, it will be inheriting it. That is why the July uprising must be kept beyond party worship, beyond partisan credit-claims. July was, and remains, a collective national phenomenon. Its credit belongs solely to the martyrs. The living inherit not glory but responsibility.

To freeze the July uprising into ‘history’ is premature. July is not finished business; it is a living present. Its political promises remain unfulfilled, and to reduce it to a bargaining chip for partisan legitimacy is rhetorical opportunism at best, intellectual fraud at worst.

No one is on the ‘wrong side of history.’ In a democracy, if someone stands against the will or aspirations of the people, then let the people decide their fate. But when intellectuals pre-empt that judgment — declaring who is a ‘denier’ of 1971 or 2024, deciding who is authentic and who is a traitor — they betray both history and democracy.

To presume that the people are too uneducated to know their own truth is essentially fascism. By doing this, they are practising the very authoritarian habits they claim to resist. They will lose even in victory, because they will still carry the DNA of the enemy within them.

And what, after all, does it mean to ‘deny’ 1971 or the July uprising? Does a citizen lose their right to political or civic existence for holding a different interpretation of events? If you believe so, then your politics is tribal. It is politics rooted in an emotional urge to punish dissent.

Ìý

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History, any history, is never singular. An event will always carry multiple interpretations. To disagree with an interpretation is not treason. To brand dissent as ‘denial’, however, is the first step towards turning fellow citizens into enemies of the nation.

The Awami League perfected this art in Bangladesh. It is also the cornerstone of Zionist politics globally. And now, the very people who claim to resist the Awami League are falling into the same trap, replicating, not rejecting, its authoritarian logic.

I am reminded of a street bookstall in Dhaka where I once picked up Ashis Nandy’s Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness. It is a title worth remembering today.

For what we need is not partisan memory, nor the tyranny of a single narrative, but a politics of awareness — one that refuses to weaponise history against its own people.

I first encountered Roger Garaudy in the introduction he wrote to a slim volume I had bought from a Dhaka street vendor. Just a few pages long, it was enough to convince me I was reading a genius.

Later, as I followed his work, I saw not just brilliance but revolution. Garaudy wrote prolifically, served prison time, and in his later years embraced Islam.

In 1996, he published The Founding Myths of Modern Israel, a book that challenged the way the Holocaust had been weaponised in service of Zionism. Garaudy never denied the Nazi atrocities; he did not glorify fascism or absolve the crimes of Hitler.

What he questioned was how Israel had transformed the Holocaust into a political myth, turning Jewish suffering into a justification for Palestinian dispossession. For that, he was prosecuted under French law as a ‘Holocaust denier’, his book banned, and his appeal dismissed.

His earlier work, The Case of Israel (1983), had already called Zionism a ‘terrorist ideology’ for its manipulation of truth and emotion to construct a genocidal logic against Palestinians. France punished not denial, but dissent.

That distinction matters for us today. When in Bangladesh someone is branded a ‘denier’ of 1971 or of July 2024 simply because they refuse to swallow a party’s sanctioned version of events, the politics at play is indistinguishable from Zionist politics.

To reduce citizenship, legitimacy, or even the right to live to whether one accepts a particular historical narrative is authoritarian myth-making. Once you create ‘deniers’, you also create people who can be killed.

After August 5, when Hasina’s authoritarianism ended, we entered a post-narrative era. We no longer see the nation through a single story. We ask instead: is a person guilty or innocent, oppressive or free?

Civic and political rights must never depend on conformity to a grand narrative. A state must be value-based, not ideology-driven. A democracy must rest on plurality, not purity.

But our pseudo-intellectuals — corrupt and half-educated — insist on turning difference into enmity. They divide society into camps, they police history, they weaponise memory. This is how communities fracture and nations are weakened.

This is how Bangladesh, instead of becoming a united people, remains a patchwork of hostile enclaves.

We must resist this fanaticism. What we need is not a single ideology, but unity in diversity. What matters is whether every citizen’s rights are guaranteed, not whether they repeat your catechism of history.

Ìý

***

The political use of the past is a dangerous game, as we can see in neighbouring India, where a fanatical Hindu nationalism has devoured society by transforming historicity into a policing project.

History, properly understood, is not owned by a party, a leader, or even an ideology. It is a collective spirit. It breathes through plurality, not uniformity. We respect the different positions our people hold in our past because that very diversity is our strength.

And we must remember, always: ‘Once man loses his faculty of indifference, he becomes a potential murderer.’

The provocations of our so-called intellectuals have turned every national event into a litmus test of loyalty, forcing citizens into opposing camps. But your position on one or two moments in time does not define your national history.

An event is not history. History is built on universality — on a synthesis of many events, ideas, and struggles. Those who try to brand a nation through one episode are not liberating history; they are weaponising the past for power.

Look at how Arab or Chinese historical consciousness was shaped. They did not enshrine a single event as sacred. They built their national narratives on a philosophy of self-power, on civilisational continuity.

The Soviet experiment collapsed precisely because it worshipped ideology over truth. The real force of history, as Hegel argued, is spirit — a civilisational energy that transcends moments. We lack it. And so, in Bangladesh, we find ourselves prisoners of event-worship, turning history into sectarian battles instead of a shared foundation.

The uprising of 2024 has given Bangladesh a new opening. We must now attempt the harder, deeper work of giving Bangladeshi identity a civilisational base.

Regardless of religion, ethnicity, or gender, Bangladesh must be a transnational identity — a unifying reference point, the way Iran, China, India, or the Arab world project themselves beyond borders.

Without such a project, we will never command respect on the world stage. If we aspire to be a pole in a multipolar world, we cannot remain chained to a handful of events; we must construct a historical identity with global reach. Without liberating history, there can be no nation, and without a nation, no true liberation.

But while that work unfolds, the urgent question is simpler: are citizens guaranteed their rights? Is the state ensuring justice, liberty, and dignity? That – not whether you endorse an official version of history – is what matters.

You may accept every sanctioned narrative, yet still lose your rights as corrupt political cadres tighten their grip on power. And when you resist, those same narratives will be used to paint you as an enemy.

This is how fanatic intellectuals have destroyed Bangladesh: by teaching us to worship ideology above life itself. Once people are categorised by belief or disbelief, they become killable.

A democracy that cannot tolerate disagreement is not democracy at all. The first principle must be tolerance; the second, democracy. Those who demand submission to their narrative are not guardians of history. They are executioners, preparing you for slaughter.

Ìý

Rezaul Karim Rony is a writer and thinker. He is the editor of Joban Magazine.