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Bangladesh Liberation War – Wars Connected to Climate Change – Scott Carney
152 Plays2 years ago
Ep 016 - Nonfiction. The Bangladesh Liberation War is sometimes called the world's first climate war. How did a mild cyclone lead to a violent genocide? Scott Carney talks about his book, co-written with Jason Miklian, "The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation."
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Transcript
Introduction to Scott Carney and 'The Vortex'
00:00:02
Speaker
Hi, everyone. This is AJ Woodhams, host of the War Books podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics. Really excited today to have Scott Carney on the show for his book, The Vortex, A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, An Unspeakable War and Liberation. Co-written with Jason McLean, who unfortunately could not join us today, but we got Scott here.
Scott's Background and AJ's Author Discussions
00:00:30
Speaker
Scott is an investigative journalist and anthropologist, so is the author of the New York Times bestseller, What Doesn't Kill Us, which is about ice bathing. Is that right? I'm a professional bather. I mean, most people forget the other things. I bathe professionally.
00:00:46
Speaker
That's really cool he spent six years living in south asia as a contributing editor for wired and writer for mother jones in PR discover magazine fast company men's journal in many other publications. Scott how you doing today good so it's so funny that that's in my bio because several those magazines don't exist anymore they were big.
00:01:08
Speaker
And now they don't exist. But yes, you know, I'm doing great. It's really fun to be here. So I just interviewed this author named George Black and he wrote this very heavy book about Vietnam in Agent Orange, very serious topic. But in his bio, I mentioned how he's written for many publications. And he's like, you know, I've also written for a magazine called Fly Fisherman magazine.
00:01:30
Speaker
Uh, so the range of the authors that I have on this show is always my dream to write for cat fancy. And then they went out of business. Now it's catster. I mean, it's rough. I don't know. My dream is that true. Yeah. Cat fancy is gone. Cat fancy is gone. It has now been bought catster. Yeah.
00:01:49
Speaker
Wow.
Bangladesh Liberation War and 'The Vortex' Inspiration
00:01:50
Speaker
Well, speaking of new things I've learned from you, I'm really excited to have you on the show. So this is my 16th episode for the War Books podcast, and a lot of the topics we talk about
00:02:05
Speaker
World War II, Vietnam, the American Revolution, the usual suspects. Maybe some Civil War gets in there too. What's that? Maybe some Civil War will show up. Yeah, I've had a guest about a fiction author writing about the Civil War, but nobody has come on here to talk about the
00:02:24
Speaker
Bangladesh Liberation War. Right. So this is going to be a really cool interview. I mean, it's a war that most people don't even know happened. I mean, you know, it was terrible. It had vast geopolitical implications. The entire world almost was reduced to a cinder from a nuclear conflict. And yet
00:02:50
Speaker
Yeah, it is completely absent from the broader imagination. Now, if you live in South Asia, you know about this war, but yeah, the implications of it for Americans, Americans were heavily involved in the, in the Bangladesh liberation war and the way I like to talk about it. And it's funny cause I know that no one listening has any idea about this, but the only reason that you and I are doing this podcast, that we are even alive at all.
00:03:17
Speaker
is because of a few scrappy fighters in Bangladesh who took the city of Dhaka. And if they hadn't done that, we'd all be dead. So everyone listen to this podcast because it's important. Well, uh, we will get to that towards the end of the interview, but wow, what a, what, what a thing to open with. Well, tell me first, um, so you co-wrote this book with, uh, with Jason McLean. What made you two want to write about this topic?
00:03:45
Speaker
So Jason and I have been friends since grad school. I was getting my PhD in anthropology. He was an undergrad. And I switched out of the academic track to become an investigative
Geopolitical Tensions and Climate Disaster
00:03:57
Speaker
journalist. And he actually did go on to become a pretty well-renowned professor. And because we were friends for so long, as you get to an adulthood, you don't really hang out with each other as much anymore. And we decided to do stories together.
00:04:14
Speaker
starting about 15 years ago for, like, magazines and the Foreign Policy Science Journal with different sort of, like, respectable magazines. And I had been a foreign correspondent in India for, you know, like six years. And Jason was living in Oslo, where he's a professor at the University of Oslo. And one of our stories, which was for Foreign Policy magazine, we were on the border of India and Bangladesh, on the Bangladesh side, because this
00:04:44
Speaker
A 13-year-old girl named Filani Kutani had been shot by an Indian border guard as she crossed over the fence.
00:04:52
Speaker
And her body laid on the fence for like five days. And the two sides were negotiating how to remove the body. And her corpse being there on the fence became this national symbol of the brutality of India against Bangladesh. Because what had happened is India built a wall around all of Bangladesh. So you think about the southern border wall in the United States, the one around Bangladesh. And Bangladesh only has two neighbors. It's Myanmar and India.
00:05:24
Speaker
It's guarded by border guards who have shoot to kill orders for people who want to cross. And it is incredibly violent. And we wanted to know, well, why did they build this fence? Why is that there at all? And it all tracks back to a storm that happened in 1970, where millions of climate refugees, essentially storm refugees, fled across the border into India
00:05:52
Speaker
and destabilize the whole region. And that what Indian politicians at the time were saying is that we need to build a wall because the next time Bangladesh gets hit by a storm, we're going to be inundated again by refugees. And we need to stop that before it happens. Now, I don't believe a wall is a great way to deal with climate change, right? It's not really going to stop people, but it became this interesting flashpoint. And as we, you know, and we decided to dig in and find out the story of this,
00:06:18
Speaker
And oh, what a doozy it became. Yeah. And so the Bangladesh Liberation War is also known as the world's first climate war. Yes. Which I think, you know, that's to me, that sounds very scary. And I think, you know, your book is an excellent example of how scary that can get. Let's let's first talk about
00:06:46
Speaker
Bangladesh. I'm really ashamed to say before I read your book, you very helpfully included a map in front of the book. But if somebody had asked me to point to a map of the world and point at Bangladesh, I wouldn't know where to point. Maybe just give our listeners who were in the same boat as me, where is Bangladesh? What's its geography?
00:07:12
Speaker
Yeah. Well, let's even make this more complex. Why don't we? So, so Bangladesh, the country of Bangladesh, the Bangladesh we all know and love. If you think about India as like sort of a triangle with an arm hanging off of it, right? Sort of like on its, when you're facing it on stage, right. There's an arm hanging off and Bangladesh is nestled in the armpit of India and you know, Pakistan's on the other side now. But when this book begins,
00:07:38
Speaker
there is no Bangladesh. Instead, that little postage stamp piece of land that we now call Bangladesh was called East Pakistan. And Pakistan, the one that we all know and love now, was West Pakistan. Because when the British broke up India in 1947, you know, Gandhi's movement, there was a militant movement in India. India had been a colonial fiefdom for a while. The British broke it up and they did it all along religious lines. Now, the
00:08:08
Speaker
Ganges River Delta, which is Bengal, had a lot of Muslims in it. And Punjab and Islamabad, Karachi, all those areas had a lot of Muslims in it. And the British, in their absolute wisdom, broke it up and had the country divided. So Pakistan had both Eastern and Western wings, even though they weren't touching and they had India in the middle. Now, your listeners probably have a vague idea.
00:08:36
Speaker
that India and Pakistan do not get along. And there's a long history to that, but essentially the British had to divide and rule.
00:08:45
Speaker
ideology where they divide in religious communities to fight against each other so that they could take control. So when Pakistan came into existence, Pakistan is actually not a word, it's an acronym. I learned that too. I had no idea about that. Yeah, tell us what's the acronym. I'm going to butcher it now because
00:09:09
Speaker
I can't actually remember all the provinces, but P is for Punjab. I think A might be for Afghan. K is Kutch in Pakistan, right? But there's no B in Pakistan. It is an acronym without the B. And so all of the locus of power in Pakistan was in Islamabad and Karachi. They had all of the political power. They spoke Punjabi and the Urdu and these sort of
00:09:39
Speaker
North-South Asian languages. And just to kind of repeat, these two, East Pakistan and West Pakistan, are really far apart. This is not like an East Germany, West Germany. There's a line that goes through. There's, I don't know how many miles, but basically the width of the modern day top of India. Huge distance. Huge administrative craziness for a new country to suddenly try to administer these two parts.
00:10:08
Speaker
What you need to know is West Pakistan, the Punjabi-speaking Bihar, Pakistan, treated the Bengali-speaking Pakistan like a colonial fiefdom. They just extracted money. They're like, we don't care about those Bengalis. They considered them inferior, a lot of racism and casteism and the various issues there. And there was always consternation.
00:10:35
Speaker
in East Pakistan, the Bengali speaking area, that they didn't want to be ruled by a foreign, essentially a foreign power. And yeah, it was a very bad situation. Now, India and Pakistan had had several wars by 1970 and there were fronts on both sides of India. And then when this book starts, right, we know
Cyclone's Impact on Politics and Crisis
00:11:00
Speaker
there's tension
00:11:01
Speaker
We know that there's problems in East Pakistan. And the way we- This is around 1970. Really history. Around 1970, yeah. And the way the book starts is we actually write this in a narrative nonfiction way, right? This is not a history book in the sense that we give you a lot of dates and times and historical facts that move us through the narrative. We try to create characters out of the people, which is very hard to do because these are all real people based on interviews.
00:11:28
Speaker
but we write it in the way of a novel because we want to put you in the center of everything. Well, I was just saying, I enjoyed that style because you get a real human connection to these events that are taking place. Yeah, and it's very hard to write this way. I would not recommend this to other writers because it is like orders of magnitude more difficult to do it this way.
00:11:56
Speaker
But it is very engaging. And we sort of begin the narrative. One, we talk about a football game between the Soviet Union and the Pakistan national team. And one of the heroes in this book is a guy named Hafezuddin Ahmad.
00:12:11
Speaker
who is like the Pele, the David Beckham of Pakistan, right? And he is the best football player around. And every time he gets the ball, and they're playing the Russian, the Soviets at that time, every time he gets the ball, the crowd goes crazy. And they're in Dhaka, which is the capital of East Pakistan. And he gets the ball, the crowd goes crazy, and he kicks it over to his front, the forward, and he was a Punjabi. So from the other side of Pakistan, the crowd goes silent. And this happened all the time.
00:12:40
Speaker
in East Pakistan at the time because they didn't, we would never cheer for a Punjabi, but they would cheer for their own people and they would rather cheer for a Russian than a Punjabi. And so that sort of sets the tension that we're talking about in this book, right? You know, we have real hard racial divides and Hafez becomes, turns into a very, very important character in this story. Well, talk real quick about just kind of politically
00:13:09
Speaker
So obviously, the great bolus cyclone is, if I'm pronouncing that correct, is the, that's like really kind of the main event, or maybe the first main event of this book, terrible cyclone, what we call hurricane, of course, in the US.
00:13:27
Speaker
Talk a little bit right before this cyclone hits politically, what is the situation like in Pakistan, East Pakistan and West Pakistan? We are on the verge of the very first national election in Pakistan. Since 1947, Pakistan has been ruled by military dictators and this new military dictator gets basically assigned the top post of president.
00:13:53
Speaker
And he's given one mission, which is to run the first free and fair election ever. And so everyone's gonna vote, and they're pretty sure it's all gonna go to the, it's called the PPP, which is the West Pakistan sort of main normal political establishment. But they're gonna run a real fair election. And the election's gonna happen in December. And in November, we have this enormous
00:14:20
Speaker
gyre coming up the Bay of Bengal, which is a very, very powerful cyclone. It's picked up by the very first weather satellite, picks it up coming to the, I mean, there are emergency transmissions from ships that are getting caught in this cyclone. And India hears this, the radio distress calls, but they're an enemy with Pakistan, so they don't share any information. And there's just a number of just like
00:14:47
Speaker
Maybe you could call them coincidences, maybe you could call them planned genocidal ideas. But the messages never ultimately get to the people living on the coast. So this storm smashes into this low lying, very wide and flat river delta where the average above sea level land height is about one meter, so about three feet.
00:15:14
Speaker
And the storm surge comes in, which is 20 feet high. And so we're talking the only people who survive are the people who can climb up to the top of palm trees. And we have islands where 90% of the population is wiped out completely. The estimates that we have for the number of deaths from that cyclone is about 500,000 people just from this cyclone. It is a watery catastrophe.
00:15:42
Speaker
We've never had anything like this in America. It's like sort of having at that time the entire city of Miami disappearing. And then what would the political fallout be from that? Now, if you had a very callous leader who hated the people of Florida in office,
00:16:05
Speaker
That leader might use this to what they saw as their political advantage and decide not to give aid because we don't like those people, which is exactly what Yahya Khan, who is the president, did. He withheld all of the aid to these low-lying regions. There are some presidents in the American recent past who might do similar tricks with aid, but this was at an order of magnitude that you cannot imagine
00:16:31
Speaker
And then we have cholera epidemics. We have all of starvation. It is just a catastrophe. But all of this is happening just two weeks before the first free and fair national election that Yaya Khan thought he had in the bag. Well, it just so happens. And this is very interesting about Yaya Khan.
US-Pakistan Relations and Nixon's Role
00:16:51
Speaker
He could have put his finger on the scale and be like, we're just going to
00:16:54
Speaker
make this not a fair election. We're going to make this look fair, but it's not going to be fair. He could have done that, but to his great and lasting credit, he didn't. And it was a landslide against his party. It's, you know, if you think about the American example, it would be sort of like the Democrats getting 70% of the electorate, right? Like a huge landslide to the other side. In fact, in considering divided Pakistan at the time,
00:17:19
Speaker
Bengal was more populous than the Punjabi sections. And it actually would have moved the locus of power from the colonial masters to the colonial subjects. It would be sort of like moving Washington DC to Puerto Rico. It is a very, very different change in power. And then Yaya Khan
00:17:44
Speaker
says, oh, that was an error. We have this big national election. He realizes he lost, but then there's the interregnum, right? There's the time when you transfer power to the other party. And that's when he starts putting his finger on the scales. And Yaya Khan is actually, so he has a good relationship with Richard Nixon. Talk a little bit about the relationship between America and Pakistan at this time.
00:18:14
Speaker
So now remember, this is in the middle of the Vietnam War. Okay, so we have Vietnam raging, not so far away from from Bank from East Pakistan at the time. And Nixon wants to make his mark on history and Vietnam is not really the place where he's going to win a lot of friends, right? And he has this idea that he wants to open up diplomatic relations with China, which had at that point been a closed economy, right? This is Mao Zedong. This is like the
00:18:40
Speaker
the height of the Cold War, Soviets are there and he doesn't want this other domino to fall, and he needs an entree to Mao. Well, it just so happens that the only person in the entire world who is friendly with both Mao and Nixon is a guy named Yaya Khan. And this is because in the war, the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, which I'm sure you'll do another podcast on, is
00:19:07
Speaker
America supplied arms to actually both sides, but, you know, supplied arms to Pakistan. And then there was a trade embargo against Pakistan. And then and then Nixon found ways to circumvent the trade embargo to arm his pal, Yaya Khan, because he liked him. And, you know, they had a history as well because Nixon had traveled to Pakistan, you know, when he was a senator. Congress and I should forget what was Nixon before. I think he was a senator. Yeah, I think so.
00:19:38
Speaker
And, you know, but he had traveled to Pakistan, Pakistan had met Yaya Khan and was friendly with the Pakistanians. And for some reason he hated Indians. Like he just really didn't like India and he really liked Pakistan. And his buddy Yaya Khan offered to, to conduct a secret mission to, to open up relations with Pakistan. And this, this culminated with him sneaking Kissinger into
00:20:06
Speaker
into China on a secret flight to meet with Zhao Enlei and begin the opening of trade relations, which Nixon is considered a genius for. He's still today considered one of the reasons why China opened up its economy.
00:20:23
Speaker
and we have this amazing trade partner now, but it was all in trade. And this is like sort of one of the linchpins of this book is that that relationship funnels a lot of American weapons into Pakistan.
Operation Searchlight and Genocide
00:20:38
Speaker
And when this election hit, you know, falls over to the other side, Nixon continues to funnel tank parts, artillery parts, jets,
00:20:51
Speaker
and munitions in general into Pakistan. And Yaya then starts sending troop transports from Karachi to Dhaka. And in the interregnum of, I think it was like two months. My timeline's maybe a little off.
00:21:13
Speaker
On the day that transition of power is supposed to happen, instead of handing over the reins to a guy named Mudjib, who's their Abraham Lincoln figure, he arrests him and then starts the genocide called Operation Searchlight, where the orders are to kill everyone.
00:21:30
Speaker
Yeah, well, we'll talk about so talk about the war. So it's it's the officially known as Bangladesh Liberation War. Correct. But yeah, I mean, you called Operation Searchlight in the book. So the Operation Searchlight is the genocide. That's the internal attack against there's no war. Right. So when this starts, it's it's a surprise attack.
00:21:56
Speaker
on an undefended Bengali population. There aren't very many Bengali army units anyway. There are some border security forces, there's some police, there's some paramilitary. And there's a small handful of actual Bengali units. Everyone else is Punjabi.
00:22:18
Speaker
They go in and right before this, they disarm or they attempt to disarm everyone that they can, every Bengali with a gun, essentially. And then they round them up and whoever they can, they bring into several central stockades and just start executing all the Bengali speaking soldiers. Horribly brutal and violent. Yeah. And we have all of these eyewitness accounts of standing outside the bunkers, not bunkers, the word is
00:22:49
Speaker
cantonments and just hearing one bullet after another going off as they massacre all of the Bengali soldiers because they don't want any resistance. And then when that's done, they go after the intellectuals, the politicians, anyone who could run a country, they want them dead because the idea is decapitate the Bengalis. And what Yaya Khan, his quote was, kill a million of them and the rest will eat out of our hand.
00:23:11
Speaker
which is a pretty brutal dictator thing to say. And so he attempts to do this. Of course, he's doing this with American weapons. There's a news blackout. It's not like today where you can just tweet, hey, we're being attacked. You actually have to fly out of the country in order to get information out to the world. And it's very hard. And he's quite successful at sculpting this. And Nixon and Kissinger are right on board. They are helping, you know, the American embassy is run by a guy named Archer Blood.
00:23:41
Speaker
who sends out this telegram, you're like, oh my God, there's a genocide going on. We're seeing everything happen right in front of us. The bodies are everywhere in the streets. America has to stand up for its values. We have to stand up for our marketing materials. And Nixon basically has this guy removed. And they call it like a civil unrest that is being put down by the good Pakistanis. And this is not very shocking for Nixon to be doing these things.
00:24:11
Speaker
Well, talk a little bit more about kind of the scale of the violence. How many people are killed? So the estimates vary widely. They weren't like the Nazis who had records of every person that killed, right? It wasn't that sort of genocide, even though Yaya Khan did fight the Nazis and spoke quite highly of them.
00:24:37
Speaker
This, the estimates are really difficult. We don't even have censuses really of the existing population. So birth certificates for everyone, they're not really there, but the estimates are 3 million people died in this genocide over the course of nine months.
00:24:51
Speaker
I mean, and that's, I mean, that's incredible. And to, I mean, to, to think too that, you know, obviously this is the big theme of your book, but the, the cyclone is what has kind of put this all into action. Uh, I'm, I'm wondering if you can just like talk about that first domino, which is the cyclone and just kind of like connect the dots on how that cyclone led to the genocide. Sure. Well,
00:25:21
Speaker
Obviously there was underlying political tension. This goes back at least to the origin of Pakistan, but also we can go into the medieval period. So there are tensions that exist and unrest that exists because history happens. But the cyclone is this sort of random weather event and it wasn't caused by climate change. I make a climate change argument in the end of the book, but the cyclone was a cyclone.
00:25:45
Speaker
at that time, happened to hit at a very vulnerable moment and it became the catalyst for violence and it became a political tool by the West Pakistan authorities. First, what their idea was, hey, this got rid of votes. If we get rid of more votes, that's going to help. It was a very cold and calculated logic. You know, more dead people, fewer people voting on the Bengali side.
00:26:12
Speaker
What we see are weather events that become political tools. And in my opinion, the real danger of climate change isn't losing beachfront property or crops or salinization. It's the way that humans respond to climate change and respond to these weather events because they become opportunities and inflection points where everything changes. So the storm happens, which hits the next domino where the election flips to the other side completely, which then
Global Tensions and Nuclear Threats
00:26:42
Speaker
triggers the genocide where three million people are killed, which then triggers an influx of people to flee to India because they don't want to get killed. And there's only really one neighbor. And then India is overloaded with refugees. And they're like, oh my God, what are we doing with all of these refugees? And what would happen if two million Mexicans showed up in San Diego? People are not going to be psyched in America. And that's what's happening here. They're all in Calcutta.
00:27:10
Speaker
India says, well, we're going to invade our neighbor to liberate them. And India is a Soviet ally, right? This is the Cold War. This is one side versus India's Soviet ally. Pakistan's an American ally. India, well, actually what happens is Yaya Khan in his terrible military planning decides to attack India first.
00:27:32
Speaker
and launches a whole bunch of jet attacks on runways in Rajasthan and Agra, which are on the northwest side of India, and does no damage at all, basically. He puts some potholes on runways. But it is the impetus for the invasion. Indira Gandhi says, thank you, Yaya Khan, and then invades both sides. And India's army is huge.
00:28:00
Speaker
crushes Pakistan in any conventional military conflict and They invade and then Yaya Khan says we need more weapons from from America and China and he reaches out to his allies and American China like well We don't really want to get involved but oh my god and they hem and haw for a little bit and then all of a sudden they realize they have to get involved and Kissinger tells Nixon this is our Rhineland this is where we must fight and and
00:28:29
Speaker
And so Nixon agrees to send the USS Enterprise, which is not Captain Kirk, which is actually our largest super air carrier, a carrier that carries enough nuclear weapons to obliterate half the world. And it motors over from Vietnam because by the way, we're still fighting in Vietnam. It motors all the way over there. And Indira Gandhi calls up her pals in the Kremlin and they send their Soviet
00:28:55
Speaker
a nuclear sub fleet that was based in Vladivostok, which actually somehow gets ahead of the enterprise, and they draw a line in the ocean, a red line in the ocean where the orders from the Kremlin are, if the enterprise crosses this arbitrary line, vaporize it, those are the orders, and then go radio silent. It's a very hunt for red October here. And the enterprise doesn't even know this is happening.
00:29:24
Speaker
and they're motoring forward. And in any good Soviet sub drama, in any good hunt for Red October, we have a very wise Soviet naval commander here. Kruglyakov is his name. And he says, well, if they don't know, this guarantees World War III. So he orders his subs to do the most insane thing that a submarine can do, which is go to the line of control, the red line in the sea,
00:29:52
Speaker
with three subs, and they actually have some other assets in the area too, with three subs and surface right in front of the enterprise in a line. As the sign of saying, you know, they don't radio, they're just like, here's where you stop. And they have obviously nuclear missiles on these subs and they can vaporize the enterprise. The enterprise has orders at that point to destroy the Indian Air Force and it can do it.
00:30:17
Speaker
It has the total ability. The first thing is going to destroy Indian communications, Air Force, and it's going to launch nukes. And to be clear to Nixon is he's like, you write that he's prepared to defend. He's he's prepared to use nuclear weapons. He is absolutely prepared to do that. And the orders are set and the subsurface and the enterprise guy named Tiso, who's the captain,
00:30:44
Speaker
stops the enterprise, and they radio for orders, and Nixon's like, I guess we, you know, at this point Cold War logic kicks in, and they're like, well, we have to do proportional responses, right? We can't just go nuke a city, because nuking a city would go World War III, but what if we nuke a military asset? What if we just kill the subs? What if we just kill this smaller thing so they know that we mean business? This is classic Nixon.
00:31:12
Speaker
And the idea sort of goes through the pipeline. Now, meanwhile, while all of this is happening in the Bay of Bengal, Indian forces and rebels from the Bengali side have crossed over the border.
Liberation of Dhaka and Conflict Resolution
00:31:26
Speaker
They're destroying the Pakistani resistance, which is really only built for genocide. They're not really ready for a full on tank attack. And the Mukti Bahini, which is the freedom fighters of
00:31:39
Speaker
free Bangladesh because Bangladesh is being created as this front of military hardware crosses over the border. They get there and essentially the Indian forces take Dhaka. Indian and the Mukti Bahini together roll into Dhaka and radio messages from the US Embassy and other places go to Nixon and they're like, there's nothing to defend anymore. Like you lost.
00:32:08
Speaker
And then the enterprise gets this order. Well, I guess you can stand down because we haven't won this conflict. And so the only reason that you and I are alive is because these guys armed with Soviet weapons, right? That Soviet artillery, Soviet, you know, made weapons, made it to Dhaka before Tissot or Kruglyakov pressed the button and vaporized each other.
00:32:32
Speaker
Yeah, and it's such a crazy story because I feel like the story that's kind of like, we almost came to the brink, like the story that lots of people think about is like right before the Bay of Pigs, like there is the embargo on Cuba.
00:32:48
Speaker
And Kennedy is like, we'll nuke him if we have to. And the Soviets are prepared to launch. We're prepared to launch. And some Soviet, there was a PBS show I think made about this event where some Soviet submarine captain was like, we can't do that. We're not going to do that. And that's what I think about when I'm like, oh yeah, Cold War almost brought us to the brink. But this story equally as, it's not serendipity, but it came very close
00:33:17
Speaker
to
00:33:38
Speaker
delegate control to the guy who's going to push the button, who's in the place where the presidents have decided, well, this is where if it starts, it's going to start here, right? And all of a sudden some, you know, fleet, some rear admiral
00:33:54
Speaker
has the fate of the world in their hands. And not only the Rear Admiral, but the person the Rear Admiral delegates to decide, because the Rear Admiral is a little bit away from the conflict, right? And it's just this person being like, okay, what do we do now? Do I end the world? Do I not end the world?
00:34:09
Speaker
It's so fascinating that this all begins with
Climate Change and Future Conflicts
00:34:11
Speaker
a storm. It's so fascinating that we have this super interconnected world right now. We have a world right now where a ship goes sideways in the Suez Canal and the economy explodes. We're like, oh my God, it takes years to sort out that problem. And this level of globalization has many benefits, of course, but that hyper efficiency also makes taking a breath
00:34:34
Speaker
really, really hard. And we now see events. We are going to see a future where there's more and more storms. We are going to see a future where there's more and more climate problems, whatever those might be, however they might show up, droughts, fires, floods, storms. Take your pick, really. And those things don't only land on coastlines and farmlands and things like that, but they land in political conflicts that already exist.
00:35:04
Speaker
And we could totally say, I mean, at that point, Bangladesh or East Pakistan was unknown. Like, who cares? East Pakistan, poor country, not much going on there. India wasn't really a big deal. These were considered backwaters in general. And yet this random feeling, regional conflict could have ended the lives on the planet. So what happens now? We had this storm just like a few months ago.
00:35:31
Speaker
crisscrossing Africa, like I think it hit Madagascar like five times. It crossed, it hit the coast of Africa, it came back, hit Madagascar, came back, and it was devastating the area. If you had slightly different geopolitical concerns in that area,
00:35:47
Speaker
and the politicians were a particular breed of not nice rational thinking person, we can see how these conflicts can spiral out of control from seemingly small events. We're seeing this somewhat in Ukraine right now. Ukraine's not a climate war, obviously, but they're, oh my God, we didn't really think much about Ukraine a few years ago, and now someone's threatening nuclear weapons. India and Pakistan have enormous nuclear arsenals right now.
00:36:17
Speaker
In part, because of this war, because Pakistan lost the war and Bangladesh got its freedom, the next move that Pakistan did was start its nuclear program, went to A.K. Khan and actually started enriching uranium of its own in order to get nuclear weapons because they realized they couldn't beat India in a conventional conflict. So in a way, the Pakistan-India nuclear conflict started also with a storm.
Post-War Bangladesh and Modern Parallels
00:36:40
Speaker
Yeah. And honestly too, just kind of thinking about modern times and how these small events, I mean, this is kind of, this is me, you know, amateur military professionals saying this here, but you know, think of like Taiwan, like imagine like, you know, it's an island country. Imagine like a, you know, a terrible cyclone or, you know, the seas rising and then China perceives that being a good time to invade Taiwan.
00:37:06
Speaker
And then they invade Taiwan and America responds to them invading Taiwan. And you start to see how just something like that could trigger this huge global conflict. Very similar to what you're writing about. And that could have very easily gone the other way. Like you've said a couple of times, we might not be here right now. So it is very frightening. Let's real quick close the loop on
00:37:36
Speaker
on Bangladesh and how Bangladesh becomes a country and how the conflict ends. Sure. Well, you know, the Mukti Bahini and Indian forces, you know, liberate the country. Meanwhile, a general called Niazi, who is a horrible human being, basically running the concentration camps that are liquidating Bengalis. What he does in the hours right before liberation is he
00:38:05
Speaker
does an extra purge to be sure that he's gotten all of the intellectuals, be sure that he's gotten all of the bankers, all of the politicians, anyone who can run a country, basically the literati. And he executes as many as he can right before. And he also takes the treasury and dumps the treasury in the ocean. So there's no gold, there's no money in Bangladesh. And then he surrenders and
00:38:33
Speaker
And in doing that, Bangladesh gets its freedom, but it starts as basically a crippled country. Mujib, who Sheikh Mujib, who is the George Washington figure, has been in prison this whole time. And he actually didn't even know the war was going on, which is, you know, he was kept in solitary confinement for the year. And he's first flown to London, where he first sees a newspaper, and he is just, what? He has no idea what's going on. And he flies in and says, I guess we'll try to,
00:39:02
Speaker
You know, he's president. They just say, you're president. But he doesn't have any real connection to the on the ground fighting. And he tries to unify this country. And he's a pretty smart and inspiring guy. But also, America has lost the war too. And so they, you know,
00:39:21
Speaker
Bangladesh starts off wounded. It goes immediately into a famine and there's no food aid offered because America's like, we don't care. Just go die. And so, so the first thing that he deals with is a famine that now kills millions more people in his country. He has no government workers who are competent, who have background to run anything. And he's trying to create it, create sort of a free democratic built on like liberal ideals. And he realizes he has to become a dictator or else he can't even run anything.
00:39:50
Speaker
And then, you know, what happens happens. Bangladesh becomes a sort of corrupt dynasty because one side doesn't like, you know, the people who disagreed with him didn't like that he was a dictator all of a sudden. Elections are rigged and we get a Bangladesh that really has like 40 years of horror as it begins. And we all think about Bangladesh and famines and how it's not very good. I mean, honestly, Bangladesh has done well considering where it started.
00:40:19
Speaker
There's also a series of assassinations. Sheikh Mujib gets assassinated a few years after he's in office. I think it's in 75. Bangladesh is liberated in 72, so he has three years to do this. He gets assassinated, and then the next few prime ministers all get assassinated. And assassinations are not good for political stability, right? Because it's one side sees their guy, it gets killed, maybe they kill the other side's guy, and it's this cyclical violence.
00:40:49
Speaker
And those dynasties still to some degree are in power even today. It's the Mujib side and the other side. And I think Bangladesh, I will say, has done admirable overall. To today, it is a better per capita income than India. It is a rapidly industrializing
00:41:11
Speaker
becoming a real player in the world, but it started off hobbled. And there's also these theories that the CIA was involved in Mujib's assassination. You couldn't just imagine. I wonder, and I know hindsight's 20-20, so this could be a very hard scenario for us to imagine here, but I wonder what things look like if this cyclone either just doesn't hit or if it was a mild cyclone.
Speculations on History and Storytelling
00:41:38
Speaker
How do you think things would be different?
00:41:40
Speaker
Well, interesting laugh, it was a mild cyclone. It was only category four, it wasn't a category five. It just happened to hit during a moon high tide. So it just hit at the right moment for the storm surge to be insane. You know, I've asked this question of many people in Bangladesh, right? And there are two camps. One people will say, look, we were trending towards independence anyway, right? Like independence was on its way. We were...
00:42:06
Speaker
You know, there had been riots for years. There have been little resistance movements for years. And eventually, Bangladesh would have become free. But that's not what happened. What happened was a storm hit and that that was the catalyst. Like it's always this question is history. If things were different, they'd be different, but they weren't different. This was the way things happened. And this storm certainly was a catalyst because it flipped the election.
00:42:32
Speaker
and flipping the election led to the genocide. So yeah, I don't know how history would have planned out. Maybe it would have been more peaceful. There's an argument to say that it would have been more peaceful.
00:42:44
Speaker
because they wouldn't have won the election that first time, but maybe that free and fair ideology might have gotten a hold in Pakistan, maybe, and maybe the political process would have sorted out in a less contentious way. Because when the Democrats win 70% of the vote in America, the Republicans, if they're in power, may not feel great about that, or may not feel great about their prospects. If Puerto Rico was suddenly making decisions
00:43:13
Speaker
for Montana, Montana might be like, hmm, right? Well, at the beginning of this, we talked about the structure of your book and how there's a human connection to each story that gets told to paint this picture of Bangladesh in the Bangladesh Liberation War.
00:43:39
Speaker
Maybe you could just, well, so for the listeners, each chapter is actually the name or names of people in the stories. I think even Richard Nixon gets his own chapter. Oh, several, yeah. Yeah. Talk, maybe just pick like a couple of those stories and maybe you could just tell us a little bit about them and why they're important to this story.
00:44:02
Speaker
So I think my favorite character is Hafezuddin Ahmad. I think there are brilliant characters throughout. We have Hafezuddin, who is the Pele of Pakistan, who
00:44:13
Speaker
is a soccer player, an hour miss soccer player looks like everyone loves Hafez and he's and he's fighting and eventually he decides that because in America, you know, sports stars can make money. But even in Bangladesh, the Pele can't and he decides to become a ringer for the army team and and and joins the army to play for their soccer team. And and and and he's playing against the Soviets and you know, Turkey and those in Iran.
00:44:42
Speaker
And then he, so he's like sort of this like guy in the Bengali unit, but really is like the pinch hitter for their, just their sports stuff. And on the day that operation searchlight happens, he's just, you know, they're planning to kill his entire unit, but no one, none of his people know this. And he wakes up one morning and with the message, they have locked the armory, right? They have.
00:45:09
Speaker
They have locked our armory and they're asking us to report. And Hafez is like, hmm, that sounds odd. I wonder why? Because he's like a junior officer. He's like their soccer star, but they gave him an officer assignment because he was college educated. So he walks over to the head of the Bengali unit, a guy named Jalil, and says, what's going on? Why have they closed our armory? Meanwhile, the SPs, sort of the seapoys, the privates of the army,
00:45:38
Speaker
are breaking open their armory to get their own weapons because they have a feeling that shit's about to go down because they have more, they're ear to gown. And Hafez is like, hmm, what's going on? And his Bengali officer says, I can't take it. I don't know. And he just goes, basically becomes useless, becomes inactive, starts crying at his desk.
00:45:58
Speaker
Hafez walks outside and see some bullets firing. He looks back at his, uh, at his officer, says, well, this is bad. And then a private comes up to him and says, God comes up to Hafez and says, Hafez, we need a leader. Cause they're just shooting. We're just shooting randomly. Like we need an officer to actually tell us what to do. And Hafez has this moment where he's like, I was totally apolitical before this. Like he, I just want to play soccer. I want to be the soccer guy, but I guess I have to lead my men in revolution. And in this moment,
00:46:25
Speaker
He says, okay, we'll do this. We'll stage it. So he plans how to survive because the Kenton has, I think it's 1500 soldiers and 500 Bengalis in it and the Pakistanis are encircling them and encroaching them. And he plans a, you know, a fire and move retreat out of
00:46:44
Speaker
the cantonmen and the only other Bengali officer who also was active at this moment to get shot on his way out. And Hafez doesn't know if he's leading a national thing. He might be the only military unit in all of East Pakistan that revolted. And he has no clue, but he flees with his men in his arms. It was like, I guess we're guerrillas now.
00:47:04
Speaker
That to me is like one of my favorite moments in this book because it really happened. I'm talking to Hafez a few years ago and we're getting this whole story. I'm like, oh my God, I'm on the edge of my seat. Hafez learns shortly after he exits the cantonment that yes,
00:47:21
Speaker
There are people he needs to meet up with. He just doesn't know how to do it. And so that's sort of the beginning of this year long resistance where, you know, India gets involved and all that. But the other character that I truly love is, is Muhammad Hai. And we there's also American aid workers who are involved and there's lots of people. But Muhammad Hai is a farmer who
00:47:41
Speaker
is on one of the islands, an island called Manpura, which is going to be hit. He's a teenager and his island gets wiped out. And so we follow him through that 20 foot storm surge as his entire family drowns and he's holding onto a one palm tree as that happens. And then he gets caught up in the aid movement. Like he's like, his first mission is like, I need to bury my family. And he buries 50 family members in his front yard.
00:48:05
Speaker
And from there, he's like, well, we have to feed the people around us. So he starts a local aid movement, just basically sharing resources from the survivors.
00:48:17
Speaker
which gets picked up by sort of the international aid movement, a woman named Candy Rody and John Rody, who are from Boston, who suddenly create the largest civilian aid distribution effort in the history out of nothing, out of phone calls. And while the army is not distributing aid because of this political pressure, John and Candy Rody actually saved millions of lives. And Muhammad Hai is part of this until the Pakistani government stops aid entirely
00:48:44
Speaker
and Muhammad Hay becomes a revolutionary. And so we see how he becomes from being an aid worker to, and aid is very interesting. It's like you have to get food from, you got a food drop and then you move the food to the different resources. He uses those same skills to move arms around his island.
00:49:05
Speaker
during the resistance. And he can't personally fight against the Pakistani gunboats, but he can delay them. He can do little tiny actions that just keep them on edge. And that's what he does for a year. And then his story has a very interesting twist at the end, which I won't tell you about. But after liberation, things get real again.
00:49:35
Speaker
Well, we've kind of touched on this throughout our interview so far. And frankly, this might be the first interview I've done where this question probably can so easily be answered. But I'll ask you so we can put it into words, what lessons are you hoping people take away from your book?
Human Agency and Climate Change Threats
00:49:56
Speaker
There's so many, actually. One is that in moments of crisis, you have choices and you have agency. Like right now, a lot of us feel like we don't have agency because we're like, well, climate change is coming and I can't do anything about it. But but climate change and all of these things hit the rubber hits the road eventually. And the decisions that feel so opaque
00:50:17
Speaker
right now, come into laser-like focus when the rubber hits the road. And then you can suddenly, like, your actions can be good or evil, and you can just see them right in front of you. And I think that one of the lessons in climate change is that while we can do some preparations right now, and we absolutely should, the rubber will hit the road. And you will, you know, probably be asked to take decisions that you are unfamiliar with beforehand, whenever that happens.
00:50:46
Speaker
And I also think that we need to be more aware of how political systems are affected by climate change in general. And this is just what's not talked about. Like if we look at the New York Times and the coverage on NPR and whatever else.
00:51:00
Speaker
We're always talking about these big environmental, relatively slow moving things. Oh look, these beach foot properties are going away off of Miami. Oh look, we're gonna have insurance losses. Oh look, there's gonna be refugees and refugees are gonna be hard. But we don't really conceive of what that actually means when the rubber hits the road. The dangers of climate change in my mind are not those factors.
00:51:26
Speaker
The dangers are how humans react to climate change. If we think the world is doomed because of climate change, it's not because we've become Mad Max and everyone's in the desert convertible shooting each other in Burning Man looking clothes. It's because we're going to start firing weapons at each other. And our weapons now are existential weapons. The danger of climate change is radiation and nuclear winter. It's not the slow heating of the globe.
00:51:55
Speaker
Profound, wow. But this, I mean, but your whole book is a very, it's a profound book and it's, you know, it's a cautionary tale, kind of like we've talked about. Well, Scott, this has been a really great interview.
Scott Carney's Diverse Writing Career
00:52:12
Speaker
What are you, what are you working on next?
00:52:14
Speaker
Oh, my God. I am. So again, it's really funny. I have a very diverse writing career. You know, I started by writing about organ trafficking. I've written a book on cults. It's called The Enlightenment Trap. It's out right now as well. Two books on biohacking. This book about climate change and war. And I'm working a book about napping right now. I also have a YouTube channel that where I pontificate on a wide variety.
00:52:38
Speaker
of things. Anything from consciousness to climate change to war to AI. I'm an ADD dilettante, you could say. What's your secret to being so prolific as somebody who is a writer myself?
00:52:56
Speaker
Oh, I mean, I have no idea. Not a clue. ADD is really super useful in this idea. I mean, not having another job helps. I mean, I've written six books, but I did it over 13 years. So it's not that impressive. It's just sort of, I just do stuff.
00:53:13
Speaker
And I'm interested in a wide variety of things. And yeah, what's the secret? I mean, writing a book is super easy, by the way. What you do is you make an outline, and then you write 500 words a day until you're done. And then you have a really bad book. And then you make it better. You edit it. And then presto, that's a book. That's great. Inspiration for us all. At least all of us want to be writers out here.
00:53:38
Speaker
Well, Scott, if people want to follow you, find you, are you on social media? How can people get in touch? I am in all of the places, and I would love you to go check out my stuff. If you want to know more about the Bola Cyclone, I have a video on my YouTube channel, which I think is called Scott Carney on YouTube. You can put it in the search bar and I'll show up. SG Carney on the Twitters and the
00:54:03
Speaker
TikToks and the Instagrams and all of that stuff. I have a newsletter, which is, I think it's probably the best way to sort of follow my stuff. Cause I tell you what's new.
00:54:13
Speaker
And I also have a podcast called Scott Carney Investigates. So I am all over the map. You're everywhere, man. Probably the newsletter is going to be how most people would follow me. You can find that on my website, ScottCarney.com. There's like a little annoying pop-up that will come every time you visit my website until you put your email address in because that's the game. Yes, that's the game.
00:54:39
Speaker
Scott Carney with Jason Mickley in two, let's not forget Jason here on his new book. Well, it's actually, this is the new paperback edition, correct? Yep. That's the paperback edition. It's based on the cover that was released in India, where obviously this book is quite popular in India because they're the heroes. Well, it's The Vortex, A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, An Unspeakable War in Liberation. Go buy a copy. Go check it out from your library. It's a story worth reading. And Scott, thanks so much for joining me today.
00:55:09
Speaker
100%. Thank you for having me. Thanks.