Aik Bar Phir Memo by Javed Chaudhry
70 years and what have we learnt from them?
That we’re still not learning – and that the Panama verdict may be no different “Nawaz Shareef, his children and their lawyers gave the impression of playing a game of puzzles with the Supreme Court of Pakistan.” For any authoritarian strongman, a lesson of history is that you can’t do it by yourself. To accumulate power and vanquish your opponents, you need powerful elements of the state, such as the police, the armed forces, the senior establishment, certain politicians, and the judiciary, to go along with your designs, or at least to stand aside as you do as you wish. In some cases, such as Weimar’s Germany and Vittorio Emmanuel III’s Italy, many people in positions of influence were willing to support an authoritarian upstart because their commitment to democracy was weak or nonexistent to begin with. In other cases, such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, elected leaders exploited threats of terrorism and domestic chaos to justify the curtai...
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