Nabila Idris, the much-discussed member of Bangladesh’s Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, recently wrote a facebook post on a troubling phenomenon.

It was about the complicity of those who, though not directly tied to acts of forced abduction or murder, nonetheless commit new crimes by destroying evidence and manipulating narratives.

Their hands may appear clean, but their conscience is deeply stained.

In seeking to explain this moral collapse, Nabila offered two theories. The first is disturbingly human, assuming many people empathize with the perpetrators, imagining that if they were in similar circumstances, they would have done the same.

The second is even bleaker. Those defending the perpetrators lack the capacity to empathize with the victims at all. They cannot comprehend the horror of enforced disappearance–the most chilling crime of all in a state that pretends to be lawful.

But perhaps the roots lie deeper than conscience or empathy. What we are witnessing is probably more than just emotional failure.

Rather it is a deliberate, calculated reason.

Those who now shield the perpetrators are not empathizing with past criminals but with future ones. Their logic is strategic. They are building an insurance system for tomorrow’s crimes.

As Søren Kierkegaard once wrote, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” The protectors of today’s impunity are most likely preparing for the impunities of tomorrow.

This rational complicity functions through what I call the ‘Colonial Machinery’–a term often used but rarely dissected. The word “machine” gives it a falsely mechanical certainty, as if it were a lifeless object rather than a living consensus.

In truth, the colonial machine is a network of social agreements, a collective understanding of how power should operate and whom it should protect.

Its structure is both invisible and omnipresent: it defines who counts as human, who deserves justice, and who can be safely sacrificed. It sets the hierarchy among exploiters and the incentives that keep them loyal.

And above all, it sustains the stories that justify the system–the narratives that turn cruelty into order, and exploitation into governance.

A machine that runs on lawlessness

In Bangladesh, this colonial machinery never vanished; it merely changed uniforms or dress codes.

What was once imposed from abroad is now enforced from within. The same logic persists–protect the powerful, silence the powerless, divert the attention of the masses and call it stability.

Those who rush to defend the perpetrators are engineers of the next chapter of oppression.

This endurance of Bangladesh’s colonial machinery exposes a stark continuity. The gaze through which the nation’s builders and laborers are seen has never shifted.

So too do the tacit agreements among the ruling elites on how to divide the surplus extracted from their labor. Beneath every political slogan and every promise of reform lies a silent consensus about who must toil and who must profit.

And who must also vanish.

Those now scrambling to rescue the “criminals” of the old order understand this perfectly. They are not motivated by misplaced loyalty or moral confusion, but by self-preservation.

They know that the machinery of power cannot run without its lubricants–enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, rigged elections, and backroom deals that sell the nation in fragments.

In a country where the trade in human labor has long replaced the trade in goods, such crimes are inevitable. Workers returning from decades abroad are discarded overnight; garment workers go months without wages; factories are locked, their workers burned alive behind gates of steel.

The nation’s banks are looted, its currency debased, its dollars smuggled away and yet the economy continues to “grow,” sustained by the same predatory logic.

To imagine that the rule of law can emerge naturally from such a system is to indulge in fantasy.

The fact is Bangladesh does not need socialism to achieve justice. Even a basic bourgeois-democratic rule of law would demand that much of its so-called entrepreneurial class spend the rest of their lives behind bars.

Lawlessness, not legality, is the fuel that keeps this machine running.

Self-fulfilling logic

And as long as that fuel burns, the fire must be tended. Some will light it; others will be tasked with pretending to put it out. Between them, the machine will grind on–devouring lives and rewriting laws.

And also calling it progress.

What unfolds in Bangladesh today is what sociologist Robert K. Merton once defined as a self-fulfilling prophecy long ago.

The most entrenched elements of power–the bureaucrats, top generals, business elites, and political actors welded into the old colonial machinery–begin with certain assumptions about the people that they are exploitable and incapable of transformation.

And because those assumptions govern every policy, every transaction, and every act of repression, the system keeps producing outcomes that confirm its own beliefs.

The prophecy essentially sustains itself, feeding on its own success.

This cycle–assumption becoming proof–cannot be dismantled by token gestures or cosmetic reform. Sending bright-eyed student advisors into ministries or secretariats, as the government had tried, did nothing to rattle the machine.

They merely learned to see through the same lens: the one that reduces citizens to data points and bodies to objects of extraction. Once inside, many ended up parroting the same bureaucratic language of those they once opposed.

Walter Benjamin warned that “all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them.” In Bangladesh, that inheritance is procedural. Each new government inherits power structures of its predecessor along with the worldview that justifies them.

The faces change but the framework remains.

And until that framework collapses, those within it will continue to defend what we call “crimes” as necessities of governance.

Extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, custodial torture, election rigging–these are not aberrations to them, but instruments of stability.

What appears to the citizen as a moral catastrophe appears to the system as operational logic. And it will not change.

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Mikail Hossain is a writer and analyst