The birthplace of fascism was Italy. It was there that the people who once succumbed to Mussolini’s cult of personality finally rose against him.

On April 28, 1945, the dictator and his mistress were executed by their own countrymen. Their bodies, hung upside down in a Milan square, were pummeled with shoes and brooms by ordinary citizens.

It was a grotesque but symbolic act, an emphatic rejection of tyranny. Hitler, watching from afar, chose suicide over the same fate.

Yet what followed in Italy was far more significant than the spectacle of Mussolini’s death. The uprising was cultural rather than a political one. Italians began the difficult work of dismantling the social architecture that had sustained fascism.

They understood that dictatorship is not embodied in one man; it is embedded in a nation’s culture. Removing the dictator is easy; erasing the culture that enables dictatorship is not.

That is where Bangladesh faltered after its own “5th of August.” The change that followed was political, not cultural. No reckoning came. No widespread rejection of authoritarian culture took root.

In its absence, autocracy simply changed hands and found new homes in every layer of society.

Our social and cultural institutions mirror the very structures they claim to resist.

Hefazat-e-Islam, one of the largest social organizations in Bangladesh, is almost feudal in its hierarchy. Youth voices are dismissed, women are excluded, and dissent is punished. Ironically, Jamaat-e-Islami, a party widely criticized for its rigid ideology, appears more democratic by comparison.

The same pattern infects the secular front. Sammilita Sangskritik Jote, which champions cultural freedom, operates with an autocratic impulse that would make any dictator proud.

A handful of personalities dominate; their word is law. Udichi, by contrast, offers a rare example of internal democracy, but it is an exception that proves the rule.

The disease runs deep. From the Sajida Foundation to corporate boardrooms, from NGOs to university departments–authority flows downward, never sideways. Even the act of grading a student’s paper can become an exercise in unchecked power.

Mosques and village councils are structured around command. Ninety percent of Bangladesh’s public companies are ruled by a single voice.

This is the true legacy of our political history: a culture where obedience is rewarded and questioning authority is perilous. We have not merely lived under autocracy; we have learned to reproduce it.

The tragedy of Bangladesh is not that it had dictators. It is that we have turned dictatorship into a habit.

The illusion of stability under autocracy

It would be dishonest to claim that autocracy offers no advantages. Decisions are made swiftly. Bureaucratic bottlenecks disappear. Governance appears efficient, at least on the surface.

It’s no surprise that a 2014 survey found that nearly one in three Bangladeshis favored some form of authoritarian rule. For a society exhausted by chaos, the illusion of order can feel like relief.

Indeed, in moments of lawlessness or political paralysis, people often long for a “firm hand.” They equate control with competence. But what appears efficient in the short term corrodes everything that sustains a nation in the long run.

The past sixteen years have been a masterclass in that corrosion. Anyone who still can’t see the harm either hasn’t been paying attention or has stopped feeling altogether.

The deepest wound inflicted by autocracy is intellectual. Autocracy kills merit. Merit demands new ideas, and new ideas inevitably bring dissent. But dissent is precisely what a dictator, or any authoritarian system, cannot tolerate.

In a culture where loyalty trumps logic, intelligence becomes a liability.

Evolution dictates that each generation surpasses the one before it. Your father, smarter than your grandfather; you, smarter than your father. Progress depends on this upward spiral of thought.

But autocracy reverses evolution. It silences the next generation to preserve the comfort of the old. It fears competence because competence threatens control.

Ask any bright mind in Bangladesh who has tried to challenge the status quo. The stories are endless and depressingly consistent.

A brilliant programmer walks into the Ministry of Science with a proposal to fix digital infrastructure. Nobody will meet him.

An award-winning filmmaker visits the Ministry of Information to suggest reforms. She’s shown the door.

A senior traffic expert from New York offers advice to Dhaka’s police on congestion management, and is humiliated. (That one actually happened.)

A student dares to cite twelve books in an exam instead of parroting the teacher’s notes. His grades plummet. (That one happened too.)

Even in the most ordinary spaces, the reflex is the same. Offer your mosque committee a practical suggestion–they’ll ignore you. Tell your elders to carve the Eid-ul-Adha meat more efficiently–they’ll scold you. The scale differs, the instinct doesn’t.

This is what happens when autocracy ceases to be a system and becomes a habit. When hierarchy becomes second nature, and every space–from ministries to madrasas–learns to distrust the new.

Of all its forms, sectoral autocracy–the localized tyranny of small fiefdoms–is the most insidious. It doesn’t wear a uniform or hold an office. It hides in our classrooms, in our living rooms.

Dismantling the autocratic fabric

A nation is not built on politics alone. It is built on sectors–industry, media, development, pharmaceuticals, publishing, advertising, culture. Together, these form the scaffolding of a society.

But when the virus of autocracy spreads through an entire sector, it kills innovation. When one or two powerful actors monopolize space, new talent is locked out, new ideas are suffocated, and progress flatlines.

Bangladesh is not short on talent. The country produces brilliant coders, writers, filmmakers, and thinkers. Yet our cultural output remains stagnant. Why? Because autocracy has captured entire creative ecosystems.

The film industry is ruled by Jaaz Multimedia and Ananta Jalil’s empire of self-importance. Television drama bows to Impress Telefilm. Advertising bends to Asiatic. Photography is policed by Shahidul Alam’s gatekeeping circle.

When one man, or one company, dictates the rules of an entire sector, the effect is no longer business competition–it’s cultural decay. “Only I will play, and no one else will play” might work as a business motto, but when it governs an entire industry, it metastasizes like cancer.

It prevents new ideas from taking root and ensures that the sector falls further behind on the global stage.

That is why Bangladesh’s social and cultural organizations seem so bereft of continuity. They have no future because they have no succession. No one is mentoring the next generation–only subjugating them.

What we call “discipleship” has devolved into servitude. The so-called disciples are trained to obey, not to think; to flatter, not to question. But dissent, in any healthy culture, is another name for merit. Without dissent, there is no growth–only decay.

Political organizations have followed the same path. Jamaat-e-Islami, for all its ideological rigidity, understood the value of intellect and occasionally rewarded merit within its structure.

The Awami League did not. It built its fortress on loyalty. And when loyalty becomes your only measure of worth, the result is predictable: stagnation.

Across Bangladesh’s most visible institutions—the Sammilita Sangskritik Jote, Drik Gallery, The Daily Star, Amar Desh, Jaaz Multimedia, Asiatic, the Asiatic Society, Bishwo Shahitto Kendro, and even university departments–the same story repeats itself.

Hierarchies have hardened. Obedient followers wait, vulture-like, for their leaders to die, hoping to inherit the ruins. But when that moment comes, there will be nothing left to inherit.

The organizations will have rotted from within, hollowed out by their own inability to trust the next generation.

Autocracy, in the end, does not just silence opposition. It erases the future.

But some institutions endure. BRAC, Udichi, Visva-Bharati, Jamaat-e-Islami–whatever one thinks of their politics or philosophies–have learned a simple truth: longevity requires structure, not personality. They built systems, not shrines.

They allowed new generations to inherit and reshape their legacy. That is why they will last a century or more, long after their founders’ names have faded from public memory.

Dhaka University, once a crucible of brilliance, offers a sobering contrast. People often ask why it now stands in a state of moral and intellectual decay, worse than during British or Pakistani rule.

The answer, once again, is autocracy. When authority becomes absolute, curiosity dies. When obedience is rewarded, imagination retreats. Autocracy never produces excellence—not even for the autocrat.

Because what, ultimately, does an autocrat build? Nothing that survives him. Power sustained by fear cannot be passed on. When the applause dies and the courtiers disperse, he is left alone–with his failures and the knowledge that everything he created will collapse the moment he is gone.

That is the final cruelty of autocracy: it condemns its own creators to die in vain.

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Irfan Sheikh is a writer and analyst. He graduated in International Relations from Jahangirnagar University