The Battle Between Hidden Dominion And Sovereign Freedom

Empire in the Shadows! It denotes a modern incarnation of imperialism—one that endures not through banners and battalions alone, but through calculated silence, covert subversion, and the machinery of systemic manipulation!!

By any honest measure of history, the gravest threats to democracy have rarely announced themselves with tanks alone. They arrive more often cloaked in euphemism—stability, national interest, rules-based order—while elected governments are quietly undermined, delegitimized, or displaced. In country after country, from Latin America to West Asia, from Africa to South Asia, the pattern has been chillingly consistent. Bangladesh in 2024 stands as a stark and painful chapter in this long ledger: a legitimate government unseated, not by the will of its people, but by the invisible hand of external power politics.

What many now call the American “deep state” is not a single cabal, but a durable ecosystem: entrenched security bureaucracies, intelligence networks, military–industrial profiteers, compliant media pipelines, and financial leverage masquerading as diplomacy. Its objective is neither democracy nor human rights as lived realities. Its objective is dominance—geopolitical, economic, and narrative. As former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his farewell address, “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” That warning went unheeded.

The method is familiar. First comes the narrative offensive: a sovereign government is branded authoritarian, unstable, or problematic. Selective outrage follows; sanctions and coercive diplomacy tighten the noose. Internal fault lines are amplified; opposition forces are encouraged, funded, or legitimized beyond their democratic mandate. When institutions buckle under pressure, the outcome is presented as inevitable—even virtuous. What is erased from public memory is the central fact: the people did not choose this rupture.

Bangladesh’s 2024 experience fits this grim template. Whatever internal debates existed—and every democracy has them—the ultimate disruption did not arise organically. It was midwifed by external actors whose primary concern was not the welfare of Bangladesh’s citizens, but alignment with strategic interests. The result has been institutional paralysis, social fracture, and a dangerous erosion of national sovereignty. As Chile’s Salvador Allende once lamented, “History is ours, and people make history.” Yet time and again, that agency is stolen.

This is not an isolated offense. Iran in 1953. Guatemala in 1954. Congo in 1961. Chile in 1973. Iraq in 2003. Libya in 2011. Each case bears the same fingerprints—different decades, same doctrine. The cost is always paid locally: shattered institutions, prolonged instability, radicalization, and generations condemned to clean up the wreckage of someone else’s “interests.” Hannah Arendt warned us of the banality of evil—the quiet normalization of harm done in the name of order. That banality now travels at digital speed.

Defenders of this system argue that power must be exercised to preserve global order. But order without justice is merely managed chaos. If democracy is imposed by subversion, it ceases to be democracy at all. George Kennan, architect of containment, admitted the moral hazard when he wrote that the United States should dispense with “sentimentality and day-dreaming” about human rights in foreign policy. That candor, while honest, is an indictment: it reveals a worldview where peoples are instruments, not ends.

The moral contradiction is glaring. A nation that proclaims itself the custodian of freedom cannot credibly operate a shadow apparatus that topples elected governments. As Martin Luther King Jr. warned, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” When sovereignty is violated in one place, the precedent metastasizes. Today Bangladesh; tomorrow another capital, another people told their choice was inconvenient.

What, then, is to be done?

First, truth must be reclaimed from propaganda. Independent journalism, scholarly inquiry, and civil society must document these interventions relentlessly. Silence is complicity. Second, international law must be defended not selectively, but universally. Sovereignty cannot be conditional upon alignment. Third, a worldwide, peaceful and vigorous campaign must rise—anchored in democratic norms, legal accountability, and multilateral solidarity—to expose and constrain covert regime-change operations wherever they occur.

This is not anti-Americanism; it is pro-humanity. Many Americans themselves resist this shadow empire and pay the price for speaking out. As Noam Chomsky has long argued, “The responsibility of intellectuals is to speak the truth and expose lies.” That responsibility now belongs to all citizens of the world.

Finally, nations like Bangladesh must invest in institutional resilience—strong courts, transparent elections, independent media, and economic self-reliance—so that no external force can so easily tip the scales. Sovereignty is not granted; it is defended.

History will not be kind to empires that mistake coercion for consent. The age of impunity is ending, not with vengeance, but with vigilance. Let the global community say, with one voice: governments derive legitimacy from their people, not from shadowed corridors of power. And let that principle be defended—peacefully, persistently, and without fear—until the machinery of covert domination is halted, finally and forever. Thus, a forthright indictment of the American “Deep State,” and a resolute global campaign by the conscientious world community of nations to reclaim sovereignty, has become an urgent and inescapable necessity.

Written by Anwar A. Khan 

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