1935 to 2021: From Haile Selassie Gugsa to the TPLF

November 16, 2021

In 1935, the West betrayed Ethiopia. Is 2021 going to be another year of betrayal by the West?

Haile Selassie Gugsa (left) with Italian General Emilio de Bono ( Photo Credit : Wikipedia)

By The Alula Aba Nega Collective

The TPLF is a committed student of Goebbels’ practice of the “big lie.” Goebbels claimed, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” For 27 years in power, the TPLF practiced the “big lie” about practicing “democracy” while ruling Ethiopia as the private property of the TPLF, its members and their families. Out of power since 2018 and trying to reconquer it now, it has started another campaign of big lies, the biggest of which is the lie of “genocide.” Thus, seconded by Western media, NGOs and politicians, the TPLF has been incessantly repeating the “big lie” that Ethiopia is committing “genocide” in Tigray. Note that Meles has already conceived the “big lie” of “genocide” in 1991 as a tool to garner the support of Tigreans to keep political and economic power in the hands of the TPLF. 

Far from suffering from “genocide,” the TPLF has invaded the Afar and Amhara regions and murdered innocent people, committed sexual aggression on women, destroyed public property, schools, hospitals, health centers, ransacked villages and towns, devastated farmlands, and plundered harvests, condemning peasants to hunger. The cruelty, depravity and inhumanity of the TPLF is so deep that it even executed cows and oxen in Amhara, and camels in Afar! 

To understand the TPLF’s pathological behaviour, one must consider Africa’s fateful encounter with the West in the 15th century. Throughout the history of this encounter, characterized by the slave trade, horrendous colonial and neo-colonial exploitation, Western powers have always treated the interests of Africans as obstacles to be demolished to ensure the unimpeded exploitation of Africans and the coldblooded siphoning of Africa’s wealth to render Europe powerful economically, politically, and culturally. To facilitate their domination, Europeans recruited power-hungry Africans such as Moïse Tshombé and Jonas Savimbi as “useful” Africans who are willing to sacrifice the interests of their people for a “plate of lentils.”

The cultivation of such “useful” Africans is still the West’s approach to Africa. The fascist invaders of Ethiopia had such a “useful” Ethiopian in 1935: Haile Selassie Gugsa. Since 1991, the West has found its own Haile Selassie Gugsa: the TPLF. Note that in 1935 many Tigreans condemned Haile Selassie Gugsa’s treason. They went to his house and torched it. Tigreans are now getting wise to the Haile Selassie Gugsa nature of the TPLF and have started organizing themselves against it.

 It is not surprising that some Western politicians, NGOs, social media, and journalists engage in hybrid warfare against Ethiopia in their support of their new Haile Selassie Gugsa: the TPLF. They find it “useful” for dislodging Abiy Ahmed’s democratic government. They know that Abiy’s democratic government has the interests of Ethiopians at heart, and therefore will never be the proctor of the West in Africa, as the TPLF has been from 1991 to 2018. 

The new democratic government has frustrated those in the West who want to use Ethiopia as a base for the political, economic, and cultural domination of East Africa, and of Africa in general. They know that the victory of Ethiopia over the TPLF will strengthen Africa’s ongoing resistance to the West’s “developmental exploitation,” “media colonialism,” and “cognitive imperialism.” Hence the present Western vicious chorus to discredit Abiy’s democratic government and to create conditions that will facilitate the return to power of the TPLF.

For Ethiopians, there is a sense of déjà vu in this Western support for the enemy of Ethiopian unity and sovereignty. In 1935, when Fascist Italy invaded and dismantled Ethiopia, many Western governments, politicians, journalists, and academics, some of whom consider themselves “Ethiopianists,” supported Fascist Italy. A prominent pro-fascist “Ethiopianist” was Enrico Cerulli—a predecessor of the present-day pro-TPLF “Ethiopianists”—whom Haile Selassie I wanted to see the United Nations try him in 1948 for war crimes. 

In 1935, the USA, Great Britain, and France abandoned Ethiopia. The Hoare–Laval Pact of 1935 between Britain and France proposed to deliver her to Mussolini. France and Britain recognized Italy’s sovereignty over Ethiopia in 1938. Roosevelt invoked the neutrality Act, but he allowed American companies to continue exporting war-related materials to Fascist Italy. These three countries, who were unwilling to sanction Italy’s naked aggression of Ethiopia propose in 2021 to impose sanctions on Ethiopia because she is defending, as in 1935, her sovereignty against the TPLF effort to dismantle it. Not because they love the TPLF, but because it has been since 1991 a willingly compliant Trojan Horse for facilitating the West’s economic, political and diplomatic domination of Africa, and is willing to continue serving the West’s interests if returned to power.

Anthony Blinken, channeling the ghost of Samuel Hoare, seems to be preparing a new version of the Hoare-Laval Pact, with the TPLF being its main beneficiary as the agent of the West. Hence, the TPLF’s current talk about repeating its 1991 farce of EPRDF with a collection of ethnic individuals who do not even represent their own shadows, but are useful for creating a puppet state in Ethiopia that does the bidding of the West. Isn’t this a new version of the Hoare-Laval Pact? 

2021 seems to replay 1935. Some of the Western “Ethiopianists” and journalists that are campaigning in the New York Times, Le Monde, and other publications are walking in the footsteps of Enrico Cerulli and other Italian Ethiopianists and journalists who supported the Fascist destruction of Ethiopia’s sovereignty in 1935. History repeats itself: “first as tragedy, then as farce,” Thus the farcical nature of those pro-TPLF western “Ethiopianists” and journalists trying to mimic the “Ethiopianists” and journalists of Fascist Italy.

Resistance to foreign diktats is inscribed in the historical DNA of Ethiopia. Since her major diplomatic contact with the West in the 16th century, Ethiopia has become aware that the West was bent on promoting its interests rather than in respecting the interests of Ethiopians. However, throughout history, Ethiopia has successfully triumphed over the West’s encroachment on her sovereignty. Note that Emperor Tewodros and Emperor Yohannes died on the battlefield defending the sovereignty of Ethiopia, Ethiopia has always been a thorn in the West’s imperial ambitions to subjugate peoples of African origin. In defeating a major European power in 1896 at Adwa, she disproved forever the West’s claim of White superiority and inspired the anti-colonial movement. However, the stench of the West’s condescension is still around us, rising from the sanctimonious pronouncements of pro-TPLF western politicians, NGOs, “Ethiopianists,” and journalists. 

In 2021 as in 1935, the West is siding with the TPLF: an anti-democratic organization that is trying to dismantle Ethiopia. The current American support of the TPLF is nothing more than a continuation of the Western neo-colonial practice, always resisted by Africans, to submit Africans to the Haile Selassie Gugsa that serve the West’s interests. The West is now seized with the fear that the victory of Ethiopia over the TPLF would be “a misfortune of the first magnitude” for Western interests, because such a victory marks one more decisive achievement in the liberation of Africans from foreign interference in their domestic affairs. The West is apprehensive that the defeat of the TPLF will fortify the African determination to dismantle the political and economic mechanisms that transfer history-making to the West and reduce Africans to aid recipients. 

The Western chorus in support of the ethicist and anti-democratic TPLF is an effort to erase what W.E.B Du Bois called the “Star of Ethiopia,” a star that he named “Ethiopianism,” a “star” that shines in the firmament of Humanity as the promise of liberation of Africans and people of African descent from Western domination. Mandela, the giant of African history, expressed the truth of Africans in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom when, on visiting Ethiopia, he wrote, “I felt I would be visiting my own genesis, unearthing the roots of what made me an African,” because he knew that Ethiopia is the symbol of the dignity of Africans. Mandela would have rejected categorically the TPLF and the other Haile Selassie Gugsas of Africa. 

In 1963, Kwame Nkrumah, the liberator of Ghana, wrote a poem entitled, “Ethiopia shall rise.” Indeed, despite the anti-Ethiopian machinations of America and Europe and of their Haile Selassie Gugsa—the TPLF— “Ethiopia shall rise” in 2021, as she has done repeatedly in her long history. 

Let it be clear to all the pro-TPLF western politicians, NGO’s, “Ethiopianists,” commentators, and journalists: Ethiopian history has been made and will continue to be made by Ethiopians and not by Americans, Europeans, and their Haile Selassie Gugsas: the TPLF and its avatars.