Without much planning, I happened to end up in Ethiopia in 2018, just a few months after Abiy was elected prime minister. It was an unusual experience.
In Addis Ababa the feeling was.. electric. People were so hopeful and happy. Everyone was talking to me about Abiy and how everything was changing.
Then I traveled around the country, further and further north. I visited Tigray - not the place where the massacre happened, but very close by. Not the church in the articles, but many like it.
And then (long story) I had an opportunity to visit a military camp at the Ethiopia/Eritrea border... and then you start to realize how complicated everything is. Ethiopia has a border on Google Maps, but that doesn't mean the people in the north see things the same was as in Addis Ababa.
What is a national border anyway if you define yourself more by your tribe than your so called nation?
The people in Ethiopia are fantastic and I hope some peace can come eventually.
IIUC Google Maps has more than version of some contested borders, displaying one or the other depending on where you view it from (eg. India or China). I’m curious how OSM handles this.
The problem with nation-states is that if you want a nation to have just one people, you need to cleanse it of all the others. The old empires could be more humane in ways.
When I read about massacres in general, I wonder what any regular civilian can learn about how to detect the conditions that lead to them, or prevent them from happening. The first step I think is to look at them unblinkingly.
The counterfactual view of "if only there were someone there to protect them," only marginally reduces the massacre to a battle where many people are still killed, albeit with some likelihood of there being at least some survivors. If we ask what could have prevented a battle, it's what hypothetically prevents every battle, which is, if not the cost/benefit to the combatants, at least the risk/reward yields some kind of equilibrium where people aren't killing each other. (I sympathize with the american 2A conservative view that reduces to preferring battles to massacres, but even they would agree most prevention is upstream of that.)
Massacres are not random, they work for the people who order them. They are not about taking territory or defending it, they are a demonstration meant to instill terror so that a target people will not fight or resist. It creates a fear that overtakes rational self in the population and reduces them to acting on fear instead of as people. The economics of brutality are such that local atrocities have a low risk and high reward that reduces the cost and effort to dominate the rest of the population. To think this way you must already see people as liquid and interchangeable, like Stalin's comment that the death of one is a tragedy but the deaths of many is a statistic. The men who ordered this massacre operate on that view.
This particular story of mothers binding the hands of their sons to prepare them for execution raises the question we ask about every other historical massacre, which is, "why didn't they resist?" The question itself gets attacked as blaming victims, but it's much more nuanced than that. The answer is because they were lied to. They didn't resist because they believed they could sacrifice their way out and that they were saving themselves and others by not resisting. History tells us over and over that they aren't.
How to prevent massacres? I don't know, but I do know we have to look at them coldly. The only thing I can see is that it's way upstream of the events themselves, and the necessary condition for every single one is a lie and a deception, and that deception is what we recognize as the real capital-E evil in all of it. We might not be able to prevent future massacres, but every person has the capacity to resist deception, and also to name it as what we recognize as evil. If you detect cancer early, you can stop it, but if you let it go, it consumes the body. The same can be said for deception, where all live with a little, but unchecked, it is consuming.
I think the most consistent and reliable way to see a coming massacre is to be conscious not just of the amount of "othering" that exists, but with the context of dehumanization.
It can be subtle, but generally if the "others" are identified with attributes like "inferior", "threat", "danger", etc., the society is on track for massacre or war. The stronger this division is, the closer the society is to some atrocity or another.
If the side that's "othering" a group has great or vastly imbalanced power, then the result is likely to be a massacre. If not, then it's likely a war will occur.
It's sometimes hard to tell if a group is being "othered", but generally if you can replace a generalization with the word "others"
or "those people" and it sounds sinister, then that's probably what's happening.
Examples:
"The Patriots defeated the Giants."
Rephrased: "The Patriots defeated the others."
Not sinister; no threat of massacre/war.
"The Russians attacked our voting infrastructure in 2016."
Rephrased: "The others attacked our voting infrastructure in 2016."
Somewhat sinister; possibly war.
"Muslims have attacked two buildings in New York.".
Rephrased: "Those people have attacked two buildings in New York."
Sinister; risk of massacre.
"Whites are responsible for implicit racism by nature of their history of oppression."
Rephrased: "The others are responsible for implicit racism..."
Somewhat sinister; possible war or massacre.
"Adults are increasingly falling into debt."
Rephrased: "Those people are increasingly falling into debt."
Not sinister.
"Blacks are responsible for 5x more murders than whites."
Rephrased: "Those people are responsible for 5x more murders than us."
Sinister; possible massacre.
The frequency and intensity with which you witness these types of phrases—especially in the face of increasing generalization that captures less and less aspects of individuality—the closer you are to something bad happening.
And if it's accepted as de facto with no room for nuance or argument, then your society is likely on the precipice of atrocity.
The best way to fight it? Recognize when it happens and call it out for what it is: dehumanization.
While I don't entirely disagree, it does imply that intersectionality by this definition is dehumanizing, which I don't think we should infer, unless we should? (many would agree) Otherness is a historical human norm, but it's very possible your examples are also a necessary condition.
Othering and deception, are necessary conditions, unless there is an example of a massacre where these were not present. The sufficient conditions, who knows, I think that's in the details of the otherness and psychopathy of the leadership, but the sufficient conditions to make it possible are more complex.
"we" ?
as in people in the West in cushy SV Tech jobs?
AFRICOM plays a huge part in geopolitical events across the region. Kick them off the continent along with European colonialists still deploying troops to the region.
Until today France still launders its war money in Gabon but it's chicken-shit and whataboutism to even attempt enumerating anything.
There isn't any solution (at least not a non-hypocritical one) that anyone from the West could suggest. Seriously fighting this and not succumb to hypocrisy would mean you're immediately crossing into "terrorism" territory.
I know that the first world countries of today had to go through their share of pointless massacres, but I always thought the amount of stupid tribal warfare had been somehow tied to the state of the world, the available technologies and the state of knowledge, at least to some extent. As in now that we have Facebook in most parts of the world the people can see better that it's just people like them on the other side, making memes, living their lives, having families. Guess I was wrong.
Also if "let it play out" is actually the best we can do, I wonder whether it makes the civilians' lives better when we supply modern weapons (as in AK-47s instead of machetes) to the conflict zones and whether this makes the conflicts longer, shorter and more or less violent? This is an actual question.
no. ideally "we" use sanctions and economic incentives, but also all the troops should go home or only remain there for civil support (clean up, distribute aid, lot of non-capitalistic, socialist ideas I have as a European which most Americans would hate like the plague). Secondly, people like Eric Prince and other Blackwater, "Wagner Group" type private terrorists should be prosecuted by the ICC. And "we" make the US play by the same rules as they dish out to the rest of the world.
any "call for peace" from the West can never not be hypocritical. Even if we would try, it's a silly pipe dream that will never play out in our universe. (nor is any other reality that advocates for a world without war and blood). But the least we can do IMHO is to _not_ continue what we've been doing since hundreds of years in that part of the world ("protecting our interests abroad" as the US call it). the only thing to be on the right side here morally is to clean up our own act so that nobody in our own countries thinks ICE and children in cages are justifiable. Or that it's OK that refugee children and families get separated, raped and rotting in our FRONTEX secured Greek islands.
Make room in the prisons for all these criminals running companies and not paying their taxes and maintain the death penalty (where it exists) only for white-collar crime or those that abuse the power they've been given (law enforcement & any public office).
Literally any crazy idea that improves society in our own countries would be better than keeping troops in Africa. And none of these idealistic suggestions above (insert your own dreams and lunacy if you think you can do better) will play out the way we want them. But nothing good can come for us in the West if we pretend we're "the good guys" who bring "democracy" and "equal opportunity" or whatever we believe that we're doing there. What we stand for in reality in these countries is hypocrisy, black sites, drones, legalized torture & kidnapping, foreign meddling, ... so apologies I don't believe it when we're saying "we must stay there because we are the lesser evil" or whatever BS
Punishing the evildoers is how the atrocities happen. What people need to realize is that they are not in a position to identify what is and is not evil, because odds are that you are just as evil as whatever it is you are condemning.
For a start, war crimes should be prosecuted much more comprehensively than today. I think most criminals do make some kind of risk/reward calculation. Even the nazis did that when they dug up mass graves and tried to hide the evidence.
Cool, so what are you going to do about a China, and what it's doing to its minorities? It is so big, powerful, and vital to global trade. Are you only going to enforce these things on weak countries? Or are you willing to go to war against China?
Just like nothing really happened to Russia for invading and still supporting Ukrainian border conflict. Israel's atrocities vs gaza strip and pushing out their border. US committed war crimes, white phosphorous drone strikes in random countries.
As you said only weak countries are targeted by the justice.
I thought it notable that the faith wasn't named in the lede-in.
Although 'church' denotes a Christian house of worship, it is also a generic, western term. I am accustomed to seeing the faith expressly identified, in the build-out to a story like this.
I don't think it's absence is anything other than benign, however.
26 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 75.7 ms ] threadIn Addis Ababa the feeling was.. electric. People were so hopeful and happy. Everyone was talking to me about Abiy and how everything was changing.
Then I traveled around the country, further and further north. I visited Tigray - not the place where the massacre happened, but very close by. Not the church in the articles, but many like it.
And then (long story) I had an opportunity to visit a military camp at the Ethiopia/Eritrea border... and then you start to realize how complicated everything is. Ethiopia has a border on Google Maps, but that doesn't mean the people in the north see things the same was as in Addis Ababa.
What is a national border anyway if you define yourself more by your tribe than your so called nation?
The people in Ethiopia are fantastic and I hope some peace can come eventually.
> Ethiopia has a border on Google Maps
IIUC Google Maps has more than version of some contested borders, displaying one or the other depending on where you view it from (eg. India or China). I’m curious how OSM handles this.
There were some tense moments with huge city wide protests and this was down south not far from Addis. To me things were not feeling so stable...
The North and even the Tigray region seemed fine and normal to me. I heard a lot of complaints from people about government back in Addis.
So sad to see what's happening there. I agree, the people are fantastic and it's a very unique country.
Largely irrelevant.
The nation state concept was rolled out worldwide over the last 300 years.
It introduces some opportunities like compartmentalizing laws to your advantage but it isn't really relevant to the land.
The counterfactual view of "if only there were someone there to protect them," only marginally reduces the massacre to a battle where many people are still killed, albeit with some likelihood of there being at least some survivors. If we ask what could have prevented a battle, it's what hypothetically prevents every battle, which is, if not the cost/benefit to the combatants, at least the risk/reward yields some kind of equilibrium where people aren't killing each other. (I sympathize with the american 2A conservative view that reduces to preferring battles to massacres, but even they would agree most prevention is upstream of that.)
Massacres are not random, they work for the people who order them. They are not about taking territory or defending it, they are a demonstration meant to instill terror so that a target people will not fight or resist. It creates a fear that overtakes rational self in the population and reduces them to acting on fear instead of as people. The economics of brutality are such that local atrocities have a low risk and high reward that reduces the cost and effort to dominate the rest of the population. To think this way you must already see people as liquid and interchangeable, like Stalin's comment that the death of one is a tragedy but the deaths of many is a statistic. The men who ordered this massacre operate on that view.
This particular story of mothers binding the hands of their sons to prepare them for execution raises the question we ask about every other historical massacre, which is, "why didn't they resist?" The question itself gets attacked as blaming victims, but it's much more nuanced than that. The answer is because they were lied to. They didn't resist because they believed they could sacrifice their way out and that they were saving themselves and others by not resisting. History tells us over and over that they aren't.
How to prevent massacres? I don't know, but I do know we have to look at them coldly. The only thing I can see is that it's way upstream of the events themselves, and the necessary condition for every single one is a lie and a deception, and that deception is what we recognize as the real capital-E evil in all of it. We might not be able to prevent future massacres, but every person has the capacity to resist deception, and also to name it as what we recognize as evil. If you detect cancer early, you can stop it, but if you let it go, it consumes the body. The same can be said for deception, where all live with a little, but unchecked, it is consuming.
It can be subtle, but generally if the "others" are identified with attributes like "inferior", "threat", "danger", etc., the society is on track for massacre or war. The stronger this division is, the closer the society is to some atrocity or another.
If the side that's "othering" a group has great or vastly imbalanced power, then the result is likely to be a massacre. If not, then it's likely a war will occur.
It's sometimes hard to tell if a group is being "othered", but generally if you can replace a generalization with the word "others" or "those people" and it sounds sinister, then that's probably what's happening.
Examples:
"The Patriots defeated the Giants."
Rephrased: "The Patriots defeated the others."
Not sinister; no threat of massacre/war.
"The Russians attacked our voting infrastructure in 2016."
Rephrased: "The others attacked our voting infrastructure in 2016."
Somewhat sinister; possibly war.
"Muslims have attacked two buildings in New York.".
Rephrased: "Those people have attacked two buildings in New York."
Sinister; risk of massacre.
"Whites are responsible for implicit racism by nature of their history of oppression."
Rephrased: "The others are responsible for implicit racism..."
Somewhat sinister; possible war or massacre.
"Adults are increasingly falling into debt."
Rephrased: "Those people are increasingly falling into debt."
Not sinister.
"Blacks are responsible for 5x more murders than whites."
Rephrased: "Those people are responsible for 5x more murders than us."
Sinister; possible massacre.
The frequency and intensity with which you witness these types of phrases—especially in the face of increasing generalization that captures less and less aspects of individuality—the closer you are to something bad happening.
And if it's accepted as de facto with no room for nuance or argument, then your society is likely on the precipice of atrocity.
The best way to fight it? Recognize when it happens and call it out for what it is: dehumanization.
Othering and deception, are necessary conditions, unless there is an example of a massacre where these were not present. The sufficient conditions, who knows, I think that's in the details of the otherness and psychopathy of the leadership, but the sufficient conditions to make it possible are more complex.
AFRICOM plays a huge part in geopolitical events across the region. Kick them off the continent along with European colonialists still deploying troops to the region.
Until today France still launders its war money in Gabon but it's chicken-shit and whataboutism to even attempt enumerating anything.
There isn't any solution (at least not a non-hypocritical one) that anyone from the West could suggest. Seriously fighting this and not succumb to hypocrisy would mean you're immediately crossing into "terrorism" territory.
I know that the first world countries of today had to go through their share of pointless massacres, but I always thought the amount of stupid tribal warfare had been somehow tied to the state of the world, the available technologies and the state of knowledge, at least to some extent. As in now that we have Facebook in most parts of the world the people can see better that it's just people like them on the other side, making memes, living their lives, having families. Guess I was wrong.
Also if "let it play out" is actually the best we can do, I wonder whether it makes the civilians' lives better when we supply modern weapons (as in AK-47s instead of machetes) to the conflict zones and whether this makes the conflicts longer, shorter and more or less violent? This is an actual question.
no. ideally "we" use sanctions and economic incentives, but also all the troops should go home or only remain there for civil support (clean up, distribute aid, lot of non-capitalistic, socialist ideas I have as a European which most Americans would hate like the plague). Secondly, people like Eric Prince and other Blackwater, "Wagner Group" type private terrorists should be prosecuted by the ICC. And "we" make the US play by the same rules as they dish out to the rest of the world.
any "call for peace" from the West can never not be hypocritical. Even if we would try, it's a silly pipe dream that will never play out in our universe. (nor is any other reality that advocates for a world without war and blood). But the least we can do IMHO is to _not_ continue what we've been doing since hundreds of years in that part of the world ("protecting our interests abroad" as the US call it). the only thing to be on the right side here morally is to clean up our own act so that nobody in our own countries thinks ICE and children in cages are justifiable. Or that it's OK that refugee children and families get separated, raped and rotting in our FRONTEX secured Greek islands.
Make room in the prisons for all these criminals running companies and not paying their taxes and maintain the death penalty (where it exists) only for white-collar crime or those that abuse the power they've been given (law enforcement & any public office).
Literally any crazy idea that improves society in our own countries would be better than keeping troops in Africa. And none of these idealistic suggestions above (insert your own dreams and lunacy if you think you can do better) will play out the way we want them. But nothing good can come for us in the West if we pretend we're "the good guys" who bring "democracy" and "equal opportunity" or whatever we believe that we're doing there. What we stand for in reality in these countries is hypocrisy, black sites, drones, legalized torture & kidnapping, foreign meddling, ... so apologies I don't believe it when we're saying "we must stay there because we are the lesser evil" or whatever BS
The only safeguard is to incentivize that people mind their own business.
Just like nothing really happened to Russia for invading and still supporting Ukrainian border conflict. Israel's atrocities vs gaza strip and pushing out their border. US committed war crimes, white phosphorous drone strikes in random countries.
As you said only weak countries are targeted by the justice.
Saudi’s really know how to run things
Although 'church' denotes a Christian house of worship, it is also a generic, western term. I am accustomed to seeing the faith expressly identified, in the build-out to a story like this.
I don't think it's absence is anything other than benign, however.