Black History Month 2012: Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Red Terror

Mengistu Haile Mariam leads Ethiopia through the Red Terror and the Great Ethiopian Famine of 1984

Ethiopia

Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia belongs with Charles Taylor of Liberia and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe in the Greatest Dictators of Africa Hall of Fame.

In 1974, the tottering regime of 82-year-old Emperor Haile Selassie, which had been overthrown by Mussolini in 1936 and restored by the Allies in 1941, collapsed under the pressure of the Wollo famine, rising energy prices, and student riots.

A military committee called the Derg seized power and overthrew the Ethiopian monarchy. Over the next three years, the Derg proclaimed the advent of Ethiopian socialism and nationalized all the banks and insurance companies in Ethiopia, followed by all industrial and commercial companies, and finally all rural and urban land and urban houses and apartments.

In 1976, Mengistu Haile Mariam appeared on radio and television to announce that Marxist-Leninism had become Ethiopia’s official ideology. In typical Marxist fashion, Mengistu progressively eliminated his rivals in the Derg and launched a series of purges to consolidate power and destroy all opposition to his regime.

The Black Undertow of the urban ghettos was organized into “neighborhood defense squads” called “kebeles” and was armed with the “revolutionary sword” to spread “Red Terror” into the camp of the reactionaries.

During the Ethiopian Red Terror, 10,000 to 20,000 “counter-revolutionary” students, teachers, and intellectuals – most of whom were Marxists who had supported the collectivization of agriculture – were rounded up and executed. The corpses of thousands of children were publicly displayed in the streets of Addis Ababa attached with signs that labeled them “oppositionists.”

The Ethiopian Civil War broke out when the Derg seized power in 1974 and raged until 1991 when Mengistu was finally driven out of power. Eritreans in the north were fighting the Eritrean War of Independence. Somalia invaded the Ogaden in southeast Ethiopia to annex their kinsmen to “Greater Somalia.” Tigray secessionists in the north also attempted to breakaway from the Mengitsu regime.

Ethiopia under Mengistu aligned itself with the Soviet Union and became the most important communist satellite in Africa. A friendship treaty between Ethiopia and the Soviet Union was signed in 1978.

Massive assistance from the Soviet Union and Cuba followed including a Soviet airlift and sealift of tanks, aircraft, artillery, armored personnel carriers, a 17,000 strong Cuban fighting force, and up to 10,000 experts and specialists of various kinds from the Eastern bloc. The Somalis were crushed in the south and the Eritreans and Tigrays were pushed back in the north.

It was in the context of Mengistu’s nationalization and collectivization of agriculture, the shift to state farms in the south, the subordination of the peasantry to urban workers in the cities, and especially the civil war against the secessionists in Tigray and Eritrea – in which everything from mines to napalm to poison gas was used by the military against the rural insurgency – that the disastrous Great Ethiopian Famine of 1984 struck Northern Ethiopia.

Tens of thousands starving Ethiopian peasants descended upon Save The Children relief centers. The sensational images of starving black children were broadcast around the world and became one of the most memorable scenes of the 1980s. The West responded with over $1 billion dollars in relief assistance. Bono organized the Live Aid concert which became one of the most watched television events in history.

While the Great Ethiopian Famine of 1984 was striking Tigray and Wollo, Mengistu was more interested in spending $150 million dollars to celebrate the ten year anniversary of the Ethiopian Revolution. A “Great Hall of the People” was built on the Chinese model. With the help of North Korean engineers, triumphal arches with revolutionary slogans were constructed in Addis Ababa with gigantic red stars displaying the hammer and sickle. Huge posters of Marx, Lenin, and Mengistu were hung around the city.

The slogans around Addis Ababa included “Forward with the Revolutionary Leadership of Comrade Mengistu Haile Mariam,” “The oppressed masses will be victorious,” “Marxism-Leninism is our guideline,” “Down with American imperialism” and “Temporary setbacks shall not deter us from our final objective of building communism.”

In between the Ethiopian Red Terror, the Ethiopian Civil War, and the Ethiopian Great Famine of 1984, 1 million to 1.5 million Ethiopians lost their lives under the “revolutionary leadership” of Mengistu Haile Mariam.

OD commemorates Black History Month 2012 by remembering the greatest disaster in Ethiopian history, not its brief conquest and occupation by Mussolini’s Italy in 1936, but the Red Terror of Comrade Mengitsu from 1974 to 1991 who used the “food weapon” against his political enemies.

Red Terror from Justin Cerato on Vimeo.


About Hunter Wallace 12390 Articles
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29 Comments

  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bono
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Geldof
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holmes_(British_diplomat)
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzNy0F4pwJ8 White Flight in Ireland
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE9SWkofylU Irish Traitors – Immigration
    Bono, Geldof, Sir John Holmes, Andrew Geoghegan, and Valerie Browning are industrious in their destruction of the European races. I cherish the memory of William Pierce. In 50 years will Dublin, Ireland be like Detroit, Michigan?

  2. Do you see how many babies are in the famine video? In conditions like that, one would think reproduction would cease.

    The only way, to at least mitigate mass starvation in that shit-hole, and others like it, is to impose forced sterilization on nearly all of them.

    That is the one solution White people can offer.

    That might send shock-waves of disbelief down the liberal spine, but nothing else has worked, and no amount of charity will cure the root of African squalor.

  3. My understanding us that the regime, deliberately starved them. There was plenty of food to go around. Gob Beldorf’s efforts At charity lined regime pockets. Surely the quicker they are killed off the better?

    However, the burned faces should have left to die.

  4. Meanwhile Irish Nationalist Gerry Adams, who fought for decades to eject the Scot/English/Welsh, British, welcomes in the Nigerians.

    Addio Dublin! Addio Eiran!

  5. I get this when trying to log onto BUGS:

    Forbidden

    You don’t have permission to access /blog/ on this server.

    Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
    Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) DAV/2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_ssl/2.0.63 OpenSSL/0.9.8k Server at whitakeronline.org Port 80

    (Time Warner/Road Runner)

  6. The retarded ‘post-colonialist’ theory that all of Africa’s problems can be laid at the feet of White Imperialists is most obviously exposed as a fraud by Ethiopia. Ethiopa was controlled by the Italians for less than a decade. The Ethiopians have controlled their homeland for thousands of years and still it is a dump.

  7. I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. – Ruth Bader Ginsburg
    http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/02/06/ginsburg-to-egyptians-wouldnt-use-us-constitution-as-model/
    Though the action was then already well developed along the lines described in Camp of the Saints (boat people, the radicalization of the North African community and of other foreign groups in France, the strong psychological impact of human rights organizations, the inflamed evangelization of the religious leadership, a hypocritical purity of consciousness, refusal to look the truth in the face, etc.) in actuality the unraveling will not take place in three days but, almost certainly, after many convulsions, during the first decades of the third millennium, barely the time of one or two generations. – Jean Raspail
    http://www.mnforsustain.org/camp_of_the_saints_bookreview_taylor_sj.htm
    Note that, according to Raspail, if we don’t solve the open borders/non-white tide problem by the year 2050 then Western civilization will be unraveled. White and non-white liberals believe that governments have a moral imperative to prevent famine and genocide throughout the world and that productive whites should support indigent non-whites. Anti-racism is anti-white. Humanitarianism is manipulating and taxing whites to pay for their own destruction.

  8. When I was in somalia, we were told the famine there was also man made. The “war lords” used food and starvation as a weapon. We were also told they learned that trick from ethiopians. I doubt they “learned” it any where. Using food as a weapon is as old as time

  9. Black History Month would not be complete without looking at Black Troops assassinating white officers. My bet it that the cases in Vietnam and other wars involve black NCOs and Privates in disproportionate numbers.

    I am even tempted to think that the reason America faired so badly in Vietnam was the integation of the US Army. If I were a white Captain in the bush wars down there ,with an infantry company, I’d not turn my back on the savages in my company for fear of a knife or bullet in the back. I’d have told my Lieutenants the same thing.

  10. The first principle of war is to starve your enemy. It’s much better than bullets or bombs.

    Chevauchee, scorched earth, laying waste, harrowing…

    Tactics in battle are beside the point 9 times out of 10.

  11. Head Niggers In Chief prefer that they are feared more than they wish to cultivate respect.

    It’s their main weakness. It must have made Mugabe insanely mad to pretend to govern during the 1980s with something approaching an even hand. The cannibal must have been licking his lips at the thought of what he’d do to Rhodesians later on.

  12. Another great post!

    This history dropped down the Memory Hole of “politically correctness” long ago so it is good to see you revive it.

    In fact, these events were almost completely censored from the American public by the Corrupt Liberal Media at the time they happened because they violated two cardinal rules of leftist dogma.

    They accurately show the horrific brutality of a black population and the communists that supported and led it. Accurate reporting about blacks or communists that show them in a bad light are two ultimate no nos of “liberal” reporters and historians.

  13. The stats are astonishing.

    During 1967-68 soldiers in the Mekong Delta pooled their money to pay the person who killed a marked officer, but there were not many fragging cases until 1969. In that year there were 96 documented assault cases; that number increased to 209 in 1970 and peaked in 1971 with 333 confirmed fragging incidences and 158 possible fraggings. By 1969, the war seemed hopeless, and units at the platoon and squad level were refusing orders when they perceived their lives to be at risk. Fragging victims were warned by the discreet leaving of a grenade pin by the entrance of his tent or by the throwing of a smoke grenade into his billet in the middle of the night. If the warning was not heeded, a fragmentation grenade would be used.

    As soon as there was an influx of Ghetto Rats post 69 the white officers and white NCO’s were targeted in very large numbers. It’s almost an untold story of the war. Blacks were not heavily conscripted until 69 and as soon as they were tactical cohesion, strategic cohesion and discipline broke down.

    The black in Uncle Sam’s uniform and forced to fight is no better than a Mau Mau. Sucker punches galore.

  14. Approx 700-800 US officers were assassinated or victims of attempted assassination, by their own men in Vietnam over a two year period.

    55,000 soldiers died during the war.

    if they were all killed in the fraggings 1/60 to 1/70 of all casualties during the war were deliberately self inflicted. More so obviously during that two year time frame. That’s pretty fucked up.

  15. Hi Every-one! Hapy Valentine’s Day!

    I LOVE YOU! (And yes I had booze at dinner!)

    To John – you mentioned “Shaun of the Dead” in that other thread. Well – this nextclip is for you. It’s from the sublime Dylan Moran’s “Black Books” , and it’s possibly
    THE
    MOST
    transcendent moment, ever broadcast, on screen:

  16. Hi Jon – I had a great night! Went out to dinner with the Lord and Master, and then I did go online and send out messages, and then we ….had a lovely night.

    I hope you had a wonderful night with your gal, too.

  17. Did you folks know March 14 and Steak & BJ day? That’s right! There is an actual holiday for men. It was founded in 1816 in honor of St. Valentine’s female cousin, Mary Fellatio, who ran a 5th century bed and breakfast. Legend states St. Fellatio would serve beef and eat meat for all weary travelers, rich and poor, for one month every year in early spring. It was called “Rumps and Humps” month.

    Make sure you remind your significant other about Steak & BJ day this year.

  18. Any story about Ethiopia and the Band Aid concert needs to talk about the incredible fecundity of that God forsaken land.

    A quick look at the CIA factbook will reveal that Ethiopia’s population TRIPLED between 1984 and 2010, to 90 million people created exclusively by shortsighted white intervention.

    Good intentions do indeed pave the road to hell.

  19. Any story about Ethiopia and the Band Aid concert needs to talk about the incredible fecundity of that God forsaken land.

    A quick look at the CIA factbook will reveal that Ethiopia’s population TRIPLED between 1984 and 2010, to 90 million people created exclusively by shortsighted white intervention.

    Good intentions do indeed pave the road to hell.

    crimesofthetimes.com

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