A DISSENTING PERSPECTIVE: Ethiopia Peace Deal is Cover for Western Destruction of a Strong, Independent African State

The complicated political situation in Ethiopia, always a key African nation, is causing something of a deplorable rift among the tiny Western left. We need to avoid this at all costs.

As most of our readers know, since the end of WW2 and the death of FDR, the real left has been pitifully small in the US. The Cold War and the anti-communist hysteria inaugurated by Churchill and Truman in the late 1940s sought to criminalise participation in left politics, and roll back the gains socialists and communists had made throughout the West during the Great Depression, and during the war itself, especially in institutions of working class self-defence, such as unions. The capitalist reactionaries also made sure that academia, the arts, and above all, the media, were purged of cogent anti-capitalist voices. Long decades have passed but the situation has not improved much for the real left, and the world has paid for such absence with numerous tragedies, the Ukraine War but the latest example.

The list of Western capitalism's crimes, betrayals, and grotesque deficiencies is long and need not be repeated here. Suffice it to say that in what passes for democracy in the US and much of the bourgeois world, something had to be created to fill the void of a true oppositional force, and it is here that the US, alarmingly good at manufacturing pseudo-reality, has given rise to a veritable industry of fake leftism. That's why, absurd as it is, in the US the public has been conditioned to believe that in a fake "two party system", the Democrats—and liberals in general—represent a left alternative. The devious right and the paranoid Yahoo right have fortified this political labeling imposture by calling dedicated servants of the Empire and Wall Street like Barack Obama a "communist", and his deeply flawed, onetime Republican healthcare scam, "Obamacare", some sort of commie plot. More recently, the rise of an openly fascistoid, deeply hypocritical Woke imperialism in the age of Clinton, Obama and Biden has brought this nauseating farce to its natural conclusion.

In this clime of wholesale political dishonesty —the inevitable reflection of the advanced capitalist crisis we inhabit—we obviously need a real left more than ever. It's clear, therefore, that if we allow our thin lines to be further fractured, we will be doing the enemy's bidding. Factionalism within the ranks of the real left has long been a real danger. By now, there's simply no fat to spare. Which brings us to this apparently highly divisive issue, the question of Ethiopia.

Let's admit this at the outset: Ethiopia is hard to understand. For more than a hundred years, this country has been in constant change and turmoil, passing through various phases of feudalism, colonialism, rabid ethnic conflict, imperialist invasions and war, and almost every facet of Marxism and foreign meddling. Adding to this, Ethiopia has seen its share of charismatic leaders, from Emperor Haile Selassie, to Mengistu Haile Mariam, the head of the military junta —the Derg—that eventually replaced him with, of all things, a Marxist-Leninist government in the 1970s, when the country enjoyed an alliance with the Soviet Union. It hardly needs mentioning that the ebb and flow of events, and the clash of personalities, from principled to opportunist, and from well informed to misguided, plus the fundamental changes in society, have fueled a wide spectrum of political positions. Marxists, capitalists, and feudalists have changed colors and tendencies, ethno-alliances and international friends more than once; and, the Eritreans, too, a singularly important factor in this historical mix, have also shown shifts in their ideological character. All warring factions can be shown to have made serious mistakes of concept and commission resulting in enormous social costs and—for most outside observers—colossal confusion.

At this point, only a broader perspective can begin to suggest a satisfactory solution to the problems piling up in Ethiopia—in this entire crucial region, actually—so tolerance and respect for diverging leftist viewpoints is essential if we are to sort out the evidence in good faith, while we all strive to strengthen the unity of the anti-imperialist left. In this particular context, Finian Cunningham has a lifetime of activism and a formidable record of lucid anti-imperialist analysis to back his perceptions. It is imperative that fellow populists and multilateralists hear his testimony.—PG