Mereja.Forum

Professor Donald N. Levine of University of Chicago's Department of Sociology, who studied Ethiopian history throughout his academic career, in his 2012 interview with ESAT TV shared a story about one of his elite Ethiopian students who had never experienced any hardship his entire life, but was so worried that white people may view him as "backward" due to the abject poverty in Ethiopia that he was willing to exterminate the poor people in Ethiopia so he can compel the whites to change their views on him.

"..... I'll tell you an experience I had that signaled to me that terrible times were ahead for Ethiopia.

I had a student in Chicago, an Ethiopian (and this was around 1970-71) በጣም ጨዋ ልጅ, he was the son of an elite family, and he said "a lot of us are thinking that we should do what they did in Russia to modernize."

And I said to him, do you know that in Russia what Stalin did cost the lives of 20 million people?

And here's what he said.....

"well, they had like 200 million people in Russia. So 20 million dead out of 200 million is 10%.
Ethiopia has about 30 million people, and 10% of that is 3 million people."
Then he said...
"3 million dead Ethiopians would not be too high of a price to pay for progress."

When he said that my heart stopped, because he's the representative of the educated group of Ethiopians who were so embarrassed to be poor, and to be backward that, they thought how can we modernize as fast as possible? And if that means killing 3 million people, so be it!

I'm afraid that kind of thinking is still to be found even today. When the Ethiopian elite say 'blood must flow', it's always other people's blood that must flow, not their own blood, not the blood of their own children, or the blood of people from within their own ethnic group..."