Re: ETHIOPIA & PAN-AFRICANISM
Why did Ethiopia’s Prime Minister blame African Americans for their victimization?
8 October, 2020by Asafa Jalata
African Americans’ ongoing struggle for equality should be seen as an inspiring lesson for other subjugated peoples.
Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister of Ethiopia, who came to power primarily as the result of the Oromo youth protest movement known as Qeerroo, has talked about cultural attitudes behind different communities’ relative success twice in the last two years by comparing the development of Jewish Americans and the underdevelopment of African Americans.
Abiy argued that Jews have become prosperous and powerful Americans by forgetting their past oppression, while Blacks have caused their own suffering and underdevelopment by focusing on their past victimization.
The 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner asserted that American Jews collectively decided to avoid dwelling on their past mistreatment and to look forward to their future achievement. On the contrary, he said, by focusing on their racial oppression and exploitation and by ignoring their future, African Americans have remained at the bottom of U.S. society.
Presumably to try and encourage Oromo to look forward and not backwards, this is a translation of what Abiy said in Afaan Oromo on 30 October 2019 a town hall meeting in eastern Oromia following violence earlier that month:
“70-80 years ago, in the United States, two groups of people were discriminated against: the Jews and the Blacks. The Jewish people used to be tortured, imprisoned, and denied jobs. The Blacks faced the same fate. You know the Germans killed the Jews and many of those who survived fled to America. Israel did not exist then, and they [Jews] were scattered all over the world.
The Jews made a decision as a people: they said ‘yesterday we were tortured, oppressed, and discriminated against. If we merely continue to talk about the past, we won’t go far enough. We need to have a winning vision so that we will be equipped with better knowledge and wealth than the Whites, who have been victimizing us, and then ruled us.’
On the other hand, the Blacks continue to sing, and complain about being oppressed and tortured, saying the Whites did this and that to us. To this day, they [Blacks] have not gotten anywhere. What about the other guys [the Jews]? The media belongs to them; the banks belong to them; everything belongs to them! While sitting there [in the U.S.], they [Jews] protect and support the small country Israel. Every policy of the United States on Arab countries [Middle East] is entirely decided by the Jews because they have so much power.”
The premier also made similar comment in Amharic when he spoke to a group of artists in Addis Ababa on 27 June 2018:
“During the long American system of [racial discrimination], the most victimized segments of the society were the blacks and Jews. Both were tortured, oppressed, imprisoned, and denied the right to work and acquire properties.
The difference is, after the civil rights movement, the songs, poems, films, and dramas of the Jews became forward-looking; they became about conquering the world and economic empowerment.
Blacks, on the other hand, simply lamented about their history of torture, murder, and so on.[audience smile and chuckle]; making the current generation [of blacks] to live in the past. While the Jews made their people live for tomorrow.
Less than fifty years later, Jews became prosperous and powerful while Blacks became freed poor- they are granted freedom, free to sing, but unable to get out of poverty.”
Leaving aside Abiy’s employment of anti-Semitic tropes, did American Jews really develop by looking to their future and forgetting their past? Have African Americans victimized themselves by perpetuating their own underdevelopment through focusing on their past victimization as the prime minster claimed?
To understand the relevance of Abiy’s argument, one needs to understand that the Ethiopian empire-state he leads has a history of colonialism, slavery, terrorism, genocide, and racism against which the Oromo, Sidama, Somali, Qimant, Agew, Wolayta, and others are struggling while narrating their past and present victimization.
In his speeches, the prime minister implicitly discredited the narratives of these colonized and victimized groups in order to rationalize and legitimize the crimes of the Ethiopian government through inventing a false narrative about African Americans.
Being discriminated against in their home countries, Jews began emigrating to the U.S. in the mid-17th century. The first group of Jews came from Brazil and settled in New Amsterdam, New York, in 1654. Most of these Jews were merchants and established businesses in American colonial ports such as New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah.
In addition, in the 1840s, German Jews responding to social upheavals began emigrating to the U.S. in significant numbers, and at the beginning of World War One their number reached 250,000. After 1880, pushed out by overpopulation, oppressive systems, and poverty, Eastern European Jews started to emigrate to the U.S..
Between 1880 and 1924, more than two million Jews from locations including Austria-Hungary, imperial Russia, and Romania arrived and settled in the U.S.. Overall, since they were not enslaved in this country, American Jews were able to maintain their history, culture, language, psychology, identity, and religion, which have been the foundation of their survival as a people, as well as the engines of their sociocultural, economic, and political development.
In contrast, beginning in 1619, the ancestors of African Americans were merchandized by European slavers and their African collaborators and forcefully brought to the 13 colonies that later became the U.S.. Overall, between the early 17th and the last decades of the 19th century, European slave traders and their African collaborators sold and transported between 13 and 15 million Africans to the Americas.
African-descendent slaves lived under bondage and terror until 1863-1865, when the system was defeated in the process of the American Civil War. Black people in America were stripped of their identity, culture, history, languages, names, and religions and forced to take those of Anglo-Americans during racial slavery.
After the legal abolition of racial slavery, racial oppression and exploitation continued by another name—segregation or Jim Crow laws—until the mid-1960s. These injustices were enforced by U.S. governments, paramilitary groups such as the White Citizens’ Council, the American States Rights Association, the National Association for the Advancement of White People, the Ku Klux Klan, as well as a white society practiced torture and lynching, which were forms of terrorism. These criminal acts were committed to maintain a racial hierarchy and white privilege.
During racial slavery and segregation, millions of African Americans were not allowed to use the fruits of their labor to accumulate wealth but were forced to enrich the white capitalist class and white society which emerged as a hegemonic world power in the mid-20th century. They suffered in ‘the belly of the beast,” while acting as its backbone and helping to make it the richest and the most powerful country in the world.
They helped build the country through suffering, deprivation, and by working day and night. In the systems of racial slavery, which was an ultimate denial of human freedom, and racial segregation, African Americans were forced to enrich white slave owners, and later white society, and contributed to the development of the U.S. for almost three and a half centuries.
In contrast, American Jews arrived in the U.S. as businesspeople and free workers. In this way they maintained control over their wealth and labor. Despite the fact that they were discriminated against because of their religion and ethnic identity, American Jews were allowed to achieve generational and intergenerational upward mobility by culturally and structurally assimilating into white society through open access to political and economic opportunities because they were not slaves and they were not black. They never faced racial segregation like African Americans in this country.
Formal racial segregation continued in the U.S., mainly in the South through the 1960s; white establishment and society excluded most African Americans from the cultural, political, and economic resources of the country.
During racial segregation, African Americans were terrorized and lynched by terrorist organizations such as KKK, which were allowed by the U.S. federal, state, and local governments to dehumanize and kill Black Americans in order to maintain a racial hierarchy and white privilege. The situation began to shift when African Americans engaged in the Civil Rights Movement and the black liberation struggle to change their deplorable conditions.
Continue reading and watch the video https://www.ethiopia-insight.com/2020/1 ... imization/
8 October, 2020by Asafa Jalata
African Americans’ ongoing struggle for equality should be seen as an inspiring lesson for other subjugated peoples.
Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister of Ethiopia, who came to power primarily as the result of the Oromo youth protest movement known as Qeerroo, has talked about cultural attitudes behind different communities’ relative success twice in the last two years by comparing the development of Jewish Americans and the underdevelopment of African Americans.
Abiy argued that Jews have become prosperous and powerful Americans by forgetting their past oppression, while Blacks have caused their own suffering and underdevelopment by focusing on their past victimization.
The 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner asserted that American Jews collectively decided to avoid dwelling on their past mistreatment and to look forward to their future achievement. On the contrary, he said, by focusing on their racial oppression and exploitation and by ignoring their future, African Americans have remained at the bottom of U.S. society.
Presumably to try and encourage Oromo to look forward and not backwards, this is a translation of what Abiy said in Afaan Oromo on 30 October 2019 a town hall meeting in eastern Oromia following violence earlier that month:
“70-80 years ago, in the United States, two groups of people were discriminated against: the Jews and the Blacks. The Jewish people used to be tortured, imprisoned, and denied jobs. The Blacks faced the same fate. You know the Germans killed the Jews and many of those who survived fled to America. Israel did not exist then, and they [Jews] were scattered all over the world.
The Jews made a decision as a people: they said ‘yesterday we were tortured, oppressed, and discriminated against. If we merely continue to talk about the past, we won’t go far enough. We need to have a winning vision so that we will be equipped with better knowledge and wealth than the Whites, who have been victimizing us, and then ruled us.’
On the other hand, the Blacks continue to sing, and complain about being oppressed and tortured, saying the Whites did this and that to us. To this day, they [Blacks] have not gotten anywhere. What about the other guys [the Jews]? The media belongs to them; the banks belong to them; everything belongs to them! While sitting there [in the U.S.], they [Jews] protect and support the small country Israel. Every policy of the United States on Arab countries [Middle East] is entirely decided by the Jews because they have so much power.”
The premier also made similar comment in Amharic when he spoke to a group of artists in Addis Ababa on 27 June 2018:
“During the long American system of [racial discrimination], the most victimized segments of the society were the blacks and Jews. Both were tortured, oppressed, imprisoned, and denied the right to work and acquire properties.
The difference is, after the civil rights movement, the songs, poems, films, and dramas of the Jews became forward-looking; they became about conquering the world and economic empowerment.
Blacks, on the other hand, simply lamented about their history of torture, murder, and so on.[audience smile and chuckle]; making the current generation [of blacks] to live in the past. While the Jews made their people live for tomorrow.
Less than fifty years later, Jews became prosperous and powerful while Blacks became freed poor- they are granted freedom, free to sing, but unable to get out of poverty.”
Leaving aside Abiy’s employment of anti-Semitic tropes, did American Jews really develop by looking to their future and forgetting their past? Have African Americans victimized themselves by perpetuating their own underdevelopment through focusing on their past victimization as the prime minster claimed?
To understand the relevance of Abiy’s argument, one needs to understand that the Ethiopian empire-state he leads has a history of colonialism, slavery, terrorism, genocide, and racism against which the Oromo, Sidama, Somali, Qimant, Agew, Wolayta, and others are struggling while narrating their past and present victimization.
In his speeches, the prime minister implicitly discredited the narratives of these colonized and victimized groups in order to rationalize and legitimize the crimes of the Ethiopian government through inventing a false narrative about African Americans.
Being discriminated against in their home countries, Jews began emigrating to the U.S. in the mid-17th century. The first group of Jews came from Brazil and settled in New Amsterdam, New York, in 1654. Most of these Jews were merchants and established businesses in American colonial ports such as New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah.
In addition, in the 1840s, German Jews responding to social upheavals began emigrating to the U.S. in significant numbers, and at the beginning of World War One their number reached 250,000. After 1880, pushed out by overpopulation, oppressive systems, and poverty, Eastern European Jews started to emigrate to the U.S..
Between 1880 and 1924, more than two million Jews from locations including Austria-Hungary, imperial Russia, and Romania arrived and settled in the U.S.. Overall, since they were not enslaved in this country, American Jews were able to maintain their history, culture, language, psychology, identity, and religion, which have been the foundation of their survival as a people, as well as the engines of their sociocultural, economic, and political development.
In contrast, beginning in 1619, the ancestors of African Americans were merchandized by European slavers and their African collaborators and forcefully brought to the 13 colonies that later became the U.S.. Overall, between the early 17th and the last decades of the 19th century, European slave traders and their African collaborators sold and transported between 13 and 15 million Africans to the Americas.
African-descendent slaves lived under bondage and terror until 1863-1865, when the system was defeated in the process of the American Civil War. Black people in America were stripped of their identity, culture, history, languages, names, and religions and forced to take those of Anglo-Americans during racial slavery.
After the legal abolition of racial slavery, racial oppression and exploitation continued by another name—segregation or Jim Crow laws—until the mid-1960s. These injustices were enforced by U.S. governments, paramilitary groups such as the White Citizens’ Council, the American States Rights Association, the National Association for the Advancement of White People, the Ku Klux Klan, as well as a white society practiced torture and lynching, which were forms of terrorism. These criminal acts were committed to maintain a racial hierarchy and white privilege.
During racial slavery and segregation, millions of African Americans were not allowed to use the fruits of their labor to accumulate wealth but were forced to enrich the white capitalist class and white society which emerged as a hegemonic world power in the mid-20th century. They suffered in ‘the belly of the beast,” while acting as its backbone and helping to make it the richest and the most powerful country in the world.
They helped build the country through suffering, deprivation, and by working day and night. In the systems of racial slavery, which was an ultimate denial of human freedom, and racial segregation, African Americans were forced to enrich white slave owners, and later white society, and contributed to the development of the U.S. for almost three and a half centuries.
In contrast, American Jews arrived in the U.S. as businesspeople and free workers. In this way they maintained control over their wealth and labor. Despite the fact that they were discriminated against because of their religion and ethnic identity, American Jews were allowed to achieve generational and intergenerational upward mobility by culturally and structurally assimilating into white society through open access to political and economic opportunities because they were not slaves and they were not black. They never faced racial segregation like African Americans in this country.
Formal racial segregation continued in the U.S., mainly in the South through the 1960s; white establishment and society excluded most African Americans from the cultural, political, and economic resources of the country.
During racial segregation, African Americans were terrorized and lynched by terrorist organizations such as KKK, which were allowed by the U.S. federal, state, and local governments to dehumanize and kill Black Americans in order to maintain a racial hierarchy and white privilege. The situation began to shift when African Americans engaged in the Civil Rights Movement and the black liberation struggle to change their deplorable conditions.
Continue reading and watch the video https://www.ethiopia-insight.com/2020/1 ... imization/