5 ms·

A religious festival in Ethiopia turned into a massacre

66 points by elwell 6y ago

bjeds 6y ago
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.
- boogies 6y ago
  (offtopic) > 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.
- kilroy123 6y ago
  I was in Ethiopia this time last year, before COVID hit the world. 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.
- vmception 6y ago
  > What is a national border anyway if you define yourself more by your tribe than your so called nation? 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.
  - vinceguidry 6y ago
    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.
    - vmception 6y ago
      Yeah, sadly it works too.
clcaev 6y ago
How is it that such atrocities still happen? How do we need to change ourselves to make the world a better place?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- motohagiography 6y ago
  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.
oriettaxx 6y ago
did you know that population in Ethiopia is 100 millions & the size is two times France?
corobo 6y ago
Such a waste of life. Humanity has a long way to go.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Check out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Mina_stampede https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Mina_stampede Saudi’s really know how to run things
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
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.

66 points by elwell 6y ago

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.

boogies 6y ago
(offtopic) > 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.
kilroy123 6y ago
I was in Ethiopia this time last year, before COVID hit the world. 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.
vmception 6y ago
> What is a national border anyway if you define yourself more by your tribe than your so called nation? 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.
- vinceguidry 6y ago
  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.
  - vmception 6y ago
    Yeah, sadly it works too.

clcaev 6y ago

How is it that such atrocities still happen? How do we need to change ourselves to make the world a better place?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
motohagiography 6y ago
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.

oriettaxx 6y ago

did you know that population in Ethiopia is 100 millions & the size is two times France?

corobo 6y ago

Such a waste of life. Humanity has a long way to go.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Check out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Mina_stampede https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Mina_stampede Saudi’s really know how to run things

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago

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.