The Problem With "LF Groupies"

So I picked up the Los Angeles Times, and as it happens every time, I wonder why I ever bother reading the Los Angeles Times.

One Mike Clough opined about Ethiopia in A Losing Bet on Ethiopia, and thus was born another “LF” Groupie, and yet another angel in heaven lost its wings.

The briefest history of the “LF Groupies.”

It all started with one erratic know-it-all.

Michela “Oh So” Wrong was a journalist without a cause. She wandered the deserts of Africa until, the gods must be crazy, she found the Eritrean Peoples Liberation front, EPLF. The heavens opened. Ever since then she’s had a borderline unhealthy, obsessively savior-complex”y relationship with Eritrea… the kind of burdensome, pulsating love that makes her write half-assed books devoid of ... what’s that thing you need to be an authority on something… facts. Hell hath no fury than a guerilla babe journalista with no credibility. As the Grand Dame of “LF”s, Ms. Wrong’s devoted groupie status remained entrenched even when confronted with solid evidence that EPLF’s part-sociopath, part-lunatic leader had turned into a fulltime sociopath lunatic.

So what’s Ms. Wrong gonna do with all that junk in her trunk? Apologize for her myopia? Do a little gut check and ask herself how come she was so astronomically duped? Please. Not when a robust “youa culpa” will do: if only Ethiopia would agree to the border demarcation, Issayas would return to being the studly good Samaritan he really is deep down. Yawn.

And so people took her seriously. Respected media outlets asked her to write sagely about Africa, even as Africans got increasingly irritated by her loquacious renderings of murderous goofballs as brave, misunderstood warriors.

Sadly, all good things must come to an end, and on December 18 Ms. Wrong’s tortured career as a Horn of Africa raconteur came to a screeching halt with her pasty, frenetic “analysis”, How Horn of Africa Brothers Fell Out . Thank you, BBC, for finally putting an end to the madness.

With the kind of dazzling ineptitude she has obviously worked hard to perfect, note her contribution to the dumbing down of human beings.

Reason 1 they fell out… get a intellectual’s scrutiny:

"We Eritreans think with our hearts, but the Tigrayans are very wily, very complicated. Just like the road," any local driver is happy to explain.

Reason 2:

[Meles and Issayas] were undoubtedly close, but brothers can also be intensely, destructively competitive. The relationship was always a stormy one, with each side brooding over perceived slights, chafing over their enforced intimacy.

Give Freud a few minutes to flip over in his grave. I ain’t touching that with a ten foot pole.

She then trashes Ras Alula, who I bet she has read exactly zero about other than the notes she has gotten from the EPLF, but facts have never been a prerequisite for Ms. Wrong. Continue, on ye lady of bottomless indignant self righteousness…

That historical resentment was offset by a more recent sense of cultural superiority.

Then, brace yourself…

Eritreans took pride in their 1890 colonisation by the Italians, a contact, they felt, that had left them better educated and more sophisticated than their neighbours to the feudal south.

Ahh.

Bonus noxious dishonor to journalists everywhere…

If a job was dirty and demeaning in Eritrea, it was probably done by the "Agame", as the Tigrayans were dismissively known.

How about that for scholarly analysis! Worse thing about Ato Issayas, whose halo (nailed to his head by Ms. Wrong herself) has blinded any flickering of rational thought in d’ Madame je adore la EPLF? He’s “famously prickly.” And why wouldn’t he be? The West and the UN have tag-teamed in “betraying” the Eritrean people since dinosaurs roamed the earth.

As the little known 20^th century philosopher and social critic Chris L’Rock put it with nimble yet devastating finesse, “Just shut the fuck up. If you don’t know something, just shut… the fuck… up!”

There, I said it.

You will note in Ms. Wrong’s article that it is all about the Eritreans versus the Tigrayans… not Ethiopians. Wily. Retarded, but wily. Nothing left on the cliché menu for Ms. Wrong to pick. Take a break, Michela. Get your hair done. Enjoy a manicure. Muse about poetry because we have stuck a fork in you. You are done, D-O-N-E.

Scary part is that the only person calling her bullshit is, of course, the one and only Dagmawi, who didn’t even have to sharpen his knife to abzol-lewtly dismiss the “LF Missus.” The Bile of Michela Wrong is her journalistic obituary. (Please God, never let me be on the wrong side of Dagmawi.) I might have missed it, but no Eritrean website has called to question Ms. Wrong’s fantastic assertion that Eritreans loved them the colonization. Maybe they’ve been over her a while ago.

R.I.P, Ms. Wrong. If you are looking for another pet project, I have a dictatorial PTA I would like you to look into.

Continuing with the history of the LF Groupies…

Is there a more genteel LF Lover than our own Jimmy Carter? Oh he could not get enough of the TPLF, led by another “renaissance leader” turned Tina Turner quoting gale force-serpentine maniac. Oh, the love Mistah Jimmy has for the TPLF. Sure, a few hiccups here and there… who hasn’t set up concentration camps in defense of democracy?… but the love lingers between these two, much like the blisters from a cold sore.

And now, boys and girls, bow down and avert your eyes as we, on the nineteenth day of the month of December, in the year Two Thousand and Five crown a new-new “-LF Groupie”, Mike Clough. He shore loves him some OLF.

He lulls us with great prose…

Meles has been a U.S. client since 1991, when his rebel movement seized power. He is good at talking the language of democracy and development — and even more adept at manipulating Western fears of terrorism.

And then… get your knighting swords out:

Most experts on Ethiopia believe that if the Oromo Liberation Front, which was forced to leave the country in 1992, had participated [in the elections], it would have won a majority of votes in the region. That would have left Meles and his party with only a minority of parliamentary seats.

Now I know this was a commentary, but don’t you need facts anymore when you write about Africa these days? Who are these experts, and what do they base this astounding belief in? Would OLF be more popular than the ONC? Why? How? What does the OLF believe in? Ah, you don’t need to know.

After the elections, the Oromo Liberation Front abandoned its sporadic and ineffective struggle against Meles and sought a peaceful accommodation.

Exsqueeze me very much, but does this accurately depict the armed struggle for independence from Ethiopia that the OLF has been waging for the past coupla decades? You think the OLF is fighting for justice? It uses the same imbecilic vitriol used by the EPLF and the TPLF to rally its troops.

The Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) is a political organization established in 1973 by Oromo nationalists to lead the national liberation struggle of the Oromo people against the Abyssinian colonial rule.

Bring out the violin.

The change made by the Tigrean regime, that grabbed power from the Amhara rulers in 1991…

Amhara rulers in… 1991? Mengistu was Amhara? You see, its okay when people just use this kind of bullshit when they are sparring on the innernetz, where the only death is a few brain cells. Unfortunately, when it is part of official policy of a Liberation Movement, it means human beings are dying. Real human beings. The kind that breathe and think. And when you ask people to take on arms and die for you, you better be standing on more solid ground than “Abyssinian colonial rule” which apparently ran until 1991!

With all due respect to Mr. Clough, how have past liberation movements worked for Ethiopia? EPLF? TPLF? Have they been working so superbly that you saw fit to try another one?

In the end, Mike could not resist that Michela Wrong Kingmaker Complex that “experts” so often succumb to.

Washington's refusal to deal with the Oromo Liberation Front is bewildering. The party is one of the few in the Horn of Africa to bridge the Christian-Muslim divide, and there is a strong democratic tradition in Oromo civil society. It has never adopted terrorism as a tactic.

There being a “strong democratic tradition” in Oromo does not, I repeat, does not mean that the OLF has democratic tendencies. Just because someone works in, say, a courtroom doesn’t make that person more law abiding. It is this kind of intractable hubris and logic-deficient generalization that has led to unrelenting bloodshed. How many thousands of Ethiopians who have been told that they are no longer Ethiopians but Oromos (just like the Eritreans were told that they were, um, more civilized thanks to colonialism which no longer makes them Ethiopian) have been used as cannon fodder for a pipe dream of an “independent” Oromo land. You seriously think that the OLF ever thought it was possible to carve out an independent land in the middle of Ethiopia? No. But yet it lets people die for it. And Clough and his bleeding heart can march up to congress and brief lawmakers on Ethiopia without impunity, as Clough did on May 5, 2005 at a hearing of the House Committee on International Relations Subcommittee on Africa.

So after the debacle of the EPLF and the TPLF, Ethiopians are now being told to try on the OLF for size. Shut the fuck up.

Here’s something these “Ethiopia experts” might, I dunno, look into. Since thousands of Ethiopian lives died for a fuzzy concept called EPLF, and thousands more for TPLF, and thousands will die for OLF, do you think we could drop the championing of the –LFs due to...let’s say lack of one shred of goddamed evidence that LFs will miraculously morph into democratic institutions once they get power? Can we try thinking out of the pretty, rose-colored box?

It remains easy for people like Clough to gush out these inanities because he’s not being asked to die for a cause. A few thousand Ethiopian and African lives lost over ethnic maladies is collateral damage to the “experts.” But to Ethiopian mothers and fathers who have been burying their children for decades for causes that change names but not deeds, this is real life. Death is not just a theory in Africa.

It should be clear by now that curing the spoils of the various ethnic differences in Ethiopia will not come from any ethnic-based LF. Ethiopia’s ethnic divisions are not that neat and tidy. Now I’m sorry that’s not convenient to LF-ists and their groupies, but that’s a fact. Trying to understand the complexity of ethnicity in Ethiopia, the years of intermarriages and various cauldrons of melting pots is something that needs deeper thought.

May I suggest we all step back and take a break? Everyone read Berhanu Abegaz’s Ethiopia: A Model Nation of Minorities before getting a boner for another –LF.

Please?

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Take a break from politics- listen to some incredible short stories on Addis Live. I am a late comer to Addis Live and have just been enjoying the music, but the stories segment. I have come to discover, is unbelievably sublime. And for the record, I am unashamed in admitting that… yes, I am infatuated with Bewqetu Seyoum. His work will remind you of the intricate Ethiopian tradition of the spoken word. And his stinging humor… That’s the Ethiopia I want to remember.

His two stories, Ye Eteye Menasho Penseeyon and Ye Eteye Menasho Restaurant will remind of an Ethiopia that stands above, way above, stupid politics.