06-24-2018, 12:43 PM
(06-23-2018, 11:19 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: > Good luck to this daring , courageous, and apparently thoughtful
> man. Ethiopia has been a political cesspool for a long time.
> Here's something surprising. For a country with a largely
> temperate climate (surprising, considering that the country is so
> close to the equator, but it is mostly at high altitudes) it is
> doing very, very badly in economics. No, race is not the issue;
> 'race' is a moral and intellectual cop-out for hollow people. No,
> it is not because Ethiopia has a heritage of nothing but
> savagery. The country has had some eras of sophisticated
> civilization -- just look at the 'antiquities' section of a good
> art museum. Am I right to say that Ethiopia is the most
> under-rated country from antiquity?
There is something surprising about how Ethiopia is handling the
current crisis. I've written about multiple countries that experience
brutal violence -- massacres, rapes, torture, arrests, other
atrocities -- during the Awakening era following a crisis civil war.
These countries include DRC, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi,
Cameroon and, outside of Africa, Syria, Iran, Cambodia. In each case,
the Awakening era violence is a follow-on to the war itself, where
people living in the same villages and streets have to deal with the
fact that both they and their neighbors committed such atrocities.
The level of Awakening era violence varies from mild to genocide, but
there's always some violence.
But that's not the path that Ethiopia is following. The Tigray
government, in power for 27 years, initially met the massive Oromo
protests with violence, but now they're trying something different --
appointing an Oromo leader. This is significantly different than the
other countries that I've mentioned.
Why did the minority Tigrays allow this? Perhaps it was the
mountains, but my guess is that it's the fact that the Tigrays have
only 6% of the population. My guess is that if the Tigrays had 20% of
the population, then they would have resorted to the same violence.
Whether this will lead to a better outcome in the long run remains to
be seen, and frankly I doubt it. In fact, yesterday's grenade attack
may trigger exactly the same kind of violence we've seen in the other
countries.
I'll mention one more example, Thailand. Thailand's last crisis war
was the Cambodian killing fields war, 1975-79, so Thailand was only
peripherally involved. Thailand tried to implement democratic
elections, but they kept getting "hijacked" with elections won by the
dark-skinned Thai-Thai indigenous majority, and not by the
light-skinned Thai-Chinese elite minority that were supposed to win.
So finally the army took over, and there are no longer open democratic
elections in Thailand, and the army doesn't dare reinstate them
because the indigenous Thai-Thais will win again.
So the Thailand example may show what's going to happen in Ethiopia.
Abiy Ahmediat is causing so much trouble for the Tigrays that they may
try the Thai solution of an army coup. We'll see.
(06-23-2018, 11:19 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: > I am one of those 'environmental determinists', someone who
> recognizes that geography is destiny for most countries. Take a
> look at the most developed countries, and you will find that most
> of them are in the zone of temperate climates. Mexico? Its center
> of civilization is Mexico city, a place with a climate basically
> like that of San Francisco (my idea of a climatic paradise) except
> with the rainy seasons inverted. Aside from cold deserts and
> extreme highlands, the only truly under-developed country in the
> temperate zones is North Korea, and that reflects a hideous
> government more than anything else. Or Ethiopia. Yes, it's close
> to the equator, but it is still mostly temperate. Mild climates
> are best for bringing out the sharpest thought for just about
> anything. Silicon Valley was not going to develop in the Sahara or
> Siberia. (OK, you can probably figure that I have read much
> Toynbee on this).
The concept of "Environmental Determinism" looks very interesting, and
it would integrate very nicely with generational theory.
Unfortunately it's too big a project for me to think about, but it's
worth considering.
