Just finished reading a book about the insane and corrupt rule and downfall of Haile Selassie...
some very funny quotes...
Page 98, The Emperor, Ryszard Kapuściński...
Z.S.-K.:
A year after the Gojam uprising - which by showing the furious and unrelenting face of the people stirred the Palace and threw a fright into the dignitaries (And not only them: we servants also started getting the creeps) -= a singular misfortunate happened to me: my son Hailau, a university student in those depressing years, began to think. That's right, he began to think, and I must explain to you, my friend, that in those days thinking was a painful inconvenience and a troubling deformity. His Unexcelled Majesty, in his incessant care for the good and comfort of his subjects, never spared any efforts to protect them from this inconvenience and deformity. Why should they waste the time that ought to be devoted to the cause of development, why should they disturb their internal peace and stuff their heads with all sorts of disloyal ideas? Nothing decent or comforting could result if someone decided to think restlessly and provocatively or mingle with those who were thinking. And yet my harebrained son committed exactly that indiscretion. My wife was the first to notice it. Her maternal instinct told her that dark clouds were gathering over our home, and she said to me one day, "Hailu must have striated to think. You can see that he's sad." That's how it was then. THose who surveyed the Empire and pondered their surroundings walked sadly and lost in thought, their eyes full of troubled pensiveness, as if they had a presentiment of something vague and unspeakable. Most often one saw such faces among students, who, let me add, were causing His Majesty a lot of grief. It truly amazes me that the police never caught the scent, the connection between thinking and mood. Had the made that discovery in time they could easily have neutralized these thinkers, who y their snorting and malicious reluctance to show satisfaction brought so many troubles and afflictions on His Venerable Majesty's head.
The Emperor, however, showing more perspicacity that his police, understood that sadness can drive on to thinking, disappointment, waffling, and shuffling, and so he ordered distractions, merriment, festivities, and masquerades for the whole Empire. His Noble Majesty himself had the Palace illuminated, threw banquets for the poor, and incited people to gaiety. When they had guzzled and gamboled, they gave praise to their King. This went on for years, and the distractions so filled people's head, so corked them up, that they could talk of nothing but having fun. Our feet are bare, but we're debonair, hey ho! Only the thinkers, who saw everything getting gray, shrunken, mud-splashed, and moldy, skipped the jokes and the merriment. They became a nuisance. The unthinking ones were wiser; they didn't let themselves get taken in, and when the students started holding rallies and talking, the nonthinkers stuffed their ears and made themselves scarce. What's the use of knowing, then it's better not to know? Why do it the hard way, when it can be easy? Why talk, if you're better of keeping you mouth shut? Why get mixed up in the affairs of the Empire, when there's so much to do closer to home, when there's shopping to be done?
Well, my friend, seeing what a dangerous course my son was sailing, I tried to dissuade him, to encourage him to participate in amusements, to send him on excursions. I would even have preferred that he devote himself to nightlife rather than to those damned demonstrations and conspiracies. Just imagine my pain, my distress: the father in the Palace, the son in the anti-Palace. In the streets I'm protected by the police from my own son, who demonstrates and throws rocks. I told him over and over again, "Why don't you give up thinking? It doesn't get you anywhere. fRoget it. fool around instead. Look at other people, those who listen to the wise - how cheerfully they walk around, laugh. No clouds on their foreheads. They devote themselves to the good life, and if they worry about anything it's about how to fill their pockets, and to such concerns and solicitations His Majesty is always kindly inclined, always thinking of how to make things smooth and cozy." "And how," asks Hailu, "can there by a contradiction between a person who thinks and wise person If person doesn't think, he's a fool." "Not at all," I saw. "Wise he still is - it's just that he has directed his thoughts to a safe, sheltered place, and not between rumbling, crushing millstones." But it was too late. Hailu was already living in a different world, by then the university, located not far from the Palace, had turned itself into a real anti-Palace where only the brave set foot, and the space between the court and the university increasingly resembled a battlefield on which the fate of the Empire was being decided.
Page 97
His August Majesty chided the bureaucrats for failing to understand a simple principle: the principle of the second bag. Because the people never revolt just because they have to carry a heavy load, or because of exploitation. They don't know life without exploitation, they don't even know that such a life exists. How can they desire what they cannot imagine? The people will revolt only when, in a single movement, someone tries to throw a second burden, a second heavy bag, onto their backs. The peasant will fall face down into the mud - and then spring up and grab an ax. He'll grab an ax, my gracious sir, not because he simply can't sustain this new burden - he could carry it - he will rise because he feels that, in throwing the second burden onto his back suddenly and stealthily, you have tried to cheat him, you have treated him like an unthinking animal, you have trampled what remains of his already strangled dignity, taken him for an idiot who doesn't see, feel or understand. A man doesn't seize an ax in defense of his wallet, but in defense of his dignity, and that dear sir, is why His Majesty scolded the clerks. For their own convenience and vanity, instead of adding the burden bit by bit, in little bags, they tried to heave a whole big sack on at once.
