AdwaMan TDF

Gebru was describing a historical fact. I fail to see why the validity of that assessment should change because of your particular view of the TPLF, or even its supposed “strategic failure”, that tired phrase perpetually on the tongues of Tigray’s elites, yet rarely accompanied by a serious explanation of what it actually means. If you are serious about locating the sources of Tigray’s national vulnerability, you might begin by examining your own place among the considerable ranks of Tigrayan elites and intellectuals who failed to take Gebru seriously on the historical foundations of Tigrayan nationalism. Worse, you imagined that separating party from state in a postrevolutionary society, where the party had been constitutive of both the state and the nationalism, would be as simple as brushing a stain from one’s teeth. The TPLF certainly has its share of historical responsibility to bear. But you lot, armed with your supposedly superior strategic foresight, were convinced that you could socially reengineer Tigray by cleansing it of the TPLF while somehow preserving the nationalism whose modern political foundations were inseparable from that revolutionary history. Well, look where we are. We have arrived at a peculiar historical conjuncture in which the revolution’s greatest beneficiaries are now devouring the revolution itself. And what is emerging from its ruins is hardly liberal emancipation. To borrow from Walter Benjamin, the failure of revolution prepares the ground for fascistic politics, almost always. That is precisely the political temptation with which you are now flirting, while dressing it in the respectable, and by now excruciatingly tedious, language of liberalism.