Ethiopian History: Fighting more lies about Haile Selassie and the Second Italo-Ethiopian War

Jan 01, 2025

A favorite target of those trying to undermine Ethiopian culture is Haile Selassie. Fortunately, it’s easy to set the record straight.

My book, Prevail, a history of the Second Italian-Ethiopian war, has defied the odds of publishing and managed to stay in print for more than a decade, but like taxes and sunrise, we can still count on morons who keep peddling lies and myths about this conflict and about Haile Selassie.

Sadly, until we get properly funded libraries and genuine African history taught in junior high, high school and at the university level around the world, we’ll keep getting nonsense like the posts from this guy:

In my other article, I dissected how this idiot doesn’t have the first clue as to the history of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, plus other matters. I think what he’s doing is despicable, as he’s trying to dismiss what are genuine achievements of a justifiably proud African people.

On this war, what’s interesting is that Mr. Posturing Would-be Bad-Ass thinks he’s fighting the colonial “enemy,” but he’s actually parroting the white colonialists’ history. Let’s break it down.

No, Italy did not conquer Ethiopia

Britain, France, the rest of the League of Nations, as well as the United States all stood by and did nothing to intervene when Mussolini sent his troops and planes into Ethiopia on October 3,1935. So, it perfectly served these white nations’ interests to claim that Italy “conquered” there and was “victorious” over the Ethiopians after the fall of Addis Ababa in May of 1936. Many English-speaking historians after the war such as the odiously incompetent A.J. Barker—who made several factual errors in his history—kept up this fiction that the nation was “conquered” and downplayed the Italian bombing of Ethiopian civilians.

When the Ethiopians wanted Italian fascists tried for war crimes, the Europeans snootily told them that no, that was another war, supposedly separate from World War Two. They didn’t want Italians in a court dock because Italy had switched sides, and now thugs like Pietro Badoglio—guilty of committing genocide in Libya as well as Ethiopia—were suddenly useful to fight Nazis and supposedly to help Italy from going Communist.

You can see the racism still running through the language of how we look back on this conflict. The Nazis marched into Paris in June 1940, but we reflexively still call their era the “French Occupation.” Why don’t we call it the French Conquest? The Americans, while running the land of their enemy for seven years, routinely referred to it as “Occupied Japan,” knowing full well that if they called it a “conquest,” they’d out themselves as a colonial power—which indeed they already were.

So, no, the Italians didn’t conquer Ethiopia. In fact, even on the day the Italians rolled into Addis Ababa in multiple vehicles like a 1930s Mad Max sequence, there were already Ethiopian arbegnoch, Patriots, in the mountains surrounding the capital and taking sniper shots at them. When I dug through UK Foreign Office records at Kew, I found incredible, often stirring and even comical episodes reported by the British of how the Ethiopian fighters wore the Italians down to the nub, prompting widespread desertions. Historian Ian Campbell set the record straight in his book, The Plot to Kill Graziani, how it wasn’t simply two Eritreans but a whole resistance network that prepared the grenade attack in 1937 that prompted Yekatit 12, the Addis Ababa Massacre.

How sad that to this day in the West, you still get celebrations and histories and movies made about the brave resistance fighters in France and other parts of Europe, but NOBODY will put out a big Hollywood film about one of the most heroic fights against fascism ever.

And how pathetic that some self-loathing creep wants to tear down the legacy of these African heroes.

One of those heroes, in my opinion, was indeed Haile Selassie. He was a complicated figure who no doubt will be debated by historians for years to come, and there is much to pick over and criticize about his post-war rule. But at least when it comes to the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, I would argue his conduct was exemplary and he rose to the challenge of a sinister and sadistic enemy. So—

No, Haile Selassie did not abandon his people when he fled Ethiopia

This libel followed the emperor for the rest of his life and went on long after he was dead. One of the latest versions is from the Kemite clown:

There is a lot to unpack here, and I think it says a lot that this shmuck throws in a homophobic slur. It’s a guess, but I suspect I’m right that he has never been even close to a war. I have visited two. That’s not to say I “saw any action” as the macho types put it, but I did stand two kilometers away from an ISIS-held village in Kurdistan in 2015, and as my regular readers know, I reported from the field in 2021 during the TPLF war, interviewing internally displaced persons and soldiers, seeing the vandalism and looting and burned-out tanks and strolling through a field of bodies.

My point is maybe you ought to visit a war before you beat your chest and rant about those who left one. I have images seared into my brain that I can’t forget, and I was only in the middle of all that as a journalist. I can’t even imagine the memories and traumas of Ethiopians who experienced the attacks, who lost their homes and loved ones. When it comes to the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, we have a grim treasure trove of photos—many from Red Cross units—that show the victims burned by the Italian poison gas and the wreckage from Fascist planes.

Most of the Ethiopians who fought in 1935 and 1936 were lucky if they had rifles at all. Many went up against tanks and artillery with just spears.

And those who claim “Haile Selassie fled” always forget that he was right there for the fighting. He manned an anti-aircraft gun in Dessie. He led the final push of doomed conventional forces against the Italians and suffered with his men when the Fascists dropped yet more poison gas. Even when he did finally leave with his family on the train for Djibouti, at one stop he changed his mind, and supporters had to plead with him not to go back.

So don’t give us this crap that this man was a coward. What would have been gained by his staying? Very recently, some scumbags in Switzerland tried to auction off a medal that was stolen off Ras Desta Damtew, one of the last hold-outs against the Italians in 1936. If nothing else, this despicable behavior gave a chance to highlight what happened to Desta—he was shot while several of the officers and commanders with his army were tortured, the women with his army marched stark naked to detention. Thousands of Ethiopians died in Italian concentration camps like Danane of starvation, disease and neglect. Resistance fighters, when captured during the five-year occupation, were routinely tortured as well.

So, please tell me, what good would it have done anyone, let alone the emperor or his family, for him to stay and end up tied to a post and machine gunned?

The Emperor, Exile and Britain

Kemite guy, not content with queer-bashing, also wants to indulge in lying about Haile Selassie as a slave holder.

But Haile Selassie had no slaves. He went out of his way to try to stamp out the slave trade more than once, which didn’t come to an end until after the war. Paired with this ugly slander is usually the fiction that the emperor ran away with a fortune, but I addressed this in a previous article.

More importantly, the notion that “the British came and removed the Italians from power, reinstituting Selassie [sic] as the puppet king” is not only offensive but wrong on multiple levels.

First, the Ethiopians wanted their emperor back. When the awaj, the imperial decree announcing his imminent return, was dropped as pamphlets from a plane, ordinary people who had suffered for five years under the cruelties of the Italians kissed the sheets of paper and jumped up and down, crying with joy. While the Patriots had been fighting under their own rules and leadership, they had often fought with each other as much as the enemy. The emperor was a natural, logical rallying force. Kemite guy’s line about the British “removing the Italians” is also incredibly insulting to the memory of the Nigerians, Sudanese, Indians and others in the Liberation forces who fought in 1941 to oust Mussolini’s soldiers.

As I argued in Prevail, and I believe I proved it with the historical record, the Ethiopian Patriots and Resistance did more than anyone else to make the final Liberation possible. Someone once asked me if they would have been able to free Ethiopia without the help of the British-led coalition of colonial forces. I answered—and I still believe it—that yes, they would have, only it might have taken a slightly longer time.

Of course, Kemite guy’s real goal here is to portray Haile Selassie as some kind of British stooge. But once again, it’s clear he’s never done much reading. The emperor—and indeed, Ethiopia’s—relationship with Britain was always a complicated one. Yohannes IV had aligned himself with the Brits to fight the Mahdi of Sudan, and they screwed him over with their side-deal to sell Massawa to the Italians. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the father of the famous explorer Wilfred Thesiger, the ambassador to Ethiopia during World War One, was conspiring to help push Lij Iyasu out in a coup led by the Shoa nobles (evidence which I will produce in a book I’ve drafted about imperial Ethiopia).

But by the time we get to 1935, Haile Selassie couldn’t and didn’t trust his British friends, not by a long shot. The sympathetic Anthony Eden tried his best to help as an ambassador and later as Foreign Affairs Secretary despite getting undermined by British prime ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. It was Baldwin’s regime that insisted on pushing the infamous Hoare-Laval Pact, which would have given away half of Ethiopia to Mussolini—a pathetic Czechoslovakia-like giveaway that Haile Selassie turned down flat.

Now if the emperor were some kind of colonial tool, wouldn’t he have accepted it?

That sleazy deal was co-authored by French prime minister Pierre Laval, who was on the phone with Mussolini almost continuously as he negotiated its terms with the British. We can take some grim pleasure that the son of a bitch later earned himself a firing squad for helping to lead the Vichy regime. But in 1936, when Haile Selassie had to flee his country, he didn’t go to the land where he was fully comfortable in the language (French). He went to England.

Why? Because the English people welcomed him. They had always supported his efforts, and he knew it. They had filled Trafalgar Square at rallies to support Ethiopia. The British government did not, and an anecdote about Stanley Baldwin is useful for showing what was really going on. I wrote about it in Prevail:

Baldwin couldn’t even bring himself to share the same air as Haile Selassie. One afternoon in June, he was taking tea with a colleague on the terrace of the House of Commons. Then, as now, the Houses of Parliament were a big tourist draw, and a small group of Black people seemed to be making a beeline towards his table. It included a diminutive figure wearing a cape. The prime minister of Great Britain obviously hadn’t paid close attention to the photos in the papers, because he had to ask a waiter who it was.

“Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, and some Ethiopians, sir.”

Baldwin, flustered, looked for escape. Haile Selassie’s entourage cut off his direct path out. Where to go? There weren’t many options—not unless he felt like jumping in the Thames and swimming away. Instead, Baldwin shaded his face with a hand and slunk behind some tables, finding another route to hurry back to his office.

Tell us again how Haile Selassie was supposedly Britain’s stooge.

After the Liberation, when Winston Churchill was anxious to try to use Ethiopia for British interests, an aid hastily arranged a meeting with the emperor and asked him what matters he wanted to talk about with the British prime minister.

“None,” snapped Haile Selassie. Anthony Eden would always be welcome back in Ethiopian circles, but Britain could forget about having any substantial influence on the imperial government.

Haile Selassie, Marcus Garvey and More Muddled Portrayals

I can appreciate some hero worship for Marcus Garvey, but again, it would help tremendously if those who want to talk about him and the emperor do their homework. The best biography of Garvey is Colin Grant’s excellent Negro With a Hat, and I relied on it heavily with the author’s permission for my own book just as I combed through issues of Garvey’s newspaper. Copies of The Black Man are surprisingly and remarkably kept in nice bound volumes at a branch of the Toronto Public Library system.

In his ludicrous thread, Kemite guy included this gem:

Okay, there is no context given here. Shmuck posts this, leaving any reader with the implication that Garvey’s views were consistent. They weren’t, and what he leaves out—which is critical—is that Garvey wrote such a grumble because his ego was bruised. I’ll explain.

Garvey drafted almost cloyingly effusive articles about Haile Selassie when Mussolini’s saber-rattling went on before the invasion in 1935. The emperor, he wrote in a July issue was “a sober, courteous, and courageous gentleman.” Even when the emperor was forced to go into exile, Garvey didn’t have any immediate complaints. So, what changed?

When the emperor arrived at Waterloo Station in 1936, Garvey hoped to meet him with a small band from his Universal Negro Improvement Association. But when Garvey approached, Haile Selassie either didn’t see him or apparently ignored him and went on his way.

At first, Garvey went into denial. The snub was “no doubt, advised by his minister to receive the white delegation that waited on him.” (The Black Man, May-June 1936) As time went on, he couldn’t get over this perceived slight. He became more scathing and downright obnoxious in his criticisms of the emperor. For the March-April 1937 issue of his paper, Garvey wrote, “It is a pity that a man of the limited intellectual caliber and weak political character like Haile Selassie became Emperor of Abyssinia at so crucial a time in the political history of the world.” But—

Again, those who like to quote these screeds conveniently forget that in making them, Garvey earned a huge backlash. Subscriptions to his paper nosedived. Staff members quit the UNIA, and its organizer in the States complained that “disgrace stares us in the face.” Garvey—the Jamaican titan deported from America who managed to build a new base for himself in Britain—was reduced to making speeches like any other crank at Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park. At one public debate with the Black activist and journalist George Padmore, he got badly heckled, called his hecklers “riff-raff” and then ranted about Haile Selassie relying on white advisors. (Grant, Negro With a Hat)

When the crowd turned ugly, Padmore had to step in and save him from getting physically attacked.

Idiots like Kemite guy who want to invoke Garvey apparently seem to think he should be the last word for Black responses on the war and Haile Selassie. But there was a range of opinions on it, which you can find wonderfully documented by the late professor William R. Scott in his monumental Sons of Sheba’s Race. It’s no accident that Haile Selassie and the war helped launch the Pan-African movement, inspiring the likes of young Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Ralph Bunche, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, among others.

It amounts to an intellectual crime and a disgusting betrayal of all Black people, not just Africans but African Americans, African Canadians and their Caribbean brothers and sisters, to try to degrade and malign the true history of the war and its powerful influence on Pan-African thought.

In his thread, Kemite guy, with stunning ignorance, writes that “in Ethiopia the illusion of Selassie [sic] as a liberator was not sustained. The people rose up and removed his treacherous Solomonid Dynasty from power.”

Well, no, they didn’t.

The Derg were not “liberators.”

Whatever chance Ethiopia had in the 1970s for replacing the imperial regime with a new democracy, fueled by the inspiration of student protests, was extinguished by a group of soldiers known as the Derg. They were led by a psychopath, Mengistu Haile Mariam, and began their reign of terror by machine-gunning to death 60 military and civilian officials, including three Derg members. You have only to walk into the Red Terror Museum in Addis Ababa to see their handiwork. One estimate put the Derg responsible for killing almost half a million people. In my very first trip to Ethiopia, I met countless individuals whose families were impacted by Derg sadism, and I interviewed at least two individuals who were tortured by Derg officers. I’ve written about the Derg’s complicity in hiding the 1980s famine here, and fortunately, the memoir, Red Tears, by Dawit Wolde Giorgis is now available again in ebook form.

To sweep all these facts under the carpet, to pretend the barbarisms of the Marxist regime that followed the emperor didn’t happen, is yet another insult to Ethiopians. It’s a slap in the faces of cherished elders who lived through those dark years. It’s a disgusting lie shamelessly intended to sucker those too young to know better.

Too bad that this insane approach to just “making history up” has become commonplace. Its influence is demoralizing, but we can’t give in to it.

In the last few years, the relentless tide of misinformation on the Internet and social media has whipped up into a tsunami when it comes to Ethiopia, its culture and institutions.

All I can do is remind those who care that the Lalibela churches were deliberately built within the earth. Unlike the architects for cathedrals in Europe, the builders of Lalibela dug down. They dug in. And so we, too, who care about a magnificent culture, about its institutions and its 3,000 years of history, must dig in and stay like the defiant rocks, calmly holding off each wave.