As violence & grievances, on the one hand, and ill-conceived triumphalism, on the other, denies reason of its discursive space, #Ethiopia needs multi-layered dialogue and healing more than ever.

THREAD!

In the last few years, Ethiopia has shown chronic symptoms of a society in which the arc of the values that used to glue the nation together has been eroded. Without values of civility and moderation, humans are often reduced to mere animality.

Some grievances and popular anger had their logics. There were injustices committed often against poor citizens. These grievances have, however, been hijacked by political opportunism. Pitting people against each other is being increasingly used as a shortcut to power.

As a result, difference, especially of ethnic nature & religious nature, has become a crime on and of itself. This is because the epistemic behaviour of the society is now increasingly coloured by mutual suspicion.

When mutual mistrust filters down to ordinary life, atrocious acts do not need an evil genius. Everyday people could be weaponised.

Hannah Arendt – a Jewish social theorist who personally witnessed the horror of holocaust – has grappled with the ordinariness evil. In her observation as a reporter and academic, one person emerges as a symbolic figure: Adolf Eickmann.

Eickmann was someone who used to facilitate the transportation of Jews to gas chambers. We often imagine monsters when we think of the actors of holocaust. But, what Arendt discovered in Eickmann is an unremarkable individual.

He used clichés when he stood in the court, and even found it difficult to follow thought trails of others. Moreover, to her surprise, he didn’t harbour a strong hatred towards Jews.

During his trial, he portrayed himself as an obedient bureaucrat whose mission was carrying out what he has been told by high ranking Nazi officials. He said he was shaken and horrified when he saw people being gassed to death.

It was this observation that gave birth to Arend’s famous phrase, “the banality of evil”. She then wrote on her Eickmann in Jerusalem: A Report on Banality of Evil, “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor..

sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

Citizens need to be coached into being persons (who can think for their own), not instruments. This is because, as Ardent rightly said, the greatest atrocities in the world were committed by individuals who refused to be persons.

Ethiopia needs to unlearn mutual suspicion and re-learn good old ways of talking with one another and seeking truth and justice through dialogue instead of force. Elders and religious leaders need to reclaim their natural position instead of fanning the flames of violence.

END.