Welcome to the Deep Dive. We're really so glad
you're here with us today. Absolutely. Because,
you know, have you ever really stopped to think
about how we as humans actually process the weight
of history? That is a big question. Right? I
mean, not just memorizing a list of dates for
a history test or, you know, skimming a Wikipedia
page until your eyes completely glaze over. We've
all been there. Oh, for sure. I mean, really
feeling the sheer undeniable reality of the past.
It's rare. So today we're taking you on a journey
to a very specific, deeply impactful destination.
The Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum in Addis
Ababa, Ethiopia. It is. It's a profoundly heavy
place to explore. But an absolutely vital one
because our focus today isn't just, you know,
a walkthrough of a building. We are unpacking
a highly concentrated period of history, specifically
the incredibly complex Ethiopian Civil War and
the devastating campaign known as the Red Terror.
Which is just an intense topic. It is. Our mission
for this deep dive is to look closely at how
a nation physically memorializes a deeply painful
era. We want to abstract the critical insights
from our sources about how human beings process.
massive historical trauma, how we demand accountability,
and really how we preserve memory against seemingly
impossible odds. And I think it's a history that
isn't always front and center in global discussions,
right? Especially for those of us who might be
more familiar with Western historical narratives.
Definitely. It often gets overlooked. But the
way this specific history is remembered and the
actual physical space dedicated to it holds universal
lessons for all of us. lessons about resilience,
and the true human cost of political upheaval.
Okay, let's unpack this. To really understand
the impact, we first need to ground ourselves
in the physical space of the museum itself. Make
us feel it. Exactly. This is a relatively modern
effort. It was established in 2010. Oh, wow.
Yeah, right in the heart of Addis Ababa. And
its primary unyielding purpose is to serve as
a memorial to those who died during the Red Terror.
Which was orchestrated by the Dirk government.
Correct. It was a brutal, brutal campaign. That
year, though, 2010, that really stands out to
me. We aren't talking about ancient history here
or, you know, some dusty ruins from centuries
ago. No, not at all. This is a modern structure.
Built by a contemporary society to house an incredibly
dark, heavy, and very recent past. And stepping
inside is repping. Yeah, when you step inside
those doors, it is not a sanitized, gently curated
experience. Far from it. It is intensely physical.
You are walking past displays of actual torture
instruments. You see walls of skulls and bones.
There are coffins just right there. The physical
reality of it. Right. There are glass cases holding
the bloody, dirt -stained clothes of the victims
positioned right alongside their photographs.
It's a lot to take in. It's a visceral experience
that just refuses to let you look away. And that
physicality is deeply intentional on the part
of the curators. When you're looking at bloody
clothes or the smiling, everyday photographs
of victims. Just normal people. Exactly. Normal
people. Position right next to their exhumed
skulls. You are forced to confront the individual
human cost. You know, it completely strips away
the protective comfort of statistics. Yeah. You
know, when we study large scale conflicts, it
is so easy to let the numbers just wash over
us. Just data points. Right. A thousand casualties
here. Ten thousand over there. It becomes abstract.
Totally abstract. But a photograph. Yeah. Or
a shirt with a tear in it. That belonged to one
specific person. Someone with a family. Someone
with a family, a job, a favorite food, a future
that was violently cut short. Yeah. The museum
uses these tangible artifacts to bridge that
massive gap between abstract historical data
and the very real flesh and blood human tragedy.
I really want you, the listener, to try and imagine
standing in front of those exhibits. It's a powerful
exercise. Because in our daily lives, we are
constantly bombarded with digital information
overload. Oh, constantly. We scroll past headlines
about global crises. We swipe through news stories
of conflict. We can easily just turn off our
screens when it gets to be too much. We have
a built -in buffer. Exactly. We have a buffer.
But how does seeing the actual physical evidence
of history in a room with you... change the way
you absorb that information. You can't just swipe
away a display of actual chains. No. You can't
swipe away the torture instruments used on citizens.
It demands your absolute attention. And more
importantly, it demands your empathy. It removes
the buffer entirely. It completely grounds you
in the stark reality of the events. Right. And
what is equally compelling to me from our sources
is how the museum chooses to guide its visitors
through this reality. The narrative they build.
Exactly. The curation makes very specific narrative
choices. Well, the museum offers free tours,
right? Yeah. Which is an amazing detail because
it completely removes any financial barrier to
learning this history. It ensures the space belongs
to everyone. But the really striking part of
these tours is where the guides choose to begin
the story. Yeah, this is unexpected. You would
think a museum about the Red Terror would start
with the first gunshot. Or the first arrest.
The obvious starting point. But they don't. The
guides begin the narrative from Emperor Hale
Selassie's 80th birthday celebration. Yes. Wait,
how does an 80th birthday party actually trigger
a massive revolution? Was it just a contrast
of wealth? Or was there a specific breaking point
that the guides are trying to highlight? What's
fascinating here is how the museum guides use
a moment of royal celebration as the narrative
anchor for the horror that followed. An anchor
of contrast. Precisely. An 80th birthday party
for a long -reigning emperor implies immense
grandiosity, right? Stability and untouchable
wealth. Right. It looks great on paper. It projects
an image of an empire completely at peace with
itself. But that celebration was happening against
a backdrop of severe cascading crises. Behind
the scenes, everything was falling apart. Yes.
The guides start there to show you the ultimate
breaking point of a fractured society. So it's
about the massive cognitive dissonance. Exactly.
You have the emperor and the establishment, the
nobility, known as the Mequanit, living in this
bubble of absolute luxury while the rest of the
country is collapsing around them. The period
leading up to this was marked by intense, growing
opposition to hail Selassie's rule. Who was leading
that opposition? Well, you had the Ethiopian
student movement gaining massive traction. They
were demanding deep societal changes. Okay. You
also had systemic issues with land reform. The
wealthy Mequannan held tight control over the
land, heavily exploiting the peasantry. So severe
inequality. Very severe. Add to that deep -seated
ethnic discrimination and the economic shockwaves
of the 1973 global oil crisis. This is piling
on. But the most devastating factor was the wallow
famine from 1972 to 1975. I want to pause on
that famine for a second because the juxtaposition
is just staggering. It truly is. You have a massive.
opulent royal birthday celebration happening
in the capital while entire regions of the country
like wallow are experiencing a catastrophic famine
where countless people are starving to death
and the government tried to hide it it's no wonder
the tension snapped it sounds like a powder keg
that was just waiting for a spark it was an unsustainable
situation And that brings us directly to the
1974 coup d 'etat. The breaking point. That coup
is the true pivot point of this era. It marks
the Ethiopian revolution. Right. The military
steps in. It leads to the death of Hale Selassie.
And it results in the complete shift in power
to a Marxist -Leninist military junta. Known
as the Derg. Yes. The Derg. The centuries -old
empire falls, and the Derg takes absolute control.
And then things get worse. Much worse. It is
this new regime that initiates the violent campaign
the museum is dedicated to memorializing. Because
when we talk about the Red Terror, we are talking
about a systematic, incredibly violent campaign
directed at citizens. Citizens who oppose them.
Or who were simply suspected of opposing the
Derg. This wasn't just a battlefield conflict.
No. This was a government turning its weapons
and its secret police on its own neighborhood.
Or an everyday people. The museum outlines how
these political prisoners were treated. And those
torture instruments we mentioned earlier make
it incredibly clear that the treatment was unimaginably
brutal. Designed to completely break them. Designed
to strip away every ounce of human dignity. But
amidst all of that intentional darkness, there's
a detail from the tours that I keep coming back
to. Which one? Here's where it gets really interesting.
The museum guides specifically take the time
to explain how the prisoners secretly communicated
among each other in the cells. Uh, yes. It is
a remarkable, crucial detail to include in a
memorial of this nature. It really stuck out
to me. Think about the environment. We are talking
about extreme repression. The worst imaginable.
Individuals are thrown into overcrowded, unsanitary
cells. They are completely stripped of their
legal rights. Yeah. Subjected to horrific physical
and psychological torture and facing the constant
daily threat of execution. Just a nightmare.
The entire system is designed to break them,
to isolate them and to make them feel entirely
alone. Right. And yet the human drive to connect,
to share information, to maintain. some semblance
of community. It survives even that absolute
nightmare. Just the act of whispering through
a crack in the wall. Or tapping a rhythm. Right,
tapping a rhythm on a plumbing pipe. It makes
you realize that communication itself can be
the ultimate form of resistance. It absolutely
is. But why highlight that? In a museum full
of such large -scale tragedy, what does it change
about how we view those victims? It restores
their agency. Agency. Yes. In an environment
designed to completely break the human spirit
and reduce individuals to mere objects of the
state's violence, the act of secret communication
is a profound testament to human resilience.
It's them fighting back. It shows that even when
a regime tries its hardest to reduce people to
helpless victims, the people fight back. They
retain their deep enduring need for connection.
They stay human. Exactly. By highlighting this,
the museum ensures that visitors remember the
strength the ingenuity and the humanity of the
prisoners rather than just the cruelty of their
captors. That completely shifts the narrative
from pure victimhood to active daily resistance.
It changes the whole tone. But to really understand
the sheer scale of what these prisoners in the
entire country were up against, we need to pull
back a bit. The Red Terror was horrific, but
it wasn't an isolated event, was it? No, it wasn't.
If we connect this to the bigger picture. The
Red Terror is actually situated within the massive,
sprawling, and incredibly chaotic context of
the Ethiopian Civil War. A very long war. A conflict
that spanned nearly two decades, from 1974 all
the way to 1991. I'm looking at the timeline.
of major events from this period provided by
our sources. And the scale of the conflict is
dizzying. It's a lot to process. It is just one
heavy, world -altering milestone after another.
We already discussed the 1974 coup and the fall
of the emperor. Right. But then you have the
massacre of the 60. You have the Red Terror itself.
You have the devastating 1983 to 1985 famine.
Which was a massive global news event. And we
should be clear, that is a completely separate
later famine from the wallow famine that happened
under the emperor. Yes. Two distinct tragedies.
Then there is something called villagization,
a massive peasant revolution and the Hazen Massacre.
It is almost too much history to process at once.
It's relentless. Can you break down some of these
massive shifts? What exactly was villagization,
for instance? Villagization was a disastrous
policy implemented by the Derg. Okay. In an attempt
to control the rural population and radically
restructure agriculture, the government forcibly
relocated millions of farmers. Millions. Yes.
They took them from their ancestral lands and
scattered homesteads and forced them into highly
regulated state -controlled villages. That sounds
like a recipe for disaster. It was. It disrupted
traditional farming practices, destroyed rural
economies, and significantly exacerbated the
suffering and food shortages across the country.
So it wasn't about farming at all. It was about
control disguised as modernization. And the massacres
listed here, the Massacre of the Sixty, the Hausen
Massacre. The Massacre of the Sixty occurred
very early on in November 1974. Right after the
coup. Exactly. The Derg executed 60 prominent
officials of the former imperial government without
trial, cementing their ruthless grip on power.
Sending a message. A very clear message. Later
in the war, the Hasen Massacre stands out as
an example of the sheer brutality inflicted on
everyday people. When was that? In 1988, military
aircraft bombarded a crowded public marketplace
in the town of Hasen, resulting in massive civilian
casualties. A marketplace. Yes. Yes, it is a
relentless sequence of historical traumas. And
what is crucial for you to understand is the
sheer complexity of this civil war. It wasn't
simple. It was not a simple, clean cut, two sided
conflict with the Derg government on one side
and a single unified rebel group on the other.
Far from it. The list of factions and liberation
fronts involved is practically its own textbook.
There were so many. You have the Derg, which
later reorganized into the People's Democratic
Republic of Ethiopia. of the central government.
Yes. But the resistance was incredibly fractured.
You have the EPRDF, which was a coalition that
included the Ethiopian People's Democratic Movement
and the Tigray People's Liberation Front, or
PPLF. That's right. Then there is the AFAR Liberation
Front, the All Ethiopia Socialist Movement, the
Ogaden National Liberation Front, the Oromo Liberation
Front. It's a very long list. How did the conflict
fracture so badly? It seems like every region
and political ideology had its own armed wing.
The fracturing happened because Ethiopia is a
vast, incredibly diverse nation with complex
regional, ethnic, and political histories. That
makes sense. When the central authority of the
emperor collapsed, all those long -suppressed
regional grievances and ideological differences
exploded into the open. A power vacuum. Exactly.
Many of these groups weren't just fighting the
derg. They were fighting for regional autonomy
or specific political visions. And sometimes
fighting each other. Yes. And we also have to
factor in the Eritrean rebels, like the Eritrean
Liberation Front and the Eritrean People's Liberation
Front, who were fighting a parallel, grueling
war for complete independence from Ethiopia during
this exact same period. And if that wasn't complicated
enough, you have the entire globe weighing in.
This is all happening under the massive, overarching
shadow of the Cold War. Precisely. This period
is often referred to in the context of the Cold
War in Africa. Because of the U .S. and Soviet
involvement? Yes. You had the United States and
the Soviet Union, massive global superpowers
projecting their own geopolitical anxieties,
influences and ideologies onto this already fractured
nation. Using it as a chessboard. They were funneling
weapons, military advisors, and financial support
into the region, shifting allegiances to maintain
their own strategic footholds. Which just made
everything worse. This foreign interference poured
gasoline on the fire. It dramatically prolonged
the civil war and increased the lethality of
the conflict. It is like a geopolitical earthquake
that just kept violently shaking for nearly 20
years. A good way to describe it. Multiple rebel
coalitions, shifting borders, global superpower
interference, forced relocation. multiple devastating
famines. It's overwhelming. It is. When you zoom
out and realize the sheer overwhelming magnitude
of that history, it actually makes the existence
of the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum even
more poignant to me. Oh, so? Because a civil
war with a dozen factions, international proxy
wars, and decades of shifting political alliances,
it is incredibly difficult for the human brain
to comprehend. It's too big. It's way too big.
But walking into a silent room and seeing a pair
of bloody clothes belonging to a single victim
of the derg secret police that cuts through the
noise that is immediate that is universally understandable
the museum takes the overwhelming chaotic noise
of the broader ethiopian civil war and distills
it down to its most tragic undeniable human essence
it gives you something tangible it provides a
focal point for the grief That is a very astute
observation. It focuses the lens. It anchors
the sweeping geopolitical history back to the
everyday people who paid the ultimate price.
So what does this all mean? Why does a museum
in Addis Ababa commemorating a campaign for the
1970s matter to you? Listening to this deep dive
right now. The big takeaway. I think it comes
down to the core takeaways about how societies
choose to handle their darkest chapters. Yes.
The fact that this museum was established in
2010 shows a very deliberate, conscious, and
modern effort to confront what happened. They
didn't just sweep it under the rug. Exactly.
It was a powerful statement that the victims
of the Derg, the people who were tortured in
secret, and whose bones are now respectfully
placed behind glass, will never be reduced to
mere footnotes in a dusty history book. They
are given a space. They are given a dedicated
physical space, they are given dignity, and they
are given a permanent voice that speaks to future
generations. And this raises an important question.
about the turbulent aftermath of a fallen regime.
Which is always messy. Very messy. How does a
society actually transition from that visceral
horror to something resembling closure or justice?
Right. If you look at the end of the timeline
provided in our sources, it notes the eventual
fall of the Derg regime in 1991 as the final
major event of the war. But what follows in the
aftermath is just as significant. The trials
of the Derg members. That transition is incredible
to think about. You go from the absolute lawlessness,
paranoia and brutality of the Red Terror. Where
there were no rules. Where citizens are dragged
from their homes and murdered simply for suspected
opposition to the highly organized legal and
structured pursuit of justice through formal
trials. It's a complete 180. That is a massive
structural societal shift. It is the rebuilding
of the rule of law. It shows that true memorialization
isn't just about constructing a museum building.
It is also fundamentally about accountability.
They mean both. Exactly. The trials and the museum
work hand in hand to process the drama. The trials
seek legal, structured justice for the crimes
of the past, while the physical museum ensures
the emotional truth of that past is never forgotten
or rewritten by the future. It is a two -pronged
approach to healing. And the timeline itself
is telling. How so? The war effectively ends
in 1991 when the dirt falls. But the museum isn't
established until 2010, nearly two decades later.
Which tells us that processing this magnitude
of historical trauma takes time. It can't happen
overnight. It cannot be rushed. It requires a
certain amount of historical distance, deep reflection,
and ultimately a conscious collective choice
by a society to look backward. To face it, they
have to choose to stare directly at the most
painful parts of their own history, even when
it hurts, to ensure those mechanisms of terror
are never allowed to take read again. It has
been a heavy, intense journey today. but a deeply
necessary one. I agree completely. We want to
thank you for joining us on this exploration
of the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum and
for diving into the incredibly dense, complex
history of the Ethiopian Civil War that it preserves.
It's not an easy history to sit with. It's not,
but it is a powerful reminder that history isn't
just a collection of dates and geopolitical shifts.
It is made of people, it is carried in memory,
and it is cemented in the physical spaces we
intentionally build to remember them. To leave
you with a final provocative thought to mull
over, think back to the very beginning of our
conversation and how the museum guides intentionally
start their narrative. The birthday party. Right.
They trace the origins of a horrific, nation
-shattering tragedy, not to a battlefield, not
to a political rally, but to a seemingly grand
celebratory event, an emperor's 80th birthday
party. Yeah. It begs a deeply unsettling question
for all of us. How many ordinary public celebrations
happening in our world right now, events that
project an image of perfect stability, wealth,
and success, might actually be viewed by future
historians as the quiet, unrecognized catalyst
for massive, unimaginable historical shifts?
That's certainly something to keep you thinking
long after you take your headphones off. Until
next time, keep digging into the past, keep questioning
the narratives around you, and keep exploring
the history that shapes our world.