Abyssinia

The Italian fascist war on Ethiopia, 1935-41

Review: Prevail by Jeff Pearce, Simon & Schuster, 2014

Prevail by Jeff Pearce is about the Italian fascist war in Ethiopia in the 1930s. Pearce deals with the 1935-6 invasion, the guerrilla struggle, the British intervention and liberation in 1941, and the global impact of the struggle.

This book is important because the Italo-Ethiopian War is often reduced to a bullet point on a list of ‘events leading up to’ the Second World War, or as an episode in the history of appeasement, with the camera focused on white diplomats tugging their collars. In this book the white diplomats get some attention, but the focus is on African protagonists and their epic struggle against conquest. No doubt there have been other good books in English about the war, but I haven’t happened across them. Neither has popular culture, with the exception of Bob Marley, brought it to the attention of the English-speaking world. Eurocentrism has cheated us of a fascinating story.

I hadn’t really read anything on this topic before, so below is a list of twenty interesting facts I learned from Prevail. I hope they give you an appetite to read further.

Ethiopian troops on the way to the Northern Front, 1935

The Invasion
1. The Ethiopian armed forces were made up primarily of the retinues of petulant aristocrats. These guys were wedded to obsolete modes of warfare and refused to submit to any general plan. At one point the foot-soldiers, when they managed to storm some Italian position, ran all the way back to the rear just to throw trophies at the feet of their emperor – to his immense frustration! It was these organic weaknesses, as much as the shortage of modern weaponry, which made the war an unequal struggle.

2. Emperor Haile Selassie was a retiring and dignified character, to the point of being frustratingly passive at times. But in his modesty he is a foil to the strutting and ranting Mussolini, and at one point in the war he did personally mount an anti-aircraft gun and fire on Italian bombers.

3. The Italians justified their war by claiming they wanted to end slavery in Ethiopia. Humanitarian intervention, in other words. Plus ça change…

4. The fascists started the war by engineering stage-managed ‘incidents’ where they could semi-plausibly claim to have been attacked by Ethiopian troops. Japanese imperialism performed the same tricks in China at the time.

5. After starting the war, the Italian state angled for international sympathy by promoting atrocity stories. One Italian pilot was shot down and his grisly fate at the hands of enraged locals was made into headlines. Meanwhile the Ethiopians were being killed in their thousands. Plus ça change…

6. The British and French diplomats sold Ethiopia down the river. Mussolini admitted in 1938 that if the British government had closed off the Suez Canal, the invasion simply could not have gone ahead. They didn’t even have to start a war with Mussolini! Why did they sell out Ethiopia? One answer is appeasement. But in addition, they didn’t want to support an anti-imperialist struggle which might give dangerous ideas to their own imperial subjects.

This grainy image apparently shows the use of mustard gas, which Italian planes dropped on Ethiopian forces

Global Impact

7. The war was seen all over the world as a proxy struggle over racism and imperialism. Thousands marched against the war in Harlem, New York. There were protests in Ghana (Gold Coast), South Africa, and many other places. News from Ethiopia would trigger brawls and riots between Italian-Americans and African-Americans.

8. A year before the International Brigades were recruited to fight in Spain, thousands of Black people from the US volunteered to fight in Ethiopia. As the last independent country in Africa, Ethiopia was a potent symbol of resistance to white supremacy – even if as an absolute monarchy it was an unlikely icon for progressive forces. But very few of these volunteers ever made it there; the US government cracked down hard.

9. Two Black aviators made it from the US to Ethiopia. One was a prima donna and con artist, the other a dedicated and brave pilot who would go on to fly Haile Selassie’s personal plane throughout the 1935-6 struggle.

Ethiopian guerrillas on the move

Occupation and Guerrilla Struggle

10. The Italian occupation in Ethiopia was incredibly racist, brutal and vindictive, even by the low standards of European imperialism in Africa. There was a massacre of one-fifth of the population of Addis Ababa when the Italian troops and their allies were given three days to loot and destroy the city. this was a reprisal after the Ethiopian resistance tried to assassinate a top Italian official.

11. Guerrilla struggle continued after the defeat of the Ethiopian armed forces in 1936 right up to 1941. Groups called the Black Lions and the Patriots (Arbegnoch in Amharic) carried on a struggle from remote areas. Some key leaders were women. The young men grew massive afros.

12. Sylvia Pankhurst, who was previously well-known as a suffragette and communist, became the foremost champion of the Ethiopian cause in Britain. She printed a newspaper documenting Ethiopian resistance victories. It’s difficult not to admire her dedication to internationalism even though it seems she was uncritical of reactionary features of Ethiopian society. On her death she was given a state funeral in Ethiopia.

An Ethiopian irregular soldier carries a wounded comrade

13. The Ethiopian war was a key moment in history for other socialist, black freedom and pan-African leaders. Pearce cites the contemporary writings and activities of CLR James, Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, Leon Trotsky and many others.

14. Josephine Baker, an African-American singer who was one of the most famous people in the world at the time, made a vocal statement in support of Mussolini’s invasion. Pearce explores the possible reasons for this bizarre action.

15. Haile Selassie lived in exile in England from 1936 to 1941 and allegedly snubbed Marcus Garvey.

Members of the Argebnoch

Liberation

16. World War Two changed the political landscape and made Ethiopia a soft spot for the Allies to strike blows at Italy. Britain and France, remember, controlled all the surrounding countries as imperial colonies. Even so, intervention was grudging, delayed and under-funded.

17. The British intervention was led by some glorious English eccentrics and consisted of just 2,000 guys – Sudanese, Ethiopians and British. But they brought supplies, arms and trained military specialists to the Ethiopian resistance, which transformed the situation. It was not an easy struggle, but the Italian forces were overstretched and hated by the local people. They were defeated quite rapidly. 

18. After liberation, the British state set about looting everything they could get their hands on – treasure, machinery, vehicles, etc. They stripped bare an already underdeveloped country. Selassie was further enraged by Ethiopia’s treatment at the hands of the Allies. Even though they died in their thousands in the anti-fascist struggle, the Ethiopians were not recognised as a constituent part of the Allied cause.

19. Selassie gave little reward to the youth who had made up the ranks of the Patriots. Ethiopia remained a very conservative and stagnant society under his rule – though the impact of war and occupation could not have helped in its development.

20. During the war, the Italian fascists looted a huge monument called the Aksum obelisk, which stood in Rome for decades. It was only returned to Ethiopia in 2005 – a symbol of how unrepentant the powers-that-be in Italy remained for a long time after the whole brutal affair.

Go to Home Page/ Archive

The Aksum Obelisk, built in the 4th Century CE, a monument to Ethiopia’s ancient civilisation

Review: Appeasing Hitler (Or, why I gave up after 70 pages)

Appeasing Hitler (Tim Bouverie, Bodley Head, 2019)

“How bad do you think it’s gonna be?”
“Pretty goddamn bad. Probably all the other Families will line up against us… You know, you gotta stop them at the beginning. Like they should have stopped Hitler at Munich. They should never let him get away with that. They was just asking for big trouble.“

Michael Corleone and Peter Clemenza in The Godfather

If there’s one thing everyone knows from history, it’s that in the 1930s when Nazi Germany was on the rise, British politicians tried to give Hitler what he wanted instead of fighting him. It’s become a cliché.

Clemenza can be forgiven since the events of The Godfather happen only a short time after the war, and what he says is not wrong, as far as it goes. But over the last 80 years, this infamous policy of appeasement has been trotted out as a morality tale again and again. The funny thing is, it is usually invoked to justify aggression (Iraq, Vietnam), not to resist it. Anyone who opposes bombing a third-world former colonial country, anyone who has a problem with killing children and blowing up hospitals, is accused of being an appeaser. And any little warmongering psycho can strut around fantasising that he’s Churchill, the only one (so the fable goes) with the moral courage to stick it to the Nazis. If Hitler was around today, he’d be accusing his opponents of wanting to appease Poland.

I reccomend this article from Spartacus Educational and Claud Cockburn’s brilliant memoir I, Claud, both of which challenge the standard narrative around appeasement. I wanted to know more so I attempted to read Appeasing Hitler by Tim Bouverie. The covers of this 2019 book are weighed down with all kinds of glowing quotations and accolades (‘fresh, challenging’) so I expected to learn something.

But I gave up after 79 pages. Here’s why.

Neville Chamberlain given the red carpet treatment by Mussolini

The author Tim Bouverie gets a real kick out of writing long, loving sketches of British Tory politicians. We get one deft little character introduction after another. We are told about their histories, their personalities, their quirks. Sketches of Tories just keep piling up, going nowhere. They are not badly written, but it’s unclear why we’re supposed to care.

For some, naturally, this is a selling point. One reviewer says that the author Bouverie ‘excels at capturing the atmosphere and conveying the debates in the dining clubs, drawing rooms and society playgrounds of interwar Britain.’ Well, good for him. But I don’t really care about the atmosphere in the society playgrounds, or whatever.

‘Abyssinian Imbroglio’

I stopped reading at a chapter which described the diplomatic storm caused by Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The chapter was titled ‘Abyssinian Imbroglio.’

What a bizarre title.

Google tells me that an ‘imbroglio’ is ‘an utterly confused, complicated or embarrassing situation.’ So it was confusing and embarrassing when 380,000 Ethiopian civilians died under the bombs and bullets and poison gas of the fascists. It was so complicated when 20% of the population of Addis Ababa was wiped out in a terror campaign.

Ethiopian cavalry facing into a desperate battle for the survival of the last independent nation in Africa. I say, what a, wretched little imbroglio!

I suppose my problem is that I’m looking at things from the perspective of humanity in general. If, like Bouverie appears to do, I looked at the world solely from the point of view of male British Tories from the 1930s (and their dining clubs and society playgrounds), I would see the Italian invasion of Ethiopia simply as a complicated, embarrassing situation.

Racial Hatred

Bouverie says some… well… interesting things about anti-Semitism.

They don’t really mention this in the school history books, and it’s not talked about in polite society, but one reason why appeasement happened was that most British conservatives hated Jews.

…or so I thought, until Bouverie reassured me that it wasn’t an issue. This hatred, he tells us, was ‘broadly social and snobbish, rather than racial and extremist.’

Phew. Thank goodness for that.

Let me remind you that this book was published in 2019, year number four of Jeremy Corbyn being publicly scourged over alleged anti-Semitism. At various stages Corbyn was keel-hauled by the press for liking Charles Dickens, for praising J.A. Hobson and for mispronouncing Epstein. But two reviews of Appeasing Hitler in the Guardian make no mention of the author’s bizarre comments (The Guardian, which eviscerated Corbyn for much, much less). One review in the New York Times paraphrases the offending comments with approval. Bouverie’s obvious sympathy for the Conservative Party makes this all the more galling.

From The London Economic – Viscount Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, supported Hitler, as well as (less consistently) Mosley’s Blackshirts

The nuances and cross-currents of Viscount Rothermere’s Nazi sympathies are explained at great length and put into context – because of course one mustn’t be unfair to Viscount Rothermere. In this ‘fresh, challenging’ account of appeasement, Churchill is once again lionised, clever little things he said are quoted ad nauseam, every twist and turn of his policy is explained and justified. But the positions of the Labour Party are caricatured in passing, in contemptuous fragments of sentences.

Even though I was interested in the topic, there was nothing in this book for me. The camera lens was fixed exclusively on the least interesting part of the scene. So I gave up.

Conclusion

It seems to me that the British Empire is the elephant in the room in discussions of appeasement. These politicians held hundreds of millions of people in thrall in Africa and Asia and the Caribbean. It was certainly not any lack of aggression or militarism that stayed their hand when they were confronted with Hitler. They were not meek in India – contemporary training booklets advised soldiers on the best methods of burning villages. The attitude of Churchill toward non-white people was certainly ‘racial and extremist.’

From a selfish British imperialist point of view, the logic of appeasement held water. In exchange for an alliance with Britain, Hitler probably would have reserved his aggression for Eastern Europe. It seems to me that the appeasers calculated on letting Hitler loose like a wild dog on the east. They were willing to let him kill tens of millions without impediment as long as he destroyed communism in the process. Looked at this way, appeasement becomes even more disgusting. It also explains why supposed anti-appeasement politicians like Churchill in fact flip-flopped on the issue. But he eventually settled on a harder anti-Hitler position; more far-seeing British imperialist policy realised that facing a vast German empire five or ten years down the line was too big a price to pay.

Well, that’s my understanding of it based on admittedly limited reading. Maybe if I’d read past page 79 of Appeasing Hitler, I would be better-informed on the topic. Then again, maybe I’d have just learned about society playgrounds and drawing rooms. Either way, I couldn’t bear to read another deft portrait of another rich Tory whose racial hatred was only social and snobbish.