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Cheeks wrote

I know this isn't contributing towards what you're asking but can we stop talking about marxist-leninism? It lacks serious transformative revolutionary praxis. There are multiple historical case points almost always resulting in the same state capitalist model that is highly oppressive/repressive.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

Not an ML, but it appears that like Stalin, the Mengistu military government used a drought to facilitate a targeted famine, starving out areas where their political enemies were concentrated. Most of their opponents, interestingly, appear to be at least vaguely left-wing. As a result, the military regime collapsed from a series of insurgencies and popular uprisings, however not before killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Death by starvation is no joke, one of the most painful and protracted ways to go, and also one of the best ways to kill disproportionately children and the otherwise vulnerable, ensuring a long-lived hatred of the regime which perpetrates such a crime. It appears that this "purge" of political opponents was not very effective.

After the government was overthrown in 1987 by another left-wing group, another collapse came from the coup in the USSR, as much of the aid post-famine came not from Western countries (there was, in fact, a major reversal of policy where western NGOs were shamed publicly for having contributed to the government's counter-insurgency plans) but from the USSR. Once that was gone, another political upheaval resulted ultimately in the contemporary state of Ethiopia.

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