4 ideas
Hiwot Teffera was a university student in Addis Ababa when the student movement's slogan 'Land to the Tiller' helped topple Haile Selassie. She then joined the clandestine Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP) and lived underground as the Derg's Red Terror hunted its members. She survived to write, decades later, a first-person account of how a generation's revolutionary hope ended in mass killing.
Underground organizations use compartmentalization and cell structure to survive state repression. The same secrecy keeps rank-and-file members from seeing strategic errors, factional splits, and the leadership's decisions. It also turns dissent into suspected betrayal, so the rules that shield the organization from the enemy remove its ability to correct itself.
A survivor who was also a militant can refuse the simple frame of innocent youth crushed by a brutal state. She can examine how her own movement's choices contributed to the escalation of violence, such as its embrace of armed struggle and its urban assassinations. Read this way, victimhood and responsibility stop being opposites and become layers of the same experience.
A revolutionary vision of a perfectly just future works like a tower built in the sky: the more glorious and distant it looks, the more any present sacrifice seems justified to reach it. That includes the deaths of comrades and of young people barely out of school. The idealism that gives the movement its moral energy also stops it from counting the human cost of its means.