What if Ethiopia started to rapidly industrialized during it's communist days?

Justinian Girgis

Banned
Of course for rapid industrialization, you need many well-educated people which Ethiopia simply did not have. So, China, North Korea, and every country in the warsaw pact donate a dozen educated people each to work for Ethiopia's communist party, in exchange. After 1 year Ethiopia will give each of those countries 0.1% of it's GDP every year until it's communist regime is replaced.
 

Lalli

Probably millions more dead. Communists seems being totally unable to industrialise without killing millions of their citizens. Only good way would be slow industrialisation with foreign investmentss. But this hardly would be acceptable to cmmies.
 

Justinian Girgis

Banned
marathag said:
So meaning there was a Year Zero?
That never turns out well.
So you get Cambodia crossed with Mao's Great Leap Forward.

Yikes.
Click to expand...
No, I don't mean Ethiopia fully industrializes in 1 year. I mean they start paying back the countries that donated educated people to them. With 0.1% of the GDP they had starting the year after they were donated.

So since they'd be donated the year Ethiopia became communist which was 1987. Ethiopia gives each of these countries 0.1% of their 1988 GDP. A long with 0/1% of their gdp at the end of every subsequent year that they remain communist.
 
Last edited:

Simreeve

Justinian Girgis said:
Their own Natural gas along with imported oil & coal from the other countries in the 2nd world and any non-aligned countries.
Click to expand...
But do they have enough exports to pay for those imports, or are you expecting that the fuels would be donated for free out of ideological solidarity?
 

Justinian Girgis

Banned
Simreeve said:
But do they have enough exports to pay for those imports, or are you expecting that the fuels would be donated for free out of ideological solidarity?
Click to expand...
They don't have enough to pay for ALL of them, but the fuels would be sold at a cheaper rate like how the USSR generously overpaid for Cuba's sugar. Or they may not need to import as many. Like I said . They could build the Renaissance damn in 1987 giving them all the hydroelectric energy needed
 

Arkenfolm

Ethiopia was a hellscape of violence during the Derg's regime, and the only educated people they'd want were military advisors to crush rival communist factions, ethnic separatists, and Somalis. Ethiopia needs a huge amount of investment that needs to go to right place, starting with mechanisation/modernisation of agriculture, infrastructure, and light industry. Other communist countries can't supply that because they need to invest the money in their own countries (usually their armed forces or their party elite). If somehow Ethiopia received the money, much of it would be misappropriated by officials or used instead to fund the military to crush the many different rebel movements. Note that the latter is what Ethiopia actually did OTL with aid money/food donations from the famine--much of it went toward the military and government loyalists.
Lalli said:
Probably millions more dead. Communists seems being totally unable to industrialise without killing millions of their citizens. Only good way would be slow industrialisation with foreign investmentss. But this hardly would be acceptable to cmmies.
Click to expand...
Nah, they already killed about 2 million people with the famine and civil war, all this would do is mean Ethiopians die through other means. Basically I'd assume instead of deliberate starvation of rebel regions (the main cause of the infamous famine in the 80s in Ethiopia), Mengistu/the Derg would engage in Stalinist-style infrastructure programs where the rebel peasants are instead worked to the death (or shot if they flee).
 

Justinian Girgis

Banned
Arkenfolm said:
Ethiopia was a hellscape of violence during the Derg's regime, and the only educated people they'd want were military advisors to crush rival communist factions, ethnic separatists, and Somalis. Ethiopia needs a huge amount of investment that needs to go to right place, starting with mechanisation/modernisation of agriculture, infrastructure, and light industry. Other communist countries can't supply that because they need to invest the money in their own countries (usually their armed forces or their party elite). If somehow Ethiopia received the money, much of it would be misappropriated by officials or used instead to fund the military to crush the many different rebel movements. Note that the latter is what Ethiopia actually did OTL with aid money/food donations from the famine--much of it went toward the military and government loyalists.
Click to expand...
Ok. What if first, the Derg made compromises with other communist factions then used those educated people in my OP to industrialize Ethiopia?
 
SealTheRealDeal

SealTheRealDeal

Justinian Girgis said:
Of course for rapid industrialization, you need many well-educated people which Ethiopia simply did not have. So, China, North Korea, and every country in the warsaw pact donate a dozen educated people each to work for Ethiopia's communist party, in exchange. After 1 year Ethiopia will give each of those countries 0.1% of it's GDP every year until it's communist regime is replaced.
Click to expand...
The famine just got deadlier.
 
CHKeeley

CHKeeley

Frankly, I find the responses to the post so far to be lacking a bit in detail. It seems the main response to why Ethiopia couldn't rapidly industrialize a la other communist states was because they were *too killpeopleist* to do so.

The Derg definitely did perpetrate an extreme amount of violence, but the reason they perpetrated this violence is the same reason they couldn't rapidly industrialize. Lack of control and legitimacy from the Derg (which fueled extremism) is the main reason that there was so much violence, and so the reason they could not industrialize as specified in the OP. The Derg came to power not through a highly organized and structured vanguard intending to seize power, but instead they realized Haile Selassie was weak and the imperial regime was completely rotted from the inside out. It quite literally blew over as slowly various sections of Ethiopian society started to push demands on the government. The Derg assumed command, and the most popular 'ideology' came from the students, and was some flavor of Marxism. In an attempt to posture and maintain control, the Derg (read now: Mengistu Haile Mariam and his clique) increasingly adopted the rhetoric of the opposition to its left. To simplify incredibly, this spiraled into infighting with student factions and leadership struggles within the Derg and the Red and White Terror kicked off which plunged the country into a very protracted and multi-stage civil war.

For most of its history, the Derg was fighting for control of the country, and in many places its ability to enforce policy (especially the former imperial peripheries) was tenuous as best. Of course, this fluctuated at different times and in different contexts, but remained very much a rule. For one of the best accounts of this first-hand, I highly recommend Donald Donham's "Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution" which gives an account of the chiefdoms of Maale in southern Ethiopia and how they interacted with the center at Addis Ababa. The shifting web of local alliances with the state are crucial, but until the 1980s they primarily relied on evangelical Christians (!) to maintain state power, and after the anti-Evangelical turn (when Mengistu's regime appropriated Ethiopian Orthodoxy and the aesthetics of the Empire), they relied on the new WPE Party cadres but still faced rebellion and opposition from both Christians and Traditionalists. I think the book, alongside the constant violence and rebellions we saw IOTL, illustrate just how impossible it would be for any large scale economic construction to happen in Ethiopia during this time.
 

Father Maryland

Justinian Girgis said:
They don't have enough to pay for ALL of them, but the fuels would be sold at a cheaper rate like how the USSR generously overpaid for Cuba's sugar. Or they may not need to import as many. Like I said . They could build the Renaissance damn in 1987 giving them all the hydroelectric energy needed
Click to expand...
I mean citing Cuba as a positive example is an odd one. Since Castro took the ( For Cubas size) absurdly high subsidies and from a long term economic perspective almost totally blew them like a lottery winner buying everybody they even vaguely know a ferrari.

I mean they took the money and largely wasted it in absurd manners. Like say making Cuban agriculture the worlds most single least efficient, wasteful, and often pretty environmentally catastrophic. Cuban farmers from what I understand per acre farmed used something like 23 times as much fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and diesel ( for tractors and farm equipment) as the United States ( the worlds Wealthiest country and in many sectors single most productive agricultural producer and largest exporter in many categories). I'll repeat that 23 times as much fertilizer, pesticides, and diesel as the US per acre. If I recall correctly Cuba ( a nation a fraction the size of the US in pretty much every category including agricultural production) used something like a third as much pesticides and fertilizer every year as the entire US. And they weren't even the worlds largest sugar producer. I'm surprised for efficiencys sake they just didn't shell their sugar fields with artillery shells full of VX. I'm surprised that after that much pesticides that not only were there any bugs alive but any people left alive in Cuba.

Castro also wasted enormous amounts on insane vanity projects like trying to breed super productive mini cows the size of Labrador retrievers that families could keep in their apartments and supply themselves with all their dairy needs.

That and for such a poor and small country an incredibly interventionist foreign policy basically trying to sponsor coups or insurgencys in nearly all his non sufficiently marxist neighbors in latin America and Africa to boot. Then getting massively involved in Angola ( From what I understand for the Cubans in terms of military age males participating in the war it was like the equivalent of the US during the ACW.) sending whole brigades ( trained and armed completely at Soviet expense) to fight on another continent.

I mean Cuba did build a pretty good med school program and basic universal health care but considering the sheer amount of aid ( and that Castro was blatantly ignoring the Soviets falling apart and obviously soon no longer able to provide insane subsidies. Until they no longer did and basically the whole Cuban economy utterly crashed.).

In the end almost all of the money was wasted. Yeah cuba got a lot of doctors which isn't nothing but its like a guy who won 100 million dollars in the lottery and in a year is totally broke and homeless but says " Well at least I got my veneers done!".
 

Justinian Girgis

Banned
Viralworld said:
Frankly, I find the responses to the post so far to be lacking a bit in detail. It seems the main response to why Ethiopia couldn't rapidly industrialize a la other communist states was because they were *too killpeopleist* to do so.

The Derg definitely did perpetrate an extreme amount of violence, but the reason they perpetrated this violence is the same reason they couldn't rapidly industrialize. Lack of control and legitimacy from the Derg (which fueled extremism) is the main reason that there was so much violence, and so the reason they could not industrialize as specified in the OP. The Derg came to power not through a highly organized and structured vanguard intending to seize power, but instead they realized Haile Selassie was weak and the imperial regime was completely rotted from the inside out. It quite literally blew over as slowly various sections of Ethiopian society started to push demands on the government. The Derg assumed command, and the most popular 'ideology' came from the students, and was some flavor of Marxism. In an attempt to posture and maintain control, the Derg (read now: Mengistu Haile Mariam and his clique) increasingly adopted the rhetoric of the opposition to its left. To simplify incredibly, this spiraled into infighting with student factions and leadership struggles within the Derg and the Red and White Terror kicked off which plunged the country into a very protracted and multi-stage civil war.

For most of its history, the Derg was fighting for control of the country, and in many places its ability to enforce policy (especially the former imperial peripheries) was tenuous as best. Of course, this fluctuated at different times and in different contexts, but remained very much a rule. For one of the best accounts of this first-hand, I highly recommend Donald Donham's "Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution" which gives an account of the chiefdoms of Maale in southern Ethiopia and how they interacted with the center at Addis Ababa. The shifting web of local alliances with the state are crucial, but until the 1980s they primarily relied on evangelical Christians (!) to maintain state power, and after the anti-Evangelical turn (when Mengistu's regime appropriated Ethiopian Orthodoxy and the aesthetics of the Empire), they relied on the new WPE Party cadres but still faced rebellion and opposition from both Christians and Traditionalists. I think the book, alongside the constant violence and rebellions we saw IOTL, illustrate just how impossible it would be for any large scale economic construction to happen in Ethiopia during this time.
Click to expand...
Would u mind trying to comment on this post of mine?

What if Ethiopia started to rapidly industrialize when it was communist?

First off since Ethiopia was a hellscape of violence during the Derg's regime spending most of their resources on crushing rival communist factions, ethnic separatists, and Somalis. So what if first, the Derg made compromises with other communist factions to avoid becoming the hellscape Ethiopia...
www.alternatehistory.com
 
CHKeeley

CHKeeley

Justinian Girgis said:
Would u mind trying to comment on this post of mine?

What if Ethiopia started to rapidly industrialize when it was communist?

First off since Ethiopia was a hellscape of violence during the Derg's regime spending most of their resources on crushing rival communist factions, ethnic separatists, and Somalis. So what if first, the Derg made compromises with other communist factions to avoid becoming the hellscape Ethiopia...
www.alternatehistory.com
Click to expand...
Isn't this the exact same thread at this one, except you took something you wrote in this thread and pasted it there? I'm confused.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top
Top