Wokineh Gebeyehu’s Interview, Ethiopia, Global Bank, Business Men, And the Similarity Of Adolf Hitler Hosting Garmisch Olympic: By Getachew Reda
For some of you might have listened to Benyam Kebede (Ben website), interviewing the TPLF Police Commissioner Workineh Gebeyehu from Addis Ababa Ethiopia. Workineh and Benyam both express their happy moment how their international guests enjoyed and exited with Addis Ababa’s, peace full atmosphere during the gathering event of over 40 countries’ Head of States in the capital during the “NEPAD” conference.
This picture of distortion by the interview and the interviewer was not only limited there, such distortion was also supported by International bankers and their advisors, Diplomats and the similar international business people. Leaving aside the two Ethiopian aside, the distortion of the foreigners obtained from the record they made speech at the time and in different events in the past is shocking to testify such temporary sweetness and calmness of the city for a country suffering repression and murder reminded us the similarity of the group of American business men and who came to Berlin during the winter Olympic games hosted by Hitler Germany on which they were puzzled on which they said the Germany they were seeing was quiet different from what they had conceived from American reporting from William L. Shirer then The Chicago Tribune reporter stationed in Berlin during the Nightmare years (1930-1940).
The TPLF Federal Police Commissioner or the interviewer praising and glorifying the public cooperation and peaceful atmosphere of the city of Addis Ababa during the said conference held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia was misinterpreted purposely to miss lead the facts in a country where so many lives living in the cage of hell and intimidation in a city where the entire 99% express openly to the world its dissatisfaction & disapproval of the system during the election in 2005/ (1997 Ethio-Calendar).
The interpretation of the government or some benefited international business group and country expressing the peace in the city as a sign of peace and development in favor of the system’s good governance and implementation law and order in the city or in the country in general can't be a sign of progress as they wanted us to believe.
The city is quiet, but sited under a time bomb of public anger and frustration where such dissatisfaction would sooner or later be exploding in search of law and order and freedom of speech and democracy.
There is some fact that we can't deny. The people of the country or the city might have been quite and peace for the occasion, even for longer years. It is not necessary meant, the peace is real love for the system (for TPLF) tycoons and gangs. It is not necessary in a totalitarian dictatorship to be loved by the people. It is enough to be feared, as Stalin was in Soviet Russia, as Mengistu was in Ethiopia. But, all dictators don't mean they too lack lovers and sympathizers. Hitler of course was loved by German masses-shocking as to the outside world-there could be no doubt.
Similarly, no question, Meles is also a darling to its coltish followers. Do not ask me how such bloody thugs that are wet with blood and shameful mercenary records are possible to be loved by some Ethiopians/Tigrayans. Yes, it is possible. We have seen it in history, in Nazi Germany. Next to Hitler loved by the Germans, as we saw it above was Goring. Goring (Goring was the #2 man in power next to Hitler, a powerful, blood thirsty roughneck) was next in their affection. They loved him, his down-to- earth saltiness, his jovial ness, his rude sense of hummer, his common touch. To them, he was a hail- fellow-well- met. It never seemed to concern them that he was also a brutal ruthless, unscrupulous killer. Mengistu and Meles Zenawi had affected so many minds of Ethiopians who never seem to concern them that they too were liars, brutal, ruthless thugs as any of the previous tyrants the world had witnessed. It this reason why we say the world is full of odds.
So, for society like Ethiopia governed by fear and intimidation, in itself, is enough for society to be ruled in a peaceful and silence atmosphere hiding the facts, emotions and dissatisfactions it felt against the government from inside of its soul. We should not be surprised any time the government heads or their stooges or foreign diplomats/business tycoons/bankers who see a big stake of strategy (security), capital or mineral to exploit out of the impoverished virgin land that comes out its womb are obviously willing to lie and distort the picture apart from the reality on the ground on their own media in order to fit them best.
I will now present you the similarity of such event during Nazi Germany and TPLF”s Ethiopia and how diplomats, international and American business people praised the “peaceful” Berlin during the Winter Olympic game at Garmisch during the Hitler era.
The document is written by an eye witness American foreign correspondent/reporter of The then “Chicago Tribune” William L. Shirer a man who lived in Berlin and surroundings as a reporter from started of the rise and demise of Hitler. The title of the book is “20th Century Journey- The Nightmare Years 1930-1940) (Volume II). An amazing book that every one need to read, if available in book stores. Bear with me, if it is a bit a longer, you will find it interesting and educational.
(I)
“The Olympic games were a dazzling success for Adolf Hitler. Both at Garmisch. Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps, where the winter games were held, and in Berlin, where the more important summer games took place, the Nazi hosts staged them on a scale more lavish than any other country had ever attempted. The athletes from around the world were delighted; the spectators, especially from America, were impressed. Never before, to my knowledge, had the Nazi bigwigs put on such extravagant parties. Goring, Ribbentrop and Goebbels each try to outdo the others in their entertaining.
The propaganda minister’s “Italian Night” on the Pfaueninsel on Wannse gathered more than a thousand guests (including even me) at dinner in a scene that resembled the Arabian Nights. While the best food and wine I had ever tasted in Nazi Germany were being served to the immense throng on a- broad terrace overlooking the lake under a spreading canopy of five thousand Chinese lanterns, we listened to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and starts from the sate Opera and watched the dancers from the Opera ballet.
The Games themselves were not themselves were not only beautifully organized and staged. Hitler saw to it that the country was on its best behavior: no persecution of the Jews. (They already had been outlawed by the Nuremberg Laws of the fall before.) No action against unruly Catholics and Protestants. No savage attacks against the “decadent”. Western democracies and “Jewish-dominated “America. All was, for the moment, sweetness and light, except for an occasional diatribe in the press against the terrible Bolsheviks. The Russians had not yet been invited to the Olympics. They were still considered beyond the pale by the Olympic committees of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and democratic U.S.A, Britain and France.
The good Aryan German people struck most visitors from abroad as happy, content and united under the swastika dictatorship. The harassed Jews, shorn of their evil rights and the opportunity to earn a living, did not dare to approach the distinguished foreign visitors to enlighten them.
At Garmisch I became so alarmed at the way some American businessmen were being taken in that I gave a luncheon for several of them and invited Douglas Miller, our commercial attaché in Berlin and one of the best-informed men on Germany we had at the embassy, to talk to them. He got no where. The genial tycoons told him what the situation in Nazi Germany was. They like it, they said. The streets were clean and peaceful. Law and Order. No strikes, no trouble- making unions. No agitators. No Commies. Miller a patient man could scarcely get a word in.
In Berlin a group of American businessmen- Norman Chandler, the conservative owner and publisher of the Los Angeles Times, was one of them-invited me and Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald-Tribune to lunch in the Hotel Adlon bar. They were puzzled, they said, that the Germany they were seeing was quite different from what they had conceived from our reporting. They had never seen a people so happy and content, and so enthusiastic about their leaders. They had talked to Goring. They Sais and he had told them that we American correspondents in Berlin peddled nothing but lies about National Socialist Germany.
For an hour Barnes and I tried our best to tell them the truth. “I don't think” I noted in my diary that night. “That we convinced them.” I was rather puzzled that our American businessmen and our rich tended to sympathize with Fascist countries. I wondered if it was because the right wing dictatorships claimed to be anti –Communist. (They ploy is still working in America in the 1980’s not only with our well-heeled men of affairs, but with our government.) I should have remembered how these well-off American types, who controlled our about conditions in Germany to get the United States to boycott the Olympic Games that year
In 1933, the year Hitler took power, both the American Athletic Union and the U.S. Olympic Committee had voted overwhelmingly to boycott the Games unless Jewish athletes were permitted on German teams. Our Olympic Committee had dispatched Avery Brundage, its president, to Germany the following year to check on whether Jews could, and returned to New York to announce his recommendation that America not boycott the games.
The agitation for the boycott, however, continued, and in September, 1935. General Charles E. Sherril, a member of both the American and International Olympic Committee, was sent back to Third Reich; Hitler promulgated the Nuremberg Laws outlawing the Jews. General Sherrill took no notice. He returned to New York in October and announced; “I went to Germany of the purpose of getting at least one Jew on the German Olympic team, and I feel that my job is finished”.
Actually, Sherrill had got two Jew on the German team, both of whom returned temporarily from exile to provide window-dressing for the Nazis. No Jewish athlete living in the country (in Germany) was allowed a tryout. But the minor Nazi concession of two token Jews satisfied the American Olympic Committee. In Berlin we could scarcely believe it when the New York Times quoted Fredrick W. Rubien, secretary of the U.S. Olympic Committee; - On this basis of this brazen lie the Americans came to Germany that year to complete in the Olympic Games.
Our star that summer, one of the greatest in the history of the Olympics, was the sprinter Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals. Owens was black. Adolf Hitler, who was in the triumphs. Each time Owens trotted up the track after a smashing win the German spectators stood and gave him thunderous applause. But Hitler, I noticed from my seat in the press box a few feet away from him, turned back to talk to some cronies. One of these was Baldur von Schirach, the Hitler Youth leader, who much later told what the Fuhrer said when he turned away from Owens.
“The Americans ought to be ashamed of themselves,”
Hitler complained, “for letting their medals be won by Negroes. I myself would never shake hands with one of them.” When Schirach suggested that it would be good propaganda for the Fuehrer to be photographed with Owens, Hitler screamed at the thought.*
(II)
Among the distinguished American visitors to the Olympic Games in Berlin that summer was Anne Lindbergh. He is the first flight over the Atlantic. He was America’s idol of the nation, most publicized citizen, and its one authentic hero.
“The talk is,” I wrote in my diary that evening after the ride Hindenburg,” that the Lindberghs have been favorably impressed by what the Nazis have shown them.” (Goring, invited the author of the book (William L. Shirer), others and the famous American pilot to test the newly came out world’s largest airplane “Lufthansa” to attract Americans how Nazi Germany is developing the nation’s economy.
Through Major Truman Smith, our American military attache and a friend of the flyer, some of us American correspondents sought again to talk with Lindbergh in the hope countering any Nazi propaganda minister persuaded him to have a few words with us. But, he refused to anew a few words with us. Late that evening be sauntered over to our table and greeted us graciously enough. I thought it was a golden opportunity to enlighten the famous flyer about what lay hidden beneath the surface in Hitler’s dictatorship. But, like my American businessmen, Lindbergh proceeded to tell us what the situation was in Germany and to express his administration for what had been achieved here. He, too, had found a happy, united people, he said. As an airman he was particularly impressed by the German air force and the progress of German aviation in general. Once again, we did not get a word in.
By this time I was getting a little tired of bigwig American visitors in the Olympic telling how it was in Nazi Germany, I thought I knew better than they. Far important was a development that would have far reaching and tragic consequences for Lindbergh. That summer in Berlin, the German Nazi leaders were able to sow in Lindbergh’s mind, and in that of his attractive and gifted wife, seeds that, when they flowered, would poison their judgment about the course of history and of Western civilization. I was more saddened than surprised when this national idol, American hero (Lindbergh) accepted from Adolf Hitler the Service Cross of the Germany Eagle with star, the highest German decoration that could be conferred on a foreigner, along with the citation that the recipient will of the Reich.”
The timing could scarcely have been worst and showed, I thought not only Lindbergh’s insensitivity to man, but his ignorance of what was going on in the world. The evening Goring, on the Fuehrer’s behalf, hung the Service Cross around Lindbergh’s neck at a ceremony in Berlin was just three weeks after Munich, when Hitler, by threatening war, had frightened Britain and France into Abandoning Czechoslovakia to him and Europe trembled in fear of the mad the dictator’s next threats of aggression and war. It was just three weeks before Kristall Naxht, the Night of the Broken Glass, the worst program Germany had ever experienced until the massacre of the Jew began in the Nazi extermination camps three years later.
We correspondents of course, busy with our reporting, were blissfully ignorant of what the Fuehrer was up to. We were ignorant of much that was transpiring in the secret those days behind the Nazi facade; for example - Hitler’s great “Peace”.>
Indeed, doesn't this history repeating itself over and over again in the present era of tyranny governments like that of our in Ethiopia? Doesn't those TPLF officials resembled to you the way they present themselves and the way they beautifying Addis Ababa, the way they host foreign diplomats and business tycoons the extravagancy and lavish parties they threw to their foreign guests just as Goring, Ribbentrop and Goebbels each trying to outdo the others calling it “Italian Nights”, and “Arabian Nights” as our TPLF in its own way, called it “Millennium celebration” and “Wegah Tibel Leytee”, lavish party after another lavish party, all to make look good and peaceful country that suffering under tyranny and injustice. Doesn't such similarity express the ignorance of some Ethiopian and foreign reporters who calling themselves reporters and web site operators sound to you the same reporters that what Mr. William L. Shirer (the eye witness reporter of the Nazi era) just referring the as “blissfully ignorant” when website operators like Ethiopia First express his excitement of seeing peaceful, sweetness Addis Ababa in support to the TPLF Police Commissioner while the fact on the ground is not sweet but hidden sour, resentment, frustration, anger, depression and hopelessness, grief and grievance against the system. The interviewee and the interviewer are reading wrong pulses and wrong palpitation of the heart rhythm of the people. Our hope is that one day the people will speak up openly who was right when reading their heart beat and desire what it was meant when they act gentle and peaceful in front of tyranny and injustice. //-// Ethiopia will prevail-/-
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