T.:
How wonderful international life is! It suffices to recall our visits: airports, greetings, cascades of flowers, embraces, orchestras, every moment polished by protocol, and then limousines, parties, toasts written out and translated, galas and brilliance, praise, confidential conversations, global themes, etiquette, splendor, presents, suites, and finally tiredness, yes, after a whole day tiredness, but how magnificent and relaxing, how refined and honored, how dignified and proper, how—exactly—international! And the next day: sightseeing, stroking children, accepting gifts, excitement, programs, tension—but tension that is pleasant, significant, that frees one for a moment from Palace troubles, displaces Imperial worries, lets one forget about petitions, coteries, and conspiracies. His Benevolent Highness, however, even when magnificently entertained by his hosts and lit up by the popping flashbulbs, always asked about telegrams with news from the Empire, asked what was with the budget, the army, the police, the students. Even I took part in these worldly splendors, I who was only a member of the sixth decade of the eighth rank of the ninth level.
Please notice, my friend, that our monarch had an exceptional taste for foreign travel. As early as 1924, the first monarch in our history to cross the borders of the Empire, His Gracious Majesty honored the European lands with a visit. There was something of a family inclination to travel, inherited from his father, the late Prince Makonen, who had been sent abroad many times to negotiate with other countries on the orders of the Emperor Menelik. Let me add that His Majesty never lost that inclination, and, even though old age usually makes people inclined to keep close to home, His Indefatigable Majesty traveled more and more as the years went by, inspecting, visiting the most distant countries, losing himself in these peregrinations to such an extent that malicious journalists from the foreign press called him the flying ambassador of his country and asked when he planned to visit his own Empire. This is indeed an appropriate moment, my friend, to pour out all our grievances over the impropriety and maliciousness of the foreign newspapers, which instead of working toward understanding and rapprochement stand ready to commit any baseness and to meddle in internal affairs. And with delight, I may add.
I wonder now why His Venerable Majesty traveled so much in spite of the heavy burden of years that pressed upon his shoulders. It all goes back to the rebellious vanity of the Neway brothers, who forever destroyed the sweet peace of the Empire by pointing out with impious irresponsibility its backwardness and the way it lagged behind everyone else. A few of the journalists picked up such slanders and used them to calumniate His Majesty. Then the students grabbed it and read it, although no one knows how they got their hands on it, because His Most Gracious Majesty forbade the importation of slanders. And so began the pronouncements, criticism, talk of stagnancy and development. His Majesty sensed the spirit of the times, and shortly after the bloody rebellion he ordered complete development. Having done so, he had no choice but to set out on an odyssey from capital to capital, seeking aid, credits, and investment : our Empire was barefoot, skinny, with all its ribs showing. His Majesty demonstrated his superiority over the students by showing them that one can develop without re-forming. And how, I hear you asking, is that possible? Well, it is. If you use foreign capital to build the factories, you don’t need to reform. So there you are—His Majesty didn’t allow reform, yet the factories were going up, they were built. That means development. Just take a ride from downtown toward Debre Zeit. Factories lined up one after the other, modern, automatic!
But now that His Noble Majesty has ended his days in such unseemly abandonment, I can confess that I also had my own thoughts about the Emperor’s visits and travels. His Majesty looked more profoundly, more acutely, into things than any of us. He understood that the end was coming and that he was too old to stop the impending avalanche. Older and older, more and more helpless. Tired, exhausted. He needed more relief and freedom from worry. And these visits were a break, a chance for him to rest and catch his breath. At least for a while he didn’t have to read the informants’ reports, to listen to the roar of crowds and the sound of police gunfire, to look into the faces of toadies and flatterers. He didn’t, at least for one day, have to solve the insoluble, repair the irreparable, or cure the incurable. In those foreign countries no one conspired against him, no one was sharpening the knife, no one needed to be hanged. He could go to bed calmly, sure that he would wake up alive. He could sit down with a friendly president and have a relaxing talk, man to man. Yes, my friend, allow me once more to commend the international life. Without it, who could ever bear the burden of governing these days? After all, where is one to look for recognition and understanding if not in the faraway world, in foreign countries, during those intimate conversations with other rulers who will respond to our grief with sympathetic grief, because they have worries and troubles of their own?
But it didn’t all seem quite as I’m describing it to you now. Since we’ve already reached this degree of sincerity, let’s admit that in the last years of his reign Our Benefactor had fewer successes and more problems. In spite of every endeavor, his monarchical achievements were not multiplying. And how can anyone justify not having achievements in today’s world? Certainly it was possible to invent, to count things twice, to explain, but then troublemakers would immediately stand up and hurl calumnies, and by that time such indecency and perversity had spread that people would rather believe the troublemakers than the Emperor. So His Most Supreme Majesty preferred to set out abroad, to settle disputes, recommend development, lead his brother presidents onto the high road, express concern for the fate of humanity—on the one hand he saved himself from the exhausting troubles at home, and on the other he gained salutary compensation in the form of the splendors and friendly promises of other governments and other courts. You must remember that despite all the hardships of such a long life he never gave up the fight even in the moments of greatest trials and disappointments, and in spite of fatigue and the need for reward he never for a moment considered stepping down from the throne. On the contrary, as adversaries accumulated and the opposition grew, the Emperor observed the Army-Police Hour with exceptional diligence, reinforcing the order and stability necessary to the Empire.
B. H.:
First, I will emphasize that His Majesty, the highest person in the state, was above the law, since he himself constituted the only source of law, and he was not subject to any of its norms and regulations. He was supreme in everything, in all that had been created by God or man, and therefore also he was supreme commander of the army and the police. He had to exercise particular care and discrimination in his supervision of the two institutions, especially since the December events proved that shameful disorder, abusive opinions, and even sacrilegious treason had taken root among the ranks of the Imperial Guard and the police. Fortunately, the army generals had shown their loyalty in that unexpected hour of trial and made possible a dignified though painful return of the Emperor to his Palace. But having saved his throne, they now started to importune the Supreme Benefactor, asking to be paid for that service. Such was the down-to-earth attitude prevalent in the army that they computed their loyalty in money terms and even expected His Benevolent Highness, of his own initiative, to stuff their pockets full, oblivious to the fact that privileges corrupt and corruption stains the honor of the uniform. This impudence and aggressiveness spread from the army generals to the head police officers, who also wanted to be corrupted, to be showered with privileges, to have their pockets stuffed. All because, having observed the progressive weakening of the Palace, they cleverly deduced that our monarch was going to need them often and that in the end they constituted the surest, and in critical moments the only, prop of sovereign power.
And so His Unrivaled Highness had to introduce the Army-Police Hour, during which he bestowed abundant favors on the highest-ranking officers and expressed his concern about the state of those institutions that secured the internal order and stability for which the people
thanked heaven. These generals, with His Gracious Majesty’s help, arranged such a good life for themselves that in our Empire, which contained thirty million farmers and only a hundred thousand soldiers and police, agriculture received one percent of the national budget and the army and police forty percent. This provided the students with subject matter for their cracker-barrel philosophizing and wisecracks. But were they right? Did not His Majesty create the first regular army in our history, an army paid out of the Imperial cashbox? Before that our armies always assembled from a levy en masse. When summoned, soldiers set out for the battlefield from all corners of the Empire, stealing whatever they could along the way, plundering the villages in their path, butchering peasants and cattle. After such incidents—and they occurred endlessly—the monarchy was a shambles and couldn’t get back on its feet for a long time. So His Venerable Highness punished robbery, forbade the levy en masse, and entrusted to the British the task of forming a regular army, which they did as soon as the Italians had been pushed out.
His Distinguished Majesty had a great fondness for his army. He willingly reviewed parades, and he liked to put on his Emperor-marshall’s uniform, to which rows of colorful decorations and medals added splendor. However, his Imperial dignity would not allow him to probe too deeply into the details of barracks life or to investigate the condition of the simple soldier and lower officer, and the Palace machine for deciphering military codes must have been out of order much of the time, because it came out later that the Emperor did not even know what was going on behind army walls, a state of affairs that unfortunately caught up in a disastrous way with the affairs of the Empire.
P. M.:
. . . and as a consequence of Our Benefactor’s concern to develop the forces of order and thanks to his great generosity in that area, the number of policemen multiplied during the last years of his reign, and ears appeared everywhere, sticking up out of the ground, glued to the walls, flying through the air, hanging on doorknobs, hiding in offices, lurking in crowds, standing in doorways, jostling in the marketplace. To protect themselves from the plague of informers, people learned—without anyone knowing how or where, or when, without schools, without courses, without records or dictionaries—another language, mastered it, and became so fluent in it that we simple and uneducated folk suddenly became a bilingual nation. It was extremely helpful; it even saved lives and preserved the peace and allowed people to exist. Each of the two languages had a different vocabulary, a different set of meanings, even a different grammar, and yet everyone overcame these difficulties in time and learned to express himself in the proper language. One tongue served for external speech, the other for internal. The first was sweet and the second bitter, the first polished and the second coarse, one allowed to come to the surface and the other kept out of sight. And everybody made his own choice, according to conditions and circumstances, whether to expose his tongue or to hide it, to uncover it or to keep it under wraps.
M.:
And just think, my friend, amid all this flowering development, amid the success and well-being proclaimed by our monarch, suddenly an uprising breaks out. A thunderbolt from a clear blue sky! In the Palace—astonishment, surprise, running back and forth, bustle, His August Majesty asking, “Where did it come from?” And how can we, humble servants, answer him? Accidents happen to people, don’t they? So they can also happen to an Empire, and in 1968 this is what happened to us: in Gojam Province the peasants jumped on their rulers’ throats. All the notables found it inconceivable, because we had a docile, resigned, God-fearing people not at all inclined to rebellion, and here, as I said, suddenly, for no reason whatever—mutiny! To us humility is uppermost and even His Majesty, as a young lad, kissed his father’s shoes. When the elders were eating, children had to stand with their faces to the wall to avoid any ungodly temptation of considering themselves equal to their parents. I mention this, dear friend, to help you understand that if the peasants in such a country go on a rampage, they must have an extraordinary reason.
Let us admit here that the reason was a certain clumsy overzealousness of the Finance Ministry. These were the years of enforced development, which brought us so many worries. Why worries? Because in advocating progress His Highness whetted the appetites and whims of his subjects. Eager to be thus encouraged, the people thought that development meant pleasure and treats, and they kept demanding provender and progress, delicacies in excess. But the greatest troubles sprang from the progress in enlightenment, because the multiplying numbers of school graduates had to be placed in offices, thereby causing the ascendancy of the bureaucracy, which waxed enormous as His Majesty’s cashbox waned. And how can you make clerks tighten their belts when they are the most stable and loyal element? A clerk will slander you behind your back, grumble secretly, but when called to order he will shut up and, if need be, turn out to support you. You can’t put the courtiers on hard rations, either, because they are the Palace family. Nor the officers—they secure peaceful development. And so during the Hour of the Cashbox a multitude of people showed up, and the purse dwindled away because every day His Benevolent Majesty had to pay more for loyalty.
Since the cost of loyalty was going up, there was an urgent need to increase income, and that’s why the Finance Ministry ordered the peasants to pay higher taxes. Today I am free to say that it was His Unrivaled Majesty’s decision, but because the Emperor, as a gracious benefactor, could not issue vexatious or plaguing decrees, any proclamation that put a new burden on the shoulders of the people was issued in the name of some ministry. If the people could not shoulder that burden and started a rebellion, His Majesty scolded the ministry and replaced the minister—although he never did so immediately, to avoid creating the humiliating impression that the monarch allows the unbridled mob to put his Palace in order. On the contrary, when he saw the need to demonstrate monarchical supremacy he would raise the most disliked officials to higher positions, as if to say, “Get an eyeload of who’s really in charge here, of who makes the impossible possible!” His Noble Majesty asserted his force and authority by benevolently needling his subjects.
Yet now, my gracious sir, reports are coming in from Gojam Province that the peasants are brawling, rebelling, bashing in the skulls of tax collectors, hanging policemen, running dignitaries out of town, burning down estates, uprooting crops. The governor reports that rebels are storming the offices and that whenever they get their hands on the Emperor’s people they vilify them, torture them, and quarter them. Obviously, the longer the submissiveness, the silence, and the shouldering of burdens, the greater the hostility and cruelty. And in the capital the students defend the rebels, praising them, pointing a finger at the court, hurling insults. Fortunately that province is so situated that it could be cut off, surrounded by the army, shot up, and bled into submission. But until that was accomplished you could sense a great fear in the Palace, because you never can tell how far boiling water will spill. That is why His Providential Majesty, seeing the Empire wobbling, first sent the strike force to Gojam to take the peasants’ heads off, then, confronting the incomprehensible resistance put up by the rebels, ordered the new taxes repealed and scolded the ministry for its overzealousness.
His August Majesty chided the bureaucrats for failing to understand a simple principle: the principle of the second bag. Because the people never revolt just because they have to carry a heavy load, or because of exploitation. They don’t know life without exploitation, they don’t even know that such a life exists. How can they desire what they cannot imagine? The people will revolt only when, in a single movement, someone tries to throw a second burden, a second heavy bag, onto their backs. The peasant will fall face down into the mud—and then spring up and grab an ax. He’ll grab an ax, my gracious sir, not because he simply can’t sustain this new burden—he could carry it—he will rise because he feels that, in throwing the second burden onto his back suddenly and stealthily, you have tried to cheat him, you have treated him like an unthinking animal, you
have trampled what remains of his already strangled dignity, taken him for an idiot who doesn’t see, feel, or understand. A man doesn’t seize an ax in defense of his wallet, but in defense of his dignity, and that, dear sir, is why His Majesty scolded the clerks. For their own convenience and vanity, instead of adding the burden bit by bit, in little bags, they tried to heave a whole big sack on at once.
So, in order to ensure future peace for the Empire, His Majesty immediately set the clerks to work sewing little bags. He had them add to the burden in little bags, taking a break between one bag and the next and keenly watching the expressions on the faces of the burdened, judging whether or not they can stand a little more, whether one should add a wee bit or let them breathe for a while. In that, my dear friend, lay the whole art: in not doing it all at once thickly and blindly, but rather carefully, kindly, reading the faces to know when to add, when to tighten the screw and when to loosen it. Thus, after some time had passed and the blood had soaked into the ground and the wind had blown away the smoke, the clerks started adding taxes again, but this time they dosed it and bagged it gently, carefully, and the peasants bore it all and took no offense.
The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat Page 9