In regard to the CIA's disinformation on Ethiopia, we haven't yet gotten the equivalent of Srebrenica's "French Connection" revelation, or of the WikiLeaks dump exposing Syria's Douma incident as a false flag, but we have gotten a leak that exposes the types of information warfare strategies the TPLF is using. According to this rough translation of the instructions the TPLF has given to its online propaganda operatives, promoting fabricated or highly biased accounts of the conflict's developments is integral to its goals of dividing Ethiopians and Eritreans, and of destabilizing the region more broadly:
"Tell them [the Ethiopians] that fascist Abiy has transferred your children to Eritrea & are suffering under Eritrea's custody"
"Tell them over and over again that Ethiopia's soldiers are faced with death while fighting TPLF forces and also being attacked by Eritrea from the back, if they retreat"
"Organize all your friends & colleagues in a form of campaign to make sure this information is disseminated widely to have an effect"
"We should know that this is the most opportune time to send all our enemies, both internal [Ethiopia] & external [Eritrea] alike, to their final resting place. Therefore, we shall not falter nor rest rather remain focused & organized like a "Bee" to make sure our goal succeeds & our future is guaranteed."
If you're familiar with white supremacist rhetoric, this language feels familiar. They're talking about sending all who challenge their supremacist project to death, and about making sure that "our future" as an ethnic group is ensured. It resembles the cry of "white genocide" that white racists have been using, an insistence that if white supremacy gets defeated, this will only make for a reverse racism where those who used to be on top get exterminated. This narrative necessitates that the TPLF's crimes, which include depriving Tigrayans of food and grooming Tigrayan children into military service, get whitewashed so that the TPLF can be made out as a heroic freedom defender. The fact that the TPLF is itself the primary source of Tigray's suffering is hidden, and the Ethiopian government is cast as the sole culprit. As Alan Macleod has written about the misleading nature of our media's Tigray coverage:
The conflict is ultimately a struggle between two political forces for the control of Ethiopia's economy. Yet this is not at all how corporate media have presented the issue, preferring instead to frame it as the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments exterminating an ethnic minority group. CNN, for example, wrote: Eritrean troops aren't just working hand in glove with the Ethiopian government, assisting in a merciless campaign against the Tigrayan people; in some pockets they're fully in control and waging a reign of terror... [that] bears the hallmarks of genocide and has the potential to destabilize the wider Horn of Africa region. The New York Times has followed a similar line in much of its reporting. Embedding themselves with the TPLF, they described their companions as "a scrappy force of local Tigrayan recruits" that had, against the odds, "scored a cascade of battlefield victories against the Ethiopian military, one of Africa's strongest."
This is how the imperialist media portrays Washington's proxy wars: by not covering the pivotal role that Washington's terrorists play behind the horrors, and shifting all of the blame onto the government imperialism seeks to crush. Crucial to this is a perpetual stream of fabricated or false flag-atrocity accounts.
Following the murder of Yugoslavia, the imperialists have done this in Syria with the war effort by the "moderate rebels," in Ukraine with the conflict between Russia and Ukrainian fascism, and in the horn of Africa with this fraudulent "national liberation" insurgency. They've hoped to also do this in Xinjiang using the Uyghur genocide hoax as a terrorism recruitment tool, but they're clearly never getting their desired civil war within China, as the CIA-incited Uyghur terrorist attacks have been definitively ended by China's deradicalization program. The imperialists may have managed to start a civil war in Ethiopia, but the TPLF is increasingly in a state of desperation, unable to overcome the Ethiopian people's resistance efforts. It's now looking like they'll ultimately fail to stop the BRI's implementation in the region, though not without first causing years more of destruction.
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