No tyranny sustains itself on guns alone
Guns rust. Soldiers tire. Pilots miss. What endures is something far more durable: language. And language is supplied, almost invariably, by men who call themselves scholars.
Adolf Hitler did not invent National Socialism in a barracks. He inherited it, in part, from the university. Martin Heidegger lent his immense prestige to the Führer in 1933, declaring that the German people must have their own destiny. Carl Schmitt supplied the legal architecture — the friend-enemy distinction, the state of exception, the sovereign who decides. They did not build gas chambers. They built the sentences in which gas chambers became thinkable.
Benito Mussolini understood this even better. Giovanni Gentile, the philosopher of actualism, became his Minister of Education and the ghostwriter of The Doctrine of Fascism. He gave fascism what no Blackshirt could give it: metaphysics. A claim to history. A claim to reason. When Gentile wrote that the state is not a limitation on freedom but its realization, he was not describing philosophy. He was drafting permission.
But it was a Polish sociologist, writing decades later, who explained how that permission becomes a machine.
Zygmunt Bauman, in Modernity and the Holocaust, argued that Auschwitz was not a failure of modern civilization. It was its logical product.
The Nazis did not start with gas chambers. They started with shooting. Shooting was inefficient. It was slow. It was psychologically unbearable for the shooters. It left bodies in plain sight.
So they innovated. Gas vans. Then stationary chambers. Then Zyklon B. Each innovation was presented not as more cruel, but as more humane — more efficient, more orderly, more scientific. The goal was not to stop the killing. The goal was to shorten the pain of killing — the pain felt by the killers, the pain felt by the bureaucracy, the administrative pain of doing murder at scale.
Bauman called this the bureaucratic division of moral labor. One man schedules the train. One man supplies the gas. One man writes the report. No one kills. Everyone is just doing their job efficiently. And once killing is divided, it is no longer felt as killing. It is felt as administration.
Read that, and then listen to Professor Brook Hailu on Ethiopian state television.
Ethiopia, he tells us, cannot afford to buy everything, like a child in a Christmas shop. It must buy only the “key elements that will fulfill our objective.” Its defense strategy is, in his words, “very correct and effective and efficient.”
And what is the key element? Drone technology. Ethiopia, he announces with pride, has “highly advanced in drone technology. It’s even producing and making even available to our African brothers.” Drones, he explains, allow you to monitor quickly, “to finish up the business, to shorten the unnecessary pain of fighting for months and years.”
Shorten the pain.
That is Bauman’s phrase, returned to us in a new accent.
Hailu is not talking about the pain of the mother in Tigray who hears the drone. Or the farmer in Amhara. Or the family in Sudan that counted 187 strikes in a UN complaint. He is talking about the pain of the system. The pain of a long war. The pain of inefficiency. The drone, like the gas chamber, is offered as a humanitarian innovation: a cleaner way to do an unclean thing.
That is the scholar’s work. To translate murder into management.
Getachew Reda, a man of undeniable eloquence, performs a different but related translation. His is the language of historical inevitability. He can place any present atrocity within a long arc of Ethiopian state formation, and by placing it there, make it seem unavoidable. Suffering becomes the price of continuity. When a mind of that caliber chooses to explain rather than to condemn, to contextualize rather than to interrupt, it performs an act of political absolution.
Dangachew Asefa belongs to the same lineage — the political scientist as courtier. The analyst who can, with footnotes and frameworks, render the indefensible defensible. He does not need to deny that civilians die. He needs only to suggest that their deaths are a byproduct of a larger, rational process: state-building, counter-insurgency, sovereignty. Once you have accepted the framework, you have already accepted the casualty.
What unites these men is not ideology in the narrow sense. It is a function. They are not the architects of the drone program. They are its interpreters. Heidegger later claimed he was merely mistaken. Schmitt claimed he was merely describing reality. Gentile paid with his life, assassinated by partisans who understood, perhaps more clearly than the philosophers themselves, that ideas have consequences.
History is rarely kind to the scholars of the regime. It does not remember them for their footnotes. It remembers them for what their footnotes made possible.
The Ethiopian case will be no different. When future historians ask how a government came to wage drone warfare against its own populations and its neighbors — and to speak of that warfare as progress — they will not look only at the air force commanders. They will look at the men in suits who sat on television and called it “correct and effective and efficient.” They will look at the men who used their flawless English, their doctorates, their familiarity with Gramsci and Clausewitz, to make the abnormal seem normal.
Bauman warned us: The most dangerous moment is not when a society becomes cruel. It is when a society becomes efficient at cruelty, and calls that efficiency progress.
For that is the ultimate service the scholar renders to fascism, whether in Berlin in 1933, Rome in 1925, or Addis Ababa in 2026: He does not invent the crime. He invents the language in which the crime no longer sounds like a crime.
And that, in the end, is the most dangerous invention of all.
Author can be reached at : tingirtsocy@gmail.com
Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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