"Among today's Italians, when treading upon Haile Selassie's memory, the sense of guilt and shame is such that they react by seeing only his positive traits: the merits of his past actions. His portrayals always brim with excessive deferance, unwarranted admiration and delusion. They go on and on about his priestly composure, his regal dignity, his great intelligence and his generosity towards former adversaries. They never explain who this sovereign, who we made into a victim, really was. They never dare tell us if he was something more, or less, than a victim. For example, that he was an old man hardened in principles which were centuries out of date; that he was the absolute ruler of a nation which has never heard the words rights and democracy, which lives in a near prehistoric fashion in the suburbs, opressed by hunger, disease, ignorance and the squallor of a feudal regime which even we did not experience during the darkest years of the Medieval period."
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Anti-communistsNew religious movement leadersMonarchs from AfricaEthiopian military leadersEthiopian activists
Original Language: English
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Sources
Oriana Fallaci, in June 1972, quoted in Intervista con la Storia (sixth edition, 2011) p. 509
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Haile_Selassie
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Haile Selassie
Haile Selassie [Ge'ez: ቀዳማዊ ኃá‹áˆˆ ሥላሴ, romanized: qädamawi haylä sÉ™llasé] (23 July 1892 – 27 August 1975), born Tafari Makonnen Woldemikael, was regent of Ethiopia from 1916 to 1930 and Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974, including 5 years of exile from 1936 to 1941 in the period of Italian occupation. Though himself a life-long Christian, and a member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, an Oriental Orthodox Church, he became revered as God incarnate by followers of the Rastafari movemen
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