By-Abatneh
“The vibrations are affecting the churches,” the deacon said, requesting anonymity, fearing reprisals.
He was not speaking metaphorically. He was describing what happens when armed men come to a village in the Arsi zone of Ethiopia, execute farmers in their fields, and set a hundred-year-old church on fire. The ground shakes. The walls crack. The congregation scatters.
On June 6, 1944 eighty-two years ago today nearly 160,000 Allied soldiers crossed the English Channel and stormed the beaches of Normandy. Over 4,000 did not survive the day. By the war’s end, an estimated seventy to eighty-five million people were dead. The Second World War was not an accident. It was the destination of a road paved by ethnic chauvinism, imperial nostalgia, and the systematic elevation of charismatic incompetents to supreme power on the fuel of popular rage. D-Day was humanity paying the ultimate price for that mistake.
The deacon in Arsi is evidence that we are making it again.
- Nationalism’s Oldest Trick
The nationalism that produced Hitler and Mussolini was not born in darkness. It was applauded in daylight in stadiums, newspapers, and pulpits. It offered something intoxicating: a story in which your group was chosen, your suffering was someone else’s fault, and your lost greatness was a destiny being stolen by internal enemies. It fused ethnicity with divine purpose, and humiliation with the promise of restoration.
Weimar Germany was a literate, modern, sophisticated society. It still happened. This is the lesson the world keeps refusing to learn: democratic societies are not immune to catastrophically unqualified leaders when nationalism is the selection mechanism. Ultra-nationalism, by its nature, rewards a very specific talent: the ability to perform identity, channel grievance, and project absolute certainty. It penalizes what governance actually requires: nuance, competence, and the willingness to manage complexity rather than simply inflame it.
The post-war international order, the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European project was a deliberate architectural response to this lesson. For several decades, the wager held. It is now being dismantled, piece by piece, by the very democratic processes it was designed to protect.
- Ethiopia: Governance by Denial
Nowhere is the consequence more visible, more painful, or more urgently ignored than in Ethiopia today.
When Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018, he arrived on a wave of genuine hope, young, charismatic, fluent in the language of reconciliation. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. Within three years, his government was presiding over one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes on earth: the Tigray war, with hundreds of thousands dead and atrocities documented on multiple sides. Simultaneously, in Oromia’s Arsi zone, Orthodox Christian communities began facing systematic attack: churches burned, people executed in their fields, entire villages displaced.
By March 2026, death tolls in Shirka district alone had reached 164 Orthodox Christians killed. This week in the same days the world commemorates D-Day at least 37 more were massacred in Aleko Teleta district. A church over a century old was burned to the ground. The regional government’s response: denial. The federal government’s response: silence.
This is not ordinary governance failure. It is the predictable output of a system in which nationalist and religious identity performance has entirely displaced the will or the ability to protect citizens. Millions of lives are being shaped, stunted, and ended by leaders who were selected not for their capacity to govern but for their talent at mobilizing identity. Ethiopia is not an outlier. It is a warning.
- The Gospel of Power
Layered onto the political crisis is a religious disruption that deserves far more scrutiny than it has received.
Ethiopia’s Orthodox Tewahedo Church is one of the oldest continuously functioning Christian institutions on earth. Its liturgical language, Ge’ez, is among humanity’s most ancient written tongues. Its theology, music, and sacred calendar are not merely religious practices they are the civilizational DNA of the Ethiopian highlands, a living Semitic heritage stretching back to the 4th century.
Andrew DeCort, writing in Foreign Policy in June 2022, diagnosed what is happening with precision: an ancient Christian imperialism is resurging in Ethiopia under Abiy Ahmed, promising to restore the nation’s divine glory while in practice shattering its pluralism and fueling catastrophic suffering. Ethiopia, DeCort notes, is a country where an estimated 98 percent of citizens say religion is “very important” to them, making faith one of the most powerful instruments of both genuine community and ruthless political manipulation.
Into this landscape, a prosperity-gospel evangelicalism individualistic, transactional, and oriented toward power rather than covenant has been fused with ethnic nationalism to produce a political theology that sanctifies dominance. It does not ask leaders to serve. It anoints them to rule. And it renders any questioning of that rule an act of spiritual betrayal. When governance is framed as divine mission, accountability becomes heresy.
- The Semites the World Forgot
There is a question the international community has not yet been willing to ask seriously: why does the suffering of African Semitic peoples register so faintly on the world’s moral radar?
The word “Semitic” describes a family of languages and peoples that includes not only Hebrew but Amharic, Tigrinya, Ge’ez, and Arabic. The Amhara, the communities of the Ethiopian highlands, the bearers of the Ge’ez civilization these are Semitic peoples, carrying one of the oldest Semitic literary and spiritual traditions in human history. That tradition is now under systematic assault: churches burned, manuscripts destroyed in the Tigray war, communities driven from ancestral lands as part of a deliberate reshaping of Ethiopian identity.
The world has been largely silent. And that silence is inseparable from a bias embedded in how global moral discourse is constructed. Antisemitism, as a concept, has been built almost entirely around the European Jewish experience devastating, real, and worthy of every protection. But the selective application of outrage, the failure to extend the same moral urgency to African Semitic peoples facing documented persecution, is not a neutral oversight. It is a hierarchy of human worth dressed in the language of humanitarianism.
This is not a competition for suffering. It is a demand for consistency. If “never again” means anything, it cannot mean “never again for some.”
- The Bill, Coming Due
The soldiers who died on D-Day paid an extraordinary price to interrupt a road that began with flags and speeches and the promise of restored greatness. That road, then as now, was built by leaders who were brilliant at mobilizing people and catastrophic at governing them who confused popularity with mandate, and loyalty with competence.
In Ethiopia’s Arsi zone, that road is being walked again. In the Ge’ez churches that are burning. In the silence of governments that deny what their own citizens are dying from. In the voice of a deacon who will not give his name because he has learned, at great cost, that speaking truth in a nationalist state is its own kind of martyrdom.
The vibrations are affecting the churches. The world should be listening.
