Archive
Let Them Tremble at OUR Power
"We were never asking to be seen. We are done being managed. Let them tremble — not because we are many, but because we have finally stopped being afraid of our own strength." Say that sentence out loud once before you read anything else. Remember how it sounds in your own voice. That's the sound they don't want you to hear yourself make.
Sira Staff · Jan 1 · 2 readers
Leopold: The Man Far Worse Than Hitler, But You Rarely Hear About — And Why
There's a photograph from around 1904 that a lot of people have seen without ever learning the story behind it: a Congolese man named Nsala, sitting on a porch, staring down at a small severed hand and foot laid out in front of him.
Sira Staff · Sep 8 · 9 readers
Your Money, Their Profit
Here's a number to sit with before you read another word: 98 billion birr. That's what a federal audit found had disappeared from public funds in a single nine-month stretch this year — close to 5 percent of the entire national budget, gone — through a corruption network the federal police themselves admitted is too "sophisticated" to fully untangle. That's not a rounding error. That's your money. And I'm about to show you exactly how they took it.
Sira Staff · Sep 6 · 77 readers
Mengistu and the Derg Were Never Socialist — Here's the Proof
Every time someone in this country wants to kill a conversation about Marxism before it starts, they reach for the same four words: "Look what happened with Mengistu." I get it. If your grandparents lived through 1977, you didn't hear about socialism in a classroom — you heard about it from someone who buried a brother because of it.
Sira Staff · Sep 5 · 7 readers
We Were Never Lazy. We Were Left.
You've heard it your whole life. From uncles. From ministers on television. From your own tired parents on a bad night: *this generation doesn't want to work.* I want to say something to you plainly, before anything else: they are lying to you. Not about everything. About this. Seventy percent of the people in this country are under thirty. You are not a minority group needing special mention in someone else's plan. You *are* the country.
Sira Staff · Sep 4 · 37 readers
Ethiopia at the Crossroads: Who Owns the Future?
Ethiopia is not a country without wealth. It is a country whose wealth is unequally organized. This is an analysis of what that actually means, for the farmer, the worker, the graduate, and the country's fragile peace.
Sira Staff · Sep 1 · 6 readers
The Cover Story: How States Launder Fascist Continuity Behind a Manufactured Enemy
In 1950, 47 percent of the senior officials in West Germany's own Justice Ministry were former Nazi party members. By the late 1950s, that number had climbed to 77 percent. The Interior Ministry wasn't better: 54 percent of its staff between 1949 and 1970 were former Nazi party members, 8 percent of them holdovers from the actual Nazi-era Interior Ministry once run by Heinrich Himmler. These are not activist claims.
Sira Staff · Aug 31 · 3 readers
The Abiy Ahmed Phenomenon: A Marxist Analysis
A lieutenant colonel who spent his career inside Ethiopia's signals-intelligence apparatus becomes prime minister promising to unite a fractured federation. Within eighteen months, he wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Within thirty, he is presiding over a war that kills more people than almost any conflict on Earth this century.
Sira Staff · Aug 26 · 10 readers
You Will Never Make It Under Capitalism: The Hustle Trap, Revisited
I used to do the math in my head at night. Ten men control the wealth of the United States — everyone on the internet says so — so if I just built the right app, cracked the right hustle, put in the right eighteen-hour days, I'd be number eleven. I actually believed that. Not as a joke. As a plan. I want to tell you exactly how that ended, because I think a lot of you reading this are still doing the math I used to do.
Sira Staff · Aug 25 · 6 readers
Americans Should Have A Israel Problem. Not a Netanyahu Problem.
Remove Benjamin Netanyahu tomorrow — indict him, vote him out, exile him — and ask yourself honestly what actually changes. The settlement outposts don't disappear. The ministries funding them don't close. The ideological current that produced them didn't arrive with him and won't leave with him. This is the same mistake this newsletter has made about Trump, about Obama, about Haile Selassie and the Derg: treating a system as if it were one man wearing a crown.
Sira Staff · Aug 24 · 2 readers
The IMF Puppets: How Ruto and Abiy Use the Same Playbook to Starve the Youth
Two presidents, two currencies, one memo. In April 2024, William Ruto sat down with the IMF and agreed to raise $2.7 billion by taxing bread, sanitary pads, and mobile money transfers. Months earlier, Abiy Ahmed had floated the birr and watched it lose more than three-quarters of its value overnight, on the same institution's insistence. Different capitals, different currencies, the same signature at the bottom of the page. This is not a coincidence of bad governance. It is a franchise.
Sira Staff · Aug 23 · 4 readers
They Are Stealing From the Poorest People on Earth, and Calling It Development
A shirt sewn in Hawassa sells in an American mall for around seventy dollars. The woman who sewed it took home, that whole month, about twenty-six. Sit with that for a second before you read another word. Twenty-six dollars. Not a day. A month. That gap between what her hands made and what she was paid for making it isn't a glitch in the system. It is the system, working exactly the way it was built to work.
Sira Staff · Aug 22 · 47 readers
Social Democrats, Liberals, and the Sheepdogs: Why Neither Communists Nor Anyone Else Should Trust the Reform
Bismarck built the welfare state to prevent revolution. Bernie pledged DNC loyalty. AOC voted “present.” Mamdani won as a Democrat. A materialist critique of reform as pressure valve, not destination—and what that means for socialism in America.
Sira Staff · Aug 21 · 0 readers
Guide: How to Not Get Smoked
On July 16–17, 1918, the Bolsheviks executed Tsar Nicholas II, his family, and servants—11 people in a basement in Yekaterinburg. The question of justification is not a moral abstraction. It is historical necessity. They killed the Romanovs because the alternative was the restoration of a regime that had already proven itself incapable of ruling without mass murder.
Sira Staff · Aug 21 · 4 readers
SENDING THE YOUNG TO DIE: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY BEHIND ETHIOPIA'S "ZEMECHA"
They are knocking on doors in the middle of the night. Not in the mansions of Bole, but in the rented rooms of Kolfe and Shiromeda. They want to send you to the frontlines to fight for an "Ethiopia" in which — like every other Ethiopian, rich or poor — you are constitutionally barred from ever owning the ground beneath your feet. Let's talk about why the youth aren't fighting for a country. They're being harvested by a class that has never once sent its own sons.
Sira Staff · Aug 20 · 5 readers
Generation Exit: Why the Mediterranean Is the Only "Prosperity Party" We Know
Every young Ethiopian I know is studying for the GRE, prepping for the IELTS, refreshing the visa lottery page, or quietly saving birr for a smuggler in Metema. We don't want to leave our soil. But the system has made survival inside Ethiopia a punishment for staying. We are a generation in exile before we even pack a bag.
Sira Staff · Aug 20 · 8 readers
Stop Blaming "Great Men." Fascism Is a System, Not a Person.
Liberal politics loves a hero and a villain. But history isn't written by singular men at the top — it's written by the systems they operate inside and the movements that rise up against them.
Sira Staff · Aug 20 · 69 readers
We Give Back to All That Help. So Let's Help Cuba.
From Florida, it takes a strong swimmer just to reach Cuba — that is how close the island sits to the most powerful military empire in human history. For over sixty years, Cuba has stood inside that shadow, under the weight of the longest-running economic embargo in modern history, and it is still standing. Before we ask what we owe Cuba, it's worth remembering: we've been here before. Cuba didn't wait for us to ask.
Sira Staff · Aug 19 · 3 readers
Ethiopian Jews in Israel Are NOT Victims
You have heard the story. It circulates in every anti-Zionist space, on every protest sign, in every TikTok explainer. Ethiopian Jewish Israelis are the victims of a mass sterilization program — the Israeli state, terrified of Black babies, has been secretly sterilizing Ethiopian Jewish women for decades. The claim is repeated with such confidence that questioning it feels like a betrayal. It is a lie. And it is a lie that serves the enemy.
Sira Staff · Jun 22 · 1 reader