Let Them Tremble at OUR Power
By Sidoc Haytu.
"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.
The line that started it
In 1848, a thirty-year-old named Karl Marx sat down and wrote a line that has outlived every government that ever tried to silence it: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution." He followed it with something even simpler — the people doing the trembling had everything to lose. The people he was writing for had almost nothing left to lose at all.
That sentence wasn't poetry. It was a description of arithmetic that is still true today. A handful of people at the top of any system have a great deal riding on things staying exactly as they are. Everyone underneath them, the overwhelming majority, has comparatively little riding on the current arrangement — which means, when they finally move together, the fear runs in the direction it was always supposed to run.
For a century and a half, every time ordinary people forgot that arithmetic, they stayed afraid. Every time they remembered it, something moved.
When it worked
You don't have to reach back to 1848 to see it. You barely have to leave the region.
In 2018 and 2019, young Sudanese — students, doctors, teachers, people with no army and no party machine — filled the streets of Khartoum for months against a dictator who had ruled for thirty years. They organized under sit-ins the state tried repeatedly to crush, and in April 2019, Omar al-Bashir was removed from power — not by a foreign invasion, not by a palace coup, but by the accumulated weight of people who decided, together, that fear was no longer the arrangement they'd accept.
Then, last September, it happened again — this time in Nepal. A government ban on social media was meant to silence a generation. Instead it became the spark. Within days, Gen Z protesters organized largely through Discord and TikTok had burned down the very parliament building that had ignored them for years, and the prime minister resigned. Nepal followed Sri Lanka in 2022, and Bangladesh in 2024, where student protests drove a prime minister who had ruled for fifteen years to flee the country entirely. Three governments, three different countries, in three years — brought down not by armies, but by young people who stopped waiting to be given permission to matter.
Notice what all of them had in common. Not wealth. Not weapons. Not the approval of the people they were confronting. Just numbers, coordination, and the collective decision to stop being afraid at the same time.
What it would look like here
Ethiopia's youth already proved this once — in 2018, a movement with no army and no seat in government made the country ungovernable enough to end twenty-seven years of one-party rule. The capacity was never the question. What's needed now is what Sudan built and Nepal is still fighting to build: youth who organize across every ethnic line this country has drawn instead of within them, who show up not as Oromo youth or Amhara youth or Tigrayan youth alone but as the actual majority of this country standing together, refusing in the same week, speaking in the same voice, so that no single region's uprising can be isolated and crushed while the rest of the country watches from a safe distance.
It looks like students who organize the way Nepal's did — decentralized, digital, impossible to decapitate by arresting one leader. It looks like workers, teachers, and the unemployed of every nationality recognizing, finally, that the government currently spending 94 percent of its airtime on itself and postponing elections in whole regions it can't control has more in common with the government it replaced in 2018 than either would like you to notice. It looks like refusing quietly and refusing loudly, at the same time, until refusal itself becomes too large to manage.
Show them the arithmetic
You've been called lazy. Called disorganized, called too online, too divided by tribe, too tired to matter. Every uprising that has actually moved something in the last decade — Sudan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and once already, right here — was carried by exactly the generation people were busy calling lazy while it happened.
Marx's arithmetic hasn't expired. The people at the top of any system still have everything riding on you staying divided, distracted, and afraid. You still have almost nothing riding on the current arrangement continuing — and that was always, in every one of these stories, the only math that mattered.
So let them tremble. Not because you're loud. Because you finally did the arithmetic they hoped you never would.
Sidoc Haytu is an Ethiopian writer and researcher focused on political economy, class dynamics, and anti-imperialist movements in the Horn of Africa. If you are ready to build, not just read, join the movement at https://t.me/SiraPress.
