Surrender or Starve

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Caveat Emptor - Rated
Let the buyer beware. While Kaplan's book is a good factual account of conditions in Eritrea and the Horn generally during the wars of the 1980s, this account is filtered through his own political worldview - and that worldview is most charitably described as 'idiosyncratic'. Kaplan correctly links the famines that struck Ethiopia and Eritrea in that decade to the policies of the Moscow-oriented Dergue junta. He embarasses himself by expressing perplexity over the fact that it was western liberal newspapers such as London Guardian which did most to expose the role of the Dergue in creating famine conditions. In other words, he is apparently incapable of grasping a basic political fact like the distinction between social-democratic liberalism and the Stalinist version of marxism.

That someone like this has been elevated to the status of an authority says something about the world we live in.