Haile Selassie Quotes
Above all, we must avoid the pitfalls of tribalism. If we are divided among ourselves on tribal lines, we open our doors to foreign intervention and its potentially harmful consequences.
Selassie, Haile. "Towards African Unity." Summit Conference of Independent African States, 22 May 1963, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The major purpose of the Black Hand was to create a single empire of ‘Greater Serbia’---a nation uniting all people of Serb extraction throughout Europe and the Balkans. They wanted to combine the lands where ethnic Serbs lived regardless of what other nation the land was a part of.
The Vietnam War was raging and the country was polarized by it. The real issue of the time, as we were in the war, was whether we could better obtain peace by winning victories in the field causing the enemy to want to negotiate or to withdraw and produce peace unilaterally. In the end we tried a little of both reflecting the division in the nation. We succeeded at neither strategy and the polarization continued for many decades.
The debate had come to an impasse over the issue of voting and taxation by state equally or proportional to the population. Witherspoon warned of the consequence of there being no agreement on some form of unity.
Haile Selassie I was the Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974. Prior to his coronation, he had been the Regent Plenipotentiary of Ethiopia from 1916. He is a defining figure in modern Ethiopian history. He was a member of the Solomonic dynasty who traced his lineage to Emperor Menelik I.
