"That's the government's newspaper," Dawit said.
"That's exactly why you should be reading it. How else would you know that we're all fighting the same fight? They've gone left, my friend." He chuckled. "They've jailed us, they're killing us, they've started dumping us like trash on the road, and now they've really done it, they're stealing our ideology [...] We don't have a fight anymore, we're all saying the same things." (201)
This passage in a way summerizes how the fight of the people against the monarchy turned from one with honest intentions into one of terror and corruption, even though in both moments the goals is supposedly the same.
Citizens like Dawit and other students who were dissatisfied with the monarchy and the suffering in the country, once participated in a people's revolution to demand justice. Later a military led government under the Derg, uses the same socialist motivations, but their practices are violent and brutal.
Their motivation illustrates the populist attempt to unify the people against the oppressive elite.
The transformation of the rather peaceful revolution into one of terror highlights how populism, when corrupted, betrays the very people it seeks to represent.