Why I Quit Democracy

I have given a lot of people whiplash over the past week. This singular question has greeted me often over the past seven days: after spending two years writing at Ghion Journal about the need to disavow cult of personalities and empower our communities instead, how in God’s name can I abruptly pivot on a dime and advocate the return of a monarchy in Ethiopia? These seemingly incongruent principles have a lot of people shaking their heads, this I know for sure, and some questioning my sincerity as I preached self-reliance for years only to dive head first into the sea of “high society”.

Although I explained my departure from journalism last week, what was missing in that missive was a broader explanation of why I elected to take a leadership role in an organization that advocates on behalf of royalty. I am taking this opportunity to explain my position with respect to the role of a monarchy in Ethiopia and why I believe that the only viable path away from the status quo is to go back to a system that at least had a level of accountability.

I know, it sounds jarring for me to state that monarchs were accountable. But I ask for your patience as I explain what seems like an obvious contradiction. Let me get straight to the point, democracy is a sham. I do not say this for effect; after being intimately involved in US politics for most of my adult life, and after being bamboozled by the First Bank President in ways that still boggle my mind, I came to the realization that our government is intentionally broken beyond repair. The default mode in DC is gridlock, the only time political logjam is loosened is when the very wealthy demand action, the rest of the time inertia rules the day.

In this paradigm of paralysis, Democrats and Republicans are complicit in the continued raping and pillaging of our planet. What is true of America is true of my birth land Ethiopia and in most nations where “democracy” is lauded as the golden standard of liberty and self-determination. In truth, “democracy”—whether as a Republic or as a parliamentary system—is a bill of goods. The entire system is built on a foundation of lies where the proletariat are conditioned to believe we have a say as the plutocracy conspire behind the scenes to take away our agency.

I only realized the duplicity of the debased (you know I don’t call the ruling class elites) after enduring two years of homelessness and hardships that tested my capacity to rise out of inflatable blue mattresses in the morning. After fighting for justice through the comforts of upper-middle class lifestyles for most of my 20s and 30s, the floor cracked beneath me and led me into a life of poverty and homelessness as I traveled across America penniless and beset by loneliness and dejection.

Two years of eating donated food and calling broken souls with tired soles my neighbors, I realized that injustice comes for all and that freedom in America is only a façade. The amenities we take for granted—warm showers, hot meals and and chilled drinks—are but a few paychecks away from melting into the recesses of our minds and being replaced by the tremors of hunger and hopelessness. In a land that has more wealth and resources than most of the world combined, nearly 35% of Americans are dependent on government assistance and the vast majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. This is what “democracy” wrought us.

More and more Americans are waking up to the lies of the status quo. The only problem is they have no viable alternatives. The two parties have colluded, in ways that would invite RICO charges if the Department of Justice was not controlled by the same terrorists who have hijacked our government, to exclude anyone who is not part of their criminal enterprise from having meaningful leadership roles. Americans who choose to get red pilled are faced with Sophie’s choice of sorts; continue voting knowing that the ballot is nothing but a symbolic gesture or walk away and nullify our voices all together.

Our republic is a Faustian bargain—damned if you abstain, damned if you vote.

The circus of Trump is not an outlier, it is a denouement after a crescendo of lies that peaked in 2008. After deceiving us with hope and hype eleven years ago, the establishment hoodwinked us with a carnival barker who has managed to simultaneously derange both his supporter and his detractors. Democracies, whether representative or direct, only work as long as the citizenry are actively engaged and when we actually have a choice. Rigged elections where we get to “vote” between a slate of vetted and pre-selected candidates who all swear allegiance to their corporate masters is not a choice, it’s a sham.

The problem with being liberated from a lie is the cognitive dissonance that comes with seeking answers. I’ve been contemplating for two years what the alternative is to this scam that is pawned off as democracy. Most of the world has been conned into accepting a vote as an ends instead of seeing it as a means to stand up for justice. Abraham Lincoln once noted that there could be no successful appeal from the ballot box to the bullet; what Abe did not take into his equation is that the ballot has become the bullet. We have been successfully conditioned to give legal cover by way of elections to a system that is burglarizing from 90% of humanity in order to enrich the 1% plutocracy.

Since the inception of the Ghion Journal, my quest was to somehow shake up the status quo by getting a broad dissection of Americans to say enough to this continued hoodwink. I had the audacity to think I could go at it alone and that my pen was enough to prod people to act. Consequently, I disavowed all ideologies and I refused to join any organization. Each time I was approached to be a part of one faction or another, I rebuffed all offers. Moonstruck by idealism, I was dead set on taking on the establishment on my own. I fancied myself David going against Goliath. Two years of indigence did not wash away hubris from my heart.

After running myself into exhaustion, I came to the realization that the debased cannot be defeated by individuals. The debased I’m referring to are globalists who have the singular aim of consolidating their power around the world and indenturing humanity with slave wages and financial anxieties. After spending centuries methodically coalescing power in Europe, nullifying the American revolution and turning the United States government into their capos, what we are witnessing now is the unveiling of their New World Order agenda as they loosen hell around the planet according to the designs of past illuminated vultures.

These secret society associates, the very monsters that John F. Kennedy warned of right before his head was exploded like a watermelon, are the devils who are bleeding humanity and purveying death and terror around the world. This is why it’s absurd to believe that a revolution will be led by politicians, people who join the club and rebel against it are given the JFK, MLK and Malcolm treatment, those who remain in power are nothing more than sheepdogs herding their flock to remain on the plantation of political parties. They call themselves many things, from Masons, Illuminati, Bilderbergs to fishers; they constantly rebrand themselves and in the process help fan the flames that buffoons like Jay Z and Lil John are part of the Illuminati in order to sow confusion into the public and drown truth in an ocean of conspiracy theories and outlandish assertions.

The greatest trick the devil ever played is convincing us that he doesn’t exist. The devil does exist, you can see his manifestation in the billionaires who are choking life out of our nation and the world by extension. These billionaires—Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Jeff Bezos, the Koch brothers, the Rothschilds and other families we’ve never heard of who live in Great Britain, Belgium and beyond —are the de facto despots of the world. After weaponizing their wealth and buying up every politician of note, they are literally dictating to world leaders what to do as duly elected politicians prostrate themselves before these Satanic aristocrats in order to maintain power.

Administering a nation through popular opinion is the worst form of government; popular opinions gave humanity George Bush, Mussolini and Hitler—when will we learn?

In China there is a saying, the most powerful person in the world is the one who is speaking least. The wealthy autocrats who run this world by fiat learned a very valuable lesson during the French Revolution. Instead of putting the target on their backs by proclaiming themselves king and queens and getting the guillotine treatments, in the process having to be accountable to their subjects, they decided to co-opt democracy and fool the citizenry with chicanery. They allow us the privilege of symbolic votes to give us the pretense that our voices are being heard only to demand 100% compliance from the parties they have in their pockets.

“All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive … and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force.”

This sage observation was made by George Washington as he gave wise counsel to Americans during this farewell address. Factionalism is the antithesis of a democracy; political parties have no interest in protecting the public’s’ interest, they are only interested in enhancing their turf. Republicans and Democrats are two factions of the same corporate coin who are pretending to be alternatives when in reality they are colluding to maintain the status quo and serve their globalist masters. The United States has zero sovereignty, I want to blame Citizens United for subverting the Constitution but in reality the American Revolution was vitiated the minute Federalists commandeered the government and turned the US into a debtor nation.

The legacy Federalists like Alexander Hamilton and James Madison left us is a tyranny of false choices and the distinction of voting in meaningless elections so that we could be governed without consent.

The poor will only be with us as long as the greedy are allowed to lead us. America has enough abundance to make everyone prosper; alas we have fallen under the spell of a false Republic and allowing public serpents to delude us into thinking we have liberties as we are being ground into dust. Democracy is not a panacea, it’s a great opiate that has medicated the public into impotence. The same way Lucifer deceived Eve and Adam to take a taste of the apple, devils in blue and red suits dupe us into taking a bite of the ballot using the pretext of free choice only to find ourselves in bondage under the watchful eyes of globalists.

This enterprise of subterfuge is now at its peak level. The leading candidates for the 2020 elections are a self-professed “pussy grabber” Trump who has made the creepiest sexual comments about his own daughter Ivanka and a septuagenarian Biden who likes to fondle–Biden’s campaign calls it “being tactile”–women and little girls. We are witnessing our nation morph from Babylon to Sodom and Gomorrah before our eyes. The arrogance of the ruling class has made them drunk with power, they now openly flaunt their authority by testing the lengths of which they can delude us as they use a cult of personality to hide their hands and propagate injustices around the world. In this paradigm, voting is not an act of freedom, it is an act of capitulation.

Diagnosing the disease is a simple task, coming up with the cure is infinitely harder. I’ve been mulling the solution in my head for more than four years, even when I was sleeping in homeless shelters, I was constantly weighing the options only to get stuck and give up in frustration. Each option led to a dead end; I believe in a strong central authority yet I abhor Federalism. I want as much power to be given to communities and localities but I see no profit in heading the way of anarchy. Unable to think of an answer, I decided to bash away at the establishment using my pen as a jackhammer while offering little in terms of solutions.

A chance online meeting soon enough led to a personal revelation. A friend named Senait tagged me on a picture that was posted by Mel Tewahade as he was posing next to a descendant of Emperor Tewodros II. As a seventh generation progeny of Emperor Tewodros, I was immediately drawn to the picture and replied in Mel’s post with my family tree that traces my ancestry back to a Solomonic line of kings and queens who I’ve always admired.

Mel responded back quickly and asked for my number. From that day, Mel and I formed a friendship as he shared with me his goals of reviving the monarchy in Ethiopia. I was initially hesitant about his grand designs; as much as I love Ethiopian history and the legacy of kings and queens who prevented imperialists from overtaking the nation of my birth during World War II, the Battle of Adwa and prior, the thought of reviving the aristocracy in Ethiopia was not something that I found appealing. But my friend Mel is no shrinking violet; instead of giving up, he kept pressing the point.

My resistance finally broke when he mentioned to me that we can push for a monarchy that has a right mix of central authority and community empowerment. Prodded by Mel’s tenacity, I started to research how the monarchy in Ethiopia was constituted and what I found was the polar opposite of the propaganda that is pushed by communists and capitalist alike to elevate state or corporate control. The Ethiopian crown, though it had its flaws, was a system comprised of small circles at the local level that expanded outward into bigger circles all of which that fell under the purview of the crown council. The monarchs did not rule by decree, at least the good ones, they ruled through consensus.

Eureka! I found my answer. Instead of fighting an institution from outside and relegating myself irrelevant or joining the political mafia with dreams of changing criminals from within, I decided to join an organization that aims to form a whole new infrastructure by using the foundations of past monarchs and incorporating principles such as inclusive justice, diversity and respecting the will of the people into its charter. This is why I made the decision to take an indefinite leave of absence from the Ghion Journal, a choice that was exceedingly difficult. Though I will occasionally post articles here as a guest writer going forward, I will be dedicating my energies to restoring the crown in Ethiopia.

As I go about this mission, I will not forget the injustices that I have witnessed here. I say this as a matter of record, I love America with all my heart. This blessed land offered my family and me a refuge when a Marxist government overthrew Haile Selassie, the last king of Ethiopia, and murdered more than 500,000 people in the process. As much as I am Ethiopian, I am also American. I care deeply about the plight of the marginalized here in America. This burden of empathy was magnified by factors after spending more than two years residing with the homeless and the impoverished in South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Iowa and Colorado. The feature picture you see above was taken while I was living at a community farm in Wellington, Colorado called Harvest Farm where I lived with fellow “invisible” making $7 a week working at the community kitchen. No complaints though; I found more happiness and purpose broke than I did making six figures at Booz Allen Hamilton.

This decision to join Ethiopians for Constitutional Monarchy was not easy for me. My father raised me to earn my legacy not based on my ancestors but through merit. Though I’ve always been proud of my lineage to Emperor Tewodros, my bloodlines did not get me into George Mason University, my ancestry did not help me earn my MBA from Johns Hopkins nor did my association with a former king help me climb the corporate ladder at Booz Allen Hamilton. During my time of tribulation, my family tree did not help me climb out of poverty. I have scratched and clawed for everything I’ve earned in my life; the thought of claiming to be nobility is something that repulsed me for most of my life. As a believer in an awesome God, I hold fast in my heart that all of humanity is royalty. We have the same blood in us irrespective of our differences; whatever ideology or religion you ascribe to, both faith and science affirm that we come from the same source.

Big God or big bang; we are all children of a singular force.

A time has come for me to stop being an idealist. I accepted the position of chair of Ethiopians for Constitutional Monarchy to effect the changes I want to see and to do so from a position of strength instead of ranting from the sidelines. For this exact reason, I also stopped pushing back when the title of Lij was conferred to me. Lij means prince in Amharic; it is an honor given to the heirs of past monarchs. The same way that Haile Selassie has descendants who proudly wear the title of prince as they honor their father, I too now proudly accept the title of Lij (prince) to honor my forefather and to continue working on behalf of justice in Ethiopia and beyond.

Let me assure you, I am not taking on the title of Lij so that I can hobnob around the world wearing tuxedos and sipping Chablis with the same billionaires who are bleeding my homeland Ethiopia and squeezing the middle-class, working class and the poor into a pulp here in America and beyond. The king who I pray I emulate is not my ancestor Tewodros but a King of Kings who led by love instead of ruling through force. Yeshua (who has been rebranded to Jesus by the same Pharisees who murdered Him) is the King who I am redeemed by and the Prince who is my role model.

Yeshua is not caricature he is presented in church by modern day pharisees who wear the cloth as they continue the hustle of the pharisees who crucified Him. Yeshua railed against injustice, He stood up against the rich, He spoke against usury (capitalism), and He fed the poor as he walked with them–He was a rebel through and through. What would “Jesus” do? This has been a question asked for centuries by believers around the world. It’s simple, love our neighbors like we love ourselves, be kind to each other, stand up to the ruling class who oppress the least among us and stop worshiping idols. Failing unity, if we decide to continue down this path of self-interest at the cost of the collective whole, a day will soon come where lamentation will be all we know and desolation shall be our new norm. #IQuitDemocracy Click To Tweet

If we are to bend the arc of history towards justice as Martin Luther King noted, it will only be through a united front. There is a connective tissue to human suffering; a child suffers in Addis Abeba for the same reasons why a child suffers in Atlanta and beyond. As long as we bicker apart, we shall continue to suffer apart. This is the reason why America is about to undergo great tribulation–the boil cometh. What the future holds, only God knows; but I will do what I can to speak up against these global agenda of greed that is destroying our planet. May God bless and protect my birth land Ethiopia, my new home America and humanity as a whole.

Yours in Service,

Lij Teodrose Fikremariam
Chair
Ethiopians for Constitutional Monarchy
email: teodrose.fikremariam@ethiopians4cm.org
Soul of Arbegnoch

Disclaimer: Going forward, Stephen Boni, who has been a regular contributor at the Ghion Journal, will take over as the interim editor until a permanent replacement is found. I will submit occasional articles at the Ghion Journal as a guest writer, but as long as I’m the chair of Ethiopians for Constitutional Monarchy, each article that is published by me in this space will make it clear that I am not a journalist but a public figure advocating policy changes.