The Anatomy of Entrenchment: A Comparative Analysis of Feudal Remnants

Leonie

This study examines the survival of "cloned feudalist states"—power structures that retain the architecture of historical feudalism while operating behind a modern veneer. By comparing the imperial land monopolies of Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia with the relic feudalism of the Scottish Highlands, we identify a common mechanism of control: the strategic use of romanticism to mask systemic attrition.

I. The Land-Grab Architecture

Feudalism is never abolished; it simply rebrands. In Ethiopia, Haile Selassie functioned as the "King of Kings," utilising land as a personal monopoly to ensure the subservience of the peasantry. In Scotland, the "relic" system persists where vast swathes of territory remain concentrated in the hands of a microscopic elite, protected by historical "rights and burdens." In both cases, the architecture is identical: land is not a community resource, but a leverage point for the elite to maintain hierarchical dominance.

II. Romanticism as the PRX of Feudalism

The most effective tool of the cloned state is not the sword, but the postcard. Romanticism serves as the ultimate camouflage for feudal power.

The Scottish Myth: The Highland narrative—the invented traditions of the kilt, the clan system, and the "rugged, empty" wilderness—functions to erase the memory of the people actually cleared from those lands. It turns a site of historical trauma into a landscape of aesthetic leisure for the ruling class.
The Imperial Iconography: Similarly, the romanticism of Haile Selassie—through the "Lion of Judah" lens—turns a feudal autocracy into a spiritual icon. This branding shields the imperial system from critique; it makes the interrogation of feudal poverty an act of "disrespect" toward the myth.

In both instances, the aesthetic is the policy. By maintaining the romantic facade, the cloned state preserves its status, forcing us to look at the icon rather than the deeds to the land.

III. The Blasphemy of the Myth

The cynical nature of this romanticisation is best exposed by the treatment of Marcus Garvey. While the Rastafarian movement elevated Selassie to the status of a living god, they did so in direct contradiction to the man who laid the intellectual foundations for their movement. Garvey himself viewed the worship of Selassie as an act of absolute blasphemy—a betrayal of the principles of Black self-reliance and sovereignty.

By deifying the Emperor, the movement traded the hard, pragmatic labour of Garvey’s vision for the performative, messianic spectacle of the "Lion of Judah." This is the "Corporate Monster" logic in action: the system prefers an icon it can worship because an icon is static, safe, and controllable. It has no capacity to challenge the status quo. Garvey, by contrast, was a threat. By prioritising the romantic icon over the radical observation, the movement successfully castrated its own potential for genuine liberation.

IV. The Attrition of the "Monster"

The eventual collapse of the Selassie regime—torn down by the visceral, chaotic force of the Derg—was the inevitable result of systemic attrition. It was a violent correction of an unsustainable imbalance. Yet, we must be cautious: the "Red Terror" that followed proved that a movement which mimics the monster it fights often becomes the very thing it sought to replace.

The danger in the Scottish context is not necessarily a sudden violent attrition, but a stagnation so profound that the community is hollowed out—leaving only a shell of "tradition" populated by those who can afford the entry fee.

V. Conclusion: Beyond the Performance

The "cloned feudalist state" relies on our active participation in its performance. When we revere the "living god" or the "ancestral clan," we are not preserving history; we are legitimising current systems of theft and monopoly.

Opting out requires a rejection of these pre-packaged romantic myths. It demands that we stop viewing land through the lens of elite prestige and start seeing it as the ground upon which an autonomous community must stand. To break the feudal relic, one must refuse to recognise its authority, not just in law, but in our own imagination. The gate is unlatched; the only remaining task is to walk through it.

Coda: The Martyr’s Trap

We must learn to be suspicious of our own desire to celebrate. To turn a liberator into an icon is to manufacture a puppet for the oppressor. Idolisation is simply a form of historical revisionism—a way to build a cathedral out of lies to replace the uncomfortable reality of struggle with a romantic myth that serves the status quo.

True liberation requires no statues, no anthems, and no followers; it requires only the quiet, anonymous reclamation of our own agency. If we want to stay free, we must abandon the need to be known, abandon the need to worship, and—above all—refuse to let the past be rewritten to serve the masters of the present. We must simply be, and in doing so, refuse to be used.

Leonie

The Architect and the Adopter: Deconstructing a Hegemonic Myth

History is often not what happened; it is what we are told happened in order to maintain a social order. In the context of the Rastafarian movement, two figures—Marcus Garvey and Bob Marley—have been co-opted, instrumentalised, and fundamentally rewritten to serve a hegemonic narrative. By examining the historical reality of these two men against the "propaganda" version promoted by the movement, we reveal a suppressive structure that functions less like a liberation movement and more like a feudal hierarchy.

The Architect’s Scorn

Marcus Garvey was a pragmatic, rigorous political organiser. He built his "house"—the UNIA—on the bedrock of economic self-reliance and disciplined structural organisation. His relationship with the nascent Rastafarian movement was not one of inspiration, but of overt, almost visceral disdain. Garvey viewed their focus on spiritual messianism as a "blasphemous" distraction from the hard, secular work of building Black power.

Yet, the hegemonic narrative has performed a total reversal: it has rebranded Garvey as a divine herald of the very movement he scorned. By stripping away his actual political critiques and replacing them with a prophetic myth, the movement has effectively turned a man who demanded material progress into a hostage of a theology that thrives on political passivity.

The Adopter’s Privilege

If Garvey was the reluctant Architect, Bob Marley was the willing Adopter. Marley’s life—often marketed as the ultimate "from the gutter to the throne" story—is frequently sanitised to fit the movement's needs. The hegemonic narrative conveniently erases the reality of his birth: he was the product of a union between a young Black woman and a white colonial administrator.

This is not a detail; it is the fundamental reality of his origin. By obscuring his colonial roots and framing his struggle as one of pure, unadulterated "ghetto" identity, the movement uses him as a shield. Marley becomes the "universal psalmist" whose existence is used to validate a movement that often demands rigid conformity. His interracial reality, which fundamentally clashes with the ethnonationalist sentiments Garvey once championed, is smoothed over, forcing two incompatible histories into one convenient, compliant myth.

The Suppressive Machine

Why do these distortions persist? Because they are the foundational stones of a suppressive system. By holding Garvey and Marley as untouchable icons, the leadership of the movement creates a "common sense" that cannot be questioned. If you challenge the theology, you are not debating a structure—you are "attacking the prophet" (Garvey) or "betraying the voice" (Marley).

This is the definition of a hegemonic apparatus: it is a system that creates its own reality to protect its hierarchy. It does not need to censor the truth; it simply makes the truth irrelevant by saturating the cultural landscape with a version of history that serves its own survival.

The tragedy is that the movement did not liberate Garvey or Marley. It consumed them. It turned two men who were defined by their complex, human contradictions into two-dimensional tools used to demand submission. To understand the true power dynamics of the movement, we must stop worshipping the myths they created and start looking at the suppressive machinery that requires those myths to function.