TEBYE VS. ELY- CHAITLIN:
THE FINAL ROUND

What follows is the third and final installment of the debate between Julian Tebye and Marc Eric Ely-Chaitlin on the historical basis of monarchy, and whether or not the United States should remain a republic. Both of these individuals have put a great deal of time and thought into their respective arguments, and I thank both of them for this. However, after this installment I think it is wise to let this matter lie, at least as far as these two are concerned. I still invite comments from other readers about this in-print debate, all input is welcome and will be passed on to Julian Tebye and/or Marc Eric Ely-Chaitlin, possibly published if such is desired and the contribution provides a new insight.

With that, I present the debate on history between Julian Tebye and Marc Eric Ely-Chaitlin, for the final round. . . .

THE LAST WORD

I really don't have much more to say concerning your very creative version of history. I might point out that, among those 1.6 million people in prison, are such people as Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan. I agree that those found guilty of victimless crimes should not be imprisoned--but not all 1.6 million are in that category.

It may surprise you, but I agree with you concerning much of what you criticize. My objections are to your sweeping generalizations and gross exaggerations (e.g.: "...reliance on the principles of law that had succeeded for TEN THOUSAND YEARS.") (Your caps.) 10,000 years would put us back to about 8,000 BCA--long before written history. Probably, long before writing. Do you actually claim to know "the principles of law" that existed at that time?

And your reliance on the good old Anglo-Saxons is somewhat misplaced, in my opinion. Does that include the "time-honored" practice of Blutgeld, where it was all right to kill a man as long as you paid the family blood money? And your beloved Anglo-Saxons, with their high principles of law, moved into England and stole the land from the indigenous Celts. (But, that's okay. The Normans later moved in and took much of their land from the Anglo-Saxons.)

Let's play "What if". What if you were to become the king or regent of the USA? What makes you think that your "Vision of the Friendly Society" would miraculously become reality? As with other utopian dreamers, you overlook one little fact: In order to transform society, you must change people. "If only everyone would think as I think!" (I have already--cynically--pointed out that you could have had just such a "perfect society" under Hitler, as long as everyone agreed with his ideas--and as long as they weren't Semitic, gypsies, homosexuals or a few other "unacceptable" things.)

By your own admission, this would be a Constitutional Monarchy. That means that you, as king or regent, do not rule. (I am reminded of Clemenceau's observation that, "In a democracy, the people reign, they do not rule.") So there you are, sitting on your fat ... throne. As Constitutional Monarch, you must have a Prime Minister. But you do not choose the Prime Minister; he or she is chosen by the voters. And they have the major choice of Dole or Clinton. My point is: What has changed?

You state that you are there to give poor people "hope". (Hope of what?) The poor people already have hope: The hope that they will win the lottery; The hope that they (male) will "get lucky". If you persist in your attempts to establish an autocratic government, please be aware that, when a government consists of a single head, this greatly facilitates the opportunity to lop off the entire government with a single blow. In your words: BECAUSE IT IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO!

Julian Tebye
(Anyone who would like to write to Mr. Tebye may do so
through the Philosophers' Guild)

TEBYE: CONSISTENTLY INCONSISTENT

Oddly enough, there are two incidents that stand out in history, which prove out your assertion regarding the weakness of dictatorship. The first is the assassination of President Lincoln, an event that threw the Republic into a panic that was only exceeded by the panic that followed the second incident, the assassination of President Kennedy. A third episode that powerfully illustrated the dictatorial power of the president was the death of FDR, which left a bewildered population, the youngest of whom had never known any other president.

If I could determine what you were in favor of, it would be possible to address it; but you squirm around, resisting defining yourself, so that you constitute a moving target. It doesn't seem to bother you that 1.6 million of your countrymen are in prison and jail, and that at least ONE-THIRD of those prisoners are there for drug related crimes. It doesn't seem to bother you that the fascistic Republic holds more prisoners, per capita, than any other national government on the Earth. That is not "creative history," that is data that is available from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. And if you were paying attention – which it would seem that you were not, because I have already gone over this – Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan committed genuine crimes, and their imprisonment, and the imprisonment of like-criminals convicted of real crimes, is justified. But the fact that the Republic has more of its own citizens in jail than any other country on Earth is a sure and certain sign that the consent of the American people to the perpetuation of the Republic is based solely on coercion.

I don't know how to tell you this, but I am not your enemy. I have no intention of depriving you or any American of his or her rights under law. Your complete inability to fathom what I am talking about is betrayed by your inability to look beyond the Presidency, which you seem fixated on (like all the adherents of dictatorship). You seem unable to recognize that under a legitimate system of government, men with no integrity, such as Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, would not progress much. I do not think that a Clinton or a Dole would be put forward as a candidate for Prime Minister, if the United States were governed under a legitimate government.

You do not recognize the truly hostile and contemptuous opinion the politicians and bureaucrats possess regarding the American people, so you do not acknowledge that what I have done by putting myself forward as Pretender to the American Crown, is that I have risked my life. The likelihood is high that if I have any success at all in persuading a sizable audience that a change is necessary, that I will die under mysterious circumstances. And that is not to assume power myself, but to restore the ancient constitution in which individuals possess hereditary and inalienable civil rights that constitute the very sinews of the society, which are outside of the power of a legitimate government to revoke or change. It is unfortunate that you have no real education, because it is impossible to debate important topics with someone who is as handicapped as you are. You have no understanding of the Anglo-American constitution; your understanding goes no further than that blasphemy that the republicans pass off as a constitution, the Constitution of 1787, yet you think that you can argue that the institution it empowers (absolutely) is a bulwark for something positive.

I think your real enmity against me comes through in this letter, what I can only hope is actually and truly your "Last Word." I have already said everything there is to say, and to go on is to beat a dead horse. You cannot attack my ideas, so you attack me. But I don't see you putting yourself on the line. I don't see you doing anything for your countrymen, other than supporting a fascistic mass movement – the republic – which openly mocks you for believing that it makes you free. What you are completely incapable of seeing is that what I am proposing is not to change the people, but the GOVERNMENT. Any time someone suggests that the current system is not living up to any criteria of moral decency, it is people like you who come to its defense, so that it can throw more people into prison for smoking marijuana; and then you loudly declare that you are opposed to imprisoning people for such a "crime," yet you don't really do anything to change anything. You are a pure hypocrite.

The suggestion for a "Friendly Society" is in stark contrast to the Great Society, and the New Deal. It is not meant to characterize a well-financed centrally-planned government program, but a simple objective of creating a positive national community using tools such as friendship, loyalty and good faith, that are available to each and every person regardless of class, ethnic group, or partisan affiliation. You have spent untold hours thinking of criticisms of my ideas; did it ever cross your mind that you could make a positive contribution to your country, your community, your street? This is not about the vision of a single person carried out with a regimented system of thinking; to carry such a program into effect would be to do nothing but replicate the existing system of regimented thinking that now supports the republic of the Founding Fathers, the slavemaster bastards who saddled our ancestors, and whose descendants think it is their god-given right to saddle us. The logic you use to discredit the idea of a friendly society – that it would have to come into effect by some miracle – illustrates the really dark and negative outlook you have of the human race, who you apparently do not believe are capable of such a basic relationship as friendship. Is it really "utopian" to imagine a world in which teenagers do NOT kill their schoolmates, or wherein the highest cause of death in the workplace is NOT murder?

Your view of a constitutional monarchy is also oddly uninformed, which is typical of Americans educated in republican-controlled schools. A constitutional monarch cannot impose his opinions on the Government, which is a democratically elected institution. The most significant difference between a legal monarchical government, and an illegal republican state, is the fact that at the center of the republican state there is a ceremonial chief executive who is subject to powers greater than himself, namely the billionaires who literally own the country, and whose investments require them to minimize their risks by controlling the presidency through campaign contributions. The very temporary nature of the presidency makes it ideal for opportunists and rogues, which the political system of the republic has had no shortage of ever since it was crammed down the throats of the American people by a process of conventions that even Alexander Hamilton thought was high-handed and arrogant.

The idea of the kingship is that it meets the criteria of law, making it legal. In your fantasy world law is whatever Congress says it is, because that is what it says in the Constitution of 1787, and you cannot understand how this contradicts the principles of law, which represent a refinement over thousands of years. Yes, thousands of years. And to say ten thousand years is to intimate that the law evolved from human relations at a time in pre-history at a date uncertain. Does that bother your obviously Germanic sensibilities? That the law is an academic field of scholarship that was not enacted on a single day by plantation aristocrats who had no "right" to do so, but that it evolved out of a misty pre-historic past, and that it has evolved to meet changing times. By bringing up the blutgeld, you reveal that you fail to understand the underlying principle of it, which was that the payment of blood money replaced an even earlier practice whereby a murder was revenged by another murder; in the context of its origin, it was an advancement. Today, of course, we are beyond that, and it is just ridiculous of you to insinuate that in order for us to acknowledge the reception of Anglo-Saxon law, that we must also accept such outdated institutions as the blutgeld. Yet most significantly, the reason the Anglo-Saxon roots of the English law are mentioned is to remind you that we are part of a continuum, and law evolved out of human needs and common sense, not a political bargain struck by slavemasters to give them an unfair advantage over the landless masses.

I think it is possible to "know" the principles of law that were accepted millennia ago, because they are rooted in human needs for fairness and society. People are not naturally loners, the roots of community go back to those first human beings who stood erect. Truth is still truth, and a lie is still a lie, no matter how fancy our means of transportation may become, or how many industrial gadgets we invent to give us new and obscure conveniences that we are not even sure we need. You can rationalize all you want, but people love their mothers and fathers and children, and they seek to protect the ones they love, and they tend to be loyal to them; and they tend to join together with others like themselves, for no other reason than to enjoy the limited time of their mortal existence. You mention the ancient blutgeld, but you fail to see that the demand for restitution is still alive in modern life, even if the demand for blood money no longer exists. This will never change, and it embodies a drive in people that is so ancient, we do not know when it originated. But you can be certain that if men lived ten thousand years ago, and we are pretty certain that they did, that they held the same feelings of men and women who live today.

The people existed before the law, and it was to fulfill the needs of the people that law was devised, and this human influence shaped the law. When the first law came into existence it had to do with the interactions of the various individuals who constituted the community, which had the effect of recognizing the existence of "legal rights" as vested in individual human beings. Government came about as a result of the interaction of these individual rights, through the exercise of parental authority of the first leadership, as it was constituted by the actual parents of the tribe. It has been asserted that the ancient constitution is not the source of the civil rights of individuals, but the consequence of their existence; the rights of the individual are therefore pre-existent, before the state. And it is from individuals that the state has always derived its authority to govern. The idea that the Founding Fathers of American fascism originated the notion of government by the governed is absurd at best, an outright lie at worst.

I find your flippant remarks about "hope" troubled and negative. Today the American people have no hope, but that is only because every horror they must suffer through is portrayed as the end-product of the March of Civilization, which miraculously culminated in the Federal republic of the United States Government. When things go really bad, due solely to the corrupt and ineffective system of government we are forced to submit to, collaborators like you have the gall to accuse the American people of APATHY! As if slaves can JUST SAY NO! It really bothers you that others do not see things your way, and comply with your world vision; exactly what you accuse me of doing. Yet you don't acknowledge that I have put forward no such vision. The only society I want to see evolve is a friendly society, and the only way people can be friends is if every individual in that society is first and foremost, FREE. Ultimately individuals do have to liberate themselves, but if the republic is accepted at face value (which you apparently do), individuals are stripped of all authority to make their own choices, and they become, instead, the wards of an all-powerful state; and the fact that the leadership of that state is voted into power by a balloting process does not reduce the significance of the fact that the people over whom it shall exercise power are deprived of freedom of choice.

Someday you are just going to have to accept that you have been lied to by the adherents of the republic. It is not the best system of government in the world, it does not make you free; you are not better off because of it. Its founders were not good men, and the British king was not a tyrant. Kingship is not an autocracy, and law is not something that you can just invent out of thin blue air. Either you are part of the solution, or you are part of the problem; but those people who are part of the solution will be empowered far beyond their individual influence, and those people who are part of the problem will find that they are powerless and confused and reduced to irrelevance. When the abolitionists started on the long road to abolish the curse of the Founding Fathers – slavery – they were vastly outnumbered by the supporters of slavery; but by standing fast in truth, they prevailed. We, too, shall prevail, but without coercion; without fraud; without a violent civil war. Where is the instrument of "an autocratic government," that you allege I am attempting to establish? I have no army, no bodyguard, no political partisan faction. I am armed with nothing more than the truth, the historic truth, and it is the truth that shall liberate America. If I can contribute to that, I will be deeply honored.

Marc Eric Ely-Chaitlin
Regent of the United States
P.O. Box 7075
Laguna Niguel, CA 92607