Leadership Quote by Jack Kingston

Kingston’s line reads less like a history lesson than a sales pitch for regime change dressed up as moral clarity. By stacking “monarchy” and “suffering under Communism,” he compresses Ethiopia’s complicated 20th-century trajectory into a tidy cautionary tale: bad systems, then worse systems, therefore democracy as the inevitable cure. It’s a rhetorical escalator that moves the audience upward toward a predetermined destination, with “the greatest of systems” doing the heavy lifting. That phrase isn’t descriptive; it’s devotional. It turns democracy from a contested practice into a brand promise.

The intent is twofold. On the surface, it’s pro-democracy solidarity with Ethiopians. Underneath, it’s also an American self-portrait: the speaker positions the U.S. (and U.S.-style liberal democracy) as the implicit benchmark, the authority qualified to declare what “opportunity” should look like. “Must be given” subtly relocates agency away from Ethiopians themselves and toward outside actors or aligned domestic elites who can “give” the proper system. Even the word “flourish” is telling: it replaces politics with lifestyle, swapping power struggles and institutions for a softer language of growth and prosperity.

Context matters: Ethiopia’s history isn’t a simple relay from monarchy to communism to freedom, and “Communism” here is a shorthand for the Derg’s authoritarian violence. Kingston’s framing leverages that trauma to justify a clean ideological conclusion. The subtext is Cold War residue repurposed for modern foreign-policy messaging: if the past is “Communism,” the future must be “democracy,” and any messy middle gets edited out.