Leadership Quote by Neil Abercrombie

That deceptively simple exchange is how empire justifies itself in a conference-room tone. Abercrombie isn’t recounting a battlefield or a grand ideological debate; he’s remembering bureaucracy as destiny. The line “Why are we doing this?” carries the moral weight of a belated awakening, but it’s framed in the modest register of a junior official realizing the mission brief doesn’t match democratic common sense. He’s not condemning conquest in sweeping language; he’s registering the quiet dissonance of governance that knows it’s substituting for self-rule.

The chairman’s answer - “we have no mechanism to do it” - is the real indictment. “Mechanism” sounds technical, neutral, even responsible, yet it’s the oldest colonial alibi: the system can’t imagine relinquishing control because it hasn’t built the tools to do so. That’s not an accident; it’s design. Institutions that benefit from authority rarely draft the paperwork for their own obsolescence. The subtext is that Hawaiian self-determination is treated less like a right than like an administrative problem awaiting a form, a statute, a procedure.

Placed in Hawai’i’s long shadow of annexation, territorial governance, and contested sovereignty, the anecdote shows how power preserves itself by shrinking ethical questions into managerial ones. Abercrombie’s memory also performs a political self-portrait: the insider who learned to question the premises. It’s a confession, but also a warning about how easily “no mechanism” becomes a substitute for justice.