The
New Secessionists: Neo-Confederacy, America Winning By The
Gun?
04 May 2010By Chris Hedges
Editor’s note: Because of an error, Chris Hedges’
April 25 column used part of a sentence that appeared
in a recent article by Christopher Ketcham in GOOD
magazine and on its website. Truthdig acknowledges
Ketcham’s work and regrets the failure to properly
attribute the wording to him. Ketcham is credited in
the revised column below.
Acts of rebellion which promote moral and political
change must be nonviolent. And one of the most potent
nonviolent alternatives in the country, which defies
the corporate state and calls for an end to imperial
wars, is the secessionist movement bubbling up in some
two dozen states including Vermont, Texas, Alaska and
Hawaii.
These movements do not always embrace liberal values.
Most of the groups in the South champion a
“neo-Confederacy” and are often exclusively male and
white. Secessionists, who call for statewide
referendums to secede, do not advocate the use of
force. It is unclear, however, if some will turn to
force if the federal structure ever denies them
independence.
These groups at least grasp that the old divisions
between liberals and conservatives are obsolete and
meaningless. They understand that corporations have
carried out a coup d’état. They recognize that our
permanent war economy and costly and futile imperial
wars are unsustainable and they demand that we take
popular action to prevent citizens from being further
impoverished and robbed by Wall Street speculators and
corporations.
“The defining characteristic of the Second Vermont
Republic is that there are two enemies, the United
States government and corporate America,” Thomas
Naylor, who founded Vermont’s secessionist movement,
told me when I reached him by phone at his home 10
miles south of Burlington. “One owns the other one. We
are not like the tea party. The underlying premise of
the tea party movement is that the system is fixable.”
As reported by Christopher Ketcham in a recent issue
of GOOD magazine, Naylor points to the nation’s
decline. The secessionist leader notes, in Ketcham’s
words, “Of all the western democracies, the United
States stands near dead last in voter turnout, last in
health care, last in education, highest in homicide
rates, mortality, STDs among juveniles, youth
pregnancy, abortion, and divorce. ...”
The nation, he says grimly, has trillions in deficits
it can never repay, is beset by staggering income
disparities, has destroyed its manufacturing base and
is the planet’s most egregious polluter and greediest
consumer of fossil fuels. With some 40 million
Americans living in poverty, tens of millions more in
a category called “near poverty” and a permanent
underclass trapped by a real unemployment rate of 17
percent, there is ample tinder for internal
combustion. If we do not undertake a dramatic reversal
soon, he asserts, the country and the global
environment will implode with catastrophic
consequences.
The secessionist movement is gaining ground in several
states, especially Texas, where elected officials
increasingly have to contend with secessionist
sentiments.
“Our membership has grown tremendously since the
bailouts, since the tail end of the Bush
administration,” said Daniel Miller, the leader of the
Texas Nationalist Movement, when I spoke with him by
telephone from his home in the small town of
Nederland, Texas. “There is a feeling in Texas that we
are being spent into oblivion. We are operating as the
cash cow for the states that cannot manage their
budgets. With this Congress, Texas has been squarely
in their cross hairs, from cap and trade to the alien
transfer and exit program. So many legislative pieces
coming down the pike are offensive to people here in
Texas. The sentiment for independence here is very
high. The sentiment inside the Legislature and state
capital is one of guarded optimism. There are scores
of folks within state government who are supportive of
what we are doing, although there is a need to see the
public support in a more tangible way. This is why we
launched our Let Texas Decide petition drive. We
intend to deliver over a million signatures on the
opening day of the [state legislative] session on Jan.
11, 2011.”
Miller, like Naylor, expects many in the tea party to
migrate to secessionist movements once they realize
that they cannot alter the structure or power of the
corporate state through electoral politics. Polls in
Texas show the secessionists have support from about
35 percent of the state’s population, and Vermont is
not far behind.
Naylor, who taught economics at Duke University for 30
years, is, along with Kirkpatrick Sale and Donald
Livingston, one of the intellectual godfathers of the
secessionist movement. His writing can be found on The
Second Vermont Republic website, on the website
Secession News and in postings on the Middlebury
Institute website. Naylor first proposed secession in
his 1997 book “Downsizing the USA.” He comes out of
the “small is beautiful” movement, as does Sale.
Naylor lives with his wife in the Vermont village of
Charlotte.
The Second Vermont Republic arose from the statewide
anti-war protests in 2003. It embraces a left-wing
populism that makes it unique among the national
movements, which usually veer more toward Ron Paul
libertarianism. The Vermont movement, like the Texas
and Alaska movements, is well organized. It has a
bimonthly newspaper called The Vermont Commons, which
champions sustainable agriculture and energy supplies
based on wind and water, and calls for locally owned
banks which will open lines of credit to their
communities. Dennis Steele, who is campaigning for
governor as a secessionist, runs Radio Free Vermont,
which gives a venue to Vermont musicians and groups as
well as being a voice of the movement. Vermont, like
Texas, was an independent republic, but on March 4,
1791, voted to enter the union. Supporters of the
Second Vermont Republic commemorate the anniversary by
holding a mock funeral procession through the state
capital, Montpelier, with a casket marked “Vermont.”
Secessionist candidates in Vermont are currently
running for governor, lieutenant governor, eight
Senate seats and two House seats.
The movement, at its core, is anti-authoritarian,”
said Sale, who works closely with Naylor and spoke
with me from his home in Charleston, S.C. “It includes
those who are libertarians and those who are on the
anarchic community side. In traditional terms these
people are left and right, but they have come very
close together in their anti-authoritarianism. Left
and right no longer have meaning.”
The movement correctly views the corporate state as a
force that has so corrupted the economy, as well as
the electoral and judicial process, that it cannot be
defeated through traditional routes. It also knows
that the corporate state, which looks at the natural
world and human beings as commodities to be exploited
until exhaustion or collapse occurs, is rapidly
cannibalizing the nation and pushing the planet toward
irrevocable crisis. And it argues that the corporate
state can be dismantled only through radical forms of
nonviolent revolt and the dissolution of the United
States. As an act of revolt it has many attributes.
“The only way we will ever stop these wars is when we
stop paying for them,” Naylor told me. “Vermont
contributes about $1.5 billion to the Pentagon’s
budget. Do we want to keep supporting these wars? If
not, let’s pull out. We have two objectives. The first
is returning Vermont to its status as an independent
republic. The second is the peaceful dissolution of
the empire. I see these as being mutually
complementary.”
“The U.S. government has lost its moral authority,” he
went on. “It is corrupt to the core. It is owned,
operated and controlled by Wall Street and corporate
America. Its foreign policy is controlled by the
Israeli lobby. It is unsustainable economically,
socially, morally, militarily and environmentally. It
is ungovernable and therefore unfixable. The question
is, do you go down with the Titanic or do you seek
other options?”
The leaders of the movement concede that sentiment
still outstrips organization. There has not been a
large proliferation of new groups, and a few old
groups have folded because of a lack of leadership and
support. But they insist that an increasing number of
Americans are receptive to their ideas.
“The number of groups has not grown as I hoped it
would when I started having congresses,” said Sale,
who addresses groups around the country. “But the
number of people, of individuals, of websites and the
number of libertarians who have come around has grown
leaps and bounds. Many of those who were disappointed
by the treatment of Ron Paul have come to the
conclusion that they cannot have a Libertarian Party
or a libertarian Republican. They are beginning to
talk about secession.”
“Secessionists have to be very careful not to be
militaristic,” Sale warned. “This cannot be won by the
gun. You can be emphatic in your secessionism, but it
won’t happen by carrying guns. I don’t know what the
tea party people think they are going to accomplish
with guns. I guess it is a statement against the
federal government and the fear that Obama is about to
have gun control. It appears to be an assertion of
individual rights. But the tea party people have not
yet understood how they are going to get their view
across. They still believe they can elect people,
either Republicans or declared conservatives, to
office in Washington and have an effect, as if you can
escape the culture of Washington and the
characteristics of government that has only gotten
bigger and will only continue to get bigger. Electing
people to the House and Senate is not going to change
the characteristics of the system.”
The most pressing problem is that the movement harbors
within its ranks Southern secessionists who wrap
themselves in the Confederate flag, begin their
meetings singing Dixie and celebrate the slave culture
of the antebellum South. Secessionist groups such as
the Southern National Congress and the more radical
League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law
Center has labeled a “racist hate group,” openly
embrace a return to uncontested white, male power. And
this aspect of the movement deeply disturbs leaders
such as Naylor, Sale and Miller.
What all these movements grasp, however, is that the
American empire is over. It cannot be sustained. They
understand that we must disengage peacefully, learn to
speak with a new humility and live with a new
simplicity, or see an economic collapse that could
trigger a perverted Christian fascism, a ruthless
police state and internecine violence.
“There are three or four possible scenarios that will
bring down the empire,” Naylor said. “One possibility
is a war with Iran. Another will see the Chinese pull
the plug on Treasury bills. Even if these do not
happen, the infrastructure of the country is decaying.
This is a slower process. And they do not have the
economy fixed. It is smoke and mirrors. This is why
the price of gold is so high. The economy and the
inability to stop the wars will alone be enough to
bring us down. There is no escape now from our
imperial overstretch.”
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