Deep in the heart of Texas, in Nederland, Texas to be exact, lies the headquarters of the fastest growing, most serious secession movement in the United States since the end of the Civil War in 1865 – The Texas Nationalist Movement. Although TNM traces its origins back to 1995, it was catapulted onto the national stage when Texas governor Rick Perry threatened to secede from the Union while participating in an April 15th Tea Party (tax revolt) in Austin.

And it surely does not hurt that TNM is led by 35-year-old Daniel Miller, the group’s very bright, articulate, charismatic, politically sophisticated president. The goal of the Texas Nationalist Movement is nothing short of “Independence. In our lifetime.” according to its state-of-the-art website texasnationalist.com.

What truly differentiates TNM from stereotypical Southern secession movements such as the League of the South is its laser-like focus on Texas independence rather than on such spurious, divisive issues as Christian fundamentalism, abortion, and gay rights. One of the reasons the League of the South has proven to be so ineffective as a secession organization is that it is in too many unrelated businesses – evangelical Christianity, right to life, Southern history and culture, the Confederate flag, and the song “Dixie.” That’s a lot of inflammatory baggage to carry, and unfortunately, some of it is tarnished by the taint of racism. The Texas Nationalist Movement is only about peaceable Texas independence, but that’s enough!

In a recent article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram by Dave Montgomery, Daniel Miller was quoted as saying, “We maintain an open-door policy. If you’re about freedom – individual freedom – and liberty and Texas independence, we call you brother or sister.” Miller proudly proclaims that TNM “includes Hispanics, African-Americans, women, lifelong Democrats and union members.” Continuing he notes that, “We don’t argue race; we don’t argue Democratic or Republican.” And the movement predates the Age of Obama by nearly 15 years.

Texas provides fertile ground in which to sow the seeds of secession. A Rasmussen Poll conducted on April 16, the day after Rick Perry’s widely publicized threat to split with the United States, found that 31 percent of Texans believe Texas has a right to secede from the Union. Eighteen percent actually favor secession. That is a very strong foundation on which to build a viable Texas independence movement.

To “pay the bills” Miller and his wife Cara run a commercial Internet radio station RadioFreeTexas.org which broadcasts Texas music 24 hours a day. It is the perfect complement to TNM.

The mission of TNM is “To secure and protect the political, cultural, and economic independence of the nation of Texas.” To achieve this goal TNM is promoting an “internationally recognized referendum on Texas independence.” With the aid of state-of-the-art social networking software, Miller has put together a statewide political organization of Texas independence supporters.

I predict that the new kid on the block, the Texas Nationalist Movement, will soon become the role model for the thirty or so secession movements spread out all over the United States.

Rebél
Thomas H. Naylor
September 23, 2009

Since its inception in 2003 the Second Vermont Republic has been calling for the peaceable return of Vermont to its rightful status as an independent republic and for the peaceable dissolution of the American Empire. Over time two quite different paradigms have evolved as to how Vermont independence might be achieved. One is very similar to the small-is-beautiful, back-to-the-land, sustainable living, radical anti-imperialism paradigm embraced by political activists Scott and Helen Nearing between 1932 and 1952 when they were living in Jamaica, Vermont. The other, promoted by environmental activist Bill McKibben, holds that political independence is unachievable without first achieving agricultural and energy independence. We shall examine each.

The Nearing Paradigm

The fundamental premise underlying the Second Vermont Republic is that the United States government has become the largest, wealthiest, most powerful, most materialistic, most racist, most militaristic, most violent empire of all times. It has lost its moral authority and is unsustainable and unfixable. Therefore, the only morally defensible response for a state like Vermont is peaceable secession.

The six Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were all brought down by a common nonviolent strategy, namely by demonstrating unequivocally that the leaders of these regimes had lost their moral authority. The Communist government of Poland was not toppled in 1989 by Solidarity leader Lech Walesa whispering sweet nothings in the ear of President Wojciech Jaruzelski. Rather it, as well as the five other Eastern European Communist governments, was brought down by a sophisticated mixture of confrontation, negotiation, and testing of limits spread out over several years. Ultimately it was a question of political will. The political will of the people trumped the will of the government to stay in power. The emperor was found to have no clothes both in the Soviet Union as well as in its Eastern European satellites.

If SVR is to prevail, it must challenge the moral authority of the U.S. government. It must confront the lack of moral authority of the Vermont Congressional delegation – Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Congressman Peter Welch and their collaborators in the Democratic and Progressive parties in Vermont.

On 6 August 1945, the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Scott Nearing wrote to President Harry S. Truman that “your government is no longer mine.” A few years later in his book The Conscience of a Radical, he said, “My conscience is aroused, outraged, and anguished by the dangerous drift of mankind toward self-destruction, and by the satanic role which the United States is playing in the fateful drama. I have no choice in the matter – I must speak out.” And speak out he did.

What differentiated Scott and Helen Nearing from contemporary environmentalists, simple living proponents, and back-to-the-land advocates was their commitment to radical politics aimed squarely at the American Empire. All too many Vermont downshifters and newly minted agrarians overlook the fact that the American Empire is currently engaged in the implementation of a series of military horrors including full spectrum dominance, nuclear primacy, the right of pre-emptive strike, the militarization of space, and imperial overstretch. Simple living may make one feel good, but it really doesn’t do a whole lot to curtail the influence of the Empire and its use of high-tech death machines.

Not unlike the Nearings, supporters of the Second Vermont Republic subscribe to the following eight beliefs: political independence, human scale, sustainability, economic solidarity (buying locally), power sharing, equal opportunity, tension reduction, and community.

The Nearings may have lived simply, sustainably, and ascetically, but wimps they were not. They spent their entire adult lives actively confronting the materialism, the injustices, the racism, the militarism, and the violence of the American Empire.

Above all, there was a sense of urgency associated with the Nearings’ concern about the Empire – a sense of urgency that is conspicuously absent in the McKibben paradigm.

The McKibben Paradigm

Globe trotting, self-promoting, evangelical environmentalist Bill McKibben has convinced thousands of would be Vermont secessionists that agricultural and energy independence are necessary conditions for achieving political independence. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

First, Japan, the second largest economy in the world, literally imports every drop of oil that it consumes as well as most of its food. Second, of the two hundred or so independent nation states, only a handful are both energy and agriculturally independent. Third, the chances of Vermont ever becoming self-sufficient in food and energy are virtually nil. Vermont’s short summer growing season precludes the possibility of agricultural self-sufficiency. We currently import half of our electric energy. If Vermont Yankee is shut down, that percentage will increase dramatically.

Since Mr. McKibben, an American loyalist, is not an economist, he makes the common mistake of equating secession with economic isolationism. What he is really asking is, “Where will Vermont get its food and energy, if it secedes?” And the answer is, “Presumably from the same sources that it currently does.”

Extensive trade with countries outside the United States is a very important aspect of the Vermont economy. Imports amount to around $3 billion annually and exports are a little less than that amount. Per capita exports in Vermont are the third highest in the nation behind Washington and Texas. Over 600 firms export nearly twenty-five percent of Vermont’s gross state product, the value of goods and services produced in the state, which is the highest in the nation, and the rate of exports has been growing in recent years. There is no reason why this pattern should not continue after Vermont splits with the United States. While the U.S. government might try to impose a trade embargo on a seceded Vermont, it seems quite unlikely that Canada would abide by it, since Canada is Vermont’s leading trading partner. Canada never honored the American imposed embargoes on either China or Cuba.

A free and independent Vermont could trade with whomever it pleased. It might belong to a trade and economic compact similar to the European Union involving other independent states. Vermont would not necessarily have to have its own currency. For example, tiny Liechtenstein uses the Swiss franc and Ecuador the U.S. dollar. Vermont could simply adopt the Canadian or the U.S. dollar or possibly the currency of Quebec or New York, if either was independent and had its own currency.

Under the influence of McKibben, many simple living, back-to-the-land practitioners have become so self-absorbed and complacent with their newfound ideology that they overlook the fact that the world is still going to hell in a handbasket. They fail to note that the American Empire continues to bear the primary responsibility for the deaths of thousands in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Palestine, to mention only a few places. Buying locally may make one feel good, but it really doesn’t do a whole lot to curtail the influence of the Empire. One’s tax dollars are still used to purchase the Pentagon’s high-tech instruments of death.

Although simple living, localvore, conservation, and back-to-the-land are all worthwhile activities, they may also be forms of escapism, alternatives to confronting the American Empire.

Mr. McKibben should spend more time at home familiarizing himself with the evils perpetrated by his own country and less time traveling around the world trying to persuade others to reduce their carbon emissions. After all, it is we who produce twenty-five percent of the world’s carbon emissions.

So feckless are McKibben’s arguments against secession that he and some of his friends like John Odum and Carl Etnier have to resort to playing the racism card against SVR. Odum, a staff member of the Vermont Natural Resources Council, runs a political blog which, in an act of utter desperation, accuses SVR of racism. Etnier does the same on a weekly Goddard College radio show.

But the real tragedy of all of this is that SVR’s sister publication, Vermont Commons, completely embraces the McKibben paradigm. Vermont Commons editor/publisher Rob Williams not only provides McKibben and Etnier with a media platform from which to disseminate their anti-secessionist venom, but he refers to McKibben as “Vermont’s most prominent intellectual.” That’s a bit much.

The American Empire of which Mr. McKibben is so fond is going down, but he doesn’t know it. If he gets off of our case, we will gladly save him a place in the Republic.

Rebél
Thomas H. Naylor
September 22, 2009

Shortly after voting for Richard Nixon in 1960, I was won over to the political left by a combination of John F. Kennedy, a Tulane University economics professor who was a German Social Democrat, and an 85-year-old New Orleans attorney, who was a socialist and looked like Colonel Sanders. In 1964 I was elected President of the John F. Kennedy Young Democratic Club of Durham, NC, and a year later Treasurer of the State Young Democratic Club.

In 1969 I co-founded the Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar Society, an organization of progressive young Southerners committed to the premise that it was high time the South got off the race kick, came back into the Union, and began solving its own problems. Members included all of the new breed of progressive Southern governors, Jimmy Carter, Reubin Askew, Dale Bumpers, John West, Linwood Holton, Terry Sanford, and Winthrop Rockefeller, as well as prominent black politicians Julian Bond, Maynard Jackson, John Lewis, and Andrew Young.

As a direct result of the Soviets having illegally translated one of my books on computer based planning models into Russian in 1975, I had a steady stream of Soviet and Eastern European visitors to my office at Duke University over the next fifteen years. In the 80s I became a sort of self-appointed, nonpaid cheerleader for Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev resulting in frequent visits to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Needless to say, I got a lot of attention from the CIA and the FBI during this period. All of this provided me with the opportunity to observe the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the implosion of the USSR at very close range. It was breathtaking. The implications for the American Left were profound.

I remained a left-wing liberal until the 1990s, when Slick Willie Clinton, a conservative Republican disguised as a liberal Democrat, pushed me over the brink. Clinton, a pathological liar, gave the Republicans their every wish in terms of deregulation and globalization. Every time he needed a blip in the polls, Clinton bombed some country—Iraq (many times), Pakistan (He was aiming at Afghanistan, but missed.), Sudan, and Serbia. It was Clinton who invented Osama bin Laden to deflect public opinion away from his affair with Monica Lewinsky. I found Clinton’s relationship to Russia and its lamebrained leader Boris Yeltsin to be utterly disgusting. And the American Left sat silently on the sidelines.

By the time I published Downsizing the USA in 1997, I had completely disengaged from the Left, but I had not moved to the Right. I viewed liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans with equal contempt.

When I became a card-carrying liberal in 1962, those on the Left presented themselves as (1) guardians of the working class, (2) purveyors of peace, (3) custodians of human rights, and (4) defenders of big government. Ten years later they added protection of the environment to their portfolio.

I believe there is substantial evidence to suggest that the American Left has lost its moral authority and that it is clueless as to how to go about regaining it.

First, consider the case of the working class. Although there are millions of poor people in America, for all practical purposes, the so-called working class does not exist anymore. It has been co-opted by the middle class which in turn has been co-opted by the wealthy class. They are all the same, even though some make a lot more money than others.

A half century ago there was a sense of solidarity among working class people. They belonged to labor unions, were active in the Democratic Party, and shared a feeling that “we’re all in this together.” But not anymore. Labor unions are completely impotent, and solidarity has been replaced by an attitude of, “I’ve got mine, Jack.” Today it’s all about “me,” not “us.”

Whether one is rich or poor, we all suffer from affluenza—the obsessive compulsive consumption of more and more stuff. The more we have, the more we want. Enough never seems to be quite enough. We are all into having—owning, possessing, and controlling money, power, people, and things.

Second, just as the working class has faded from the national radar screen, so too has the peace movement. By lowering the pro-war rhetoric and re-assigning tens of thousands of American troops located in Iraq to Afghanistan, President Barack Obama has very effectively deflated the sails of the American peace movement. Because of the absence of a military draft, opposition to the war in Iraq has never been as intense as opposition to the Vietnam war.

But there is a much more fundamental problem. The vast majority of American leftists are not pacifists. They neither reject violence nor war. Most subscribe to the so-called “just war” theory and believe that World War II was a just war. If one believes World War II was a just war, it’s pretty easy to convince oneself that any war is just. For example, liberals uttered hardly a whimper in 1999, when Bill Clinton bypassed the U.S. Constitution, the United Nations, and international law and led a 78-day NATO attack on Yugoslavia.

Where have all the peaceniks gone? To Obamaland.

Third, there was a time when the term “human rights” meant serious business. Concern over civil rights resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965—landmark events in America’s political history. Not so, anymore. Today, the concern for human rights is used much more insidiously. The government cleverly uses alleged human rights abuses to justify a foreign policy based on military doctrines such as full spectrum dominance, nuclear primacy, and the right of pre-emptive strike. And no one on the Left seems to care.

Human rights also provide the rationale underlying what is deemed to be “politically correct” by the Left. To be considered politically correct a person must be pro-abortion, pro-gay-lesbian, pro-affirmative action, pro-Israel, pro-gun control, anti-clerical, pro-big government, and pro-American Empire. Anyone in the public limelight who does not conform to this litany or who associates with those who do not, is at risk of being attacked by a left wing truth squad such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and accused of the likes of homophobia, racism, anti-semitism, religious fundamentalism, or even hate crimes. Secession is considered to be one of the least politically correct forms of human behavior. Anyone crazy enough to advocate secession from the Union must by definition be a redneck racist.

Fourth, with the meltdown of the U.S. economy, environmental concerns such as air and water quality, global warming, and peak oil have been trumped politically by Wall Street bailouts, economic stimulus packages, and multi-trillion dollar budget deficits in addition to the battle over health care reform. Environmental issues are currently barely on the radar screen.

Fifth, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the bankruptcy of dozens of American megacompanies in recent years, serious doubt has been cast on the validity of the aphorism “bigger makes better.” Yet liberals persist in the belief that it’s possible to design and implement a national health care system for 325 million people. Such a belief is based on pure fantasy. They still don’t get it.

In summary, all of the major issues of the Left’s political portfolio are under a cloud of doubt—the working class, the peace movement, human rights, environmental concerns, and the justification for big government. I can think of no better metaphor for portraying the Left than “Little Bo-peep, has lost her sheep, and doesn’t know where to find them.”

The brain dead Left has not had an original idea since the 1960s. It is morally corrupt, intellectually bankrupt, and politically moribund.

When conservative talk show hosts Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity accuse Barack Obama of being a socialist, they flatter him. He doesn’t even know what socialism is. Obama and his friends on the Left are all technofascists committed to affluenza, technomania, e-mania, megalomania, robotism, globalization, and above all, American imperialism.

The only thing worse than the political Left in America is the political Right. But that is a story for another day.

Rebél
Thomas H. Naylor
September 7, 2009

Are you tired of having your chain jerked by the likes of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama? Have you grown weary of multi-trillion-dollar government bailouts, stimulus packages, and deficits? Are you disgusted by the fact that our government is owned, operated, and controlled by Wall Street and Corporate America? Are you enraged by our immoral, illegal, unconstitutional foreign policy which is based on the doctrine of full spectrum dominance and has resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, and Palestinians? Are you no longer able to live with the fact that our nation has lost its moral authority, is unsustainable, ungovernable, and unfixable? Then, come to Vermont, join our genteel revolution, help us secede from the Union, and escape from the Empire.

“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive…it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness,” said Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. Just as a group has a right to form, so too does it have a right to disband, to subdivide itself, or to withdraw from a larger unit.

Living in Vermont is a lot like living in a tiny European country. It is smaller, more rural, more democratic, less violent, less commercial, more egalitarian, more humane, more independent, and more radical than most states. Vermont provides a communitarian alternative to the dehumanized, mass-production, mass-consumption, narcissistic lifestyle which pervades most of America. In the Green Mountain State, the politics of human scale always trumps the politics of money, power, size, speed, greed, and fear of terrorism.

Fundamental to what it means to be a Vermonter is the right of self-preservation. The time has come for us peacefully to rebel against the American Empire by (1) regaining control of our lives from big government, big business, big cities, big schools, and big computer networks; (2) relearning how to take care of ourselves by decentralizing, downsizing, localizing, demilitarizing, simplifying, and humanizing our lives; and (3) learning how to help others take care of themselves.

America needs a new metaphor – an alternative to empire. Vermont stands ready to provide such a metaphor – the Vermont village green.

If Vermont is to remain true to its beliefs it has no choice other than to maintain a commitment to a human scale lifestyle. To remain small, rural, radical, clean, green, democratic, and nonviolent, it must continue to resist being subsumed by an undemocratic, materialistic, militaristic, megalomanic, robotic, imperialistic, global empire of which it is a part. Does it really have any other choice than to extricate itself from the United States of America? Secession represents Vermont’s only morally defensible response to the Empire.

Long live the Second Vermont Republic! Please help us save Vermont, America, and the rest of the world from the American Empire by joining our genteel revolution and helping Vermont lead our nation into peaceful disunion.

Rebél
Thomas H. Naylor
September 1, 2009