Secession and implicit whiteness

The Sarah Palin phenomenon continues unabated. Journalists are poring over Alaska to find out everything about her beliefs and anything else they can use as ammunition. So far the results are not particularly encouraging. Despite her possible support for Pat Buchanan, her comments on immigration do not suggest strong convictions one way or the other — this at a time when nothing will be accomplished without strong convictions. And her dispensationalist theology is worrisome because the neocons have been adept in exploiting such sympathies to harness US military power on behalf of Israel. Indeed, her recent statements on Iran and Israel sound like they were written by Richard Perle.

Another issue that has been aired a bit in the media is whether she supports Alaskan separatism. As governor, Palin gave a videotaped message welcoming the convention of the Alaska Independence Party—not the sort of thing a governor would do if the AIP was out of the mainstream of Alaskan politics, but not exactly an endorsement either. Her husband Todd was an AIP member for 7 years but doesn’t seem to have been active in the party.  

Secession is certainly an option that has occurred to whites intent on preserving the traditional people and culture of the US. At least on the surface, this is not the focus of the AIP. The AIP seems far more libertarian. On this audiotape, AIP founder Joe Vogler vents his grievances on overregulation, states’ rights, and federal ownership of Alaska’s land and mineral rights. At one point, he says “The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government. And I won’t be buried under their damn flag.”

Christopher Ketcham’s recent LA Times op-ed on the issue (“America’s secessionist streak” points out that a recent Zogby poll showed that over 20% of American adults agreed with the proposition that  “any state or region has the right to peaceably secede from the United States and become an independent republic.” Slightly less stated that they “would support a secessionist effort in my state.” In the same poll 44% agreed that “the United States’ system is broken and cannot be fixed by traditional two-party politics and elections.” In a 2006 poll released by CNN, 71% of Americans agreed that “our system of government is broken and cannot be fixed.”

We at The Occidental Observer are in complete agreement that the system is broken. If things continue as they are, white people will soon be a minority in the US. Ceding political and cultural power to others is extremely dangerous, especially when many US minorities have deep historical grudges against white people.

Indeed, we can already see the writing on the wall. In a vdare blog posting, Patrick Cleburne explains the sentence given to Jeremiah Munsen in the Jena race case as a result of a black affirmative action US Attorney and an AsianActing Assistant Attorney General:  “Welcome to Multicultural America: A black and an Asian use a perverted legal process to rob a white American of his political birthright and promote the interests of minorities. The effect will be to intimidate the entire white community from resisting another Black Scam: in other words, to prevent them acting politically to defend themselves.”

This sort of thing will only get worse as whites lose political power. The theme of a broken system can already be seen in some manifestations of white culture. Country music has been described as “implicit white culture” — implicit in the sense that it represents white people and white culture without explicitly making claims for white identity and interests. Implicit white culture “cannot tell its name” because of the prevailing hegemony of political correctness. But virtually all the artists and the people represented in country music videos are white, and a major theme is the culture of small town America. These are the type of people that Sarah Palin appeals to, and the unifying thing about these people is that they are white.

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An excellent recent example is the video “A Country Boy Can Survive”  by Hank Williams Jr. All the people in the video are working class whites from “little towns all around this land” far from the city: “You only get mugged if you go downtown.” And there is the confederate flag—a remnant of traditional Southern culture.  The theme is that country people can survive because of their ability to live off the land. The US political system is broken and can’t be fixed within the present political structure. But they will survive.

Secession then becomes one possibility for whites to act in an effort to carve out at least some political and cultural space for themselves. A 2007 secessionist convention described by Ketcham is notable for the presence not only of libertarians, but also “Southern nationalists” and paleoconservatives more likely to be in tune, at least implicitly, with the views of The Occidental Observer.

But a secessionist movement that is explicitly aimed at preserving white people and their culture is probably much more difficult to get off the ground than a movement aimed at small government and getting back to America’s republican past. Any secessionist movement is sure to be resisted by the Leviathan state, but the intellectual legitimacy of such ideas is certainly likely to attract more people and have a greater chance of success.

Consider the case of Vermont. Vermont is 96.9% white as of 2005, and is one of the three whitest states in the union. The Vermont separatist movement is a mainstream endeavor aimed at reclaiming republican roots. The Second Republic of Vermont is “a nonviolent citizens’ network and think tank opposed to the tyranny of Corporate America and the U.S. government, and committed to the peaceful return of Vermont to its status as an independent republic and more broadly the dissolution of the Union.” It claims that “America desperately needs a new metaphor, an alternative to empire. Vermont stands ready to provide such a metaphor, the Vermont village green. Village greens are small communities devoted to life, liberty, land, and locality rather than death, doom, and destruction of the planet earth.”

Without saying so explicitly, their vision of Vermont is a vision of the white past created by their English ancestors. Their website includes a nice article advocating a declaration of independence from the Israel Lobby and a review of a book critical of Einstein. (Einstein, who was an ardent Zionist and a Jewish racial chauvinist, has become a central cultural icon of the American empire.) Is it too much to suppose that the author, Thomas H. Naylor, has a negative attitude toward the group responsible for so many of the trends the Vermont secessionists abhor?

Their website contains links to a wide range of secessionist movement in the US (e.g., the Southern National Conference) and Canada (e.g., the Parti Québécois).  Non-white and anti-white separatist movements in Hawaii and theAztlan movement to reclaim the American southwest for Mexico are also part of the separatist scene. The Middlebury Institute for the Study of Separatism, Secession, and Self-Determination also has a wide range of separatist literature, including this movie trailer on separatism in the western US.

Obviously, separatism and secession are not ideal solutions to the problems of whites in the US. Ideally, we would reclaim the federal government with an explicit ideology of white interests and identity and attempt to return to the situation as it was before the immigration law of 1965 when the US was 90% white.

But with 100 million non-whites in the country, the chances for such a movement seem remote. Secession, perhaps under an implicitly white ideology of libertarian republicanism, then looms as another alternative that should be supported by racially conscious whites, especially if reconquest after secession remains as a possibility. It would be a fitting end to the utopian dream of multiculturalism.