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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 Asian
Acting
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.
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 the Aztlan
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.
Permanent URL: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-Secession.html
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