SECESSION: it's in the Bible, suckers, a great and virtuous ethical imperative, never doubt

[Apollonian]

Secession, a Christian Doctine in the Bible.​

Link: (this link removed because it now goes to a Chinese language site - ed.)http://www.thelonestarwatchdog.com/2012/11/26/secession-a-christian-doctine/

Posted on November 26, 2012 by The Watchdog

Secession is in the Bible as a Moral Principle When Government Goes Bad.


Secession is coming. There is a whole bunch of fear mongering by some patriots saying it will break up the country. We hear secession is treason and is a bad idea. That is no different for a wife being told to stay in an abusive marriage when the husband is unrepentant. She is beaten to near death daily. Her will is nearly broken and her dignity almost non-existent. If she does not leave the abusive spouse.

She will die a thousand deaths in her soul before physical death comes. Common sense say she must leave or hope is lost. Even under mitigating circumstances being in an abusive home where the kids and wife’s life is danger. It is perfectly within scripture to divorce him.

Many of the founders knew the bible very well. They knew secession is in the bible and is a moral action. You can see the Bible written so well in all our founding documents. Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, 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.

The Texas Constitution reflects the pprinciple of the original Declaration of Independence in Article 1 sec 1 and 2

1. Texas is a free and independent State, subject only to the Constitution of the United States; and the maintenance of our free institutions and the perpetuity of the Union depend upon the preservation of the right of local self-government unimpaired to all the States.

2. All political power is inherent in the people and all free governments are founded on their authority, and instituted for their benefit. The faith of the people of Texas stands pledged to the preservation of a republican form of government, and, subject to this limitation only, they have at all times the inalienable right to alter, reform or abolish their government in such manner as they may think expedient.

Early Texans written Declaration of Independence. The Texas declaration mimmicks the original 1776 document


When, in consequence of such acts of malfeasance and abdication on the part of the government, anarchy prevails, and civil society is dissolved into its original elements. In such a crisis, the first law of nature, the right of self-preservation, the inherent and inalienable rights of the people to appeal to first principles, and take their political affairs into their own hands in extreme cases, enjoins it as a right towards themselves, and a sacred obligation to their posterity, to abolish such government, and create another in its stead, calculated to rescue them from impending dangers, and to secure their future welfare and happiness.

The early founders understood history and the bible very well. The resorted to using natural law and nature’s God as the precedent to secede. Secession is part of natural law and is in the Bible. When the people of ancient Israel approached the king humbly asking for the taxes to be reduced here is what 1 kings 12: 10-11

10 And the young men that were grown up with him spake unto him, saying, Thus shalt thou speak unto this people that spake unto thee, saying, Thy father made our yoke heavy, but make thou it lighter unto us; thus shalt thou say unto them, My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s loins.

11 And now whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.

This was the cause for the 10 tribes of Israel splitting with the House of Judah and Benjamin. When the leader refuses to listen to the people. A king not only will increase the taxes on a people already taxed to oblivion. The King would increase abusing the people in more cruel ways. The Northern Kingdom which was the 10 tribes and a southern kingdom when when Israel broke up.


The American people said no to the TSA abuses, high taxes, Obamacare, new regulation that kill jobs and small business. The said no to indefinite detention and drone killing. How the President respond when Texas was going to arrest TSA workers who touch people in their private areas. President Obama threatened fighter jets flying over Texas making the lone star state a no fly zone if Texas passed the law. The people of Texas and other states need to see what ancient Israel did to escape a tyrannical King.

Secession is moral act. Secession is the right choice. For those who fear it will tear apart the country. Secession is about survival. Secession is how America was founded. The founders knew what the Bible spoke about secession. Secession is the only solution. Why stick around, Washington DC is broke beyond repair. Our Federal Government is so corrupt beyond redemption. The ballot box is rigged and we do not know if we have lawful government because of the massive vote fraud. The whole system is beyond repair.

Secession is a jubilee being free from private central bankers issuing the debt in the form of money. God gave us the path to freedom and happiness in the Bible. Secession is one of God’s remedies when we seek being free from tyranny. Secession is not a bad word Secession is part of God’s word. Let us not forget it.

 

[Apollonian]

Divisive Election in Spain’s Catalonia Gives Win to Separatist Parties​

By RAPHAEL MINDER

Published: November 25, 2012

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/w...ia-gives-win-to-separatist-parties.html?_r=1&

BARCELONA, Spain — Voters in Catalonia delivered victory to separatist parties in a regional election on Sunday, raising the likelihood that Spain’s most powerful economic region will hold an independence referendum that Madrid has vowed to block.

Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press

Voters cast their ballots in a polling station in Barcelona, Spain, Catalonia’s capital, on Sunday.


But even as voters set up a fight with the central government by rewarding the independence cause, they delivered no clear message about who should lead it. The party of Artur Mas, the Catalan president who called the election two years ahead of schedule, actually lost seats in the regional parliament, falling to just 50 seats in the 135-seat body, from 62 in the last vote.

As a result, before holding any referendum on independence, Mr. Mas will first have to strike alliances with smaller parties that share his separatist goal, but not his economic and social agenda. After a vote that he had described as “the most significant in the history of Catalonia,” Mr. Mas told supporters that his referendum project was on track, while recognizing his party’s failure to consolidate its grip on power.

“Mas managed to turn separatism into a burning issue, but then ended up being overtaken by more radical parties in this debate and now finds himself in a much harder position to govern Catalonia in a time of crisis,” said Ferran Pedret Santos, a lawyer who was himself elected for the first time Sunday as a Socialist lawmaker.

Indeed, despite the enthusiasm that the separatist drive has generated in Catalonia, a region in northeastern Spain with an outsize weight both economically and culturally, Sunday’s vote also underlined divisions among the region’s 7.5 million citizens. In particular, there are questions over whether sovereignty demands should be limited to seeking fiscal concessions from Madrid or stretch far beyond that.

Mr. Mas called the election after failing to persuade Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to ease Catalonia’s federal tax burden, and after a huge pro-independence rally in Barcelona on Sept. 11.

“Whether people like or not, Catalonia does most of its trade with the rest of Spain, so pursuing independence would add a lot of uncertainty, which is not exactly what people need in the middle of a crisis,” said Sara González, a 34-year-old chemist.

Before Sunday’s vote, Mr. Rajoy accused Mr. Mas of acting irresponsibly by turning the vote into a divisive plebiscite on independence, and thus diverting Catalans’ attention from his financial mismanagement. There was some evidence that Catalans agreed.

José María Cañellas, general manager of a digital television company based in Barcelona, said that, while he had backed Mr. Mas’s Convergència i Uni” party in the past, he had not voted for Mr. Mas on Sunday because “the duty of our government is to help create jobs and get us out of this crisis rather than divide people over independence.”

One of the biggest benefactors on Sunday was the left-leaning Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya party, which has long pushed for independence. That party came in second Sunday, doubling its parliamentary representation to 21 seats, from 10 seats won two years ago.

Mr. Rajoy’s Popular Party won 19 seats Sunday, little changed from the 18 seats that it won in Catalonia two years ago.

The separatist drive in Catalonia has emerged as a huge domestic political challenge for Mr. Rajoy, who has also remained stuck on the front lines of the euro crisis and is under pressure to decide whether Spain needs more financial assistance through bond purchases by the European Central Bank.

With Spain in the midst of a recession expected to last through 2013, Mr. Rajoy is struggling with a record unemployment of 25 percent, as well as street protests against his austerity measures.

The European Union, meanwhile, is expected to soon demand significant job cuts at Bankia and other rescued Spanish banks, in return for releasing part of a roughly $129 billion European banking bailout negotiated by Madrid last June.

 

[Apollonian]

Greeks punish main parties, risk euro exit​

Link: http://stratrisks.com/geostrat/5948



Greeks angry at years of austerity shrugged off the risk of a euro zone exit and punished their ruling parties, which failed to win enough votes to form a ruling coalition in Sunday’s election.

With about 95 percent of the vote counted, conservative New Democracy and Socialist PASOK, who have dominated Greece for decades and are the only two major parties supporting an EU/IMF bailout program that keeps Greece afloat, won less than 33 percent of ballots and only 150 out of 300 parliament seats.


In order to renew their uneasy partnership, they would have to woo other reluctant parties. Any coalition is expected to be short-lived, plunging Greece into fresh political uncertainty and threatening to revive Europe’s debt crisis.

As results trickled in, New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras called for a pro-European national unity government that would keep Greece in the euro zone. PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos also called for a unity government, saying his party had paid the price for handling the sovereign debt crisis.

The small parties that gained in the election are all against the bailout, but they are too divided to form an alternative coalition.

“There is a lot of uncertainty at the moment about what kind of government there will be and if it will be supportive of the EU/IMF program,” Diego Iscaro from IHS Global Insight said.


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Once mighty PASOK was pushed into third place by the anti-bailout Left Coalition party, in a stunning vote against austerity policies that have caused deep hardship in one of Europe’s worst postwar recessions.

New Democracy polled just over 19 percent and PASOK a humiliating 13.4 percent, while the Left Coalition captured 16.6.

In the 2009 election, PASOK won a landslide victory with 44 percent and the Left Coalition had just 5 percent.

“I cannot take it any more, living as beggars in our own country. The Left Coalition can shake them up, and wake them up,” said Kate Savvidou, 65, a pensioner who deserted PASOK.

Left Coalition leader Alexis Tsipras, at 37 Greece’s youngest political leader, hailed a peaceful revolution and said German Chancellor Angela Merkel should understand that austerity policies had been defeated.

“Greek people gave a mandate for a new dawn with solidarity and justice, instead of barbaric bailout measures,” he said.

In another indication of the extent of public anger, the extreme right Golden Dawn party was poised to take nearly 7 percent of the vote. This would allow such a party to enter parliament for the first time since the fall of a military dictatorship in 1974.

COALITION EFFORTS

Samaras was expected to be invited to try to form a government on Monday.

Under the constitution, Greek President Karolos Papoulias will give the biggest party three days to form a government. If it fails, the next largest group gets a chance and so on down the line. If they all fail, new polls would be called about three weeks later.

Greece faces an acid test as soon as next month when it must give parliamentary approval for over 11 billion euros (8.86 billion pounds) in extra spending cuts for 2013 and 2014 in exchange for more EU/IMF aid.

That looks like a tough task even if a new government can be formed in time, given the success of anti-bailout parties. Several analysts said the unprecedented fragmentation of the vote could bode weeks of instability and force another election.

Greeks angry at record unemployment, collapsing businesses and steep wage cuts ignored warnings that a vote against the harsh terms of the bailout would push Greece towards bankruptcy.

Othon Anastasakis, director of southeast European studies at Oxford University told Reuters: “Greeks are sending a very strong message abroad, which is enough with austerity.”

As they voted, many Greeks expressed their rage at the parties who accepted the harsh conditions of two bailouts that have kept the country from bankruptcy.

“I voted for Left Coalition, even if this means elections again in a month. I feel vindicated. Things are changing little by little because people decided to speak up,” said 22-year-old student Klelia Avgerinopoulou.

THREATS IGNORED

The Greek electoral shock coincided with the victory of Socialist Francois Hollande in France’s presidential election and was likely to add to pressure for resistance to German-led austerity policies.

Italian technocrat Prime Minister Mario Monti, who faces increasing resistance to austerity at home, phoned Hollande and other European leaders after the election results to push for pro-growth policies.

International lenders and investors fear success for the small anti-bailout parties could lead to Greece reneging on the harsh terms of the program, risking a hard sovereign default and dragging the euro zone back into the worst crisis since its creation.

Euro zone paymaster Germany has warned there would be “consequences” to an anti-bailout vote and the EU and IMF insist whoever wins the election must stick to austerity if they want to receive the aid that keeps Greece afloat.

But many voters bitterly dismissed such threats.

“I don’t think that voting for a small party will make us go bankrupt. We already are,” said 53-year-old Panagiotis, a craftsman, after voting for the conservative Independent Greeks.

(Additional reporting by Harry Papachristou, Karolina Tagaris, Deepa Babington, Ingrid Melander, Lefteris Papadimas and George Georgiopoulos.; Writing by Dina Kyriakidou; Editing by Stacey Joyce)

 

[Apollonian]

Video: Nullification – The Urgency of Protecting States’ Rights​

lINK: http://www.infowars.com/video-nullification-the-urgency-of-protecting-states-rights/


Infowars.com
Dec 1, 2012

Alex speaks with historian, economist and political analyst Tom Woods and Executive Director of the Foundation for a Free Society Jason Rink about the urgency of protecting states’ rights and keeping secession a viable option, as discussed in the documentary Nullification: The Rightful Remedy.

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[Apollonian]

Catalan Parliament Approves Plan for Secession from Spain​

Link: http://www.blacklistednews.com/Cata...r_Secession_from_Spain/47345/0/38/38/Y/M.html

Published: November 16, 2015
Source: Mike "Mish" Shedlock

Everyone's eyes seem glued to the Paris terrorist attack and the refugee crisis, but other significant events in Europe merit a spotlight as well.

For example, Catalan Lawmakers Approve Plan for Secession from Spain.
The regional parliament of Catalonia launched a plan Monday to set up a road map for independence from Spain by 2017, defying warnings from the central government in Madrid that it is violating the nation's constitution.

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy pledged to halt the effort.

The chamber, based in the northeastern city of Barcelona, passed the secession resolution in a 72-63 vote.

The proposal was made by pro-secession lawmakers from the "Together for Yes" alliance and the extreme left-wing Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP).

Spain's government reacted swiftly Monday. In a nationally televised address, Rajoy said his government will appeal the decision at the Constitutional Court, which has in the past blocked moves toward independence.

Catalan branches of Spain's ruling conservative Popular Party and the Socialist and the Citizens opposition parties had filed appeals to halt the vote, but Spain's Constitutional Court ruled last Thursday that it could proceed.

Later Monday, the parliament began what is expected to be a long, heated debate over whether Artur Mas should continue for a third term as regional president.

While his "Together for Yes" alliance backs him with 62 votes, it is short of the required majority of 68. The anti-independence parties are against him, and the CUP has said it won't support Mas because of his conservative austerity policies and the corruption investigations involving his Convergence Party.

The parliament has until Jan. 9 to form a government or a new election must be called.

By then, Spain will have held a national election — on Dec. 20 — and the issue of how to handle the situation in Catalonia will play a crucial role in whether the Popular Party can hold onto power.

The ranks of lifelong secessionists, who feel that the Catalan language — spoken along with Spanish in the region — and local traditions can only flourish in an independent state, have been joined by those suffering through Spain's economic problems and who believe that Catalans pay more than their fair share in taxes.
Collision Course

Prime minister Mariano Rajoy says "Catalonia is not going anywhere. Nothing is going to break."

But what the hell is he going to do? Send in the army?

Why shouldn't Catalonia be allowed to break away if that's what the people want?

Rajoy says the effort is undemocratic and unconstitutional. Since when do constitutions ever allow states to break away from a country? And if anything is "undemocratic" it is suppression of the will of the people.

 

[Apollonian]

The Alternative to Presidential Politics​

Link: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/09/thomas-dilorenzo/need-secession-nullification/

By Thomas DiLorenzo
September 3, 2016

In his new book Nullification: Reclaiming Consent of the Governed, Clyde Wilson pinpoints the folly and futility of “presidential politics” – of hoping against hope that some Great Savior will somehow restore American liberty. Only those who are almost completely ignorant of American history could be fooled by such a farce. Unfortunately, that seems to include most Americans.

Early Americans were never so naïve as to believe that national politicians could preserve their freedom; that was their job. They are the ones who, acting through their state-level political societies, created and gave authority to the Constitution. The government was to act as their agent and was delegated by them only a few specific powers. Moreover, the government itself could never be the judge of its own powers, for that would lead to “nothing less than a government of unlimited power, a tyranny,” writes Wilson. Of course, that is what Americans have now lived under for generations with the “black-robed deities” of the “supreme” court announcing for all of us what freedoms we shall have.

A monopoly or “national” government was always understood to be the greatest threat to liberty by such American statesmen as Thomas Jefferson, author of the Kentucky Resolution of 1798 that enunciated the concept of nullification. (He was invited to author the Resolution by friends in the Kentucky legislature). It was a response to the first totalitarian power grab by the New England, leftist establishment led by John Adams who enforced the Sedition Act, an abominable law that outlawed free political speech in America. “Resolved, That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government,” Jefferson wrote in the Resolve. “[A]nd that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.” Kentucky would not allow the enforcement of the unconstitutional Sedition Act within its borders. James Madison authored the Virginia Resolution of 1798 that said the same thing. If “consent of the governed” were to have any real meaning, that consent would have to be enforced through such political vehicles as nullification and secession.

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The leftist New England establishment first invented the lie that Jefferson was not the author of the Kentucky Resolve – until the great man’s grandson produced a copy of it in his grandfather’s own handwriting. They then invented a second lie that Jefferson was only defending free speech and not states’ rights. Jefferson himself denied this all throughout his life, Wilson points out, by insisting that in the American system of government, states’ rights and liberty could not be separated. If Americans were to have a constitution that protected their freedoms, they would have to enforce it through political communities organized at the state and local level.

The central government itself could never be trusted – especially through its “supreme” court — to do so. Jefferson understood that if the day ever came that five government lawyers with lifetime tenure would decide what everyone’s liberties were to be, then the American Revolution would have failed and Americans would live under a tyranny. That day arrived in 1865, when the U.S. government finally destroyed federalism and states’ rights and consolidated political power – including the power of constitutional interpretation – in Washington, D.C.

Once empowered by a monopolistic, consolidated, centralized government used to enrich its operators, there would be no logic that could overturn it, said Jefferson, for “you might as well reason and argue with the marble columns” in the Capitol, he said in a letter. He was well aware during his lifetime that the New England “consolidators” wanted a highly centralized government that would subsidize their business enterprises with cheap credit through a bank run by politicians; protect them from international completion with protectionist tariffs, and lavish canal- and road-building corporations with tax dollars. Jefferson’s nemesis Alexander Hamilton, the intellectual leader (of sorts) of the New England/New York/Philadelphia leftist establishment, gave this British-style mercantilistic corruption scheme the Orwellian label of “The American System.”

As Wilson points out, Hamilton praised the American ideals of federalism and states’ rights in The Federalist Papers, and then spent the rest of his life doing everything he could to undermine and destroy those ideals. This included inventing a false history of the founding in which he claimed that the citizens of the states, who ratified the Constitution in state political conventions, were never sovereign, and that Americans’ real “original intent” was to create a highly centralized, monopolistic government like the one in England. Hamilton’s theory, Wilson correctly points out, “always rested upon coercion, chutzpah, and lies.” It was also the theory of the American founding that was embraced by Abraham Lincoln who used it to “justify” waging war on his own fellow citizens, killing them off by the hundreds of thousands with the self-proclaimed objective of “saving the union.”

One of the sillier arguments fabricated against true federalism, which includes the rights of nullification and secession, is the slogan that “states don’t have rights, people do!” Duh. As Wilson points out, it was John Taylor of Caroline who actually first said this in the context of explaining the Jeffersonian dictum that “States are instruments by which the people may assert their rights against usurpers and oppressors” (emphasis added). At least they were in Taylor’s day. Today they are appendages of Washington, D.C.

In a chapter on “The Real Constitution” Wilson states the obvious fact that the fabled “system of checks and balances” has been a complete failure in limiting governmental powers to those delegated to it by the Constitution. In reality, all three branches of the federal government work in tandem to limit our freedoms. It is “we the people” who are limited and controlled, thanks to the state’s judicial monopoly of constitutional interpretation. “The real Constitution did not belong to lawyers, who obfuscate for a living,” writes Wilson, who points out that most of the participants at the constitutional convention were not lawyers, unlike today’s political class. The people do not need lawyers to tell them what “THEIR” constitution says, Wilson proclaims.

The fatal mistake of conservatives and libertarians who call themselves “constitutionalists” is their belief that the federal government can somehow be persuaded to begin enforcing the Constitution and thereby limiting its own power, prestige, remuneration, and perks. “The peoples of the states have not delegated to federal judges the power to decide what their rights are. This is a power they have reserved to themselves.”

By “the people” Wilson, like Jefferson, does not mean a majority of the electorate. “By people, do we mean that if a million Chinese wade ashore in California and outvote everybody else, then they are sovereign? I think not.” If “consent of the governed” has any meaning at all, writes Wilson, then it means what it was always intended to mean: the people of the free, independent, and sovereign states. “The right to self-government rests on the right to withdraw consent from an oppressive government,” says Wilson, and in the real American system that has historically been achieved by the people acting through their state-level political communities. It is how they decided to fight the Revolution; it is how the Revolution ended, with King George III signing a peace treaty with each individual state; it is how the Constitution was ratified; and it is how the Constitution can be amended. This is why, in all the founding documents, “United States” is always in the plural, signifying that the free and independent states are united. It never meant some Leviathan called “the United States government.” That was the lying fabrication of Lincoln in his Gettysburg address in which he invented the strange notion that the founders created a “new nation” instead of a confederacy of free and independent states, as is clearly stated in the Declaration of Independence, among other places.

Real federalism or states’ rights is all but nonexistent today, says Wilson, because “it presented the most powerful obstacle to the consolidation of irresponsible power – that consolidation which our forefathers decried as the greatest single threat to liberty. For that reason, states’ rights had to be covered under a blanket of lies and usurpations by those who thought they could rule us better than we can rule ourselves.” After the “Civil War,” writes Wilson, “the American idea of consent of the governed was replaced by the European idea of obedience.”

The destruction of the Jeffersonian, states’ rights tradition, with the elimination of nullification and secession as the essential ingredients of the consent of the governed, allowed the rotten Hamiltonian system of government by crony capitalists, for crony capitalists, and of crony capitalists to become cemented into place. This is what Lincoln and the Republican Party of his day meant when they said they were “saving the union,” Wilson observes. It was NOT the voluntary union of the states they wanted to preserve; they utterly destroyed that and replaced it with a Soviet-style, compulsory union held together by violence, mass murder, mayhem, and plunder. Their “union” was a large, centralized government that would dispense corporate welfare and protect the party’s corporate political supporters from international competition while showering them with cheap credit through a government-controlled banking system. As Wilson himself explains: “With the Lincoln revolution the Hamiltonian program triumphed. Indeed, that was the purpose of the Lincoln revolution. Thus today, all the politicians of both parties rally around so that the taxpayers and posterity can reward the Banksters, Too Big to Jail, for their evil deeds” (emphasis added).

 

[Apollonian]

Here's great, lucid speech on subject of secession by McClanahan

 

[Apollonian]

American breakup: secession is much closer than we think​

The states with the most active secession movements are progressive and want to escape from a federal government they think too conservative

Secession is much closer than we think

F.H. Buckley
December 5, 2019

Link: https://spectator.us/american-breakup/

The United States is ripe for secession. Across the world, established states have divided in two or are staring down secession movements. Great Britain became a wee bit less great with Irish independence, and now the Scots seem to be rethinking the Act of Union (1707). Czechoslovakia is no more and the former Soviet Union is just that: former. Go down the list and there are secession groups in nearly every country. And are we to think that, almost alone in the world, we’re immune from this?

Countries threaten to split apart when their people seem hopelessly divided. I’ve seen it already. Before moving to the United States, I lived in a country just as divided, without the kind of fellow feeling required to hold people together. Canada was an admirably liberal country, yet it came within a hair’s breadth of secession. America is headed the same direction today, and without the reserve and innate conservatism that has permitted Canadians to shrug off differences.

We’re less united today than we’ve been at any time since the Civil War, divided by politics, religion and culture. In all the ways that matter, save for the naked force of the law, we are already divided into two nations just as much as in 1861.The contempt for opponents, the Twitter mobs, online shaming and no-platforming, the growing tolerance of violence — it all suggests we’d be happier in separate countries.

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That’s enough to make secession seem attractive. But there’s a second reason why secession beckons. We’re overlarge, one of the biggest and most populous countries in the world. Smaller countries, as I’ll show, are happier and less corrupt. They’re less inclined to throw their weight around militarily, and they’re freer. If there are advantages to bigness, the costs exceed the benefits. Bigness is badness.

It might therefore seem odd that we’ve stayed together so long. If divorces are made in Heaven, as Oscar Wilde remarked, how did we luck out? The answer, of course, is the Civil War. The example of Secession 1.0 in 1861, with its 750,000 wartime deaths, has made Secession 2.0 seem too painful to consider. In my book, American Succession, I explode the comforting belief that it couldn’t happen again. The barriers to a breakup are far lower than most people would think, and if the voters in a state were determined to leave the Union they could probably do so.

To begin with, we’re far more likely to let it happen today than we were in 1861. John Kerry had a point when he said that Putin, by invading Crimea, was behaving as if it were the 19th century. While the secretary of state was mocked for what seemed like naivety, public attitudes have in fact changed since 1861. We are now less willing to take up arms in order to maintain the Union and readier to accept a breakup instead. Next time, we’re likely to find a President James Buchanan in office and not an Abraham Lincoln.

Second, a cordial divorce might be worked out through the amending machinery of a convention held under Article V of the Constitution, if all sections of America were good and tired of each other. Secession cannot be unconstitutional when there’s a constitutional way of making it happen, through a constitutional convention.

Finally, the Supreme Court might revisit its denial of a right of secession. The originalists on the Court would recognize that the Framers had thought that states had the right to secede, while the more politically minded members of the Court might hesitate before ruling secession illegal and permitting the president to make war against a state. Instead, the Court could be expected to look northward, to the more nuanced view of secession rights taken by the Canadian Supreme Court, which rejected both an absolute right and an absolute bar to secession.

So it’s not difficult to imagine an American breakup. The reasons why a state might want to secede today are more compelling than at any time in recent history. Slavery isn’t on the ballot, and there would be no undoing of the civil rights revolution anywhere. Indeed, the states with the most active secession movements are progressive and want to escape from a federal government they think too conservative. Were secession to happen today, it would be politically correct.

So it might happen. I see us on a train, bound for a breakup. The switches that might stop us have failed, and if we want to remain united we must learn how to slow the engine. That will take things that have been in short supply lately: a greater tolerance for ideological differences, thicker skin to imagined slights, a deeper repository of confidence in and sympathy for our fellow Americans. These are things we used to have, and can learn to have again if we recognize that the alternative is secession.

Federalism used to allow for greater differences among the states, and that permitted us to sort out our differences by settling among people with like beliefs. And while federalism was discredited when it sought to excuse racist Jim Crow laws in the South, we’ve left that world long behind. That is why I propose, as a solution to our divisions and an antidote to secession, a devolution of power to the states — not mere federalism, but the alternative that the British presented to the Continental Congress in 1778 after it had decided upon secession through the Declaration of Independence. It was what Gladstone and Charles Stuart Parnell sought as an alternative to Ireland’s outright secession. The solution was ‘home rule’. Adopted in America, this would return more power to a seceding state than it possesses now, or ever possessed under American federalism.

 

[Apollonian]

The Media Is Now Openly Pushing Secession as the Election Nears​

by Ryan McMaken | Mises.orgOctober 8th 2020, 2:53 pm

Link: https://www.infowars.com/posts/the-media-is-now-openly-pushing-secession-as-the-election-nears/

The secessionist view is now increasingly being promoted by writers outside the usual conservative and libertarian groups that have long advocated in favor of decentralization and local control

It’s becoming increasingly clear to even mainstream media outlets that things are unlikely to return to “normal” after the 2020 election.

No matter who wins, it is likely the losing side will regard the winning side as having obtained its win using dirty tricks, foreign meddling, or through relentless propaganda offered up by a heavily biased and one-sided news media.

And if about half the country regards the winning president as illegitimate, where does one go from there?

The survey data isn’t exactly calming on this issue. As reported by Politico last week, the percentage of Americans who believe it is justified to use violence to “advance political goals” has quadrupled since 2017, for both Republicans and Democrats.

After all, political invective has reached a fever pitch since Hillary Clinton declared that a sizable portion of the United States population constituted a “basket of deplorables.” Perhaps not since the 1870s and 1880s—when Catholics, Southerners, and Irish (all core constituents of the Democratic Party) were denounced by Republicans as spies, traitors, and drunks—has half the country so despised the other half. As early as 2017, when asked of the chances of another civil war in the United States, about one-third of foreign policy scholars polled said it was likely.

Perhaps, then, it is not shocking that we are now seeing articles even in mainstream publications suggesting that maybe, just maybe, the United States can’t continue in its present form. Moreover, the view is now increasingly being promoted by writers and ideologues outside the usual conservative and libertarian groups that have long advocated in favor of decentralization and local control.

On September 18, for example, Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune asked: “Can the United States survive this election?” For the past century, the answer given by most any mainstream journalist would have been a decisive yes. The usual narrative has long been this: “Of course America will endure for centuries to come! We Americans are masters of compromise. We’ll all soon realize we are all in this together and come together in unity!”

But now Chapman writes:

The concept of splitting off is as American as the Fourth of July. The high point of separation sentiment came after Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, resulting in the Civil War. But New England states contemplated leaving over the War of 1812….The bonds that hold Americans together have frayed, and what happens on Nov. 3 may do additional damage. No nation lasts forever, and ours won’t be the first. This election won’t be the end of the United States. But it could be the beginning of the end.

Moreover, Chapman notes that while many no doubt will continue to see the United States as strong and likely to endure indefinitely, such assumptions may be unwise given the reality of experience elsewhere:

In 1970, the Russian dissident Andrei Amalrik wrote a book titled, “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?” At the time, the idea of a giant superpower disintegrating sounded like a fantasy. But it eventually came true. … Countries like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia also have broken apart. Britain is leaving the European Union, and Scotland could push to leave Britain. It would be folly to think the United States is immune to these forces.

Chapman is not alone.

Last month in the Philadelphia Inquirer Chuck Bonfig suspected that maybe the end is near:

The country has gone through many periods of strife in my time here: assassinations, recessions, desegregation, inflation, gas crisis, Watergate, hanging chads, the AIDS crisis, 9/11. Maybe it’s the 24-hour news cycle or the immediacy of social media that makes the landscape seem so bleak, but I don’t recall us ever being so divided.

No one in our country seems happy today. The right is angry. The left is despondent. Our nation reminds me of those married couples who try to stay together for “the children” but end up making everyone around them miserable.

Maybe it’s time for a breakup….Just think about it, America. I know breaking up is hard to do. We used to be good together. But what is the point of having the “greatest country in the world” if none of us actually like it?

The debate over separation and secession has been additionally pushed into the national debate by Richard Kreitner and his book Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union. Kreitner, who writes for the leftist magazine The Nation, suggests that the United States has never been as unified as many suggest and also concludes that secession and division may be a necessary tactic in bringing about the left-wing reforms he’d like to see. In an interview with The Nation, Kreitner discussed how he began to think about secession as a serious solution:

What if the United States broke apart? Would that be such a bad thing? Is it possible that the progressive policies and programs that I wanted to see put into place might be easier to enact in a smaller entity than the United States, with its 330 million people and the need to always convince people with very different attitudes and interests? So with that question, I was curious if anybody else in American history had favored secession for noble or progressive reasons—not to perpetuate slavery but even to oppose it.

The answer, I quickly found, is yes: There were disunion abolitionists who were fiercely against slavery and who wanted the northern states to secede from the union in the 1840s and 1850s as a way not only to protest slavery but to undermine it. Taking in their arguments and their rhetoric was really, really interesting.

Kreitner goes on to note that secession has long been at the forefront of American political ideology. This, of course, goes back to the secession of the American Revolution and can also be found in the secession movement favored by abolitionists and in New England’s efforts to secede during the War of 1812.

Kreitner is right.

Secession has long been entertained by many Americans, and not just defenders of the old Confederacy. In the early days of Southern secession, many Americans—including those who didn’t like the South or slavery—were fine with the Confederacy’s departure. New Yorker George Templeton Strong, for instance, declared in 1861, “the self-amputated members [the Southern states] were diseased beyond immediate cure, and their virus will infect our system no longer.” That same year, other New Yorkers seriously discussed leaving the Union and becoming a city-state devoted to free trade. In 1876, the battle over who won the presidential election very nearly produced a national split, with the pro-Democrat governor of New York “promising state resistance” to the Republican usurpers.

Nor were the nation’s founders necessarily opposed to division. Thomas Jefferson expressed prosecessionist views, even when he was a sitting president. In an 1803 letter to John Breckinridge, Jefferson explained that if the future states of the Louisiana Territory sought to secede that was fine with him:

[If] it should become the great interest of those nations to separate from this, if their happiness should depend on it so strongly as to induce them to go through that convulsion, why should the Atlantic states dread it? But especially why should we, their present inhabitants, take a side in such a question?

And in 1804, Jefferson wrote to Joseph Priestly stating:

Whether we remain in one confederacy, or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies, I believe it not very important to the happiness of either part.

Only Decentralization Can Save the Union

At this point, there is only one strategy that can prevent a continued slide toward conflict, disunion, and (possibly) violence: decentralization of political power.

Thanks to decades of growing centralization of power in Washington, DC, American policy is increasingly made by the national government and not by state and local authorities. This means American life is more and more governed by one-size-fits-all policies hatched by faraway politicians in DC. Thus, with each passing election, the stakes become higher as gun policy, healthcare, poverty relief, abortion, the drug war, education, and much more will be decided by the party that wins in DC, and not in the state capitol or in the city council. In other words, the laws that govern Arizona will be primarily made by politicians and judges from other places entirely. These faraway politicians will be more concerned with the needs and ideology of a national party, rather than with the specific needs of people who live in Arizona.

It is only natural that as the national government becomes supercharged in this way many Americans might start considering ways to get beyond the central government’s reach.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The United States could follow another path in which domestic policy is created and enforced in a decentralized manner, in which laws for Texans are made in Texas and laws for Californians are made in California. This, of course, is what Thomas Jefferson imagined when he wrote that the states should be self-governing and unified only on matters of foreign policy:

The true theory of our constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the states are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign nations. Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only.

In a decentralized political scheme such as this, the stakes in a national election are much lower. It doesn’t matter as much for Ohioans which party is in power in Washington when relatively few laws affecting Ohioans are made at the federal level.

To adopt this way of doing things, however, would require a sizable departure from the current ideology that reigns in Washington. On the left especially, it seems few can imagine a world where people in Iowa or Indiana are allowed to run their own schools and healthcare systems without meddling from Washington. While conservatives’ efforts to force marijuana prohibition on states like Colorado show that the Right is not immune from this impulse, it is abundantly clear that the Left is quite enthusiastic about the idea of sending federal enforcers to ensure the states enact abortion on demand, adopt Obamacare, and enforce drug prohibitions as dictated by Washington.

But unless Americans have a change of heart and begin to decentralize the political system, expect a growing unwillingness to accept the outcomes of national elections and growing resistance to the federal government in general. What follows is unlikely to be pleasant.

 

[Apollonian]

Nearly a third of Americans want to break up the United States into like-minded countries: Poll ​

Half of Republicans in the South are ready to secede

Link: https://www.theblaze.com/news/third-of-americans-break-up-us-into-smaller-countries

[see vid at site link, above]

Paul Sacca
|February 19, 2021

The divide between Americans seems to be widening in recent years, and the political schism doesn't appear to be narrowing any time soon. The major partisan divide in the country has gotten to the point that many Americans have contemplated a national divorce because they believe there are far too many ideological differences to bridge the line of demarcation.

An eye-opening poll found that a shocking percentage of Americans are in favor of the dissolution of the United States. According to a new Bright Line Watch survey, nearly a third of Americans want to break up the United States and create smaller, like-minded countries.

Between Jan. 28 and Feb. 8, the 2,700 poll participants were asked:

Some people say the divisions within our country have grown so deep that we would be better off dividing into more like-minded regions that would govern themselves separately. Do you support or oppose the idea of the United States dividing into more than one nation?

The survey found that 29% (10% strongly, 19% somewhat) of Americans were in favor of the dissolution of the United States into like-minded regions. There were noticeable differences based on political party lines and geography. Surprisingly, 37% of independents were most inclined for the country to go its separate ways. There were 35% of Republicans who wanted to secede, followed by 21% of Democrats who wanted their own country of like-minded individuals.

Bright Line Watch proposed to divide the U.S. into five regional unions based on geography and political affiliation:

•Pacific: California, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, and Alaska
•Mountain: Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico
•South: Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee
•Heartland: Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska
•Northeast: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia

When respondents were asked how likely they would be to support joining these hypothetical regional unions, 33% of the South and the Pacific said they would. There were 50% of Republicans in the red South region who were ready to create their own nation, and there were 41% of Democrats in the blue Pacific union who wanted to separate from the rest of the country.

New report on faith in American democracy and elections from @BrightLineWatch 29% of respondents say they'd suppor… https://t.co/FGj0OVatRy
— G. Elliott Morris (@G. Elliott Morris)1613660013.0

The temptation of separation might have been heightened in recent years by social media that breeds tribalism and echo chambers, while devaluing any sense of nuance. Another agitator could be the click-thirsty media that creates hyperbolic headlines that are at times antagonistic in an effort to grab eyeballs in the bustling and oversaturated social media ecosystem.

The sense of Republican and Democratic lawmakers seemingly unwilling to reach across the aisle could also spread divisiveness. The American populace regularly engages in disputes over reality, facts, science, and election results, which may galvanize calls for a divided states of America. All of these factors could fuel a lack of unity, an atmosphere where citizens distrust each other and harbor resentment of each other.

There have been fruitless secession movements in recent years in several states, including California, South Carolina, and Texas.

A 2017 Pew Research Center report revealed the widening divide between Republicans and Democrats. The study examined the partisan divide on political values between 1994 and 2017. The research discovered that the fractionalization between the two political parties has never been worse.

The partisan gap and disagreements regarding the topics of government aid to needy, racial discrimination, immigration, and diplomacy through strength have become farther apart since 1994, according to the study.

Who's responsible for the widening partisan divide? PEW did the research. Here's the result. Anyone surprised? https://t.co/C1uJcEWt8q
— PragerU (@PragerU)1610584407.0