North American Secessionists Confront the Empire

Tweet Break up the Empire!

"According to the conventional political categories, this was an odd collection of organizations, with the spokesperson for the environmentally-minded Cascadian Independence Project (incorporating Oregon, Washington and British Columbia) sitting next to the delegate from the fiercely libertarian Republic of New Hampshire, and the representatives of a Hawaiian sovereignty group sitting across from the Southern nationalists in the League of the South and next to the anti-corporate Second Vermont Republic. But this group aligned not on a left-right political continuum but rather a top-bottom axis. In spite of the ideological differences, there was unanimity in the room regarding the diagnosis of the problem and its most effective treatment.

"The problem? In short, the American Empire. The delegates virtually all wanted to smash the Empire and bring an end to the suffering it causes at home and abroad. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was repeatedly condemned, and no praise was forthcoming for George W. Bush or any other politician (except for the candidates of the Alaskan Independence Party, the only political party in the room). In fact, several of the participants expressed the fear that the U.S. was heading toward fascism. As Ian Baldwin, publisher of Vermont Commons, the newspaper of the Second Vermont Republic, put it: "We are decentralists, and we are up against a monster." For this group, the most effective way to resist the Empire was to simply withdraw from it, chip away at its geographic foundation. Secession was seen as a way to restore democracy and promote freedom through reducing the scale (in both the senses of spatial scope and size) of government.

"A related problem for the participants was what they saw as the economic evisceration of local communities. If big government played the role of the villain at this convention, big corporations received equal billing as its evil twin. Many deplored the effects of transnational corporations on local communities, and a disgust with the influence of corporations in the political system inspired the activism of several of those at the table. Rather than protecting its citizens from corporate predation, the delegates felt that the U.S. government was assisting corporations in draining the economic vitality out of their communities. For Diana Licht, a Cambridge, Mass., resident and member of the populist (but not secessionist) Alliance for Democracy, her interest in secession was about "wanting to find a boundary within which you can protect yourself from intrusion." If the U.S. government is not able to protect communities from intrusion by the multinationals, the boundaries must be redrawn to a more manageable scale.

Found on Counterpunch.org