A Passion for Secession?

[arisbe]

Christians – and modern Jews – would do ourselves and the supposed "Culture War" good if we followed the promise to Abraham and became righteous, God-fearing and neighbor-loving secessionists. Even if secession is impractical through the political Statist process, secession can happen in each and every one of us if we want it.

Not for nothing did Beato Pio Nono award Jeff Davis the Crown of Thorns!

Comments

Statist Behometh=Antichrist? True!

[publius-aelius.livejournal.com]

Jesus, according to my faith, didn’t just forgive me for my sins. He restored creation and re-started civilization. That’s why I love the depiction of his struggle in The Passion. The reason the process of renewal has seemed so slow is that so many people are not really following Christ’s teachings but rather merging them with American ideology to create something totally confusing and often depressing. So let’s secede from Statism and follow God alone.

I agree with every word of this, except the bit about The Passion because I do not recognize any "struggle" taking place in that film, other than a struggle to KEEP ON BREATHING as the Saviour's body is being broken by Romans under the supervision of Jewish monsters!

Dr. Livingston, I presume?

[obsidian-blade.livejournal.com]

I assume you've already seen this, but for the benefit of anyone who hasn't yet read it, it's the most cogent argument for secession I've ever seen, by a PhD in philosophy (Donald Livingston) from Emory University. To wit:

It is paradoxical and demands explanation why peaceful secession by referendum should have occurred in so-called totalitarian communist states whereas in western liberal states, during a period of two hundred years (1790-1990), there have been only two cases of peaceful secession, but a great number of cases in which secession attempts were brutally defeated by the central government. Unhappily the Confederacy did not have the Communist Party under Gorbachev to negotiate with; and mercifully the Soviet Republics did not have to negotiate with the Republican Party under Lincoln. As far as I can determine, the United States since 1865 has initially resisted or failed to support every secession attempt in the world except the secession of Panama from Columbia which it engineered as a means of constructing the Panama Canal. The United States was among the last to recognize the seceding states of the Soviet Union. It did not recognize the secession of Slovenia and Croatia (as had a number of European states), and it persisted, long after it was unreasonable, to think of Yugoslavia as a unitary state. A top Croatian leader, responding to Secretary of State James Baker's arrogant and dark warning against secession, observed that Baker could not free himself from the "American tradition of demonizing the phenomenon of secession. He didn't have an ear for our proposal to establish a union of sovereign states."1 This should not be surprising from a regime whose founding father is not the secessionist George Washington or Thomas Jefferson but the violent suppressor of secession Abraham Lincoln.

[...]

The Lincolnian myth must be refuted with the Jeffersonian account that the constitution is a compact between the people of the states creating a central government as their agent and endowing it with only enumerated powers; and, further that the central government is not and cannot be the sole authority in determining what powers were delegated and what reserved. The Jeffersonian story is one of dynamic federalism and the self-government of distinct political societies. The Lincolnian story is one of increasing centralization, consolidation, and political ossification. That we have fallen under its sway explains the surprising lack of political imagination in America today.

As part of expanding this imagination, we must work to remove the moral and philosophical prejudice against the very idea of secession. America was born in secession; secession is essential to the idea of a self-governing people; and until 1865 was widely considered an option available to an American state in all parts of the union.27 But secession short of national sovereignty is also possible. Parts of cities and counties may secede. A part of a state may secede and form another state as twenty-seven counties in northern California proposed to do in 1992. The mere discussion of the merits of such proposals, whether or not they succeed, will serve to detoxify the idea of secession and re-awaken in Americans the long slumbering notion of self-government induced by the opiate of the Lincolnian ideology of a modern unitary American state.