Dixie looks away once again

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the
right to rise up and shake off existing government and form a new one
that suits them better. This is a valuable, a most sacred right — a
right which, we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.

— Abraham Lincoln

By the time the Confederate re-enactors’ color guard was lined up
alongside the stainless steel coffee urns at the corner of the open-air
pavilion awaiting the order to march forward carrying the flags of the
16 Southern states onto the rolling grounds of the Woodfield Inn near
Asheville, N.C., the 200 participants and witnesses to the inauguration
of The Southern Party (SNC) had fallen into a thoughtful silence. My
own thoughts were crowded with memory. Having had a ringside seat at
the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the political contours common to the
betrayal of liberty are grimly familiar to me.

That’s why the barely audible catch in financial consultant and
Asheville native Ron Holland’s voice during his welcoming remarks that
morning as he stood before the wall-sized Confederate flag hanging from
the rafters resounded so loudly in my ear. Directing the crowd’s
attention to Old Glory flying proudly behind us on the hill near the
Inn, Holland first referenced his own military service under that flag.
He then recalled the innocents slaughtered “by the Federals” in the War
Between the States and, more recently, in Kosovo and Sudan, pausing only
to ask of the Almighty, “Dear Lord, when will it end?”

Alas, the coercion of civilians by slaughter and maiming is the
ordinary business of empire. The Russian essayist and writer, Tatiana
Tolstaya, put the matter to me succinctly a decade ago, “Empire means
the subjugation of other people against their will. In such a regime,
there is no justice, and where there is no justice, there can be no
peace.”

In the years since that sunny June day in Soviet Moscow, I have heard
the same despair I heard from Ron Holland grip the throats of Russians,
Georgians, Armenians, Chechens, Ingusheti, Lithuanians, and Latvians.
No matter the language or the culture or the historical details, the
sting of state perfidy sounds pretty much the same everywhere.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington escaped the
competitive pressures of an alternative form of governance whose
seductive possibilities, no matter how unlikely their acceptance may
have been, made Washington publicly careful of American civil
liberties. Subsequently, the arrogance of the U.S. federal government
has exploded. Washington’s intrusions have grown obnoxious at home and
dangerous abroad. And the Republican congressional majority to which
the American electorate had looked for protection showed itself to be
constitutionally incompetent, thus aiding and abetting the lawlessness
of the Clinton administration and their own corruption.

The talented con man that is Bill Clinton and his downmarket Lady
MacBeth, Hillary Rodham, have further presumed to bribe the electorate
by unleashing the greatest expansion of cash, credit and government
favor in U.S. history, thereby debasing the population generally. With
the citizenry distracted by plenty and the concomitant rise in both
personal debt and taxation levels, and the media’s post-Cold War
transformation into Big Government propagandists nearly complete,
liberty’s gates have been left open to tyranny.

It is into this very breach that on Aug. 7 the SNC rallied. And this
nascent band of businessmen and former RNC activists find themselves
well armed with but a single piece of paper — the U.S. Constitution.

“For 134 years the American people have been led to believe that the
right of secession had been overturned by a ‘verdict of arms,’ but that
isn’t true,” SNC Chairman George Kalas remarked. “It is true the shot
fired at Fort Sumter was a mistake since it provided the pretext for the
Southland to be invaded by foreign troops, but the right of secession
realized through the ballot box remains an essential part of our
constitutional order.”

American liberty and federalism gain definition only by virtue of the
right of secession. In its most elemental meaning, the Constitution is
an assertion that “yea” can legally have no binding meaning if “nay” is
forever disallowed. Without that, the 50 states’ relationship to the
union would be one of perpetual servitude. Instead, the Constitution
affirms that only the dispersion and division of power flowing from the
people upward through the sovereignty of each of the 50 states can
provide a proper check upon the federal government. Clyde C. Wilson, a
University of South Carolina historian and editor of the John C. Calhoun
Papers, has stated the case with eminent clarity:

Federalism is not when the central government graciously allows
the states to do this or that. That is just another form of
administration. True federalism is when the people of the states set
limits to the central government. Fundamentally, federalism means
states rights. The cause of states rights is the cause of liberty.
They rise or fall together.

While Tweedledee Democrats and Tweedledum Republicans keep a
watchful eye on the political landscape for fear of third party threats
to their probable globalist standard bearers, George Kalas thinks the
political elite would be wiser to cast their eyes northward, to Canada.
“Quebec,” Mr. Kalas asserts, “is the model. The province leveraged its
political power for 30 years brilliantly.”

Citing a University of North Carolina Southern Focus Poll, Kalas
underscored the unexpected result that 17 percent of Southerners favored
secession if it could be achieved without bloodshed while an additional
7 percent said they would not oppose secession. “That’s very
significant. When Quebec’s Parti Quebecois first began agitating
for independence in 1962 only 8 percent thought it was a good idea,”
Kalas noted, “By 1976, 40 percent were in favor and in 1995, 49.4
percent voted for independence. And already in the Southland, one out
of five voters is opposed to Washington and one out of four would seek
independence by peaceful means.”

These results are less startling if one takes into account the fact
that what the SNC stands for is pretty much what a majority of the
electorate has been demanding since the end of the Cold War: a greatly
reduced federal government, more vigilant state governments, less
intrusive regulation, lower taxes, sound public finances, personal
liberty and privacy, vigorously defended property rights and judicial
reform. Oh, and after six years of federal meddling in health care,
citizens and insurers alike want the system freed of state interference
in order to repair it before it collapses in the inevitable economic
downturn. Getting the troops home goes over big with the voters too.

Intriguingly, the South is not alone in its rejection of the federal
government’s usurpations and outrages. Hawaii, Alaska, New England and
parts of the Northwest all have secessionist movements at various stages
of development. Sixty percent of Louisiana voters recently passed a
state sovereignty amendment declaring their “sole and exclusive right of
governing themselves as a free and sovereign state.” The Utah-based
Committee of 50 States, chaired by former-Gov. J. Bracken Lee, is
actively studying a modified secession proposal.

In fact, the U.S. is only just catching up with an idea that has
ripened worldwide. The Scottish Nationalist Party and the Welsh
Assembly have both enjoyed success of late. All of the Soviet Republics
are now independent, Chechnya has seized de facto independence
from Moscow and today Dagestan threatens to do the same; the two
constituent parts of what was Czechoslovakia have undergone an amicable
divorce. Italy’s Northern League and Indonesia’s East Timor both
continue to seek independence while Spain’s Basque population has yet to
mute their cry for an independent Catalonia.

A concern for native culture is how many secessionist movements
begin, moving only later to develop a political component. Even the
once notorious Pamiat (“Memory”) began in the early 1980s as a
group of airline engineers and designers who were dedicated to a
rediscovery of Russian literary classics and the restoration of public
monuments. So too the SNC, whose origins lie with the League of the
South, an organization founded five years ago which is dedicated to the
preservation and understanding of Southern culture. Inevitably the move
to political activism arises from the frustration the more local
communities experience when their drive for cultural renewal conflicts
with the larger government’s bureaucracies’ drive for homogenization and
total authority.

Critics of secession warn that such movements play into the
globalists’ desire to replace nation-states with “more manageable units”
for mega-authorities such as the EU to exploit. Certainly it is true
the consolidating ambitions of the globalists know no bounds.
IMF-created monetary mayhem and imprudent lending played their intended
part in the continuing break-up of Yugoslavia into UN/NATO
protectorates, for which a defiant and sovereign Serbia has paid the
larger price of NATO fisticuffs and occupation. The financial and
political elite hope the continuing IMF involvement in Russia’s alleged
reforms will play the same role in fracturing the Russian Federation.
However, the globalists’ drive for regional governance is a mere
administrative device and is only meant to make the larger government’s
control and fleecing of local populations more effective. Contrarily,
secession is the seizure of power by a representative regional authority
— a state, a province, or gybernaya (administrative district) —
which has no intention of delegating authority or resources to a larger
governing entity.

Utah’s modified secession proposal highlights the pragmatic argument
binding all secessionists: If three quarters of U.S. States vote their
approval, “The Ultimate Resolution” would kick in when U.S. debt reaches
a pre-determined level deemed intolerable and the entire federal status
— president, Congress and judiciary — would be dissolved and fired.
In other words, highly indebted nation states are economically
inefficient and taxpayers have the right if not the necessity of
asserting their interests politically. Scholars at the Ludwig Von Mises
Institute have joined economists such as Walter E. Williams and Thomas
Naylor in arguing persuasively for the benefits smaller governments
created by secession would offer their electorates.

In hewing to both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution,
Southland’s secessionists are assuring their party’s future course
enjoys a legitimacy that the federal government increasingly does not.
There will be no SNC presidential candidate in 2000, or possibly ever.
The Southern Party’s intention is to develop active state chapters whose
party mandate is to nominate viable states’ rights candidates for
elections at the village, city, county and state level. Once the party
infrastructure is solidly built, its finances sound and its efforts
rewarded with officeholders, only then will the SNC state chapters move
to nominate candidates for the House and the Senate whose duty will be
to vote for secession.

Critically, the SNC is prepared to wait several generations to attain
the lawful right of secession. Considering the public’s encouraging
response to the SNC’s sober-minded, well-organized effort and
superbly-written literature, a long wait may prove unnecessary.
Virginia State Chairman Jerry Baxely revels in the recent public
dressing down he received from Virginia’s RNC, “We’re already starting
to make people sweat.”

Once the states’ colors were presented, and the Asheville Declaration
setting out the SNC’s intentions signed by the state chairmen and the
re-enactors’ loud 21-musket salute had faded, the well-dressed, crowd of
professionals gave rousing voice to “Dixie.” But the most memorable and
important aspect of that colorful August day, the part that would surely
bring a knowing smile to the faces of America’s founding fathers, lay in
the words George Kalas spoke earlier that morning. “We are patient
people and our goal long-term is good governance and cultural renewal
for the Southern people,” Kalas said, adding with admirable
constitutional cunning, “If by some miracle good government can be
secured within the present federal system, so be it.”

History is full of riddles and ironies, and what could be more true
to the quixotic nature of mankind’s story than formerly defeated
Southern secessionists saving a federal union by their very presence
having made it once again harmonious and accountable? A mostly
satisfied Quebec attests to just that possibility, and explains why this
Yankee was more than glad to leave a sizeable chunk of her heart in
Dixieland.

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Anne Williamson has written for the Wall Street Journal, The New York
Times, Spy magazine, Film Comment and Premiere. An expert on
Soviet-Russian affairs, she is currently working on a book, “Contagion:
How America Betrayed Russia.”