Update At Bottom With less than a week to go to the Scottish independence election, the usual spate of articles about nothing begin to appear. National Journal, a DC insider publication that like many others is straining for eyeballs on the web in a post print era has produced another in a series of articles that treat the tiny Vermont secession movement as a contender. The NJ highlights, as though they're relevant to the Scottish situation, three largely unsuccessful U.S. secesher outfits
I'll start with the second featured first: Cascadianow! From their About page,
"CascadiaNow! is working to become a grassroots, umbrella non-profit organization that provides resources and direct services to groups, projects, and community partners to raise awareness of Cascadia, celebrate our distinct regional identity and culture, and increase the independence of the Cascadia bioregion."
They've been on the web for 8 years and they're just now "working to become" a tax free 501c3 and nothing more than an "umbrella" thing. This is just the sort of e-group that secesher maven, Southern National Congress delegate and all around crank, Kirkpatrick Sale, has complained for years about, calling such groups little more than a website address. And the NJ writer Kaveh Waddell moused his way to their website and "interviewed" the leader of the group.
Third up for NJ's Waddell was the loudest, if not the largest secesher organization in the U.S., the notoriously ludicrous and hateful
League of the South. Waddell's interview elicits the fact that the
LoSers racist leader, Michael Hill, has virtually no insight into the Scottish independence effort and goal. Hill ignorantly states that a successful "Yes" vote for Scottish independence will be,
"a brick out of the wall of centralization and the old idea of empire-building"
News Flash!: A primary goal of the the Scottish independentistas would be accession (as opposed to secession) in 18 months to the European Union with its more than 200,000 pages of laws and regulations that make it arguably the most centralized union on the planet, as well as one of the largest economic empires to have ever existed. Hill must be smoking too much kudzu.
Nowhere in his fawning outline of the
LoS's past and present does NJ's Waddell reveal that the collection of aging felons, Klansmen and racists is being replaced by a new generation of racists, Klansmen, neo-Nazis and potential felons. I say potential because they've formed a militia called "The Indomitables" who intend to target for guerrilla war type action journalists (pay attention Waddell), politicians and "elites." Waddell completely missed the racism and new radicalism that permeates today's
LoS. As for Waddell's repeating
LoS's claim "at one point recently to have 25,000 members," Waddell offers no explanation whatsoever as to why at repeated
LoS demos over this past summer the average turnout was only 10 of the racists.
First up, though, was my favorite; an interview of the
Second Vermont Republic's new
baas and a member of Champlain College's adjunct staff, as well as a self-described historian,
Rob Williams wherein Williams is positively wet-his-panties giddy over the upcoming Scottish independence vote and what he wrongly conjures it to mean to the essentially non-existent Vermont secesher movement. Williams unjustifiably effuses that,
"'I think the Scots have done a fantastic job of really making secession sexy,' Williams told (Waddell). 'If you look at the way the secession conversation has unfolded in the past several years, they've really tapped into what makes Scotland Scotland. That's something we've been trying to do in Vermont.' Williams thinks Vermont should follow suit, playing up the symbols, culture, and history that make the state unique."
Williams' muddled understanding of history causes him to conflate Scotland's centuries long struggle to re-assert independence from a United Kingdom created from the threat of force of arms with his boutique style secesher clown show. While there has always been a large segment of the Scottish body politic, including the present leader of the Scottish House of Parliament, supporting the independence line, under Williams' leadership the Vermont seceshers have disastrously fielded candidates that polled in the low or fractional digits of the electorate (99.24% of votes for governor in 2010 were for someone other than the secesher candidate).
Williams prattles on to misstate historical fact.
"The Vermont independence movement has already taken some of these lessons to heart. The movement has its own flag—borrowed from Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys militia—and a "reasonably robust network" of activists. What they're missing, Williams said, is the grassroots power of the Scottish campaign. "The Scots have proved that with a lot of time and effort and energy, you can build a political and economic conversation around independence," he said.
Williams said the success of the Scottish movement has had a positive effect on the Vermont independence movement, no matter the outcome of Scotland's referendum. Williams could hardly conceal his excitement for what's happening overseas. "If I didn't have to teach," he told me, "I'd be in Edinburgh right now!"
First off, Williams and his "reasonably robust network" of misfits, who now probably number somewhere under ten, stole the battle flag of the successors to the Green Mountain Boys, the Vermont Army & Air National Guard, and dishonor it by having done so. He also in saying that "the Scots have proved that with a lot of time and effort and energy, you can build a political and economic conversation around independence," leaves out the fact that there's is a valid, lawful claim made for hundreds of years, unlike the threadbare, historically perverted claim of the Vermont seceshers. The comparison of the two movements is typical of the hubris upon which Williams' leadership style is based, just like the spirit of sacrifice shown in his statement that if he didn't have to work he'd be right there with the Scots. What an empty, unself aware, blowhard Rob regularly shows himself to be.
As long as Williams' "activism" amounts to social media, a defunct hate blog, an occasional Statehouse stunt that can only attract 20 or so mostly out of staters and alliances with out of state hate groups like the
League of the South, the Union is very, very secure.
What Waddell's article fails to disclose (beyond the seething anti-Semitism of the Vermont seceshers and the race hatred of the
LoSers) is that most economists agree that Scottish independence will lead to a serious recession for Scotland that would probably extend to England itself, but that at least the "
golfing in Scotland will be a lot cheaper.”
http://vermontsecession.blogspot.com/2007/02/rob-williams-svr-co-chair-breaks.html
http://vermontsecession.blogspot.com/2012/03/rob-williams-continues-to-maintain-his.html
http://vermontsecession.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/second-vermont-republic-vermont-fairy.html
http://vermontsecession.blogspot.com/2011/02/vermont-commons-bloggers-anti-semitic.html
(h/t Spelunker)
UPDATE September 17: Days have passed since in his first post in months at his Second Vermont Republic website Williams sought to conflate some meaning for his dead movement from events in Scotland. An opportunity (again) was missed by Williams to renounce and denounce the racism and calls from violence now eminating from his allies at the
League of the South in crowing about Waddell's throwaway e-piece about U.S. seceshers to put some or any distance between his group and the
LoS; stupid is as stupid doesn't.
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Labels: anti-Semitism, Cascadianow!, crackpots, hate groups, Kayeh Waddell, Kirkpatrick Sale, League of the South, Michael Hill, National Journal, racism, Rob Williams, secesher delusions, Second Vermont Republic
