A Second Vermont Republic Founder Joins The Culture War

I know, it's been months since I last posted but, really, the Vermont secesher movement is pretty much dead here. Other than the occasional post at his hate site (no, I won't link to it), publisher Rob Williams, hasn't really been doing much of anything. Sure, he's tried to get his tired message out about "the Empire" out by piggybacking at other's events but Vermonters have pretty much got his number: hate. He's also been waging a bizarre anti-Bernie Sanders campaign, relying on the past writings of failed secessionists like the still dead Thomas Naylor, a lightweight by the name of Greg Guma, and his own whiny scribblings that point to the attacks of anti-Semite Stephen Lendman. Secesher Peter Diamondstone has played along with the campaign; you can read about Diamondstone's failure here.

I'd figured that this was the end of the line for the largely ineffectual SVR crowd and, for all intents and purposes, it is. It's founder dead, his successor completely failed, and the original SVR leadership scattered and silent. All except for Kirkpatrick Sale.

Sale was part of the 60's era SDS organization. He writes useless books devoted to his cramped worldview and, of course, secession. And he writes letters to his now local paper in Charleston, SC, about, of course, secession. He retired to SC from NY State a few years ago as things unraveled for his friends here at SVR in Vermont. In his retirement, Sale followed his dead friend's lead and has published some really dumb stuff but probably nothing quite as stupid as this recent op-ed in Charleston's The Post and Courier. In it, Sale offers secession as the solution to the U.S. Supreme Court's Obergefel v. Hodges marriage equality decision.

"That is why I believe that the death of states’ rights is really a clarion call for states to defy the federal government and assert their rights independent of Washington and its minions."

"I care not how it be done..."

In his piece Sale essentially says "to hell" with the 5th and 14th amendments to the Constitution and cavalierly proposes conflict between Americans and their government. How'd that work out the last time around, Kirk? 500, 600 or 800 American dead, right?

I have little doubt Sale won't find takers for his proposal among the evangelical nutters that have spent the summer fuming over SCOTUS's decision. Sale's op-ed closes with:

"For if it is not done now, it will not be done ever."

That's probably the only thing that Sale got right in his op-ed.

You can read the op-ed here and a very good response can be found here. 'Course, Sale has been whining about "gay power" to whoever who'll listen for months.

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Second Vermont Republic Co-founder, Kirkpatrick Sale, Throws A Hissy Fit Over The "Clout" of Uppity Gays

In a recent op-ed published by the Charleston, SC Post Courier Second Vermont Republic co-founder and editor at large for its defunct print publication VT Commons, as well as a raging anti-Semite who argues that the State of Israel should be "undone," gets his panties in a knot over the successes of the gay rights movement. That's easy to understand given that it's coming from a committed and vastly unsuccessful secessionist, as well as a past South Carolina delegate to the racist, neo-Confederate Southern National Congress, long affiliated with the Southern secessionist hate group, the League of the South which shares his obsession about gay marriage.

Besides not seeming to know much about cultural matters, how law suits develop, how politicians evolve in tandem with the American body politic and a host of other questions, Sale seems truly ignorant when it comes to the nature of progress. Unsurprisingly, Sale is little troubled by the state of Indiana's effort to institutionalize discrimination, bullying, and disparate treatment.

There's a lot in Sale's op-ed to criticize but his opening crap about Indiana's overtly discriminatory "Religious Freedom" act as "innocent" perhaps says more about Sale's crackpot biases than I ever can. He also erroneously states that boycotts were threatened; fact is, business voted with its feet as did our own State of Vermont in discouraging travel and business to Indiana that would make their employees, state or otherwise, second class visitors.

Perhaps if Sale and his ilk hadn't so profoundly ineffective in their own secessionist endeavors he wouldn't have felt so moved to pen this lame op-ed:

How Did Gay Power Get Such Clout?
by Kirkpatrick Sale
Apr 11 2015

The recent flap over an innocent law in Indiana protecting religious rights got taken, even before the ink was cold, to be an attack on homosexuals, particularly same-sex marriages, and quickly drew national attention. A powerful gay-rights lobby went into immediate and high-powered action, threatening boycotts and protests, and it didn’t take days before the law was amended.

How did this lobby develop such power, with instant media and political clout, and how is it able to cow elected officials so effectively?

Well, it’s not because it represents a significant part of the American population. In fact, a recent poll by Gallup published in The New York Times estimates that there are only approximately 3 million homosexual men in the cities of the United States, a finding that comports well with previous studies. Perhaps the most comprehensive one was by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention using 2013 census data, which estimated 1.6 per cent of the population as lesbian or gay, and roughly 0.7 per cent as bisexual. What all that means is that a tiny percentage of the American population is not straight heterosexual — say, 2 percent, or 6.2 million people.

My question is: why do they have so much influence in American society, politics and culture? Why is the dispute over same-sex marriage front-page news and the source of multiple lawsuits? Why are there now gay characters peppered throughout television series and openly gay sexual acts depicted, and even whole series given over to homosexual and lesbian themes? Why did Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State put forth gay rights — actually the whole gamut, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender — as an important American cause?

I have no objection to seeing homosexuals enjoy equal rights and establish a place in our culture. What I am asking is how did such a tiny percentage of the public get to have such sway over American life, when comparable minorities, at least in terms of numbers, have nothing like that influence.

There are nearly 15 million Asians in the United States, but do we see them massing for their rights and demanding that there be Asians on TV shows, or even whole networks devoted to their cause? Do the Polish-Americans, said to be some 9 million people, ask for Polish characters and Polish themes in movies, and measure, with full media attention, how many Polish characters there are on ABC Family and Fox? Are the 6 million American Jews boycotting stores that sell pork?

American Indians, who by any measure deserve some primary place in our national conscience, number a little over 5 million people, just under 2 percent. Every so often, mostly around Columbus Day, you hear something about activists asking for more Indians in Hollywood films (or at least real Indians playing Indian parts). But for at least 40 years, American tribes have been owed something like $3.2 billion that the American government has earned from mineral and other extractions from Indian lands, and while there have been Indian protests and lawsuits, it has remained an invisible issue for most Americans. And even the scandal of the Bureau of Indian Affairs losing $2 billion of that money and not being able to find it has not caused any national attention. And remember, these are the people against whom we committed genocide.

I suppose it could be said that it is the fault of these people for not organizing, not learning how to control the media, not sufficiently proving that their rights have somehow been violated. The homosexual community, especially after Stonewall and in the face of AIDS, was a masterful example of how to achieve all of that, and it took plenty of hard work, devotion, money and skill to do it.

But there’s something more than that. Indians, after all, have organized, have protested, have sued, and their moral claim is the highest of all, yet their collective political and media power is minuscule. There is something more in the homosexual cause that seems to get to American hearts and minds and make their claims to equal anti-discrimination protection legitimate. Something that even convinces more and more Americans that the bizarre idea of marriage between two people of the same sex, which for most of human history was not only not proposed but for the most part not even thought of, is not only legal but morally uplifting. There is something more playing at the American psyche that has seen gay marriage gain public support faster than any other social cause I can think of in the last 50 years.

I am not, alas, able to identify that “something more” with any precision. My initial instinct is to say that it has to do with the victory in America’s cultural wars of the academic skullduggery known as political correctness. Once everything is judged by p.c. standards, all minorities, no matter how small or what their characteristics, must be accorded equality, and if they have been denied that for a long time their case is especially strong. And that matters most in the area of sex and gender, an area that Americans are uneasy about in the first place. Hence the cause of homosexuality, and the attendant unusual gender orientations, has come to the American psychic, and thus political, fore.

Kirkpatrick Sale lives in Mount Pleasant, SC.

Charlestonians respond here and here.

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There's A New Hate Group In Town

And given the current baas of the Second Vermont Republic's very low bar for who he'll work with in pursuit of secession I think that Burlington VT's Champlain College adjunct staffer, Rob Williams, is gonna find this to be a match made in heaven. The Middlebury, VT based Creativity Alliance hates Jews, "coloreds," "niggers," race mixing and mestizos. Williams has long worked with and supported important neo-Confederate figures in the racist and anti-Semitic League of the South like Michael Hill, Franklin Sanders and Donald Livingston, so working with the Rev. Pat Tracy of the neo-Nazi Creativity Alliance should be an easy fit.

The Spring 2015 issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center lists the neo-Nazi Creativity Alliance as located in Middlebury, VT on their national hate map here. The contact information for the North American liaison for the Creativity Alliance's Reverend Pat Tracy, PO Box 1006, Middlebury, VT 05753 northamerica@creativityalliance.com can be found on pg. 4 of their handbook here. Their very particular and extremely racist and anti-Semitic membership requirements and obligations can be found on pages 7-10 of the handbook. The average, present day SVR member should fit in quite nicely.

Coincidentally, Middlebury, VT is also the original home to SVR co-founder Kirkpatrick Sale's racist enabling and anti-Semitic Middlebury Institute.

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Cascadia? Nuts!

Years ago secession guru, anti-Semite and a co-founder of the Second Vermont Republic, Kirkpatrick Sale, made the surprising admission that a good many of the secessionist organizations listed at his Middlebury Institute (much to Middlebury VT's chagrin) were little more than websites comprised of only a few or one member. While he described his own group as an "umbrella" organization, it too was little more than a website maintained by another anti-Semite like Sale called Carol Moore.

Sure, the now dead baas of SVR, the Dixie singin' Thomas Naylor was also a member of MI but that was pretty much it. The MI organized and sponsored a couple or three poorly attended (primarily by racists from the League of the South, the Alaska Independence Party and the Hawaiian independence movement) conferences, mostly in the Deep South, that were little more than gatherings of the same small group of committed racists and anti-Semitic secesher assholes - Michael Hill, Donald Livingston, Rob Williams, Naylor, Sale, the Dexters, ad nauseum. Stunts, really, designed to get some AP and FOX News coverage and accomplished little more. Except for the overtly racist LoS, they've stopped even doing that. All the "big plans" - Town Meeting articles, constitutional conventions, candidates standing for elective office - have come to naught, as well as to an end.

Recently the San Francisco Chronicle ran a piece titled "Cascadia Secession Apparently Not As Easy As It Sounds" on the Left Coast secesher group Cascadia Now! After a word salad interview of seemingly one of its few members, Brandon Letsinger, the Chronicle lays bare the phoniness of the group. (Note: The group claims thousands of members but offers no proof, much as Naylor once claimed that more than 60,000 Vermont voters supported secession but when the time came to vote far less than 1% of Vermont's registered voters supported the secesher gubernatorial candidate, a number comparable to the average of spoilt ballots in an election.)

Then the Chronicle's Caille Millner got down to it:

"When it came to the question of how this republic might come about, however, Letsinger was more circumspect. He thinks politics are “irrelevant, negative, and toxic.” Cascadia, he emphasized, is about “an identity” to connect the region’s 15 million people."

"To this end, Cascadia Now! has a soccer team (they want to play Quebec), a poetry festival, and a Scouting Association. They have their own beer, “Cascadian dark ale,” made with hops from the region."

"The crowd seemed pleased. Cascadia sounded like great fun until the next speaker, Joshua Clover, took the podium."

"Clover is a 52-year-old UC Davis literature professor who specializes in political economy. He came prepared with his own PowerPoint slides; he wanted to tell the crowd about the history of secession movements in the 20th century. (I told you Kadist was sly.)"

"Cheerfully, Clover talked about how previous breakaway movements around the world had led to battles, purges, invasions and sieges."

"As the bodies stacked up, I could feel the energy in the room shift into discomfort."

"What had happened to the hops? Where had the positive identity gone?"

"As for freedom from the shackles of the empire, well, Clover didn’t think Cascadia would have that, either — not in today’s global market. 'It’s unclear what regionalism could mean unless a place is prepared to, say, make its own refrigerators.'"

"Right now, Clover said in a buoyant voice, all of the world’s refrigerators are made in China."

"Clover wasn’t done yet. He layered a demographic map of the United States over that of Cascadia. Look at the dots, he urged us. Cascadia is 'a peculiarly non-diverse region with the exception of some native peoples for whom previous secessions have proven deadly.'"

"Cascadia, he said, represented 'demographic anti-blackness.'"

"It took the audience a few moments to come up with questions after Clover sat down."

"But his gimlet-eyed view of Cascadia’s Happy Valley had an unexpected benefit: Some audience members discovered that they had a few doubts about this whole secession thing."

"An audience member asked Letsinger about the steps that Cascadia had taken to reach out to the region’s indigenous people. Letsinger said that they had engaged in outreach, and that some of the tribes had “similar values” about environmentalism and activism. Cascadia’s values, he added, were attractive enough that others would come to them."

"But the question persisted, and Letsinger got annoyed: 'I’ve heard this, the idea that this movement is not diverse enough so you need to reach out to these people. We see that as a colonization of our values.'"

"The idea that a suggestion to reach out to historically oppressed people would cause the Cascadia movement such suffering! It was so dazzling, so bizarre, that I almost missed the next question."

"'Cascadia seems more like a brand, like a shared narrative fantasy,' said an audience member. She wanted to know, essentially, what the plan was to make the idea more concrete."

"Unfortunately, making Cascadia concrete would require, well, politics. Letsinger wanted to keep talking about bioregionalism, about creating a brand that was “open source,” about how Cascadia Now! makes all of its own merchandise."

"I felt the evening’s vision of freedom and positivity ebbing quickly away, and I felt so bad for Letsinger that I didn’t even ask him to explain his statement about colonization. Instead I asked him about how Cascadia could avoid the violence that had plagued so many other breakaway movements throughout time."

"'It’s a good question,' he said, and admitted that violence would be a breaking point for him personally."

"He wanted a model more like Scotland, where the voters had had a choice. But the voters in Scotland voted not to secede, and that election had a degree of seriousness that I hadn’t gotten from this discussion. I walked out of Kadist with new questions, like:"

"Does Cascadia really want to secede? Or do they just want a good beer?"

Caille Millner is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: cmillner@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @caillemillner

Oddly enough, early SVR member and longtime syncophant, Peter Buknatski a.k.a. "Petey Sweety," was a registered at the Vermont Secretary of State's website as an owner of Second Vermont Republic Beer, Ale and Brewing or some such nonsense which has likewise come to naught. Little wonder then that Williams got some serious wood over the alcoholic aspect to the article in his own post at his hate blog (Note: I do not link to Williams' hate site; it's easily found if you have to.)

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McSecession - National Journal Pairs Second Vermont Republic With the League of the South in Scottish Independence Article

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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"The Ghastly Idea of ‘Equality for All’"

Just when I thought that Vermont secessionists and their very close allies with the racist Southern secesher movement couldn't bite down just a little harder on the hateful, discriminatory bag of shit that they're so very fond of, Kirlpatrick Sale, a co-founder of the Second Vermont Republic, an "editor-at-large" of the Rob Williams' Vermont Commons journal blog, a longtime sufferer of Lincoln derangement syndrome (see right column for current definition) and a present day South Carolina representative to the racist Southern National Congress which is strongly affiliated with the white supremacist League of the South, has blurted out this "pernicious" bullshit at the secessionist website LewRockwell.com:

"Equality is a pernicious and dangerous political policy..."

"..."equality for all"? What could that be? And would you want to live in such a place?"

Really, Kirk? Do you wake some days and say to yourself, "What kind of outrageous crap can I spew out today that my pals at libertaritard, paleofascist LewRockwell.com will promote as though it's comprised of lucid though?"

That Sale should come out against striving for "equality for all," no matter how imperfect the result may be along the way, is no surprise. Afterall, it was Sale who, abetted by Rob Williams, promoted the lie that the South didn't secede over slavery; you'd think that at least one of those two "scholars" might have taken the time to read the Southern state's various articles of secession and to have considered the arguments presented in the various Southern legislatures. The number one issue for the Southern secessionists was slavery.

If you'd like to read Kirk's screed regarding hatred of the struggle for "equality for all," it's here.

What a sad, hateful group of people Kirk Sale and the Vermont seceshers have come to be. Hate has become the foundation of the modern secession movement.

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I've Received a Request for Recognition on the "Neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi..." Blogroll

I don't normally get, hell, I've never gotten, requests to be included on the blogroll in the right column that I label "neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, Paleoconservative, Racist, White Separatist, anti-Government Sovereignty Activists and Related Links, as well as Their Enablers and Supporters" except for one last month from a blogger who goes by the username RVDH.

RVDH is some kind of virulently anti-American, anti-Semitic, "pan-anarchist, pan-secessionist" type who has huge wood for Thomas H. Naylor.

Once again, I kinda get ahead of myself.

You see, RVDH took lotsa umbrage with this post of mine and wrote this about the Vermont Secession blog,

"This guy really hates the Second Vermont Republic but you have to wonder why he keeps writing about Vermont secessionists even though no one seems to leave comments on any of his posts… Let’s give his some site traffic and maybe he’ll be kind enough to add Attack the System to his “neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, Paleoconservative, Racist, White Separatist, anti-Government, Sovereignty Activists, and Related Links, as well as Their Enablers and Supporters” blogroll section."

Source

Here's the thing; RVDH is one of a stable of hateful demi-misanthropes that opine at what is more of an aggregator website rather than one that provides original material, except about its "leader," a self-promoting e-anarchist by the name of Michael Preston.  The website is called Attack the System. Pretty much nothing to get excited about unless you're a "pan-anarchist, pan-secessionist," self stroker.

What surprised me is that RVDH didn't ask that I include his own blog, occupysecession.com, on my “neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, Paleoconservative, Racist, White Separatist, anti-Government, Sovereignty Activists, and Related Links, as well as Their Enablers and Supporters” blogroll.

So here's the deal; I'm not going along with RVDH's request. For one, he hasn't followed my blog long enough to know that I rarely approve the comments that I get from seceshers since I can track them back to secesher websites - they've got their own platform and I'm not giving them another megaphone for their hatred. The other primary source of my comments are from tips about seceshers and I always ask for further permission before approving the comments, which invariably ends up with, "Nah, go for it."

But what's really interesting is that at RVDH's own website at occupysession.com the only comment that I can find that isn't a ping is from that flailing, ineffectual, white nationalist, secessionist, neo-Nazi bonehead, Sebastion Ernst Ronin, leader of the racist Renaissance Party of North America and secessionist associate of Thomas Naylor and Kirkpatrick Sale - they may disagree about the details but the results of their efforts are all in support of white nationalist secessionist states. Ronin's one word comment was, "Bravo!" Of course, RVDH's post was a reprint from the anti-Semitic, anti-gay (although possibly of the self-loathing sort), well known Holocaust denier, Victor Thorn.

Fact is that both websites are havens for bloggers who specialize in racist, anti-Semitic news aggregation.  When I say anti-Semitic, I'm not alluding to some vague, amorphous "they just disagree with Israeli policy" crap.  I'm referring to what is best outlined in the working definition of anti-Semitism published by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, now Fundamental Rights Agency:

"It provides contemporary examples of antisemitism, which include: promoting the harming of Jews in the name of an ideology or religion; promoting negative stereotypes of Jews; holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of an individual Jewish person or group; denying the Holocaust or accusing Jews or Israel of exaggerating it; and accusing Jews of dual loyalty or a greater allegiance to Israel than their own country."

"It also states that ‘Examples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the State of Israel taking into account the overall context could include:"

• Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
• Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
• Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
• Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
• Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.

Therefore, in consideration of Ronald, er, RVDH's request, I'm going to tack on occupysecession.com to my “neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, Paleoconservative, Racist, White Separatist, anti-Government, Sovereignty Activists, and Related Links, as well as Their Enablers and Supporters” blogroll.


And let me add,


(French version here.)

So please, don't stay in touch, RVDH. You may not be happy with the result.

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The Party's Over

... and it's back to business.

Other than a couple of unhinged comments, one from an angry anti-Semitic, pro-segregation, Vermont Commons blogger and another from a willingly blind to racism high school student from Cavendish, VT, (I probably could say something snarky about this sort of "youth is the future" for the Vermont secession movement but, the fact is, it's just sad) the dust settled pretty fast after Friday's poorly attended Secesher Statehouse Stunt that was sponsored by the Second Vermont Republic, VTCommons and what remains of, as SVR co-founder Ian Baldwin has called them, the "small community" of the Vermont secession movement deadenders.

This morning the old inbox was bare of any local media coverage of the secesher stunt but what did show up was another reminder of the lack of criticism within the movement for two other SVR co-founders repeated appearances on the Internet hate radio program, The Political Cesspool.

Over the years SVR co-founders Thomas H. Naylor, a longtime friend of the racist League of the South, and Kirkpatrick Sale, a South Carolina delegate to the Southern National Congress which has strong ties and affiliations with the League, have made several appearances on James Edwards' racist, neo-Confederate, homophobic, anti-Semitic, Holocaust denying program that is also carried on Stormfront.org ("White Pride Worldwide"). Edwards was so impressed by Naylor that he even called him "obviously a good Confederate" during Naylor's interview for a Confederate History Month show that Naylor participated in knowing full well what the show was celebrating - Confederate History Month. Yet in the nearly five years since I revealed this connection of Naylor and Sale to the racist neo-Confederate community there hasn't been a peep of criticism from within the Vermont secesher community.

My inbox contained a story from Mother Jones about the controversy that's erupted over a Southern Republican congressman's single appearance on Edward's white nationalist hate radio show. So why is it then that when Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) appears on the show it's a national issue, yet when Naylor and Sale do the same thing repeatedly there's no blowback from Vermont seceshers? We already know where Naylor and Sale's hearts lie, so this says a whole lot more about the entire Vermont secesher community's blind allegiance to these two boneheads. Read the entire Mother Jones piece here.

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

Vermont Seceshers Throw a Party to Promote Bigotry

When I first heard that the Second Vermont Republic and Vermont Commons honchos, the Dixie singin' Thomas Naylor, Rob Williams and anti-Vermont Army and Air National Guard doyenne Juliet Buck were throwing a party in the Vermont Statehouse, I wondered so how come they didn't invite me? I mean, Williams has been proposing late night trysts at various bars over the years and here's a chance for us to get it on really in public and I didn't make the list.

Perhaps the reason why is that they knew I wouldn't approve of their intent to formalize their bigotry in the seat of Vermont government, the General Assembly chamber of the Vermont Statehouse, let alone anywhere else.

For years the baas of SVR, Naylor, has promoted the lie that Jews control the U.S. government, "having a hammerlock hold over American foreign policy." You see, in Naylor's squirrelly view it's Jews that need a little push back, not the Holocaust denying scumbags that he's repeatedly agreed to be interviewed by like Victor Thorn, James Edwards and the talking heads at Iran's propaganda ministry.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

Naylor and three other tired old white guys got together and crafted a "Montpelier Manifesto" comprised primarily of Naylor's repetitive, cliché ridden, excessively anti-American crap. It's a lot of the same old same old that they've been unable to get traction on in Vermont since they began their campaign nearly 10 years ago. Naylor's lied repeatedly about the actual support in Vermont for his secession plan for years, first telling us that 8%, then 13% of Vermonters were buying into secesher nonsense - fact is, when Vermonters got a chance to vote on his handpicked, angry, "Israeli Mafia" hating surrogate for the governor's office, 99.24% of them voted for someone else.

Now Naylor and his "small community," as SVR co-founder Ian Baldwin calls them, of alienated clones intend to lead Vermonters into a mixed nut bag of Ron Paultardism, Jew hatred and a rainbow of conspiracies while being anti-virtually every Vermonter who isn't with them in their dogpatch of irrelevance called the "Montpelier Manifesto."

No, I'm not going to link to it but here's what these old farts, Thomas Naylor, Kirkpartrick Sale (a South Carolina delegate to the racist League of the South" front group, Southern National Congress, ), James Starkey and Charles Keil, have to say about "the Jews" within its "Document of Grievances and Abuses":

Foreign Policy
4. "The hammerlock hold of the Israeli Lobby over American foreign policy that forces us to support an Israeli-inspired war on terror against Muslims and keeps us from any real commitment to an Israeli-Palestinian peace process."

Sure, and playing footsie with outspoken racists like Edwards or Thorn will make you a player in the peace process, eh, Tommy Boy?

Although two thirds of Israelis oppose any attack on Iran, and tensions continue to rise between the U.S. government, and while Netanyahu's minority viewpoint continues to be marginalized, and while Americans are being murdered in the Middle East for no good reason, Naylor and his other old cranks (NB: two others unworthy of note have now signed on to the Manifesto, probably because they'd like their own failing secesher operations to get some recognition) continue to promote the (and I never use ALL CAPS) LIE that Jews control the U.S. government.

But, never to worry, tomorrow's KKKonference will approve the racist libel proposed by Naylor and the other old white men since, after all, Williams "agrees with Thomas" about the Jews and Buck is pissed at everybody.

In their press releases Williams and Buck have made a big deal out of holding their stunt in the Vermont Statehouse. Like them, Fred Phelp's gay hating Westboro Baptist Church or the reputed Vermont Ku Klux Klan would be as eligible to use the the General Assembly chamber. Yeah, the standards are that low.

Since they're having music at their anti-Vermonter klavern, here's mine:



Look for me there tomorrow. I may just "shed my skin."

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

Tomorrow's the Day

Radical America bashing will be the theme for the day, interspersed with outlandish claims that this group of angry outsiders, each of whom is more unaccomplished, inexperienced and incompetent at governing than the next, is the only collection of malcontents who can properly lead Vermonters into a secessionist future. Problem is, Vermonters aren't interested in going there, and especially not with these clowns.

Never mind that they've lied to Vermonters repeatedly about the real support for their group, which they've claimed to be as much as 18%, when in fact more than 99.24% of Vermonters voted for someone other than their angry, Che Guervara embracing, middle finger waving gubernatorial candidate, Connecticut native Dennis Steele. Never mind that during their 2010 campaign they hid from Vermonters some of their beliefs and intentions. For example, Senator Robert "Needed Killin' " Wagner would have Vermont join the South and the Mountain West in becoming a right to work state, thus undermining union effectiveness, and has said so on one of those out-of-state candidate's position sites that he so fond of. Wagner's ravings include this conspiratorial beaut:

"4. Do you know what Agenda 21/Sustainable Development and the Communitarian agenda is? Do you support it? Why or why not?"
"I consider it one of the gravest threats to our livelihoods and freedoms so far this Century, and I am fighting it tooth and nail in Vermont. There is a LOT of money flowing into tiny Vermont to support Agenda 21, going into ‘programs’ to catalog, file, stamp, assess and control Vermont’s agriculture…"

"The battle continues. That’s what I think of Agenda 21."

Wagner's friend, the virulent anti-Semite, Dennis Morrisseau, had this to say when he thought Vermonters wouldn't be gaining access to the super-secret secesher Free Vermont listserv where the seceshers chatted about their various power fantasies and conspiracy theories:

“(I)f we provoke the T(eacher)'s Unions too early in our campaign they will be a HUGE PAIN IN THE ASS.....AND A VERY BIG BLOCKING FORCE. This is one of the few places where i might want us to hold our punches until later...”

Free Vermont listserv, December 14, 2009

For those who don't know, this blog got started by exposing the Second Vermont Republic and its leadership's strong ties to the racist League of the South. As recently as last year the Vermont Commons publisher and former SVR co-chair, Rob Williams, contributed an essay to a book edited by a founder of the League of the South; SVR's founder, Thomas H. Naylor, made sounds of disapproval of the racism at LoS that had been apparent to everyone but him up to that point but he did not formally sever ties with LoS, even when LoS's president, Michael Hill, openly declared his and the League's blatant formalization of its racism this past spring. A presenter at tomorrow's sideshow will be Kirkpatrick Sale, a South Carolina delegate to the Southern National Congress, a group made up of many League of the South members like its vice-chairman, Louisiana LoS chairman Mark A. Thomey. Good to see that the racist elements from the South are to be so ably represented by Sale. It should dovetail nicely with the racist proposal that Sale, Naylor and two other old white guys will seek to have the Vermonters present at their dog and pony show formally adopt as an element of yet another of their incessant manifestos and/or declarations. More on that tomorrow.

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

Thomas Naylor Continues His Role As An Anti-American, Anti-Semitic Tool of Iran's Propaganda Ministry

Back in December of 2011 I wrote about the Second Vermont Republic's founder, Thomas H. Naylor's repeated attacks on the U.S. via Iran's propaganda website Press TV, the 24-hour English language news network owned by the state-owned media corporation Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. When Press TV was first created in July of 2007 it made a short lived pretense at offering news broadcasts that, while often amateurish, utilized presenters with real news backgrounds. That soon came to an end during Iran's 2009 election and the resulting demonstrations. In its short, five year existence Press TV has been mired in controversy, not the least of which has been its reliance on U.S. writers and bloggers with strong ties to the American anti-Semitic, Holocaust denying and, at times, neo-Nazi associated website community like CounterPunch, Veterans Today and American Free Press.

Thus far this year Naylor's done two more self-important, bloviating interviews with Press TV, one last week here and this one in January that played to Press TV's virulently anti-Semitic, Holocaust denying audience:

"The problem is that President Obama... and his foreign policy is effectively under the control of the rightwing Likud of Israel with the complete compliance of the United States media."

(Note that crack Press TV staff uses a Charlotte, NC (pop. 751,000) skyline graphic for Charlotte, VT (pop. 3,500) resident Thomas Naylor)

That's right, Naylor repeated the long discredited anti-Semitic trope that Jews control the U.S. government and that the media is in cahoots with Jews. And in what was probably meant to be a secesher twofer, Thomas Naylor's longtime ally and co-founder of his misbegotten attempt at establishing his personal Empire in the Green Mountain state, Kirkpatrick Sale, made his own pitch later that day that there is a viable secession movement in the U.S. Sale's hatred of Israel is so deep seated that he has even said in his awful, despotic essay, "Time to End the Israel 'Experiment'" :

"I am arguing that the original idea of a Jewish state, from the Balfour Declaration on down, was a mistake..."

"It is of course not so easy to know what to do to undo that mistake, but I would argue that a world that can make a state can unmake it."

It's long past time for what remains of the Vermont secessionist leadership - VT Commons publisher Rob Williams, VTC content editor and anti-Vermont National Guard activist Juliet Buck and VTC's quack medicine contributor Jennifer Stella - to disown Naylor and his Second Vermont Republic co-founder Sale's vile, unabashed anti-Semitism or own it.

Wait, we already have former SVR co-chair Williams' statement on the matter:

"(T)he thing is - I agree with Thomas re: Israel."

So, Juliet and Jennifer, what's it to be?

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

Rob Williams Continues to Maintain His Ties to League of the South White Supremacists

Since the Vermont Commons newsletter folded last fall we've heard little from its former publisher, Rob Williams. A couple of movie reviews or some such (I keep expecting to see his various recipes for the crow he's been munching on throughout this winter) but little more.

Williams is a part of the Associate Faculty at Champlain College in Burlington, VT. He has something to do with "Creative Media" at the college. That figures. He's been "creatively" making shit up for years. You know, like the Vermont secesher movement is doing better than being on life support since its inception.

It was in February of 2010 that Williams made his intellectual hajj to the center for restoration of the Confederacy, The Abbeville Institute, to become a contributor to the eventual output of a conference entitled, "State Nullification, Secession and the Human Scale of Political Order," a book about the alternative historical universe inhabited by Vermont secessionists and their neo-Confederate allies.

A little history at this point will be beneficial:

Yankee Secessionist Back in Cahoots with Neo-Confederates
Posted in Neo-Confederate by Rob Waters on October 1, 2009

Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center exposed an unsavory collaboration between the Second Vermont Republic (SVR), a quirky left-leaning band of New England secessionists, and the white supremacist League of the South, long categorized by the SPLC as a hate group. Their shared goal was to build a national secession movement.

The SPLC report, titled “North Meets South,” also documented links between SVR founder and leader Thomas H. Naylor and other extremist organizations. Naylor has appeared on the hate radio program “The Political Cesspool,” which is run by white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens board member James Edwards. He is also an associate scholar at the Atlanta-based Abbeville Institute, which is run by former League of the South leader Donald Livingston and is devoted to the ignored “achievements of white people in the South.”

Naylor initially denounced the SPLC story, calling it “a vicious attack spearheaded by the well-financed, hate-mongering, witch-hunting, left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center.” He cited no factual errors. But a few weeks later, he had second thoughts. In a letter that appeared to signal an end to the alliance, he called on the League to distance itself from racism and hatred. In the July 4, 2008, letter, he wrote, “So long as the albatross of racism hangs around its neck, the LOS can never be a truly effective partner for SVR.” His own group, he said, “risks being tainted by the scourge of racism simply by associating with the LOS.” He provided a few helpful suggestions for the League: Renounce racism, recruit black members, bring in black speakers, and promote Southern racial unity. And one more thing: “the Confederate flag has got to go!”

The divorce didn’t last long, however. Naylor and a close ally, prominent New York leftist writer and editor Kirkpatrick Sale, are now scheduled to speak at a conference on secession being organized by the Abbeville Institute. They will share the stage at the Charleston, S.C., conference in February with neo-Confederate scholars such as Thomas DiLorenzo, Clyde Wilson and Livingston, the Abbeville Institute founder. All three have current or past links with the League of the South. (Go here for profiles of DiLorenzo, Livingston and Wilson.)

The title of the conference is “State Nullification, Secession and the Human Scale of Political Order.”

Reached by telephone at his home in Vermont, Naylor declined to discuss the state of his relations with the neo-Confederates. “This has nothing to do with race,” he said. “It’s the SPLC that’s the hate group. Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

SOURCE

At the 2010 conference a plot was hatched to compile yet another group of essays by secesher "scholars" called Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century that forecasts yet more light at the end of the secesher tunnel and rehashes the various rationales for their thinking. You know, like "it's an 'emerging' movement that's poised to take off at any moment." You just wait and see. No, no, not this very minute but they're getting really, really close. Just you wait. And wait. And wait...

The reality that escapes the SVR deadenders like founder Thomas H. Naylor (an "associate scholar" at the "old times there are not forgotten" Abbeville Institute) and Williams, his former co-chairman at SVR , is that secession in Vermont is as dead as "the Lost Cause." In the book Williams' contribution elevates a bumper sticker he created (no, really!) to the status of a "scholarly essay" that is nothing more than a part of Williams' lame try a creating an Internet meme. His collaboration with the neo-Confederates on this project, "Chapter 7: Most Likely to Secede: U.S. Empire and the Emerging Vermont Independence Effort”, is just one more nail in the self-inflicted coffin of his movement's reputation. Their efforts to get secession articles on even one of Vermont's Town Meeting warnings over the past 5 years have been completely unsuccessful due to Vermonter's disdain for Williams and his fellow secesher's ties to white supremacists, racists, anti-Semites and homophobes. In not one Vermont town are voters buying into their nonsense. The handful of seceshers that ran as candidates in 2010 for various top of the statewide ticket offices squeaked into the low single digits, usually coming in last as the sesechers on the ballot (in Rutland County two seceshers came in last and next to last); the top of the ticket barely made three quarters of 1% of the vote (roughly the same amount that occurs as spoilt ballots in any election). Secesher Robert Wagner's sneaky attempt to introduce a secession ordinance at this past Monday's Town Meeting in Ripton, VT went down in flames.

And so we come to the book. Finally, one of the sham radicals at the Vermont Commons blog, Juliet Buck, a fairly recent addition to Williams kickline of dullards, conspiracy theorists, 9/11 Truthers, anti-Semites and white supremacists that have contributed to his publishing endeavors, wrote a blog post plug for the book, that was a complete cut and paste from the book publisher's website. The publisher, Pelican Publishing Company or Pelican Press, has been an institution of the neo-Confederate community since 1926:

"(A)lthough neo-Confederacy is reactionary and contains racist, sexist, elitist and antidemocratic positions, these are glossed over with a scholarly veneer of closely argued rationales, references to legislative precedents and philosophical treatises. "
[snip]
"(W)hen examining the proposals forwarded in neo-Confederate publications, it is evident that race is central to this ideology. The 1950s and 1960s are regularly invoked as the decades in which American society spiraled into terminal decline. Integration of schools is lamented, desegregation is derided as "social engineering" and policies like school busing and affirmative action are depicted as vindictive attempts to merge whites and African-Americans together to produce a single, ethnically homogenous and racially undefined identity. Leading neo-Confederate authors argue that racial animosities are now greater than ever in U.S. history and that the periods of slavery and Jim Crow segregation were eras of harmonious race relations."

"Advocates of neo-Confederacy articulate their arguments in numerous books, magazines and websites. One common practice is to reprint copies of pro-Confederate nineteenth century texts, such as those by Confederate Army Chaplain Robert Louis Dabney (1820-1898) and Mathematics Professor and Slavery Apologist Albert Bledsoe (1809-1877). Another is to produce new materials that advocate neo-Confederacy. Often written in a breathless style that makes the reader feel as if they are becoming privy to long-suppressed truths, the most prominent publisher of neo-Confederate texts is Pelican Books of Gretna, La. Its catalogue, which has important books outlining neo-Confederate sentiments, also contains several overwrought polemics including Michael Andrew Grissom's Southern by the Grace of God; James and Walter Kennedy's Was Jefferson Davis Right? and The South Was Right!; Walter Kennedy's Myths of American Slavery and Gordon Thornton's The Southern Nation: The New Rise of the Old South. Other significant neo-Confederate books include Frank Conner's The South Under Siege (1830-2000) which argues that Jews from northern states instigated and funded the African-American civil rights movement and used Martin Luther King, Jr., as a puppet in an effort to "destroy Christianity" and Southern Slavery As It Was by Steve Wilkins and Douglas Wilson, which selectively interprets slave narratives and rehashes pro-slavery arguments of the mid-nineteenth century to argue that the practice was benign, sanctioned by God and was used as a "pretext" by Unionists to prosecute a war fought over the "biblical meaning of constitutional government" in an effort to suppress Christianity."

SOURCE

For those of you who don't know or may have forgotten, the editor of the book of essays that Rob Williams contributed to is none other than a former early board member of the League of the South, Donald Livingston, who,

"Shortly after the formation of the League of the South in 1994, Livingston became the first director of the League of the South Institute for the Study of Southern Culture and History, which was organized to further the group's revisionist takes on American history."

SOURCE

and about whom Williams once famously said,

"Is (Livingston) a racist? I don't know. And frankly, it is none of my damn business, at a personal level."

SOURCE

Livingston was once famously quoted as having said,

"the North created segregation"

SOURCE

I wrote at length last fall about Williams and Livingston's essay compilation regarding their "historical alternative universe" here. Juliet Buck, Williams' book flogging toady, has gotten around to her own cheap promotion of that predictable collection of revisionist thought by reprinting in toto the publisher's promotion. She didn't mention much else about the other contributors who include a North Carolina delegate to the neo-Confederate Southern National Congress, Kirkpatrick Sale; "League of the South" bigwig, Pres. Abraham Lincoln basher and contributor to the anti-Semitic, Holocaust denial publication, The Journal of Historical Review, Thomas DiLorenzo; a minor figure in the neo-Confederate movement who was on the masthead as an advisor of the now defunct neo-Confederate Journal of Confederate History, Kent Masterson Brown; and perhaps even more absurdly, an essay from a wingnut who has claimed that Southern secessionists did not do so with the intent to preserve slavery and that therefore the Confederate flag is not a symbol of oppression and hatred but merely one that honors heritage and pride, one Marshall DeRosa.

One can only wonder what was going through Williams' head when he agreed to go all in with these nutters on a book edited by a founder of the "League of the South."

More on the neo-Confederates that Williams has thrown in with may be found at Ed Sebesta's excellent website here.

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Thomas H. Naylor: Still Crazy After All These Years!

Monday, March 5, was Town Meeting eve in Vermont. Many Vermonters, particularly those concerned with budgets, or issues like nuclear freezes, Citizens United, the impeachment of Cheney and Bush that frequently come up at meetings across the state, or simply the vagaries of local politics, are focused on informational meetings being held in some towns or the voting scheduled for the following day.

But not Thomas Naylor.

Naylor, who has offered to lead ignorant Vermonters away from what he calls an "empire" to, well, I'm not so sure that even he's clear on where he's headed on that any longer, seems to have a larger issue in his sights. His Second Vermont Republic secession idea is kaput. The few seceshers that remain around the state rarely, if ever now, mention his name. Here's one of the reasons why:

Instead of offering an essay on Town Meeting in some fashion, Naylor released a tirade of ani-Semitic bile. I don't mean of the sort that takes issue with policies of the present Israeli government. No, no, while heaping praise on Mahmoud (“In Iran, we dont have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that in our country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon") Ahmadinejad, Naylor takes issue with the very existence of an Israeli state and proposes, via his website on March 5 and then the next day (Town Meeting Day) at Counterpunch here, citing his comrade in anti-Semitism, the North Carolina delegate to the neo-Confederate Southern National Congress and maybe former advisor to Naylor's SVR, Kirkpatrick Sale, that Israel was a "mistake" and that the "mistake" of Israel can be undone. Worse still, he cites as a source for his diatribe a man who describes himself as a "self-hating Jew," Gilad Atzmon, and who "defines himself as anti-Jewish." Atzmon has called the burning of synagogues a "rational act," has endorsed the ideology of the fictional and extremely anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion and questions the relevance, indeed the very truth of the Holocaust. Atzmon compares Jews to Nazis. Little wonder that neo-Nazi David Duke and anti-Semitic, white supremacist writers like Kevin B. MacDonald also love Atzmon. Atzmon, like Naylor, firmly believes that American foreign policy is under the direct control of Jews, not just Israelis.

But I suppose that we should be thankful that on Town Meeting eve Naylor didn't pen (with that famous green felt tipped pen of his) one of his repetitive attacks on virtually everything and everyone who isn't a secesher; like his past bashing of Vermont's voters, National Guard members, legislators, congressional delegation, churches, clergy, schools, public institutions and places of higher learning, as he has so many times. You might even be excused for thinking that such an attack by Naylor on Town Meeting eve would have made more sense, but you'd be forgetting:

"Thomas H. Naylor: Still Crazy After All These Years!"

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

Earth to SVR Apparatchik and Vermont Commons Editor-at-large Kirkpatrick Sale: The Lost Cause of Southern Secession Was Always About Slavery

A Second Vermont Republic founder and longtime advisory board fixture, as well as a "Vermont Commons" editor, Kirkpatrick Sale, has been involved in the modern 21st century secessionist movement almost from its inception. Certainly, he has become one of the movement's "big thinkers"; fact is, I don't think there's one member of today's tiny, secession from the "US of Empire" movement that doesn't consider himself (yes, it's a largely male group) a "big thinker." And if by "big thinker" they mean that they'll just make shit up to have their way, I'd also agree with that descriptive for the lot of them.

Earlier this spring a friend of the blog passed along a piece that Sale had written about the sesquicentennial of this country's Civil War (here) and suggested that I comment on it. VTCommons
"publisher" and poohbah-in-chief at the Vermont secesher propaganda print journal, Rob Williams, personally promoted Sale's historical fiction in the February issue of his soon to be defunct rag.

In his convoluted perversion of history Sale asserted, in all seriousness, that,

"(W)e should understand that the issue of slavery, strictly, was not the cause of Southern secession or the reason for the war on the Confederate side."

Nothing could be further from the truth. Sale even goes so far as to say that Lincoln's refusal to capitulate and submit to Southern secessionist's demands was "a clear and deliberate act of war."

I'd meant to examine this bit of secesher historical revisionism earlier but when I recently found this piece by UVM race relations professor emeritus, James W. Loewen, that succinctly exposes the mythology (read: junk history) promoted by Sale and his friends at SVR, VTCommons and the rest of the sorry neo-Confederate enterprise, it seemed the perfect way to address Sale's historical dishonesty.

Getting the Civil War Right

William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” He would not be surprised to learn that Americans, 150 years after the Civil War began, are still getting it wrong.

During the last five years, I’ve asked several thousand teachers for the main reason the South seceded. They always come up with four alternatives: states’ rights, slavery, tariffs and taxes or the election of Lincoln.

When I ask them to vote, the results—and resulting discussions— convince me that no part of our history gets more mythologized than the Civil War, beginning with secession.

My informal polls show that 55 to 75 percent of teachers—regardless of region or race—cite states’ rights as the key reason southern states seceded. These conclusions are backed up by a 2011 Pew Research Center poll, which found that a wide plurality of Americans—48 percent— believe that states’ rights was the main cause of the Civil War. Fewer, 38 percent, attributed the war to slavery, while 9 percent said it was a mixture of both.

These results are alarming because they are essentially wrong. States’ rights was not the main cause of the Civil War—slavery was.

The issue is critically important for teachers to see clearly. Understanding why the Civil War began informs virtually all the attitudes about race that we wrestle with today. The distorted emphasis on states’ rights separates us from the role of slavery and allows us to deny the notions of white supremacy that fostered secession.

In short, this issue is a perfect example of what Faulkner meant when he said the past is not dead—it’s not even past.

The Lost Cause
Confederate sympathizers have long understood the importance of getting the Civil War wrong. In 1866, a year after the war ended, an ex-Confederate named Edward A. Pollard published the first pro-southern history, called The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. Pollard’s book was followed by a torrent of similar propaganda. Soon, the term “Lost Cause” perfectly described the South’s collective memory of the war.

All these works promoting the Lost Cause consoled southern pride by echoing similar themes: The South’s leaders had been noble; the South was not out-fought but merely overwhelmed; Southerners were united in support of the Confederate cause; slavery was a benign institution overseen by benevolent masters.

A chief tenet of the Lost Cause was that secession had been forced on the South to protect states’ rights. This view spread in part because racism pervaded both North and South, and both ex-Confederates and ex-Unionists wanted to put the war behind them. Beginning with Mississippi’s new constitution in 1890, white southerners effectively removed African Americans from citizenship and enshrined their new status in Jim Crow laws. Northerners put the war behind them by turning their backs on blacks and letting Jim Crow happen.

From 1890 to about 1940, the Lost Cause version of events held sway across the United States. This worldview influenced popular culture, such as the racist 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation and Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 bestselling paean to the Old South, Gone With the Wind. As I point out in my book Lies My Teacher Told Me, history textbooks also bought into the myth and helped promote it nationwide.

What’s Wrong About States’ Rights?
But advocates of the Lost Cause— Confederates and later neo- Confederates—had a problem. The leaders of southern secession left voluminous records. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s prompted historians and teachers to review those records and challenge the Lost Cause. One main point they came to was this: Confederate states seceded against states’ rights, not for them.

As states left the Union, they said why. On Christmas Eve of 1860, South Carolina, the first to go, adopted a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” It listed South Carolina’s grievances, including the exercise of northern states’ rights: “We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.” The phrase “constitutional obligations” sounds vague, but delegates went on to quote the part of the Constitution that concerned them— the Fugitive Slave Clause. They then noted “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery. ... In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed ...”

South Carolina also attacked New York for no longer allowing temporary slavery. In the past, Charleston gentry who wanted to spend a cool August in the North could bring their cooks along. By 1860, New York made it clear that it was a free state and any slave brought there would become free. South Carolina was outraged. Delegates were further upset at a handful of northern states for letting African-American men vote. Voting was a state matter at the time, so this should have fallen under the purview of states’ rights. Nevertheless, southerners were outraged. In 1860, South Carolina pointed out that according to “the supreme law of the land, [blacks] are incapable of becoming citizens.” This was a reference to the 1857 Dred Scott decision by the southern- dominated U.S. Supreme Court.

Delegates also took offense that northern states have “denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery” and “permitted open establishment among them of [abolitionist] societies ...” In other words, northern and western states should not have the right to let people assemble and speak freely—not if what they say might threaten slavery.

Thoroughly Identified With Slavery
Other seceding states echoed South Carolina. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery— the greatest material interest of the world,” proclaimed Mississippi. “... [A] blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.” Northern abolitionists, Mississippi went on to complain, have “nullified the Fugitive Slave Law,” “broken every compact” and even “invested with the honors of martyrdom” John Brown—the radical abolitionist who tried to lead a slave uprising in Virginia in 1859.

Once the Confederacy formed, its leaders wrote a new constitution that protected the institution of slavery at the national level. As historian William C. Davis has said, this showed how little Confederates cared about states’ rights and how much they cared about slavery. “To the old Union they had said that the Federal power had no authority to interfere with slavery issues in a state,” he said. “To their new nation they would declare that the state had no power to interfere with a federal protection of slavery.”

Their founding documents show that the South seceded over slavery, not states’ rights. But the neo-Confederates are right in a sense. Slavery was not the only cause. The South also seceded over white supremacy, something in which most whites—North and South—sincerely believed. White southerners came to see the 4 million African Americans in their midst as a menace, going so far as to predict calamity, even race war, were slavery ever to end. This facet of Confederate ideology helps explain why many white southerners—even those who owned no slaves and had no prospects of owning any—mobilized so swiftly and effectively to protect their key institution.

This historic map shows how the United States was divided in 1861, as the Civil War began. All of the seceding southern states were heavily dependant on slavery. Keeping African Americans in bondage allowed slave owners to cheaply grow cash crops like cotton, rice and sugar cane.

Tariffs, Taxes and Lincoln
The other alleged causes of the Civil War can be dispensed with fairly quickly. The argument that tariffs and taxes also caused secession is a part of the Lost Cause line favored by modern neo-Confederates. But this, too, is flatly wrong.

High tariffs had been the issue in the 1831 nullification controversy, but not in 1860. About tariffs and taxes, the “Declaration of the Immediate Causes” said nothing. Why would it? Tariffs had been steadily decreasing for a generation. The tariff of 1857, under which the nation was functioning, had been written by a Virginia slaveowner and was warmly approved of by southern members of Congress. Its rates were lower than at any other point in the century.

The election of Lincoln is a valid explanation for secession—not an underlying cause, but clearly the trigger. Many southern states referred to the “Black Republican Party,” to use Alabama’s term, that had “elected Abraham Lincoln to the office of President.” As “Black Republican” implies, Alabama was upset with Lincoln because he held “that the power of the Government should be so exercised that slavery in time, should be exterminated.” So it all comes back to slavery.

Study the Writing of History
None of this was secret in the 1860s. The “anything but slavery” explanations gained traction only after the war, especially after 1890—at exactly the same time that Jim Crow laws became entrenched across the South. Thus when people wrote about secession influenced what they wrote.

And here the states’ rights argument opens a door for teachers to explain how perceptions of the past change from one generation to the next. Most students imagine history is something “to be learned,” so the whole idea of historiography—that who writes history, when and for what audience, affects how history is written— is new to them. They need to know it. Knowledge of historiography empowers students, helping them become critical readers and thinkers.

Concealing the role of white supremacy — on both sides of the conflict — makes it harder for students to see white supremacy today. After all, if southerners were not championing slavery but states’ rights, then that minimizes southern racism as a cause of the war. And it gives implicit support to the Lost Cause argument that slavery was a benevolent institution. Espousing states’ rights as the reason for secession whitewashes the Confederate cause into a “David versus Goliath” undertaking— the states against the mighty federal government.

States’ rights became a rallying cry for southerners fighting all federal guarantees of civil rights for African Americans. This was true both during Reconstruction and in the 1950s, when the modern civil rights movement gained strength. Today, the cause of states’ rights is still invoked against federal social programs and education initiatives that are often beneficial to people of color.

In other words, teaching the Civil War wrong cedes power to some of the most reactionary forces in the United States, letting them, rather than truth, dictate what we say in the classroom. Allowing bad history to stand literally makes the public stupid about the past—today.

Source: Teaching Tolerance Magazine, Issue 40, Fall 2011

Well said, professor. I couldn't have said it nearly as well.

Professor Loewen's book, The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The “Great Truth” about the “Lost Cause” , written with Edward. H. Sebesta, a researcher and expert on the neo-Confederate movement, is noted in the links column to the right.

Editor's Note: Kirkpatrick Sale has relocated to South Carolina to wage his war against truth where it all began. He is also now a South Carolina delegate to the Southern National Congress, a reincarnation of the secesher movement of the 1850s. Here's what one local South Carolina commentator and admirer of Sale, Will Moredock at the Charleston City Paper, has to say about Sale's ludicrous historical revisionism.

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The "Magnolia" Vermonter, Thomas Naylor, Has Got To Be...

... as General Tommy Franks once so famously said about another "great," government thinker, Douglas Feith, "the dumbest fucking guy on the planet." Or maybe it's just that he thinks that the rest of us the world are so stupid and in awe of his intellectual prowess that we'll eat any highbrow shit sandwich that he hands out.

He's written yet another of his tedious essays, although toned down a bit for the greater web world but not by much. You can find it here at CounterPunch, the web refuge for "radical" poseurs.

Naylor, baas of Second Vermont Republic, makes, among other absurd statements, this gem:

"In over two hundred years, the North American continent has never been attacked – nor even seriously threatened with invasion by Japan, Germany, the Soviet Union, or anyone else."

Please, someone interrupt the salon in the Naylor drawing room and
remind those big thinkers about the War of 1812. These clowns have mentioned the War of 1812 as the predicate for the Hartford Convention countless times as a part of their argument of the rightness of secession as the solution for all that ails, so it isn't likely that Naylor just forgot it.

You also might have thought that Naylor would have had the intellectual honesty, while mentioning Andrew Jackson, to have acknowledged that first failed experiment in decentralization and defiance of Federal authority that was the compromise engineered by Jackson called the Indian Removal Act, said by some to be the nation's first civil war. Honesty just isn't the small Vermont secesher community's forte. Besides, since it's Naylor's intent to lay every Native American's death at the doorstep of the "Empire," 4,000 dead American Indians is an inconvenient truth about the even larger impending death toll to come in what was to be a continuing experimentation in secesher thinking that led to the greater second Civil War of the 1860s.

No doubt "Vermont Commons" publisher and Naylor lackey Rob Williams will be eating his baas' new piece of intellectual shit garbage up.

Photo Credit: Southern Poverty Law Center (l-r, Thomas Naylor, Ian Baldwin & Kirkpatrick Sale)

Update January 28, 2011 6:30 PM: VTCommons notes my post here. As usual, intellectual dishonesty prevents Rob Williams from accurately reflecting what I said or what he knows. Rob's never one to let a good chance to pass for a meme to stand in for the truth. There's of course no link for one of his dullards to accidently click on. Way to continue being an asshole, Rob.

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