Secessionists unite

It must be Mud Season in Vermont again. A year ago, almost to the day, the blogs were a-buzz about the Vermont secessionists and I succumbed to the buzz, having been a Vermonter for a brief period when it was a Republican stronghold. Well, today I got an email from the Southern Poverty Law Center, of all people (I thought maybe I’d be on their list of racists – since they consider everyone a racist) warning me that Vermont secessionists had united with Southern secessionists;

 In 2003, the Second Vermont Republic (SVR) sprang up to push for the independence of Vermont, a tiny, idyllic Northeastern state with fewer than 630,000 residents. In its seemingly quixotic quest, SVR took up the mantra that small is beautiful, arguing that secession would lead to sustainability, ecological balance, an end to military entanglements overseas, and a better life. SVR activists designed a new green flag for Vermont and started selling T-shirts, particularly popular with the state’s many tourists, that read, “U.S. OUT OF VT!”

But in recent months and years, SVR’s actions have gone from way out to worrying. Starting in 2005, SVR leader Thomas H. Naylor — along with SVR’s very close ally, the Cold Spring, N.Y.-based Middlebury Institute that is headed by longtime leftist Kirkpatrick Sale — began openly collaborating with a collection of Southern extremists to build a national secession movement.

SVR’s disturbing new partner is the white supremacist League of the South. The Alabama-based group is against interracial marriage, believes the old Confederacy never surrendered, and wants to reestablish “the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Celtic people and their institutions” in a newly seceded South. It seeks to accord different classes of people differing legal rights in what sounds very much like a medieval theocracy of lords, serfs and clerics.

First of all, I checked on the League of the South and they’ve said they’re not racist as a matter of policy;

We believe that Christianity and social order require that all people, regardless of race, must be equal before the law. We do not believe that the law should be used to persecute, oppress, or favour any race or class.

We believe that the only harmony possible between the races, as between all natural differences among human beings, begins in submitting to Jesus Christ’s commandment to “love our neighbours as ourselves.” That is the world we envision and work for.

We believe that the politics of race — baiting whites against blacks and blacks against white has been profitable for politicians but catastrophic for the South and Southerners.

We believe that all Southerners – black and white – want and need the same things: a safe country for their families, liberty, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Actually, they just seem nostalgic for the ante-bellum South; the Walt Disney version, probably not the Mark Twain version. But they’re a bit on the looney side – they claim the North never won the Civil War and because it never won, nothing about the constitutionality of secession was ever settled.

The Vermont secessionists are real traitors, though. Their ultimate goal is the dissolution of all 50 states under a federal government.

Political Independence. Our primary objectives are political independence for Vermont and the peaceful dissolution of the Union.

Luckily, the majority of Vermonters disagree with them;

 UVM Center for Rural Studies 2008 poll

[…]
3. Do you think it would be a good idea for Vermont to secede from the United States and become once again an independent republic as it was between 1777 and 1791?

Yes __11.5%__
No __88.5%__

[…]

That’s too bad, really. I’d like Vermont to secede, but only if they promised to take Bernie Sanders, Howard Dean and Pat Leahy with them.

Category: Politics, Society