This Country Needs to Split

Imagine an American politician as persuasive as Nigel Farage committed to this issue...

If a talented, educated, charismatic leader started the "Liberation" party who's sole goal was to split, it would make some serious waves.

People in the UK used to laugh at Ukip, but as Farage famously said after winning BREXIT, "Isn't it funny... You're not laughing now are you???"

 

The ground must be prepared.

It's a radical idea. Imagine the first American colonists who began to talk about independence from Great Britain, which was outright treason, or Wilberforce in Parliament, first proposing the abolition of slavery.

First the idea has to be 'normalized' .. made part of the common discourse -- a radical idea, but one that becomes one of the range of possibilities, just an unlikely one, like the "many-worlds" hypothesis in quantum physics. (True, physicists, since about 1900, are more used to considering radical ideas. As Neils Bohr is once supposed to have said to Wolfgang Pauli, "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.")

So, that's step one. Get the idea concretized, and in the public discourse. We will know we've succeeded when people in political argument start saying things like "You sound like one of those crazy separatists!" or "Well, we could always separate, ha ha ha." Right now, it's almost literally unthinkable, almost unsayable, and whereof we cannot speak thereof we must remain silent.

At some point, an organization has to be formed for the purpose of spreading this idea... very tricky, so many big egos around, so many cranks who will want to impose their particular nostrums from the start. "A separate republic, but unless we go back to the Gold Standard, it will be doomed!"

And of course the racial purity people, who are already concentrating into Iowa, will want to be a part. But from the beginning we must be under standing orders to 'Repel Boarders'. A separate republic which is not open to, indeed formed from, men and women of all races, would not be a descendant of the real American republic. Let the race-obsessed go elsewhere.

It can be done. A few million dollars from some benevolent millionaire would not go amiss, but businessmen like giant single markets. So that's unlikely. It will require the devoted support of a small number, which will hopefully grow. Every independence movement in history started that way.

Then serious work has to be done on all the implications -- legal, financial, economic, practical -- and above all military, in terms of how the two new nations would face the world. Lots of work for people who are specialists in these fields.

Peaceful separation must be presented as not a hasty idea, but one which has had some thoughtful people examine all the implications. A leap, but not one into total darkness.

Then, the slow propagation of this idea: it would be wonderful to have a Margaret Attwood or Robert Heinlein to write novels about it -- with happy endings, of course!

A cadre of writers and speakers would have to be trained, able to answer all the inevitable questions about dividing liabilities and assets, co ordinating air traffic control, etc. Thank goodness for the Canadian example.

So so so important to eschew violence of any sort.To repel the crazies who will be attracted. To emphasize peaceful separation, friendly relations, so much we can still do jointly, in both of our interests.

The alternative is to ride the dying Republic down. When you're learning to fly, one of the things they teach you, if you're going to crash, is to "fly the plane into the crash" -- maybe you can dodge the power pole and just plow through some bushes.

But much better to bail out when you can.

 

Just a thought.
It's the future ... a couple of hundred years... a starship full of, let's say conservatives, lands on an uninhabited but viable planet.
We all leave the ship .. we decide we're going to live there.
Wouldn't we need to set up a government?
We've got none at all now... wouldn't we need some 'more government', up to a point?

 

Yes, otherwise you have anarchy. And there are some jobs government does best.

 

Yes. Peaceful, non racial.

 

Government is an evil necessity. Yes, we need it. But because it’s inherently evil, it should be kept as small as possible.

No government is anarchy.

 

That is absolutely critical: peaceful, with the aim of establishing the True America, which is a country where you are judged by the content of your character, not the color of your skin. (If Martin Luther King were alive today, the identity-politics Left, who are doing their best to pull apart America alog the racial fracture lines, would call him an Uncle Tom.)

And in this case, although virtue is its own reward, it is also eminently practical. If you're a non-white living in part of the US that appears to be about to separate and become Angry Old White Conservative America, what are you going to do?

Conservatives have a unique ability to multiply the number of their enemies and shrink the number of their friends but maybe, just maybe, they will catch a dose of common sense in the coming events and understand why Ronald Reagan was a Big Tent guy.

We need to study German military tactics but their diplomatic skills -- "Hey, we've got a great military, let's fight the whole world at once!" [ and they did it twice, each time with the same result!] -- offer only negative examples.

 

Exactly!

Like medicine -- if you're prescribed a powerful drug, you had better not think, "Well, if some is good, more must be better, so I'll take all these little pills at once and cure myself overnight."

If you do, you're likely to achieve that 'cure' called the room temperature condition. Sort of like what socialism does to the economy.

So those little pills, too many of them, can be dangerous. But they can also cure you. It's a question of how many, how often.

That's how I think about government. How much and what kind do we need to cure our problems, understanding that times change and we change with them and what worked, or worked well enough, yesterday, might need changing today.

Which means sometimes you need to cut back on government here, maybe add some more there. There is no general rule whch says "Always more" or "Always less", but, as you say, in general we want to avoid having to take pills, even though they are sometimes necessary.

 

The goal in 1939 was never a general war. "This had never been his (hitler's) plan" (Historian Alan Bullock). And in 1914 a general war was not the plan at all. What you are right about is the tent. Nordic/Aryan racial purity politics could never work today because whites, and especially Aryans account for so little of the population. It must be about decency, law and order, work ethic, morality etc.

 

Yes, you're right. There is a controversy among historians as to whether, at the top, the Germans had been anticipating going to war at some point.

I believe I posted some links relevant to that a few weeks ago -- plans to seize the coal mines of Lorraine, or something like that; Nial Fergusson says their 'ticking clock' was the completion of the Russian railway network, predicted to occur by the end of the decade, which would allow the Russians to quickly mobilize their enormous army. I'm still a tentative believer in the 'Sleepwalkers' theory, but who can really tell - this sort of thing doesn't tend to get written down, not even by the efficient Germans. It's more of a consensus that's worked out over time in gentlemen's clubs, lunches among high officials, etc. Someone may write a book or paper proposing a strategic plan, but it remains just one individual's idea, which the country's diplomatics can smilingly dismiss when talking to nervous colleagues whose country is at the tip of those broad arrows in the offending document. "Oh, old von Schliefen ... no one takes him seriously ... his horse kicked him in the head when he was a cadet ... of course with those Prussians how can you tell, ha ha ... but don't worry my friend, we're a peaceful people. How I cherish my visits to your beautiful capital..."

I am sure you know there is a similar controversy -- not a big one, here there is more consensus -- about Roosevelt and the Japanese, based on Hopkins' notorious note that Roosevelt said the question was how to maneuvre the Japanese into firing the first shot, the remarkable lack of readiness at Pearl Harbor, the fact that all the carriers were conveniently at sea when the Japanese arrived overhead .. although I personally think there are innocent explanations.

Historians of course desperately wish that all of these decisions were tidily written into documents and preserved in triplicate in bomb-proof archives, but no such luck. (On the other hand, one of my history professors at university, whose specialty was American history, told us that the documents in Washington DC related to his research (which was aspects of the WWII period) weighed a total of four tons and what was really needed was a big fire. (In What is History EH Carr has a good discussion of all of this. .... Christ, I'm starting to write a term paper again, sorry!)

I'm personally more interested in the 'deep structure' of everything that influences the long term trends of history -- what makes the water run downhill, rather than the accidents of geology and ground cover which determine the actual path of the stream.

I think that even if whites made up 99%, that organizing formally around 'race' would be a terrible idea, for many reasons. A sort of tacit acknowledgement of present-day reality, politely never mentioned in mixed company, is one thing ... but it's atavistic thinking and would hold us back. In fifty years we'll be choosing our descendants' genomes anyway, even creating them, and our great-great-great grandchildren will all have Jewish IQs, Chinese work-ethics, and Brazilian skin color.

If we can avoid a big war.

 

I read not too long ago the British had decoded and knew of an impending Japanese attack on Pearl, but Churchill sat on it. I'll have to find the source.

 

Hmmm... the Americans had Purple, but apparently decoding and communicating the cleartext was slow. The British were absolutely desperate to get Ameria into the war, but surely that would have been accomplished just as well -- and with some American gratitude -- if they had given us warning.

In Churchill's memoirs, there is a very moving account of how he heard about the attack. It was evening in London and he had finished dinner with the American in charge of Lend Lease -- they were having after-dinner drinks. Then the butler appeared and said, "Sir, you had better turn on the radio." And that's how he learned of the attack. The phone rang and it was from Washington, for the American diplomat, who took the call, and became graver and graver as the call progressed. (The real truth about the great losses we took at Pearl Harbor were not made public until months later, but evidently were conveyed to this man then.)

Churchill mused “Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! ... How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care ... We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end ... Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.” He said that there were many people, some on our side, who thought the US would not have the resolution to really get involved ... it would just fool around at a distance. Churchill said, "But I had studied the American Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch. And I went home and slept the sleep of the saved and the grateful."