Category Archives: Secession

Forced Takeover of Catalan Government Institutions by Spanish Police Reply

by • Activism, Secession, Strategy, Uncategorized • Tags:

Liberal democratic capitalism shows what it really thinks of self-determination and political dissent.

Thomas S. Harrington

Counterpunch

I just got of the phone with Josep Maria Sole Sabaté, my friend and a leading Catalan historian and public intellectual. He was nothing short of breathless as he described the helicopters flying overhead stated flatly that he was in the the midst of a coup being carried out by the Spanish State.

He wanted to get in touch with me and others “out there” because he was not sure how much longer free communication would be available to him and other out in the street protesting against he Spanish central government’s arrest of members of the Catalan Autonomous government.

As of this writing at least six agencies of the Catalan Government have been the object of forced police searches and thirteen, mostly mid-level members of the Catalan government have been arrested.

The homes of two the leading architects of the incipient Catalan state, Carles Viver Pi i Sunyer and ex Spanish judge Santi Vidal, have been searched by police. The headquarters of the far-left CUP, part of the pro-vote coalition in the Catalan Parliament, has been surrounded by police.

The leader of the Catalan National Congress Jordi Sanchez and the head of Omnium, a major Catalan cultural organization, Jordi Cuixart, has called Catalans to come into the streets and they have responded with a massive presence.

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Support of the Right of Secession Rises to 40% Among American Reply

by • Activism, Secession, Strategy, Uncategorized • Tags:

By Kirkpatrick Sale

LewRockwell.Com

While division between both political parties has been accepted as a norm for decades, we have witnessed a level of intensity in 2017 that has dwarfed anything remotely similar in recent American history. While it appears to be boiling over, perhaps many are ready to set aside their differences in a way reminiscent of the Declaration of Independence.

Over Labor Day Weekend, a nationwide poll of 800 likely voters, conducted by John Zogby Strategies asked, among other questions, which view is closer to their own on the topic of secession; Statement A: If a majority of residents within a given state prefer to have the final say over their destiny without the control of Washington D.C. then let them have it – it is their right.Statement B: If residents within a given state were to take such a drastic measure and secede from the United States, the federal government would be justified in sending in the military to prevent secession from taking place.

While nearly 1/3 of the public (32%) agree that the federal government should intervene to stop any state movement for secession, nearly four in ten (39%) agree that each state has the ultimate say over their destiny and that secession is a right. Just shy of three in ten were not sure (29%).

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How Will the State Respond to Growing Antifa/Alt-Right Violence? 2

by • American Decline, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Fourth Generation Warfare, Law/Justice, Left and Right, Police State/Civil Liberties, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Race and Ethnicity, Secession, Uncategorized • Tags: , ,

By Keith Preston

The State exists for the purpose of maintaining a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within a particular geographical territory in order to more effectively control resources, exploit subjects, protect an artificially privileged ruling class, and expand its own power both internally and externally. The State does this while maintaining a self-legitimating ideological superstructure, and buying the loyalty of the middle class by suppressing the lower/underclass. The State is what you would get if the Mafia managed to eliminate all of its competitors, including the State itself, and consequently become a state of its own.

At times, the State will seek to maintain total control over every aspect of social life (e.g. the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, present day North Korea or Islamist regimes like ISIS, the Taliban, and Saudi Arabia, or Israel’s conduct in the occupied territories). However, most modern states allow for a fairly robust civil society to exist that may actually have the effect of affording the average person a fair amount of comfort. States of these kinds, so-called “liberal democracies,” may even encourage intense political debate within certain narrow parameters (or even fairly broad parameters). Some states will allow or even encourage a fair amount crime and disorder in order to legitimize the expansion of state power to an even greater degree (what the late paleconservative writer Samuel Francis called “anarcho-tyranny’‘). For example, isn’t it interesting that in spite of the massive police and prison systems that now exist in the United States, one third of all murders go unsolved?

However, no state can allow disorder to spiral too far out of control, or it will lose its legitimacy in the process. A state of this kind is a protection racket that continues to engage in extortion and exploitation, but can no longer offer actual protection. Hence, states tend to be very sensitive to perceived threats to their own legitimacy. At present, the violence that is taking place between the Antifa, Alt-Right, and their various allies certainly poses no threat to the state. America in 2017 is light years away from Weimar Germany in 1932. But the important question involves the issue of to what degree the State will continue allow such violence to persist, if indeed it does persist, which it may not. That remains to be seen.

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National-Anarchist Movement Conference 2017: A Summary Reply

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Electoralism/Democratism, Environment, Fourth Generation Warfare, Health and Medicine, Immigration, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy, Science and Technology, Secession, Strategy, Uncategorized • Tags:

Image result for national anarchist movement

By Keith Preston

Special thanks to Peter Topfer, Adam Ormes, Thom Forester, and Sean Jobst for their assistance in the writing of this summary.

On June 17 and 18, the first ever conference of the National-Anarchist Movement (N-AM) took place in Madrid. The process of arranging this conference was certainly not without its difficulties, and the organizers deserve much praise for their diligence in this regard. Originally, the conference was supposed to be hosted by the Madrid section of N-AM, who dropped out of the project shortly (and out of N-AM altogether) before the conference took place. This led to the irony of a conference being held in Spain where no actual Spanish people were among the attendees. Because National-Anarchists are widely despised by leftists who mistakenly regard N-A as a “fascist” tendency, security was a paramount concern.

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Is the Left Moving Towards the ATS Position? 3

by • Activism, Left and Right, Secession, Strategy, Uncategorized

My long range vision for ARV-ATS has always been to develop an anarchist-led revolutionary Left that works with the radical Right for the purpose of dismantling the American empire (Rome on the Potomac). Now that Donald Trump has taken the throne as the latest clown-emperor, it would appear that substantial sectors of the Left are starting to realize the merits of the ARV-ATS position. This latest article in The New Republic is one of multiple articles of this kind that has appeared in era of Trump, not to mention the emergence of Calexit. See here, here, here, and here. And influential figures on the radical Right appear to be prepared to embrace the ATS position in at least a moderate form. I was hoping Trump would have this effect on the Left.

By Kevin Baker

The New Republic

Dear Red-State Trump Voter,

Let’s face it, guys: We’re done.

For more than 80 years now, we—the residents of what some people like to call Blue America, but which I prefer to think of as the United States of We Pay Our Own Damn Way—have shelled out far more in federal tax monies than we took in. We have funded massive infrastructure projects in your rural counties, subsidized your schools and your power plants and your nursing homes, sent you entire industries, and simultaneously absorbed the most destitute, unskilled, and oppressed portions of your populations, white and black alike.

All of which, it turns out, only left you more bitter, white, and alt-right than ever.

Some folks here in self-supporting America like to believe that there must be a way to bring you back to your senses and to restore rational government, if not liberal ideals, sometime in the foreseeable future. Everyone seems to have an answer for how to do this. Every day another earnest little homily finds its way to me over my internet transom: “Think locally, act globally,” or “Make art and fight the power,” or the old Joe Hill standby—“Don’t mourn. Organize.”

To which I say: Don’t organize. Pack.

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Preventing Civil War in the United States Reply

by • Activism, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Fourth Generation Warfare, Left and Right, Secession, Strategy, Uncategorized • Tags:

Bill Lind has a proposal that is very similar to certain ATS positions.

By William S. Lind

Traditional Right

Low-level Fourth Generation war has been underway in the U.S. for some time, largely in the form of gang activities. That is likely to continue, as will occasional terrorist incidents. This low-level warfare is a problem, but it does not threaten the state.

However, the Left’s reaction to the election of Donald Trump as president points to a far more dangerous kind of 4GW on our own soil. Trump’s election signified, among other things, a direct rejection of the Left’s ideology of cultural Marxism, which condemns Whites, men, family-oriented women, conservative blacks, straights, etc. as inherently evil. Not surprisingly, those people finally rebelled against political correctness and elected someone who represents them.

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Commentary: Is America still worth it? Reply

by • Secession, Strategy

By Will Rahn

CBSNews.Com

Something people will increasingly ask down the road: In a wildly diverse nation of over 300 million people, would it not make more sense to have, say, three countries with a 100 million people each? Or how about 300 countries with a million people?

On the far-right, there are already those who pine for a breakup of the United States akin to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. On the far-left, we’re hearing some secession talk too, particularly when it comes to the possibility of CalExit or a Second Vermont Republic.

And it’s not just the far-left, mind you: the Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel, one of the country’s more powerful if eccentric business leaders, recently said he thought the secession of California would be a good thing.

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Calexit: Is Secession the Answer? Reply

by • Activism, Secession, Strategy, Uncategorized

By Keith Preston

American Renaissance

American political culture has come to be defined by enormous divisions. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes that present day political polarization is wider than at any time since the Civil War. Social science research finds that more Americans would oppose their son or daughter marrying someone of the other political party than would oppose marriage outside of their race, religion, or social class.

The Right and Left are coming to regard one another not merely as competitors, but as threats to the nation or even as personal enemies. Polarization has been sharpened by the election of Donald Trump. Indeed, the reaction of the Left has often been one of panic, hysteria, or terror. One leftist blogger professed to be as terrified on the night of Mr. Trump’s election as he had been when he was once arrested and put in jail. Intense polarization of this kind inevitably leads to talk of secession.

I have a fair amount of personal experience with this question. For nearly 20 years, I have advocated dissolving the US federal system through regional and local secession movements from across the political spectrum. Although I am a left-wing anarchist, I have also tried to build bridges between those opposed to, or under attack by, the US power elite from across the political and cultural spectrum–including racial nationalists.

The Trump victory has been a particular stimulus in California, where progressives have suggested that much of the rest of the nation is so out of touch with the values of their state that California should consider seceding. A group called “Yes California” has formed for the purpose of placing an initiative on the state ballot in 2019 approving California’s exit from the United States. This project has come to be known as “Calexit” as a nod to the “Brexit” referendum.

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Brexit, Texit, and the Panarchist Case for Panarchy Reply

by • Activism, Secession, Strategy, Uncategorized

By DangerNixon

Ancapistan

Flag-cutout-Texas-secede

Jacob Levy recently wrote an essay airing his teary-eyed dismay that so many of his libertarian friends are cheering on Britain’s bow down from EU membership. This comes to no surprise, since BHL seems to be bent on presenting us with the “libertarian case” for anything from a swollen welfare apparatus to mandatory sex-reassignment surgery. There are a few basic theses in this article, for instance, that the EU is not a regulatory monster and that all the all other EU member states are economically freer than Britain (an assertion that not even his own citation really backs up).  One point I would like to extract from Levy’s article and complain about in length, though, is his idea of secession. Namely, Levy claims that secession obviously cannot be a libertarian position, because, uh, like, what if the new country isn’t as libertarian as the parent nation, dude? From the article:

“There’s no reason for us to start with some enthusiastic assumption that secession is always better and that more-local, more-homogenous levels of government are friendlier to freedom than larger and more pluralistic ones. Nor is there any reason to assume that removing a level of government just makes its whole system of regulation stably disappear; we need to think about what’s likely to replace those regulations at the nation-state level.”

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The Great Divide—and Secession? Reply

by • Activism, Secession, Strategy • Tags:

By Kirkpatrick Sale

Of all the phenomena the 2016 election year has demonstrated, none is greater than the proof that this nation is deeply and probably irretrievably split into two political camps with very, very little in common.  It is more than blue states and red states, it goes deeper: it is truth, jobs, security, and intelligence on one side and lies, coddling rich, porous borders, and stupidity on the other.  And vice versa.

Perhaps the greatest evidence of this rift at this moment is to be found in Texas.   A Public Policy Polling survey on August 16 found that 61 per cent of the people who support Trump there have vowed that if Hillary Clinton is elected president they will push for Texas to secede from the union.  Nothing less: secession.

And the interesting thing is that Texans have been thinking about secession for a number of years recently, and a Reuters poll in 2014 found that 36 per cent of the population would be for secession and another 18 percent were not sure, making the anti-secession crowd a minority of 46 per cent.  And if anti-Clinton sentiment is real, her victory in November would likely solidify the secession movement further.

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American Secessionists Dream of Declaring Independence Reply

by • Secession, Uncategorized

By Clare Foran

The Atlantic

Secessionists across the United States are taking heart. The United Kingdom’s historic vote to leave the European Union last month has sparked interest in the far-fetched idea that U.S. states might win independence from Washington, D.C. Separatist groups are especially optimistic that Americans will be open to the idea of secession amid a presidential election that has witnessed a groundswell of populist discontent.

“Momentum is on our side,” Daniel Miller, the president of the Texas Nationalist Movement, an organization that describes its mission as the political, cultural, and economic independence of Texas, said in an interview. “The Brexit vote has shown not only that  the people of Texas should become an independent nation, but that it is 100 percent possible.” Following the U.K. referendum, the group put out a call for Texas Governor Greg Abbott to support a “Texit vote.”

The improbable dream of secession is alive and well across the country and across the political spectrum. In the wake of the Brexit referendum, calls for secession everywhere from Alaska to New Hampshire have cropped up on social media. On top of that, U.S. secessionists report a flood of inquiries from people interested in supporting a separatist cause.

Louis Marinelli, the president of Yes California Independence Campaign, says his group, which wants to establish an independent Republic of California, saw a three-fold increase in supporters and volunteers since the Brexit referendum.  Marinelli, who founded the group after he got fed up with Congress’s failure to pass immigration reform, doesn’t love the fact that people always seem to bring up the Civil War when he starts advocating secession. He believes the U.K. referendum makes for a promising counter-example. “It will be a good thing for the cause of self-determination in America to be able to point to a peaceful and legal secession,” Marinelli said.

There are limits to any comparison between the U.S. and the U.K. Still, the decision U.K. voters made to split from the E.U. is unprecedented, and certainly stands as a challenge to the political status quo. That alone is enough to encourage U.S. secessionists, however unlikely their aspirations. American secessionists cheered the prospect that Scotland might break away from the U.K. when it held an independence referendum in 2014, but that didn’t succeed—Brexit did.

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Is the realignment happening already? (UK) Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, News Updates, Secession, Strategy

Is the realignment happening already?
By Keir Martland
(26th June 2016)

At about midnight, the globalists in the Parliamentary Labour Party began their coup. Blairite Hilary Benn told socialist anti-interventionist Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn that he had no confidence in his leadership and the latter had no option but to give him the sack. Today we have seen a string of resignations, with half the Shadow Cabinet allegedly ready to resign to remove Corbyn. At the moment, Corbyn seems ready to put his own name forward to fight off the leadership challenge, but this may change if it becomes apparent that he doesn’t have the confidence of his Parliamentary Party. You do need the support of your MPs if you are to lead your Party.

The challenge to Corbyn is very interesting. What may be happening is a long overdue realignment in British politics. Of course, all of this is taking place following a vote from the British people to leave the European Union, and following Jeremy Corbyn’s own insistence that this vote should be respected. Since roughly 90 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party are determined to keep Britain in the European Union, this cannot have been taken well by people like Hilary Benn.  More…

Meanwhile in the Lone Star state, a secessionist #Texit campaign gains steam after the #Brexit vote Reply

by • Secession

By Jen Hayden

Daily Kos

El Paso, UNITED STATES: A sign welcoming residents of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico into El Paso, Texas is posted near the bridge that separates both cities 15 April 2006. Hundred of businesses have developed in El Paso as Mexican residents that live in Ciudad Juarez cross the border to get appliances, clothing and other supplies. AFP PHOTO / HECTOR MATA (Photo credit should read HECTOR MATA/AFP/Getty Images)

Are y’all sitting down? The Texas Nationalist Movement says they are flying high after the vote in the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. From Daniel Miller, the president of the Texas Nationalist Movement:

From the looks of it, the British people have chosen to take control of their political and economic destiny. The forces of fear have lost. It is now important for Texas to look to #‎Brexit as an inspiration and an example that Texans can also take control of our destiny. It is time for Texans to rally with us and fight for the right to become a self-governing nation.

They went all in on a fancy logo and hashtag:

Texit logo
Bless their hearts

It appears the movement has gained a little momentum in recent days. From Vocativ:

Vocativ analyzed use of the phrase “Texit” since the beginning of 2016, finding that use of the phrase exploded when the Brexit results were announced on Friday, June 24. As of publication, more than 5,800 people on Twitter used the phrase, a five-fold increase from the day before. 1,745 people tweeted about Texit between 7:00 and 8:00 AM London time, the hour when the final results were announced, with more than 3,000 Texit tweets posted in the hours since.

And Texas isn’t the exclusive home of secessionists:

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Remain: The Left Has Lined Up with the Establishment Reply

by • Activism, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Secession, Strategy, Uncategorized

By Tom Slater

Spiked Online

“Brexit is a fake revolt’, writes Paul Mason in the Guardian this week: ‘Working-class culture is being hijacked to help the elite.’ A withering article in Vice agrees. ‘Brexit is the upper classes in revolt’, writes Sam Kriss. ‘They see an undemocratic and unaccountable EU elite ruling by diktat and an unfounded sense of their own superiority, and they think: hey, that’s our job.’ Among nominally metropolitan, left-wing Remainers – or, in Mason’s case, Abstainers – this has become the overriding narrative: that Brexit is the establishment.

It’s also utter balls. Let’s run through the list of those who back Remain: there’s the prime minister; all the major political parties; every major world leader; the IMF; the Bank of England… Oh and, after this morning, we can add to that the entire British capitalist class. In a letter in The Times, 1,700 of the UK’s leading business leaders back Remain, and prominent among them are the CEOs of JP Morgan, HSBC and Goldman Sachs. You know, those fatcat bankers we hear so much about.

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If We Are Going to Take Down the Establishment: Progressives, Libertarians, Anarchists, and Non-Voters Need to Unite 3

by • Activism, Left and Right, Secession, Strategy, Uncategorized

It looks like ATS ideas are becoming increasingly closer to the mainstream. I am seeing more and more writing like this all the time.

By Tim Bryant

The Last American Vagabond

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars

Anyone paying even the slightest attention to the 2016 Presidential Election can see that this election cycle has been marred and corrupted up on a variety of fronts. On one hand, you have Hillary Clinton, a notorious insider and lifelong crook that is currently under criminal investigation by the FBI, and on the other hand you have Donald Trump, a reality TV character that says whatever’s on his mind, making it hard to pinpoint any real fundamentals to his policies, as well as creating polarizing political theatre for the public to eat up. These are the choices we’re given; you really can’t make this stuff up.

For those who have been awake for years, the ridiculousness of this year’s election is not all that shocking, as it has been on display for decades for those who cared to look behind the scenes. However, for a large majority of the population, this year’s election seems to be a major catalyst in waking them up to the obvious illusion that the United States of America is still a free and democratic society, the two supposed cornerstones of the “greatest country in the world.”

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Brexit as a Means to True Secession Reply

by • Activism, Secession, Strategy, Uncategorized • Tags:

By Chris Shaw

I’ve made it clear that I don’t see the EU referendum as particularly important. The major economic questions surrounding the modern world, from banking fragility and capital creation, to huge levels of private and sovereign debt and politico-economic centralisation are not remotely addressed within this debate, except maybe on the peripheries. If we leave, economic and political power will simply be moved from unaccountable elites in Brussels to those in Westminster and its parasitical institutions. Democracy is not important in this debate as some have emphasised, as realistically the kind of representative democracy we have has led to many of the ridiculous problems the UK faces today, from failing social systems to a debt-led economy. Representative democracy relies on mass ignorance and the ability to debate non-issues among non-representative parties.

The only important area this debate touches on is the concept of secession. By voting to leave, we are hopefully seceding from the EU. This is more hopeful when the powers that be (Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, etc.) have proposed leaving the Single Market, thus actually decreasing our involvement in the EU instead of simply renegotiating it through EFTA or the EEA. Such proposals are potentially important and even radical, particularly when put in the frame of a “people’s choice” which is currently defining this referendum. This reinterprets what were meant to be the realities of the referendum (that of a debate about how good or bad the EU has supposedly been), and has instead reoriented it toward questions of what constitutes nationality and the character and ownership of a nation.

By doing this, questions of power and where it is held are raised. With this comes the potential for a wider debate over the whole concept of how we shape our polities and economies. Fundamentally, a discussion of this sort allows for a move away from the corporatised economies and centralised governance structures which cast the current paradigm.

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Is Revolution Brewing? Reply

by • Activism, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right, Secession, Strategy

By William S. Lind

Traditional Right

Virtually all the reporting about this fall’s presidential election focuses on the candidates and the question of who is going to win nomination and election. That is to be expected. But it misses what really matters.

The likelihood that either the nominating contests or the election itself will bring change is small. The machinations of the bosses in both political parties to keep the anti-Establishment candidates from being nominated (Trump in the Republican Party and Sanders in the Democratic) become increasingly open. They are likely to succeed in both cases. In the improbable case that one party nominates its anti-Establishment contender, the entire Establishment will come together to demonize him, frightening the public into voting for more of the same. The model will be Lyndon Johnson’s campaign against Barry Goldwater in 1964. Presumably we will see television ads showing little girls picking flowers snatched away to be white slaves in the harem of either a plutocrat or a socialist.

Should a miracle happen and both Trump and Sanders be nominated, the Establishment would be undone. I would cheer madly, but I would also expect to see the Virgin Mary hovering over the White House.

In fact, the contests don’t much matter. What really matters has already happened and the Establishment cannot undo it. In both parties, the peasants have revolted.

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