Free Vermont!
Two organizers of the Vermont secession movement get prime op-ed space in the Washington Post.
You've not heard of the Vermont secession movement? The article is a fine introduction. You're not comfortable with the notion of secession? Well, that's the product of your public-school indoctrination, which has programmed millions of Americans to equate secession with slavery. (How many people are aware that the abolitionist firebrand William Lloyd Garrison favored Northern secession from the union?) The article is a fine opportunity to open your mind. There's so much that's worth excerpting that I run the risk of reproducing the entire article, so I'll share this:
Today, however, Vermont no longer controls even its own National Guard, a domestic emergency force that is now employed in an imperial war 6,000 miles away. The 9/11 commission report says that "the American homeland is the planet." To defend this "homeland," the United States spends six times as much on its military as China, the next highest-spending nation, funding more than 730 military bases in more than 130 countries, abetted by more than 100 military space satellites and more than 100,000 seaborne battle-ready forces. This is the greatest military colossus ever forged.
Few heed George Washington's Farewell Address, which warned against the danger of a permanent large standing army that "can be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty." Or that of a later general-become-president: "We must never let the weight of [the military-industrial complex] endanger our liberties or democratic processes." Dwight D. Eisenhower pointedly included the word "congressional" after "military-industrial" but allowed his advisers to excise it. That word completes a true description of the hidden threat to democracy in the United States…
…the seeds of disunion have been growing since the beginning. Vermont more or less sat out the War of 1812, and its governor ordered troops fighting the British to disengage and come home. Vermont fought the Civil War primarily to end slavery; Abraham Lincoln did so primarily to save the Union. Vermont's record on the slavery issue was so strong that Georgia's legislature resolved that a ditch be dug around the "pestiferous" state and it be floated out to sea.
After the Great Flood of 1927, the worst natural disaster in the state's history, President Calvin Coolidge (a Vermonter) offered help. Vermont's governor replied, "Vermont will take care of its own." In 1936, town meetings rejected a huge federal highway referendum that would have blacktopped the Green Mountain crest line from Massachusetts to Canada.
Nor did Vermont sign on when imperial Washington demanded that the state raise its drinking age from 18 to 21 in 1985. The federal government thereupon resorted to its favored tactic, blackmail. Raise your drinking age, said Ronald Reagan, or we'll take away the money you need to keep the interstates paved. Vermont took its case for state control to the Supreme Court — and lost.
It's quite simple. The United States has destroyed the 10th Amendment, which says that "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
A writer familiar to DR readers, James Howard Kunstler, is among those cited on the issue of why secession's time has come, especially to a state with a long and proud tradition of self-governance. Read the whole thing. (Thanks LRC)
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