MAY THE BLESSED UNREST OF THE SECESSION MOVEMENT BECOME A BLESSING TO ALL
TheMiddleburyInstitute
for the study of separatism, secession, and self-determination
127 East Mountain Road Cold Spring, NY10516
Director@MiddleburyInstitute.org
… “Blessed Unrest” is a reference to the book by Paul Hawken of that title (Viking 2007). It will inspire and motivate.
New England Groups Look to Secede
By Jim Kozubek Manchester (NH) Union Leader August 11,2008
Union Leader Correspondent
NEW CASTLE–For the time political campaigns have been moving to centrism,
integrating voter blocs and appealing to unity, scattered groups across New
England have been moving to fractionalize, to break their states from the
union.
Burt Cohen, 57, a former state senator, is leading a front in New Hampshire
to secede from the U.S., and join with Maine, Vermont, Nova Scotia, New
Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Gaspé Peninsula to create a new
authority called New Acadia or Novacadia based on maps of a 1702 maritime
union.
“This is a continuation of my politics,” Cohen said. “I am interested in
people taking part in decisions, and right now, it seems to me that fewer
and fewer people have more concentrated wealth and power.”
Secessionists draw the soul of their ideas from the 1957 Leopold Kohr book
The Breakdown of Nations in which Kohr argued social and economic failures
are due to a deplorable condition of “bigness,” he said.
The logic is based on the idea that individuals, cities and regions have
diverse economic and political interests; once a population becomes too
large, resources and taxes are not fairly dispensed and a government fails
to provide adequate representation, he said.
“The founding fathers could not have imagined 300 million people,” he said.
“This country includes a lot of people with disparate points of view, and to
have them represented in a single government, you have to ask, How
realistic is that?”
Cohen said that instead of political moves to centrism and unity, New
Englanders could find greater economic and social advantages in a move to
decentralization.
He bases this idea, of economic regionalism, on a 1981 Joel Garreau book,
The Nine Nations of North America, that insists the U.S. is made up of
nine bioregions, each with unique interests.
“People in bio-regions have much more in common, shared values and can find
what works best for economic development that might not work in another
region,” he said.
Cohen, a self-described ³″progressive,” is looking for a mix of support from
libertarians, paleo-conservatives suspect of higher-spending subsidies and
defense budgets, and those willing to ask “a lot of very serious, legitimate
questions.”
For one, he said, New Hampshire has for years paid more to the federal
government than it gets in spending.
“I have spoken lightly with some individuals who filed and there is
interest,” said Howard Wilson of Andover, a libertarian and state Senate
candidate. “The federal government is part of the problem, and we are going
to put them on notice.”
Secessionists in their writings oppose high defense spending and
intervention, corporate subsidies, bailouts of financial institutions and
central banking.
Caleb Johnson of Keene, for instance, set up republicofnh.org for secession,
with papers citing federal borrowing and printing of “fiat currency” as
causes of a weakening dollar, predicting dismal outcomes.
But the forms of capitalism, free-trade and protectionism, have remained
sources of division in secessionist movements.
Nova Scotia¹s Atlantica Party made electoral reform a priority to secession
and Atlantic Institute for Market Studies began a bid in 2006 to create a
free-trade zone in New England and Nova Scotia called Atlantica.
Atlantic Institute seeks to capitalize on the region¹s maritime position in
the era of globalization, but the move drew a small-scale riot at its 2006
convention from the Black Bloc, a group who thinks the free-trade zone will
harm worker and environmental rights.
Sebastian Ronin, a strident localist, broke with Atlantic Party in 2007 and
created the Novacadia party to secede (citing the 2000 Clarity Act created
relative to Quebec¹s mid-1990s separatist movement that gives provinces the
legal right to secede).
Thomas Naylor, 72, economics professor emeritus from Duke University, and
founder of the Second Vermont Republic for secession in 2003, connected
Ronin with New England movements.
The first secessionist convention in Vermont in 2006 drew 300 people (11 to
13 percent of the state supports secession, said University of Vermont
polls) and last year representatives from 25 states signed a document called
the Chattanooga Declaration.
It said “the old right-left split is meaningless and dead” and due to the
“privileges, monopolies, and powers that private corporations have won from
government, without secession, liberty and self-government can never be
sustained.”
The third convention is at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester from Nov. 14 to
16, drawing Cohen, Naylor, Ronin, Carolyn Chute, 61, author and founder of
2nd Maine Militia, Kirkpatrick Sale, 71, of Middlebury Institute in New
York, Clyde Wilson of University of South Carolina and Donald Livingston of
Emory University.
Kirkpatrick Sale
Director, Middlebury Institute
MiddleburyInstitute.org
RSS feed