http://www.examiner.com/article/citizens-15-states-file-petitions-to-secede-from-united-states
Does anyone find this worthy of discussion? I thought it might be slightly more than just “low content.” I hope to hear what the official response is.
IT’S HAPPENING
Secession is definately good. I doubt it will happen, though. We’ve already seen America’s response to secession back in the 1800s.
i wonder if us soldiers will kill fellow americans
“us soldiers?”
You’re a soldier?
i meant U.S
United states
I was joking around, haha.
We’ll see if the number of signatures increases in the next few weeks.
Great way for the Feds to build their “terrrist suspect” lists without moving a finger. Just adding a different angle for consideration.
They had the excuse of immoral activity though.
Think about it like this: would the US be ethical if it invaded a country to stop the institutionalized practice of slavery in that country and free those slaves?
The answer must be yes, clearly.
So, whether or not you or anyone reading this agree that that’s what Lincoln was actually doing with the Civil war, slavery became pretext for war. Wars seem to need a pretext so that the intellectuals of a country can sell it to the citizens to manufacture consent and ‘go along’ for the war effort.
So, would the Fed have a pretext for war against seceding states?
I don’t really see that it would. I could see them using the Supremacy Clause, but that would be pretty weak sauce. That would be akin to simply claiming the right to own someone, federal slavery of states.
Back then, I thought it was more evident to people that the war against the South had virtually nothing to do with slavery, and was all about “preserving the union.” You put it in those terms, and the local rednecks will be supporting the anti-secession sentiment immediately. But I mean, Lysander Spooner even saw back then that the North’s invasion of the South was all about keeping the Empire intact. They will come up with an excuse if they really want it in.
And how would a state go about getting out of the US, anyway? Would the state government people all agree to do that, or something?
It was not a casus belli by any means, even officially. Lincoln and the US government never used slavery as a pretext for war, and the issue had nothing to do with the official line on the war until over a year into the war (and even then the use of abolition as a means of warfare was accepted begrudgingly). Lincoln’s administration was won by the abolitionists, rather than the other way around, since the latter were able to convince the former that abolition would aid in the Union’s victory.
Yes, the very same one they had before. Secession cannot be allowed.
Of course it won’t happen. I would prefer to see a serious pilot project in a single State than half-hearted, fair-weather, purely-symbolic secession petitions across many states. One of the ideas I keep tossing around is for someone like Patri Friedman or Peter Thiel to go meet with the elders in a Native American tribe with coastal access (something that could be developed into an artificial harbor) and see about funding a full-on secession from Federal jurisdiction with the aim of creating a Hong Kong-like free economic zone (but the tribe would really have to buy into it, which is the difficult part… many of them would probably see it all as more trouble than it’s worth). The history of the “treaties” and what-not is all so recent that serious legal challenges could be mounted. If you worked out the strategy right, you could put the Feds in a position where it’s in their interests to just let one little sliver of land go than endanger the rest of the BS arrangements they’ve put in place with the other tribes.
Clayton -
What about a full-blown Indiginous Revolution, with them saying that all Americans must be deported back to Europe? My Dad and I have often discussed how due to property rights, the Natives could kick us out.
^
No they couldn’t. They no longer own the land anymore than I own whatever area my people inhabited which they were kicked out of hundreds of years ago… Don’t know when that happened, but I’m pretty damn sure that it happened at some point. Even if you buy into that, who exactly owns what pieces of land? A people cannot own a land, and the chances are that most people in America have a tiny bit of Native American in them.
And I don’t want to get into the issue much here, but don’t think that the matter of secession with the south was at all straightforward. It did have at least some of its roots in the matter of slavery.
Who was talking about the causes of the secession of the South? We were talking about the pretext for war, which was simply that the South had dared to defy the federal government, and taken a huge amount of federal government revenue with them!
@ Neodoxy
…And you got on my case for taking what you said about being a Marxist seriously.
Exactly. He was talking about the war, not the secession.
Well I also thought that the secession practically revolved around the South believing that the North had boosted it’s governmental powers to the point of tyranny. I’m pretty sure that if the USA would have let the CSA go their seperate way, the CSA would eventually modernize to the point where they would have to abolish slavery. In fact, slavery was Lincoln’s tool to get Europe to quit trading with the CSA, so eventually the CSA would have had to live up to that if the Federals left the South alone.