It all began in February, when one disgruntled Vermonter started a blog to attack the Second Vermont Republic, the four-year-old secessionist organization in our state.  He was apparently prompted by hearing Rob Williams, then cochair of the SVR, attacking Abraham Lincoln on the radio for the illegal suppression of Southern secession, and his political-correctness genes kicked in: This sounds like the “neo-Confederate movement,” and they’re bad people.  He did a little research and discovered that the SVR had a web-link to the League of the South, which some professional liberal foundations like to call a “hate group,” and besides, it had suspicious right-wingers on its advisory board.  So up goes the blog, posted pseudonymously as from one Thomas Rowley (originally one of Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys), and out flow the accusations and innuendoes.

This was just the meat to feed one John Odum, a Democratic Party hack and campaigner for Sen. Bernie Sanders, apparently part of the Vermont political establishment that has taken a dim view of the SVR’s successes, including a recent article in the mainstream Bur-lington Free Press.  He promptly repeated the Rowley findings on his long-standing blog, which he claims has 400 readers per day, and sent them out to his list, along with “some of my own digging.”  A half-dozen of his regulars responded with shock and awe, some SVR people responded, and the brouhaha went on for more than a week—26 pages of it in tiny type on my printer.  The SVR eventually responded on its website with denials and defenses, and Thomas Naylor, the other SVR cochair, issued a press release headed “Technofascist Smear Campaign,” which defended the connection with the League of the South as being one of 36 secessionist groups it has links to—but “we are in bed with none of them.”

At the end of it all, Odum announced he was dropping his blog; Williams announced he was retiring from the SVR to concentrate on its sister publication, Vermont Commons, and Rowley said he was going right along with his investigations and attacks.  And a group calling itself part of the North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists (whatever that might mean) issued an ultimatum demanding that the SVR dismiss two advisors and cease all links with the “undemocratic, neo-fascist” League of the South on its website.

The crux of the charges against the SVR were the claims that had long been put out by the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, an outgrowth of the Civil Rights Movement that has made a specialty of finding racists and bigots that it can magnify into profound dangers so as to scare up money; it is, as a consequence, the richest civil-rights operation in the country, and it spends more money on fundraising than legal cases.  Its charge is that the League of the South is a racist “hate group,” and it points to quotes from three or four League members (out of maybe 3,500) that, though not overtly racist, emphasize white Southern culture and are certainly intemperate and inflammatory.  It does not provide any evidence that, in 13 years, the League itself has ever had a racist platform or policy or purpose, or that the organization as a whole has said or done anything racist.  (In fact, in 2005, the League of the South issued a specific statement of its nonracist policy, even envisioning “black and white Southerners sitting down together to determine their common destiny.”)

The other charges that Rowley and Odum make have to do with four members of the SVR advisory board whom they don’t like (all scholars at reputable universities): Marco Bassani, associated with the secessionist Italian Northern League, which includes people who have made strong anti-immigration statements, though Bassani has not; Thomas DiLorenzo, author of two books of Lincoln-revisionist history who is outspokenly antilabor and pro-capitalism; Donald Livingston, a philosopher of secession who left the League of the South six years ago (“not because it was racist, it isn’t, but it was too political”); and Jason Sorens, who started the New State Project a few years ago to create a libertarian state in New Hampshire and is a political scientist who has studied secession.

The only crime these men seem to have committed is that they don’t seem to be left-liberals of the kind that Rowley and Odum think Vermonters are, or should be, or should even be associating with.  They are not accused of racism, only of holding “far-right views” that Vermonters are not supposed to like and, therefore, shouldn’t be held by those on the SVR board.  The SVR, it seems, should associate only with people that hold proper beliefs in “participatory democracy, social equality, and freedom,” or whatever set of politically correct ideas are currently favored by the liberal/progressive left.

This is dangerous and ugly political assassination at work, and it is not only a childish breast-beating of my-politics-is-better-than-yours but a complete misunderstanding of the secessionist movement.  That is why I decided to enter the fray with a statement from the Middlebury Institute about who are to be regarded as colleagues and allies and what it means to be part of a movement.  The gist of it I take to be these three points: First, the secessionist movement is made up of organizations of many different kinds that are alike in their advocacy of secession—of secession in general, and of secession of their particular part of the planet.  That is what makes them colleagues and allies—because, in this difficult task of making secession and separatism a legitimate political goal, they stand shoulder to shoulder with one another.

Second, it is not up to any organization in the movement (or its friends) to judge the attitudes, philosophies, or beliefs of others.  While one would hope that all people share a commitment to certain basic rights and freedoms, it must be understood that different people in different places will have different ideas, desires, goals, and strategies—that, after all, is the whole point of secession.  A group is for secession precisely because it does not want to be part of a larger entity whose beliefs and actions it does not like, and wishes to live free on its own terms.

Third, the kind of people who insist on telling others how to live and think, so as to have one unanimous right-minded uniformity, are dangerous people and precisely the kind that establish national governments and pass laws applicable to entire populations.  Fascism is one obvious and ugly form of this, but mass industrial democracy is a similar, if often more benign, form.  And it is exactly this that secession and separatism are opposed to.

People turn to secession because they want their own form of government, on their own terms, and hope to create a state in which to live out their beliefs, principles, ideals.  It is no more justifiable for one organization to question or criticize or castigate those goals if they work toward a Christian-directed government that outlaws abortion and adultery than if they work for a secular democracy favoring gun control and same-sex “marriages.”  The beauty of secession is that it looks toward having a world where those and many other kinds of states can exist, free and independent, while refusing to impose their ideas on others or have others’ ideas imposed on them.

That said, it still might be desirable for the organizations involved in secession to come up with a basic statement of values and principles to which they all agree—much as in the Burlington Declaration that came out of the Secessionist Convention last fall.  It could say something about freedom of association and movement, right to trial and due process, equality before the law, commitment to open and equal political participation, the right to secession of any coherent political entity, and the people’s right to alter governments when they are despotic and destructive—something along those lines, serving as our common political and social platform.

Ultimately, we in the secessionist movement stand divided, but we stand together.  We believe in secession, each of us, and, though the ends we work for may be different (and what a thriving, vibrant, multivariant world that would bring us to!), the means we use unite us all.  And we are not to be diverted from our goals because of the old-fashioned political correctness of those who are a willing part of the empire and its corrupt political system.

Oh, incidentally, Rowley responded to my statement as you might expect his knee to jerk: “To Sale, the racist attitudes and agenda of some of his secessionist colleagues, and the potential consequences to his fellow citizens, is [sic] of no importance.  Not every Vermonter will share this cavalier attitude.”  No, I expect it’s too sophisticated for certain of them.