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09.05.2022
Black Nationalists are approaching a tipping point. The window is closing to develop an impactful plan to preempt Donald Trump and the white power movement's plots to seize the federal government by a stolen national election, coup, or civil war.
Given the urgency of the moment and new opportunities that have emerged to alter the political state of play, New Black Nationalists are releasing our recommendation to adopt the "National Divorce and Secession Initiative." [N-DASI]
The Republican Party and white power groups complicity with Trump's active measures to install an authoritarian regime following the January 6 Capitol Coup, have accelerated. The unveiling of the Oath Keepers membership list that includes 373 law enforcement officers, 117 military troops, and 81 persons holding or seeking public office confirms the depth of the white power counterinsurgency.
Investigations of Trump's tax fraud in New York, elections fraud in Georgia, and stealing nuclear state secrets in Mar a Magastan have intensified. At the same time, Justice Department prosecutions of January 6, insurrectionists and white militias are generating increasingly heavy prison sentences.
Nevertheless, Trump's white power insurgency is reorganizing, revising its social media position and platforms, recruiting new shock troops, and nominating 2020 election deniers for Secretary of State races in the November mid-terms. Threats of violence against the FBI and mass riots if Trump is indicted, not to mention the medieval Supreme Court sanctions in reversing Roe v Wade, have prompted calls from diverse quarters for National Divorce.
The idea of National Divorce or a voluntary breakup of the United States federal system isn't new. Nations change, contract, expand, absorb and lose population centers, adjust borders, and endure civil wars. There is no American Exceptionalism in this regard. Quite the opposite, secession is a profoundly American cultural marker.
As currently articulated, the locus of National Divorce revolves around three themes:
1) The political, cultural, and racial differences between red states and blue states are so irreconcilable that maintaining a unitary government within the current constitutional framework is no longer tenable. Most people feel they already live in two different countries.
2) The level of acrimony and hatred between red states and blue states and their political representatives is inexorably leading to the institutional collapse of America's governance structure and civil war is inevitable.
3. To avoid a governmental collapse, social conflagration, and civil war, red states and blue states should engage in an amicable and consensual separation of the nation into a concert of sovereign nations.
Against this backdrop, "altering the political state of play" contemplates Black Nationalists entering a national conversation to reconfigure American Empire--one in which Black self-determination moves to the center of the discourse. With some polls showing 65% of Republican voters are open to some form of secession, and 48% of Democrats feeling likewise, a new political wave is gathering force offshore and preparing to make landfall. Black Nationalists must surf the crest of this new wave.
National Divorce presents a breakout opportunity to move the discussion of creating a Black nation-state beyond the familiar topography of the Black Liberation Movement and Marxist political spaces to broader sections of the political mainstream. Independent initiative will create the separation that clarifies Black Nationalists break with the Democratic Party and Black Social Democrats on the issue of patriotism.
Simply stated, New Black Nationalists contend that the Black Commons claim no ownership or authorship of America's failed experiment and imperial venture. We arrived here as subjects of British and American Empire, first as slaves, then as provisional citizens not of our own choosing, but courtesy of the yoke of the 14th Amendment.
In our view America emerged as a predatory empire--thirteen vastly different colonies that formed a military alliance to defeat the British. America was never a nation conceived in the blast furnace of culture, history, and blood, but a mythical universal republic created by its founders out of a rationalist Enlightenment document called the Constitution. It's animating principle was the individual pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness measured in wealth, not the collective destiny of a people. Its Puritan religious ethic dictated the rewards of hard work was prosperity in a spiritual shell. Even its independence movement was ignited by the colonist's' aversion to the burden paying taxes and garrisoning troops of its mother country Britian--hardly an ennobling human endeavor.
Created as a compromise between Northern commercialist and the Southern slavocracy, the bond intensifying agents that have sustained American Empire are money, white supremacy, and violence to maintain dominion over non-white populations, especially Black people. Now, as the empire spirals into freefall and collapse, Thomas Paine's quip that “even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their own families," reminds us the coming social conflagration is ostensibly a white man's war in which Black and Brown people are castigated as the cause and fated to be its collateral damage. You may have the America you built. We want no part of it, only our due in land and just compensation. We mean to have it, one way or another.
That said, entering the political fray now as the National Divorce ideal gains altitude affords Black Nationalists an opportunity to shape the discourse. This opportunity exists because libertarians, antifederalists, white nationalists, independents, and most white leftists typically characterize National Divorce in partisan terms of Republican red states versus, Democrat blue states or in some cases independent states.
The second dominant trend calls for partitioning the country into five or six major geographic regions that approximate NCAA college football conferences. What these red state/blue state and NCAA conference models share in common is substituting political parties and regions as a proxy for race.
Ironically, Alt-Right intellectuals (Yes, there is actually such a thing) like the Counter-Currents website are among the few that concede a five-state Southern Black Belt homeland for the Black Commons [Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina]. Most Alt-Right models also include a Southwest Territory for Mexican Americans and Hispanics, and blue state regions on the West Coast, New England and the Mid-Atlantic.
Why do Alt-Right intellectuals--of all groups--concede a Black Belt homeland; the same model incidentally, as the Republic of New Afrika's 1968 model derived from the Sixth Comintern Black Belt Thesis of 1928?
It's because Alt-Right theorists know a long civil war with an uncertain outcome isn't worth the mass bloodshed, chaos, and destruction of property whites would suffer. Simply put, they don't like the risk associated with the cost benefit analysis.
As New Black Nationalists recently argued in our critical reading of Professor Edward Onaci's publication of Free the Land, our conception of creating new majority Black-led [not separatist] polities are more varied, dynamic, and nuanced than the orthodoxy of a single Black nation-state in the Black Belt South.
Our assessment of the current political and geo-political configuration of American Empire, envisions a modified, Black-led nation-state within the Black Belt region, the formation of independent, Black-led city-states in metropolises like Detroit and Baltimore, and an autonomous Black region in California.
New Black Nationalists are not naive about the prospects of peacefully concluding a National Divorce arrangement. Trump's white power militia forces are spoiling for the fantasy and glory of civil war to reclaim the white supremist lost cause.
No sooner were the Sons of Odin presented with an opportunity to give battle; they charged up Capitol Hill with Trump's banner on the flagpoles they converted into weapons. Such was the measure of their resolve to sacrifice for 'blood and soil.' "As Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Tse-Tung once stated: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Should Trump's legions remain intractable on question of civil war, then let it come.
That said, in the interest of exhausting peaceful means to process the dissolution of American Empire, Black Nationalists enter the National Divorce conversation to argue four essential themes. Together, these issues define the transition from today's fast-evolving pre-revolutionary period to an existential crisis in which the collapse of American Empire's governance structure could occur as early as the 2024 national elections.
The National Divorce Argument:
1) On extra-constitution measures to seize power, coups, and civil war
Donald Trump, the Republican Party, white militias, and white power intellectuals are actively conspiring to establish a white power authoritarian government by extraconstitutional means. They are prepared to use any means available to them, including a stolen national election, violent coup, civil war or some combination thereof.
2) Is National Divorce a realistic option?
Yes. An amicable and consensual agreement to partition the United States into multiple sovereign nations based on partisan, non-partisan, racial, and political considerations would be difficult but not impossible. It is also possible to achieve a National Divorce agreement in a contentious environment with certain levels of violence preceding or occurring simultaneously with negotiated settlements and treaties.
The argument that an equitable division of debt, economic resources, business assets, pension plans, and military assets like nuclear weapons is an insurmountable task is a false argument. All these issues and others have been resolved in the breakup of empires like the Soviet Union, and multiple secession movements from the division of the former Czechoslovakia to America's independence from Great Britain.
3) Reparations for Black national polities
New Black Nationalists hold that reparations in the form of awarding land and cash payments are owed to the Black Commons to make amends for the U.S. government's legal abomination of enslaving Black people, and the subsequent century of legalized unequal Jim Crow segregation.
In as much as New Black Nationalists support majority Black-led multi-racial polities in the form of a nation-state, independent city-states, and autonomous regions, we envision reparations as a formula awarded primarily for land and home ownership for the Black commons. In recognizing the principle of reciprocity and honorable population transfers for non-Blacks wishing to relocate to other sovereign states, a compensation fund for homes, personal property and businesses would be included as a contingency fund of a reparation agreement.
4) Is secession legal?
The assertion that secession of a single state or states from the U.S. federal government is illegal according to the 1869 Supreme Court Texas v White decision is a spurious claim.
Given the centrality of Texas v. White as the sole controlling legal case regarding secession, we will quote author Richard Kreitner's brief summary of the issue at length from his 2017 publication of Break it Up.
"Seeing the need for a final statement on secession's constitutionality, the Supreme Court stepped in. The new, pro-Union government of Texas wanted to reclaim U.S. bonds that its Confederate precursor had sold. The case, Texas v. White, turned on whether the state had actually seceded or remained in the Union throughout the war. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, a founder of the Republican Party and Lincoln's former treasury secretary, seized the opportunity to enshrine in law what the war had seemingly settled in fact.
In one paragraph, Chase ruled against secession. 'The constitution, in all its provisions,' Chase wrote, 'looks to an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible states.' Texas, therefore, had never left the Union; the sale of bonds by the Confederate-era state government, like all actions of that 'unlawful combination of individuals,' was null and void."
To this passage by Kreitner, New Black Nationalists have two comments. The Texas v. White decision came four months after the U.S. government cowardly refused to prosecute Jefferson Davis, the President of the secessionist Southern Confederacy for treason. They were terrified of the prospect that a Richmond, Virginia jury would acquit Davis, or worse still, a mostly Black jury of newly freed slaves and U.S. citizens would convict him.
Second, if as Chief Justice Chase ruled, Texas never left the Union, why in February 1870, did the Texas State Legislature meet to ratify the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution to be readmitted to the Union on March 30, 1870, by President Grant?
In truth, the question of the legality of secession has never been tested at the Supreme Court level. In our view, secession is an open question.
Moving Forward with the National Divorce and Black Secession Initiative
New Black Nationalists foresee this initiative as a two-year mass education and advocacy campaign to inject a Black Nationalist perspective into the political mainstream. Preventing an authoritarian white power seizure of the U.S. government, crafting a National Divorce framework that maximizes the chances of creating majority Black-led polities, and arguing for self-determination are complex issues with a galaxy of moving parts.
To win support of the Black Commons and substantively impact the political mainstream we will need recruit speakers, writers, and activists to sign on to this initiatives' position in full or in-part. News articles, editorials, radio, and television interviews are vital to creating public opinion in favor of the initiative. We also need specialists to work with other organizations who share similar positions.
Over the coming weeks and months, NewBlackNationalism.com will be devoting its pages to informational and analytical articles on National Divorce, secession, reparations, and self-determination.
We invite you to join us in this initiative. As always, we look forward to your comments @VeseyRepublic.
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