Be Brave, Be Very Brave

From an article entitled "A State Within A State: The Centralist Better Get Used To It".

If there was one thing that seemed to annoy the Bush II Administration more than anything about Hezbollah during its recent war with Israel, was that Hezbollah was “a state within a state,” i.e. a parallel government was operating within the bounds of sovereign state (Lebanon). Apparently the Bushes and the centralizers within the Beltway don’t like “state within states” very much. Apparently such an idea seems to run afoul of the U.S.’ global hegemony. If the U.S. is the dominant power on the globe, then there is supposedly no room for such little entities to be able to operate. Don’t they know we’re an empire now according to one administration official?

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So if such places can have “states within states,” why not the U.S.? Especially why not the U.S.? After all, modern global connecting technology like the Internet and GPS satellites give such small places the opportunity to survive economically and preserve their unique cultures through independence, de facto or de jure. An independent Vermont could very well survive on its own no worse than tiny Singapore, Liechtenstein or Andorra. And even if Vermont, or New Hampshire, or the South was just independent in the mind only, such distinct regionalism is the very hallmark of the American experiment.

It should be pointed out that when the U.S. won its independence, what it did more or less was secede from the British Empire. And for much of that struggle, it governed not by the Constitution, but by the Articles of Confederation, which allowed the states a great deal of freedom within structure of the American nation. It only because of powerful economic, commercial and political interests that the convention that ultimately adopted the Constitution was called to convene. Such forces tend to be the gravitational pull of centralism. But the very technologies that are supposed to pull the world together in one globalized mass, can also pull it apart. Such technologies make persons across the globe realize there is no "golden straightjacket" that encloses them. They can "be yet separate" in mind and in fact as well, one way or another and not suffer some sort of catastrophe as the elites always warn. They just have to be brave enough to do so.

I wonder if folks truly understand the momentum this thought process is gaining across the world. The age of the nation-state may indeed be over - killed by would be empire-builders that pushed centralization too far. William Lind is perhaps one of the greatest political/military thinkers of our age - as early as 1990 he saw the real meaning of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the coming of stateless warfare and devolution. Now in the US, Canada and Britain good folks are again talking seriously about regaining their identity and independence.

Be brave compatriots, be very brave - ours may yet be a generation that fundamentally alters the shape of things. Deo Vindice!