Where it all began

Yet if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom -- for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself. (emphasis mine)

This is an except from The Declaration of Arbroath (1320), the first example in the western world of the sovereignty of the people and a clear articulation of the value of freedom. My family left Scotland in 1705, two years before the sad day of Union. The Scottish people have influenced the world vastly out of proportion to their meager population. The entire culture and heritage of the Southron people owes more to the Scots than any other influence.

May it please you to admonish and exhort the King of the English, who ought to be satisfied with what belongs to him since England used once to be enough for seven kings or more, to leave us Scots in peace, who live in this poor little Scotland, beyond which there is no dwelling-place at all, and covet nothing but our own. We are sincerely willing to do anything for him, having regard to our condition, that we can, to win peace for ourselves.

These pleadings to the pope went unheard but the truth that this document speaks still rings true today with only the names of the perpetrators changed to identify the guilty. England build an empire upon the bones of the Scots much as the Federal Government has always been able to rely on the service of young southerners to fight its wars.

It has been 142 years since my homeland was occupied and I and many of my brothers are still angry - I wonder how long it will take the Iraqis to love the neocons for liberating and occupying them?

Declaration of Southern Cultural Independence