The eleven Confederate States – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia -- plus Kentucky and Oklahoma currently form the most consistent and cohesive political South. The premier US publication tracking congressional votes and US politics, the Congressional Quarterly. The same South appeared in a highly significant 3-9 March 2007 special report in London's influential Economist magazine.
State by state, this political South parallels rather closely the present cultural South, though in certain areas of these thirteen States (southern Florida and south Texas) Southern culture no longer dominates. On the other hand, areas beyond these thirteen States maintain their Southern culture to varying degrees. Much of Missouri remains basically Southern, as do parts of southern Maryland and Maryland's eastern shore. Some say southern Delaware is Southern still.
West Virginia is a difficult state to sort out. Formed unconstitutionally under the Lincoln presidency to drive a wedge into the South and increase Republican congressional representation, many West Virginians believe their interests differ strongly from those of the Old Dominion, and while culturally Southern seem to prefer the description of "mountaineer" to "Southerner." Maryland and Delaware have become so liberal that they fit with the Northeast politically, even though some areas there remain politically conservative and definitely Southern in outlook and culture.
The US Census Bureau continues to place West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia within the South. However, the Bureau classes Missouri as a Midwestern state, although today it is politically more conservative in a traditionally Southern sense. Of the thirteen States constituting this "South," Florida ranks overall as the least southern, primarily because of the massive numbers of Northern, Cuban, and Haitian immigrants who have settled in the Sunshine State. Yet measured by congressional votes, it remains politically a Southern State. Texas is in a category by itself, the western South.
The loss of south Florida and south Texas from the cultural South sharply illustrates what happens when large numbers of immigrants arrive. Culture follows demography. For more than twenty years south Florida has been described as part of the Caribbean, because of the huge influx of Cubans and Haitians. Both south and central Florida are so dominated by Yankees that Southern culture there has been stretched very, very thin – much of it has become wholly unSouthern. As parts of Florida have become Caribbean, so, too, south and southwest Texas have become part of greater Mexico.
A Place & Name Among The Nations
In spite of these losses, the South remains one of the most important nations of the earth. Today "nation" usually refers to an independent political sovereignty, but originally it meant "a people with a sense of their own identity, occupying a certain territory that is their historic homeland."
A politically independent sovereign state is not required for "nationhood." Scots form a "nation" although they do not have their own state. The South remains very much a nation even though it has not been an independent sovereign "nation-state" since 1865. Even then the Confederate States of America were not a unitary state but a confederation of independent sovereign States.
The Latin root of "nation" comes from a word that means "to be born." Blood, kin, family, past, tradition, place, and culture are all bound up in what it means to be a nation. Once Southerners understand that they are a classic nation by the core meaning of the word, they would be cowardly and disloyal not to preserve their own unique culture and society.
The West, including the United States, has taken the path of wholesale national suicide, driven by a multi-cultural globalist agenda. Today's Western regimes are building a global state, reducing peoples and nations with all their wonderful variety to one homogenized Big Mac. An unbridgeable chasm separates Southerners' values and vision from the leaders of these regimes. Against their citizens' wishes, they want to replace national loyalty with loyalty to a universal abstract state under the banner of spurious "equality."
Western regimes (including the US) are attempting to re-build the tower of Babel, creating their own version of "heaven on earth." Southerners have wisdom enough to know that whenever fallen men set out to create heaven on earth it always becomes "hell on earth." (Southerners may not be perfect, but we are realistic.)
Nations Without States
The 2002 Encyclopedia of the Stateless Nations, in four volumes, followed a 1996 publication of a one volume work, Nations Without States. We have heard of only a handful of the many nations who want their national status recognized and a nation-state of their own. Scotland and Quebec are probably the two stateless nations you have heard most about, but since 1946 over half of the nation-states of the earth have achieved independent political status by secessions or separations from larger political entities. Centralized states are dying. Secession is the wave of the future.
After Lithuania seceded, the Soviet Union broke apart into the separate nations which had been forcibly yoked together under communism. Eastern Europe, formerly under Soviet hegemony, has also seen new nation states emerge from ancient nationalities.
The Encyclopedia of the Stateless Nations describes no fewer than 350 nations without states! To be listed, the nation must have 1) a flag; 2) a sense of identity as a special people; and 3) an organization(s) working to achieve a greater degree of recognition and autonomy, including, for many, nation-state status itself.
Does The South Qualify?
The South easily meets these criteria. Southerners have many flags. The Encyclopedia describes the Confederate Battle Flag as "the Southern national flag," but also gives the Stars and Bars as a national Southern flag. We have a very well developed and extremely widespread sense of Southern identity, and the Encyclopedia lists nineteen organizations as Southern national organizations.
In the article on "Southerners" under the subtitle "People and Culture" we find this assessment:
"Southerners are considered one of the major branches of the American nation, being the descendants of the original European settlers of the southern colonies established by settlers from the British Isles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By far the largest of the three original Anglo-American cultural areas, the South has always been the most idiosyncratic with respect to national norms. Although there are great regional differences between the inhabitants of the vast area, the cultural heritage of the Deep South remains the focus of modern Southern culture. Southern culture is still observable in almost every realm of activity, including the rural economy, regional dialects, diet, folklore, politics, architecture, recreation, and social customs."
Amazingly, Southerners are the second most populous stateless nation included in the encyclopedia, after the Tamils of southern India.
Astonished? There's more. The South's world status is further substantiated by the March 2007 Economist, published in London. This presents the South to the world as a great place for business, with a surging economy growing faster than the US economy, a region with "song, flavour and charm," building on its "traditional" strengths of "southern hospitality," southern cuisine, and attractive weather. Eighteen of the top 30 "best performing" cities in the US lie in the South. Since 1990 the number of jobs in the South has risen by a third while their number in the US as a whole has risen only by a quarter. The Economist also notes that the Southern share of US gross domestic product (GDP) has risen from 22% in 1963 to 31% today. The Economist recognizes that areas of the South, especially rural areas and some cities, such as New Orleans, remain poor, and that prosperity is "unevenly spread."
What About Racism?
The editors see the South as "A good place to be black," citing a Pew Research Center Poll of 2003. That poll found a higher percentage of Southern than non-Southern blacks saying that discrimination against them is rare. Blacks are materially better off in the South where their income is 99% of the black US norm and their living costs lower. Three times as many blacks move to the South each year as leave it. The special report also points out that although the South contains only slightly more than half of American blacks, two-thirds of the 9,101 US black elected officials reside in the South. Mississippi alone has 54 black mayors.
Are We Populous Enough?
In 2006, 101 million people lived in the South. In 1993 the South had 81 million people, about the size of then recently united Germany. Today Germany has grown to only 82.4 million, and is already losing population due to birth rates well below replacement levels. The other leading Western European nations, France with 60.9 million people and the U. K. with 60.7 million people in 2006 have far fewer people than the South. European population is growing very slowly, and in some cases already falling. In spite of rapid Third World population growth , the thirteen State South remains twelfth in population of all the nation-states of the earth, as it was in 1993.
Are We Prosperous Enough?
Under the old method of calculating GDP (gross domestic product), which used official currency exchange rates instead of purchasing power parity, the thirteen Southern States had the world's fourth largest economy 1990, behind the US, Japan, and united Germany. Today we have moved to the third strongest economy in the world, easily surpassing Germany by almost a trillion dollars (Southern economy: $3.548 trillion dollars in 2004; German economy, $2.741 trillion dollars in 2004).
Under the purchasing power parity method developed in 1998 for determining GDP, the thirteen State South again has the fourth largest economy on earth. Under the new method, China's economy has grown so fast that Asian super tiger is rapidly catching up with the entire US economy. The GDP figures for 2005 in trillions of dollars under the new method are:
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United States, 12.36 trillion
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China, $8.86 trillion
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Japan, $4.02 trillion
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The South, $3.73 trillion
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India, $3.61 trillion
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Germany, $2.504 trillion
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United Kingdom, $1.83 trillion
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France, $1.82 trillion
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Russian Federation, $1.59 trillion
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Brazil, $1.56 trillion
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Canada, $1.11 trillion
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Mexico, $1.07 trillion
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Spain, $1.03 trillion
In area the South's vast territory stretches essentially as far as all of Western Europe north of the Pyrenees and the Alps (though including Switzerland). Subtract the almost uninhabited cold northern regions of Norway and Sweden and the South would have more land than all of Western Europe. The South's homeland has more territory than the nation-states of France (close to the size of Texas), Germany, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Norway and Sweden (minus the latter two's frozen regions), with the tiny nations of Andorra, Liechtenstein, and Monaco thrown in for good measure. These countries have over 260 million people and include the three dominant nation-states of Europe, Germany, France, and the U. K. Even the smallest Southern State, South Carolina, has more land than Ireland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Lithuania, Israel, Lebanon, Kuwait, and many other nation-states of the earth.
But Don't We Already Have The Best Of All Worlds?
The South has the population, land area, economy, resources, knowledge, and innovative skill to be one of the most formidable nation-states of the earth. But why, many might ask, should the South give up a good thing when it has so much going for it?
A basic and practical answer is this: "the world the South would make for her people differs vastly from the world the US regime is constructing." Time and again on issues affecting a people's most basic values and institutions, the rest of the US has overridden Southern beliefs, values and policy choices. This radical difference in values between the South and the rest of the US is reflected in the US congress' actual votes.
The George W. Bush Republican ascendancy has not changed this. If anything, it has made things worse. The US congress continues to override Southern congressmen on key issues affecting our way of life. A sample of these congressional votes further confirms that if the South were in charge of her own destiny, life would be much closer to what we as Southerners believe, value, and desire.
Immigration
One outstanding example is the May 2006 McCain – Kennedy Immigration Bill which passed the full Senate by the substantial margin of 62 – 36. This bill put millions of illegal aliens on track for US citizenship and, some have argued, would have increased legal immigration from around one million immigrants each year at present to at least two million annually. This was a major piece of special interest legislation, benefiting big corporations with dirt cheap immigrant labour at the expense of the native-born American worker.
Seventeen Southern Senators voted against this horrendous "abolition of America" bill, while only nine voted in favour. Outside the thirteen Southern States, the vote in favour was 53 against only 19 against. The South voted essentially two to one against McCain – Kennedy, while the remainder of the US voted close to three to one for it.
The list of lickspittle lackeys promoting the South-busting American Regime is long, and includes both Republican and Democratic leaders as well as the American educational establishment, mainstream media, entertainment industry, corporate business community, and many religious, cultural, and societal leaders. The pattern of overriding our wishes has been so consistent over the past four decades that every observer must admit the truth: irreconcilable differences separate Southerners from other Americans, and the South would be much better off as a politically independent Republic steering her own destiny.
Impeachment
Another stark Southern – US split occurred when the Senate voted on President Clinton's impeachment verdict. The whole Senate voted to acquit Clinton on both impeachment charges while Southern Senators voted two-thirds in favour of convicting Clinton of obstruction of justice (18 to 8). If the South had been in charge, President Bill "the Lecher" Clinton would have been the first president in U.S. history to have been removed from office by impeachment.
Election
If the South had had its way, however, Clinton would not even have been elected in the first place. In both 1992 and 1996 the South voted for the Republican nominee for President, i.e., the candidate generally perceived to be more conservative (regardless of the reality).
Taxes
On tax policy, the South almost always votes for lower taxes, and is sometimes overridden by the US congress. In 1998 the thirteen State South voted by the required two-thirds margin for a constitutional amendment to require a two-thirds vote of both houses of congress to raise taxes. Southerners voted in favour of this constitutional amendment 90 to 41. In the full House the amendment failed by 238 to 186 opposed, far short of the constitutionally required two-thirds margin.
Religious Freedom
Also in 1998, Southern Representatives voted by the requisite two-thirds "super majority" to submit to the States the Religious Freedom Constitutional Amendment. It would have guaranteed an individual's right to pray and recognize his religious beliefs on public property, including schools. The house of representatives as a whole rejected this amendment by a vote of 224 in favour to 203 opposed, falling miserably short of the necessary two-thirds margin.
States' Rights
In 1997 Senator Hutchinson of Arkansas offered an amendment to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts and transfer its fiscal 1998 funding directly to the States. The South voted for this State Rights proposal by the ample margin of 17 to 9, whereas the full Senate rejected this affirmation of the rights and duties of the States by the almost equally strong margin of 63 against to only 36 for.
Conclusion
Living under the yoke of the Yankee empire has already damaged our Southern culture. Will we be able to leave any of it to our children and grandchildren? Not if the yankee empire has its way.
The South as its own nation is more than powerful, populous, and prosperous enough to assume its place among the nations of the earth today. For the South, secession is the only practical, the only realistic, and the only moral choice.
Free the South!
DixieNet.Org
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"The South As It's Own Nation" first appeared in the April-June issue of the Free Magnolia
