These Are The Crazy Years – Page 15 – Rants of a Fuzzy Curmudgeon

Judging from the little comment flood a couple of posts down, I hit a nerve when I asserted that Texas had no right or legal ability to secede.
But I asserted that because my belief is — and I believe history backs me up — secession is for losers. (Note: We did not secede from England. We revolted. Please do not conflate the two, no matter how much you want to believe that the Civil War was a “second American Revolution”.) Moreover, the vast majority of those who advocate secession strike me as hotheads who would look for just about any excuse to re-establish the Republic of Texas…not that the Republic of Texas was, historically, all that wonderful a place to begin with. Else why would its leaders have petitioned the United States for statehood? They understood that Texas, on its own, was going nowhere fast. They argued for a clause in their treaty that ostensibly gave Texas the right to leave the Union if it found good reason, because they knew statehood didn’t have a prayer in Texas without it, and moreover they agreed to another clause that would give the United States the right to divide Texas into five states. This does not sound like the action of a strong and robust State, but rather of a fairly weak one that is looking for protection from the nasty men with guns on the other side of the Rio Grande. The problem with most of the history of that period is that it was written by triumphialists of one or another stripe, and by their lights the Republic of Texas negotiated with the United States as an equal, and from strength. I say nothing was farther from the truth; the Republic of Texas wanted the United States Army to guarantee its southern border, so it took the only road that led to that outcome. With head held high, and an unenforceable guarantee that they could renege on the agreement if they didn’t like the results, Texans became part of an indissoluble Union.
Frankly, I place secessionists in the same round file as Randians. The problem with Randians is that their heroine and goddess, Ayn Rand, was not a native of our shores, and as such, she did not think like one of us. She was a Russian who had escaped the early days of Communism. And she thought like a Russian peasant — lie down and take it (socialism) till you can’t take it anymore, then dream of a Utopia where everyone is enlightened and free and just waiting for the rest of the country to collapse so you can walk out and teach the poor benighted souls how to stand up for themselves as good Objectivists.
Secessionists, like Objectivists, strike me as false patriots, who want to take their ball and go home because they don’t get their way.
As I have said repeatedly, I used to be an Objectivist. And then I grew up.
Similarly, I used to think secession sounded like a great idea. Then I became trained as a historian and started reading about the Civil War. If you have not read about the Civil War, I suggest reading Shelby Foote. You can’t get more sympathetic to the South and still be rooting for the North to win than Foote. And throughout his three volumes on the War, you cannot but conclude that the South made a terrible, terrible mistake in underestimating the North. Eighty years after the Civil War began, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto of the Imperial Japanese Navy would observe, “We have awakened a sleeping giant and have instilled in him a terrible resolve.” Yamamoto had studied in America and knew Americans. I cannot believe that he was unaware of how the Union, for all its faults, had prosecuted the war against the South, and how much more remorseless the United States would be against an external enemy, and that this knowledge did not inform his attitude.
In the 21st century, there are a number of things that mitigate against secession. One is that we are linked so tightly together by communications. The telegraph shortened the Civil War by months if not years. The railroad got troops and stores to the front faster than anytime in previous history. How much shorter would be an insurrection today when face-to-face communication can take place over thousands of miles? When military units are linked down to the private on the firing line with Internet-connected battle gear? When troops get to battle in all kinds of different vehicles on a vast network of improved roads? All you Turtledove fans out there need to think about this. (Parenthetically, I don’t read Turtledove, because I was trained as a historian. We don’t do “what if”. We do “what happened”.)
Other problems with secession are things like interconnected infrastructure. (Why did Russia invade Georgia? Interconnected infrastructure.) Telephone systems, the electrical grid, gas and oil pipelines, the Internet…all interconnected across the fruited plain. I mentioned in the comments to that earlier post that the United States is greater than the sum of its parts. Interconnected infrastructure is one of the reasons for that.
As I also suggested in the comments below, Russia and China are licking their chops at the thought of the breakup of the United States. The rest of the world is probably rooting for it, too, but that will stop pretty fast if it actually happens.
But I suppose what really gripes me about secession talk is that Barack Hussein Obama has been in office all of 90 days, and already a bunch of hotheads are talking secession.
Boys and girls, the South talked secession for thirty or forty years.
If you keep this up, BHO will be able to walk what he talked: “I won.”
There are mid-term elections coming up in 19 months. If conservatives and libertarians can’t come up with winning candidates in this political atmosphere, they have a problem that secession isn’t going to cure.
Point to Rand all you want. Rand was as bad as the people she inveighed against.
Point to Heinlein all you want. But notice that Heinlein never wrote about insurrection on Earth except in Revolt in 2100. And that story was a direct result of the Crazy Years and the advent of the Prophet. The only other story of revolt that Heinlein wrote was The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. And that revolt succeeded for the same reasons the American Revolution had succeeded 300 years before — primarily logistical reasons that do not obtain within the American nation today, plus a literal deus ex machina. As I suggested before, the Heinlein story that has more bearing on the direction we seem to be heading is Friday. And I don’t want to live in that world.
Secession is a fairy tale, folks. If you’re honest with yourselves, you’ll see that.
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UPDATE, 4/21/2009, 7:53AM: Don’t say I didn’t give you a fair chance to rebut. Comments closed.

Category: These Are The Crazy Years

Official: It’s the Crazy Years.

There are none so blind as those who hail from the old Confederacy.