Texan “Pissed Off at America” Declares “Republic of Doug-E-Stan” during Dallas Suburb Armed Siege

Texas has long been known as the most secession-minded part of the United States, but that reputation, along with Texans’ reputation (earned or not) for being heavily armed and mentally not all there, was given yet another boost this week.  A sixty-year-old man named Doug Leguin, nicknamed “Dougie-Doug,” held police and firefighters at bay in a multimillion-dollar home in a Dallas suburb on August 11th while declaring that the home was now “my little republic I just started” called “the Republic of Doug-E-Stan.”  (That’s the spelling he gave a police dispatcher, including the dashes; I am merely assuming that the E is capital.)

(No relationship, apparently, to the similarly named Republic of Dagestan, a sometimes-secessionist multi-ethnic civil-war zone in Russia’s Muslim-insurgency-wracked North Caucasus region, home to breakdancing suicide-bombers and the most dangerous football club in Europe.)

Though details are murky, it seems that Leguin’s wife notified police that her husband had gone missing from their home in nearby Corinth and that he had in his possession an AK-47 assault rifle, several rounds of ammunition, and some propane tanks from his garage.  Meanwhile, firefighters were called to the large home Leguin was holed up in to put out a grass fire, and when they arrived he began firing at them, which drew the police.  An eight-year-old girl and what Leguin described to a 911 dispatcher he telephoned as a non-English-speaking Mexican maid seem to have been able to escape the home unharmed.  It is not clear what relationship Leguin had to the owners or inhabitants of the house; he appeared not to know the address when he spoke to the dispatcher.

The complete transcript of Leguin’s conversation with the police reveals deep mental instability.  Leguin told police, “I’m pissed off at America.  America’s broke, it’s got a sorry government, and the people won’t vote.”  He also told the dispatcher he was “pissed off at” a particular program by the Dallas Police Department; when the dispatcher asked which program that was, Leguin said, “Shootin’ the mentally handicapped.”  He added, “I’ve got a clear mind and a full heart.  And I’m serious about this.  America’s gotta change.”

Though the Republic of Doug-E-Stan was declared in a suburban part of
Dallas County, its founder hails from Corinth, in nearby Denton County.

Eventually, a special weapons and tactics (SWAT) team was called in and he was easily arrested, despite his personal arsenal which he at one point said consisted of twenty-seven weapons.   One neighbor, Tosha Bryce, told reporters that Leguin was, “you know, the person that we know, that we spend time with, that we see outside, that waves at everybody, that's really friendly, someone who we spend time with our kids.  You know, what in the world could have set him off?”

What indeed?  Well, in an interview three days later in his Dallas County Jail cell, Leguin gave a television interviewer some context for the siege.  He said that he was partly motivated by patterns of injustice exemplified by a recent Texan scandal over the light sentence given a wealthy Tarrant County, Texas, resident who killed four people while driving drunk.  In fact, Leguin bucked the usual stereotype of the crazed Texan gunman by revealing significantly left-of-center views.  He expressed concern for the plight of unaccompanied refugee children from Central America arriving in the U.S.—a development that has stoked racist anger at the other end of the spectrum—and he denounced those who scapegoat President Barack Obama. “If you stub your toe, it’s Obama’s fault,” Leguin said, “and that’s just stupid.  That’s part of the racism that has to be talked about in America.”  His comments came as Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, continued to spiral out of control in street confrontations and demonstrations over the killing of an unarmed African-American teenager.

Doug-E-Doug’s rage reached a boiling point just as racial tensions in Ferguson, Missouri, exploded.

But mostly Leguin said he just wanted people to “get out the vote,” and the Republic of Doug-E-Stan and the rest of it were all an elaborate publicity stunt to get people to change the power structure in America by exercising their franchise.  As he put it, “This is a get out the vote campaign.  You have to do something big to get attention in this country.  I know what I did was crazy, but I’m going to pay for that.  I just got to do something to wake up America, man.  I got to do something to get people out there voting.  We got the perfect tool to change the government.  We can completely overhaul the government.  But everybody has to vote.”

A Twitter user shared a photo of an upside-down flag flying at Leguin’s home.
In anti-government circles, this is used to mean, “The republic is in distress.”

Disappointingly, no Doug-E-Stani flag design has yet been reported.  But I, for one, will be voting this November.

What’s left of Doug-E-Stan

[You can read about other manifestations of Texan lunacy, as well as the real Republic of Dagestan and sovereignty and independence movements both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Related articles from this blog:

“State of Texas Nonexistent, Claims ‘Child of God,’ in Court for Driving with ‘Republic of Texas’ Plates” (March 2013)
“Let a Thousand Secession Petitions Bloom: The U.S. Balkanized, but Perhaps Only on the White House Website, Nowhere Else—but Most Importantly: What Does All This Have to Do with Topless Car Washes and the State of Jefferson?” (Nov. 2012)
“Hispanics and African-Americans ‘Remember the Alamo’ Differently—at Least Some of Them Do” (Nov. 2012)
“Yee-Haw (Again)! Texas Patriots Ready to Defend Their State against O.S.C.E. Election Observers” (Oct. 2012)
“Yee-Haw! Texas Judge Vows to Defend Lubbock County from Obama and the United Nations” (Aug. 2012)

Many thanks to Jan Pierce for alerting me to this news story.

EPA Extends Jurisdiction of Wind River Indian Reservation, Swallowing 3 Wyoming Towns

The response from whites in Wyoming has been one of alarm.  Despite the headlines, an Indian reservation has not in fact taken over three nearby towns (just as Indians did not take over a town in Oklahoma a couple years ago, as reported in this blog), but the decision is still momentous.  This week, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.), in its proper recognition of state-like powers for the Wind River Indian Reservation to conduct its own air-quality monitoring, clarified the boundaries of the reservation, thus overruling 1905 land grants that had allowed the creation of three non-reservation towns within the reservation in violation of the original treaty.  So far there has been no talk of extending other aspects of Wind River jurisdiction to the towns, but that is what residents now fear.

The Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes, which govern the reservation, greeted the changes with approval.  The towns of Riverton, Kinnear, and Pavillion were built on reservation land ceded under an act of Congress in 1905, and subsequent court rulings have upheld that these lands—which totally 1.5 million acres—are no longer reservation lands.  But unashamed disregard for treaty rights is routine in American judicial history.  The E.P.A., in its ruling, has taken the (in American jurisprudence) unusual step of taking Indian treaties at face value and not treating violations of them as faits accompli.

The town of Riverton, the largest of the three communities in question, had, in the 2010 census, 10,615 people, of whom 83.5% were white and 10.4% were Native American.  Kinnear (population 599) is only 57.5% white and 36.6% Native American.  Pavillion has 231 people, 93.1% white and 0.3% Native American.  All are in Fremont County.  The Wind River Indian Reservation is the seventh-largest reservation in the U.S. and is larger than the State of Delaware.  It has a population of just over 23,000 people, plus Wyoming’s only four casinos.  It also contains the burial place of Sacagawea, one of the most famous Native Americans in U.S. history, the Shoshone guide who accompanied Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on the Corps of Discovery expedition in 1804-06.

The final resting place of Sacagawea, on the Wind River reservation

One of Wyoming’s two Republican senators, John Barrasso, said, in reaction to the E.P.A. ruling, “Once again the Obama administration thinks it can ignore the law of the land when it suits their agenda.  Changes to the reservation boundaries were legally made in the early 1900s.  These boundaries should be followed by all parties including the E.P.A. and other agencies within the administration.”  Matt Mead, the state’s Republican governor, had earlier warned the E.P.A. mulled the extension of boundaries last year, that such a move would have “implications for criminal law, civil law, water law, and taxation, and would also take away the voices of the citizens in Kinnear, Riverton, and Pavillion.”  Mead has now formally requested that the U.S. Attorney General challenge the ruling.

Wyoming’s Gov. Matt Mead (left)

All critics of the move seem oblivious to the irony that the land was stolen from Indians in the first place.

Flag of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, one of two nations that call Wind River home

Individual Indians from Wind River and other communities have heralded the ruling, with many references to all of the other lands across the U.S. stolen in violation of treaties.  But the response from the Wind River administration has been anything but triumphalist.  The chairman of the Northern Arapaho Business Council (N.A.B.C.), which is the Northern Arapaho government in Fort Washakie, on the reservation, wrote to Riverton’s mayor last month, after the statelike status had been granted the tribes but the boundaries had not yet been adjusted, extending an offer to discuss the situation openly and candidly and its implications for whites and Indians alike.

One of the saddest aspects of the whole business is how quickly the media resort to clichés and jokes about American Indians in discussing the matter, as though there were something inherently anachronistic and hilarious about the fact that Indians still exist.  For example, widely read conservative Washington, D.C., newspaper the Washington Times, which was founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s right-wing Unification Church religious cult (the “Moonies”), ran an editorial critical of the E.P.A. decision, full of references to “palefaces,” bows and arrows, and John Wayne, adding, “Riverton residents didn’t even get any beads.”  I don’t think one would ever, for example, see an editorial on some random issue involving African-Americans full of references to watermelons and minstrel shows.  Actually, I take that back.  I haven’t read any of the Washington Times’ editorials on Barack Obama, and I’m not sure I want to.

The Northern Arapaho flag

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it sometime in 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Hawaiian Native Activists Reject Watered-Down B.I.A.-Style “Sovereignty”

France fumed, but the soi-disant “minister of foreign affairs” of a shadow monarchist government on the Hawaiian Islands called the Hawaii Kingdom told media this past week that he and his fellow Polynesian separatists were among those buoyed by the United Nations’ recent reinstatement of French Polynesia (which includes Tahiti) on its finger-wagging list of “Non-Self-Governing Territories” (i.e. colonies).  The minister, Leon Siu, called the move “a huge boost to our efforts” of establishing Hawaii as an independent kingdom—or rather, since they believe it still is one, of garnering international recognition and the opportunity to govern.

The Hawaii Kingdom is one of a whole raft of Hawaiian independence movements, many of them monarchists loyal to either the House of Kamehameha or the House of Kalākaua, and many operating self-styled governments-in-exile of one sort or another.  But while Siu and other idealists pursue that dream, Democratic Party politicians in Washington and Honolulu are contemplating another form of sovereignty for Native Hawaiians, and the monarchist sovereigntists are rejecting it out of hand.

Sen. Daniel Akaka

Sen. Daniel Kahikina Akaka, the first Native Hawaiian in the United States Senate, had long sponsored a bill, the Akaka Bill, which would offer Native Hawaiians a form of sovereignty akin to that of American Indians and Alaska Natives in the other 49 states.  But Akaka retired this year after 23 years’ service and his efforts got nowhere.  The new push, by Sen. Brian Schatz (a non-Native Hawaiian, born in Michigan to a Canadian father), calls for a direct executive—i.e., presidential—intervention to extend some sort of tribal recognition.  As Schatz put it earlier this year, “The president is being asked to consider a number of potential executive actions.  That could take many forms, including something by the Department of the Interior [which includes the Bureau of Indian Affairs], or at the secretary level or something at the presidential level.”

Some indigenous Hawaiian separatists use this flag.

President Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii and is of mixed African and European-American ancestry, has not taken a position on the matter yet.  But Hawaiian monarchist separatists are already speaking out.  Kekane Pa, the self-styled Speaker of the House of the Reinstated Hawaiian Government, says that the “true intent” of the new legislative push “is to have the Hawaii people give up their claim to their native lands to the U.S. government.”  An August 27th petition on the White House website’s “We the People” petition page, titled “We Petition the Obama Administration to Not Bypass Congress by Signing an Executive Order for Federal Recognition of Native Hawaiian,” opposes “tribal recognition” because it seems to attempt to formalize U.S. sovereignty over Hawaii and create a subordinate status for Native Hawaiians.

Barack Obama, a Hawaii native if not a Hawaiian Native,
is being asked to grant “tribal sovereignty” to indigenous Hawaiians.

Hawaii was an independent kingdom until the mid 19th century, until annexation by the United Kingdom in the 1840s.  The U.S., still a military and economic rival to the U.K., replaced the colonial government with a restored kingdom hemmed in by treaties allowing U.S. corporations access to the archipelago’s resources.  An example was the Bayonet Treaty of 1875, which King David Kalākaua was forced to sign at gunpoint, stripping the monarchy of many of its powers.  David’s sister, Lili‘uokalani, succeeded him in 1891 and attempted to restore the monarchy to its former preeminence, and this prompted an invasion by U.S. Marines in 1893.  After a brief time as a U.S. puppet state called the Republic of Hawaii, the territory was formally annexed in 1898.  Ever since, monarchists have argued that, even though Queen Lili‘uokalani surrendered the throne, she did so under duress and that the kingdom’s legitimacy was never extinguished.  The State of Hawaii, created in 1959, is, by this reasoning, illegitimate.

Early contact

It is not clear if the Obama administration will entertain tribal recognition.  In surveys, the majority of Hawaiian residents, including three-quarters of Native Hawaiians (who are imperfectly counted but probably number between 10% and 20% of the state’s population), support some form of federally recognized sovereign status.  Meanwhile, supporters of full independence for the state reached only, for example, the 27% mark in 1995.  It is not clear that the monarchist sovereigntists have the people on their side either.  Their online petition has been taken down, but at last count it had only 53 signatures.

A protest organized by the group Hawaiian Kingdom

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Tales of Two Racial Supremacists—One of Them Working for Homeland Security

Two different racial supremacists made headlines within the past week, one white and one black.  Both operate online and have ambitious agendas.  One is even working for the United States government.  First, we’ll look at the white supremacist.

In late August, the “Hatewatch” service of the Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.), an Alabama-based non-profit which monitors and prosecutes hate groups of all stripes, revealed that a 61-year-old white supremacist named Paul Craig Cobb and his associates were buying up cheap property in Leith, North Dakota—population 24 (officially, 16)—with plans to make the area into a whites-only enclave.  Posting on a supremacist web-forum called White Nations, Cobb has announced plans to locate in Leith, for example, a Dr. William L. Pierce Pvt. Park of Leith, named for William Luther Pierce II, the late Oregon State University physics professor who founded the high-profile neo-Nazi hate-group National Alliance.  Some of Cobb’s admirers are even talking about buying up property elsewhere in North Dakota in order to make the entire state an all-white enclave.  North Dakota is one of the whitest states in the U.S.  Ninety percent of the state’s population is white, mostly German-American and Norwegian-American.  African-Americans are 1.2%.

White separatism?  There’s an app for that.  Paul Craig Cobb, in Leith, North Dakota

North Dakota, of course, is experiencing a demographic and economic boom right now as Americans from all over, and of all political orientations, move there to take advantage of the new economy based on “fracking”—hydraulic fracturing—for natural gas and oil in the North Dakota area.

Cobb moved to North Dakota last year from Canada, where he had faced charges for inciting hatred, and then Montana.  He was fired last month from a construction firm in North Dakota when his views became known.  He is suing for wrongful dismissal.

Leith, in Grant County, North Dakota

Cobb told media that he developed his views earlier, reading Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf at age 11, and he also claims he once worked in Hawaii as a taxi driver in the early 1980s and gave Barack Obama a ride.

Bobby Harper, Leith’s one African-American resident (how many other North Dakota towns are officially over 6% black?), has been targeted by Cobb’s vitriol.  Online, Cobb has called Harper’s wife Sherrill a “filthy race-mixing white woman.”  But the Harpers are staying put, and the other residents say they “have his back.”

The Harpers are determined not to move out of their home town.

It is a credit to the tiny community of Leith that its residents have banded together to let a separatist hate-monger know that he is not welcome there.  Unfortunately, the same cannot yet be said of the second racial supremacist profiled here, Ayo Kimathi, an African-American militant who works at, of all places, the federal Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.).  (That’s his photo at the top of this article.)

It was not until the S.P.L.C. broke the story of Kimathi’s secret second life as an inciter of race war that D.H.S. too notice and, on August 23rd, put him on administrative leave.  Kimathi’s position is as a small-business specialist for D.H.S.’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but by night and on weekends he is a minor celebrity named “the Irritated Genie” speaking to radical separatists the nation over through his online organization War on the Horizon (W.O.H.), which bangs the drums for a violent showdown between American blacks and whites.  W.O.H. preaches hatred of gays and lesbians as well as ethnically cleansing North America both of European-Americans and of “black skinned Uncle Tom race traitors.”

An image from the War on the Horizon website

After being put on administrative leave, Kimathi ranted on the W.O.H. Facebook page, “The war is on!  The smallhats (white so-called jews [sic]) have stepped it up.”  Kimathi appears, here, to adhere to views first promulgated, ironically, by white supremacists, to the effect that Jews are impostors who only pretend to be descended from tribes of Israel, while the true Chosen People are (fill in name of group supremacist making the argument belongs to here).

No fan of Obama, Kimathi calls him “a treasonous mulatto scum dweller ... who will fight against reparations for Black people in amerikkka, but in favor of fag rights for freaks in amerikkka and Afrika.”

Craig Cobb (second from right) posing with Estonian neo-Nazis.
Can someone identify this flag?

Right-wing commentators often criticize the S.P.L.C. for going easy on black nationalist radicals and condemning white racists with disproportionate vigor.  Nonetheless, the S.P.L.C. outing of Kimathi is not a new development for them.  They have long listed Nation of Islam as a hate-group for example, and loudly condemned the bounty the New Black Panthers placed last year on the head of George Zimmerman, the part-Hispanic vigilante who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida.

One thing you have to give Louis Farrakhan: at least the trains run on time.

As for the Nation of Islam, which preaches racial segregation and anti-Semitism and calls white people the product of a genetic experiment by a black scientist gone awry millennia ago in the Middle East, the S.P.L.C. does not like them, but they do have one unlikely fan: Paul Craig Cobb of Leith, North Dakota (see above).  In his view, the Rev. Louis Farrakhan may be an Untermensch, but “he organizes people and they’re for themselves.”  Actually, maybe not such an unlikely fan.  Despite Cobb and Kimathi’s enthusiasm for segregation, birds of a feather do indeed flock together.

[You can read more about Cobbsville and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

The Power of Pressure Groups: 3 California Lawmakers Advocate Nagorno-Karabakh Independence

In California, two United States legislators, addressing an Armenian-American pressure group, advocated diplomatic recognition of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.), also known as the Artsakh Republic, an Armenian puppet state which Armenian and Russian troops brutally carved out of the Republic of Azerbaijan’s territory in the 1990s.

Rep. Brad Sherman said, “I think Nagorno-Karabakh is an independent state, period.  It’s time to put an embassy in Stepanakert.”

Rep. Howard Berman was more equivocal, saying, “The people of Los Angeles don’t get to decide for Nagorno-Karabakh, the people of Nagorno-Karabakh get to decide.  ...  I have no doubt that they want independence and that’s where I’d like to see the process headed, but we are in a negotiation process that the government of Armenia and the government of Azerbaijan have agreed to.”

Reps. Howard Berman and Brad Sherman

They spoke at an event this week sponsored by the Armenian National Committee of America (A.N.C.A.).  Sherman and Berman, both Democrats, represent different parts of Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley.  California is home to a large number of Armenian-Americans, and in fact has more Armenian residents than anywhere outside the Republic of Armenia itself.

Later, Armenian-American media quoted a third San Fernando Valley Democrat, U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, chiming in, “The people of Artsakh—overwhelmingly Armenian and overwhelmingly Christian—cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of Aliyev”—referring to Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s president.

Rep. Adam Schiff

Meanwhile, the Armenian National Committee of America (A.N.C.A.) has announced that it is supporting neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney for the U.S. presidency since neither candidate has accepted A.N.C.A. invitations to speak out on the Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenian-genocide, and Javakhk issues.  Boy, that’s a real game-changer in the election, eh?  Hear that, folks?  Forget soccer moms, forget NASCAR dads—Armenian-American single-issue-Nagorno-Karabakh-voters are up for grabs!

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Yee-Haw! Texas Judge Vows to Defend Lubbock County from Obama and the United Nations

Meanwhile, the jury is still out on the important question of whether there is something in the air or soil in Texas that makes people stupid, or whether stupid people just all move to Texas.

No clarification on this point can be had from the latest statement by Tom Head, a judge in Lubbock County, Texas.  Speaking to reporters from—you’ll never guess—Fox Television, he predicted civil war if Barack Obama is reelected as United States president, and vowed to stand alone if necessary against the United Nations.

Hizzoner, Tom Head

As Head put it, “He’s going to try and hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the U.N.  Okay.  What’s going to happen when that happens?  I am thinking worst case scenario—civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe.  And we’re not talking just a few riots here and demonstrations.  We’re talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy.  Now what’s going to happen if we do that, if the public decides to do that?  He’s going to send in U.N. troops.  I don’t want ’em in Lubbock County.  Okay.  So I’m going to stand in front of their armored personnel carrier and say, ‘You’re not coming in here.’  And the sheriff, I’ve already asked him, I said, ‘You gonna back me?’  He said, ‘Yeah, I’ll back you.’  Well, I don’t want a bunch of rookies back there.  I want trained, equipped, seasoned veteran officers to back me.”

Lubbock County, Texas.
As we speak, Ban-ki Moon is looking at this map in the U.N. war room, twirling his mustache,
and wondering how he could possibly conquer this last redoubt of freedom.

Later, when asked if the taxpayers would have to foot the bill for the civil war, Head said his statements had been taken out of context: “As emergency management director, I have to think of the worst-case scenario, and I used that as an example.”  Nothing like the mention of evil taxes to make a Texan Republican back-pedal from any statement.

Actually, come to think of it, my vote goes for something in the soil.

[You can read more about Texan sovereigntists and other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Massachusetts Recognizes Nagorno-Karabakh Republic!

The House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on August 6th adopted a resolution urging President Barack Obama and the United States legislature to “support the self-determination and democratic independence” of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.) (a.k.a. the Artsakh Republic), a part of what the international community recognizes as part of the Republic of Azerbaijan but which the Republic of Armenia invaded in the 1990s, after the fall of Communism, establishing the N.K.R. as an Armenian puppet state.  Rhode Island passed a similar resolution in May (as reported at the time in this blog).

The massive “We Are Our Mountains” monument near Stepanakert,
in the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic

George Aghjayan, Eastern Region chair for the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), a political lobbying group, said that Massachusetts’ legislature “properly understands a simple truth that the State Department has yet to grasp, namely that our federal government’s present policy toward Nagorno-Karabakh, were it in force back in 1776, would have, in the name of territorial integrity, pressed the 13 American colonies to remain part of the British Empire.”

Well, actually a better parallel would be if, during the War of 1812, the British had invaded Massachusetts with the help of Czarist Cossacks, carried out massacres and ethnic cleansing to get rid of the pro-U.S. population, relocated thousands of loyal English settlers to the territory, policed it with a heavy occupation of British and Russian troops, and then declared that Massachusetts had finally “liberated itself” from the U.S.  But who cares about facts or history when you have an ethnic constituency to please?

The flag of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic

[Related article from this blog: “The Armenian Genocide Debate: Turkey, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Politics of Memory.”]

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]