Kremlin Hand behind Alaska Annexation Petition on White House Website?

“Obama, think about Alaska!” reads one sign at a pro-Crimea-annexation rally in Moscow.

A couple weeks ago in this blog I reported on a petition on the White House’s “We the People” website seeking to return Alaska to Russia in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s Blitzkrieg/Blitzwahl annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region last month.

Uploaded on March 21st, the petition states, with steel-trap logic, “Groups Siberian russians crossed the Isthmus (now the Bering Strait) 16-10 thousand years ago.  Russian began to settle on the Arctic coast, Aleuts inhabited the Aleutian Archipelago.  First visited Alaska August 21, 1732, members of the team boat St. Gabriel under the surveyor Gvozdev and assistant navigator I. Fedorov during the expedition Shestakov and DI Pavlutski 1729-1735 years.  Vote for secession of Alaska from the United States and joining Russia.”  (Who could argue with that?)  As of April 5th, the petition had 38,819 signatures, well on the way to the 100,000 signatures needed to require a response from the President.

Initially we knew only that the petition had been uploaded by one “S.V.,” of Anchorage.  Now the Moscow Times reveals that the original petition was in fact created by what it describes, not completely helpfully, as “an organization called Government Communication G2C, a pro-Kremlin ‘communications platform.’”

A popular “take back Alaska” meme in Russian social media.
Will someone please remind Russians that penguins live in the Antarctic, not the Arctic?

The Kremlin is not itself calling for the annexation of Alaska, which Czar Alexander II sold to the United States in 1867.  But many Russian are taught in school and reminded in the mass media that Alaska was only leased, not sold, though—like Russia’s media coverage of the Crimea crisis—that is not quite the way it went.  And Vladimir Chizhov, Putin’s envoy to the European Union, last month warned Senator John McCain, the U.S. Republican Party’s de facto foreign policy whip, who has lashed out strongly against the Crimean annexation, that he had better “watch over Alaska.”  The Guardian has also reported on an alleged clandestine tape-recording of jocular banter between two Russian diplomats in which Igor Chubarov, ambassador to Eritrea, appears to joke, “We’ve got Crimea, but that’s not fucking all folks.  In the future we’ll damn well take your Catalonia and Venice, and also Scotland and Alaska.”  Chubarov adds that California and Florida look annexable as well, explaining, “Miamiland is fucking 95% Russian citizens.  We have a full right to hold a referendum.”  (Russia’s mostly state-controlled media has been vigorously milking the topic of separatist movements in the West, as though this clinched some argument about NATO’s double standards.)

Chizhov warns McCain

And a spokesman for G2C, Alexander Zhukov, said that the petition’s goal was not actually to return Alaska to Russia—“We understand that this is not plausible”—but instead “to show the White House that its petition system is a flawed democratic tool that allows anybody to ask for anything.  We are trying to protect the citizens of the U.S. by drawing attention to a tool that is said to be democratic but could be used by terrorists or other people with evil objectives.”  Wait, no—it allows anybody to ask for anything??  Someone needs to explain to Zhukov—and to Putin—that Alaskans actually like belonging to a country where all voices can be heard.  As usual, Russian ultranationalists who claim they are on the side of democracy are deeply unclear on the concept.

[You can read more about Alaska, Siberia, and other separatist 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.]

State of Texas Nonexistent, Claims “Child of God,” in Court for Driving with “Republic of Texas” Plates

In the wake of the large boost given to the Texan independence cause by President Barack Obama’s reelection last year (discussed recently in this blog) and the more than a hundred thousand Texans who signed an online White House petition for peaceful separation (as also discussed in this blog), the activist stunts continue.

Freedom fighter.

On March 18th, in Liberty County, just outside Houston, an elderly Texan reputed to be a member of the sometimes violent separatist organization Republic of Texas demanded to be tried in an international criminal court, saying the United States’ “State of Texas” does not exist.  The man, Lionel Marmen Lamell, was charged with driving his Cadillac with a “fictitious” “Republic of Texas” license plate instead of the required state-issued plates.  Lamell, who needed all court proceedings to be shouted to him because of a hearing impairment, claims that the Republic of Texas (which joined the Union in 1846 after ten years of de facto independence) was never formally dissolved.  The proof of this, he said, ridiculously, was Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 53, which simply refers to laws enacted during the Republic of Texas period and which Lamell misinterprets as meaning that the entity that enacted those laws is extant.  Displaying a misunderstanding of the modus tollens rule of inference, Lamell told the court, “Unless you can prove in the Bible that I am wrong, then I am right.”  He added, to the judge, “I am washed in the blood.  I am a child of God.  You have no jurisdiction.  Amen.”

The text of Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 53, taped to the window of Lionel Lamell’s Caddy.

Despite supporting arguments from Albert Thomas, whose t-shirt identified him as “chief counsel for the Republic,” Lamell, who rejected court-appointed counsel, was found guilty.  Judge Tommy Chambers sentenced him to 180 days in prison, suspended upon completion of one year’s probation, and a fine of $1,500.  I hope someone clarified for him: that’s 1,500 U.S. dollars.

A Texan separatist at a recent rally

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with 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.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  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.]

In U.N. Vote, Palestine Gains Nearly the Last Remaining Markers of Sovereign Statehood

Some countries that win their independence get it all at once.  Others achieve it in painful, incremental steps over decades.  The State of Palestine is in the second category.  Yesterday, November 29, 2012, the State of Palestine was admitted as an “observer state”—not member state—in the United Nations General Assembly.  This is the same status that Switzerland had before 2002 and which Vatican City still has—both of them long recognized by the entire world as true, sovereign states in every sense of the word.

What is—or rather, perhaps, will eventually be seen to be as—the date of Palestine’s independence?  1948?  1974?  1988?  1993?  2011?  2012?

Palestinians were offered an independent state after the Second World War, as part of the same U.N. plan that created the State of Israel, but Palestinians did not want their homeland divided and half given away to new arrivals, so they rejected the plan, and Israel filled the entire vacuum created by the United Kingdom’s relinquishment of its Palestinian mandate, and Israel forced aside as many Palestinians as it felt it needed to in order to build a nation in its enlarged allocation.  The seeds of decades of grievance were planted.

Born in two disconnected shards of territory—the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—relinquished by Jordan and Egypt in the 1970s after their defeat by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, the idea of a newly sovereign Palestine arose gradually, with the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.).  The P.L.O. was granted “observer” status in the U.N. General Assembly in 1974 as the “sole representative of the Palestinian people,” but it was not a member state.  The P.L.O.’s government-in-exile declared independence in 1988, and one by one nations around the world, starting with its Arab allies, recognized it.  Not just the Muslim states that never—and in some cases still don’t—recognize Israel, but eventually most of the world.  Perhaps the moment when states recognizing Palestine tipped above 50%, whenever that was (some time in the 1990s?) could be thought of as its independence day.

In 1993, the concrete trappings of statehood—the administration of actual territory—came with the Oslo Accords.  These agreements created the Palestinian National Authority, which now governs Gaza Strip and much of the West Bank.  In exchange, the P.L.O. and Fatah (which governs the West Bank) officially pursue a two-state solution and recognize Israel’s right to exist.

In 2011, Palestine applied for full member-state status in the U.N.—a symbolic gesture, since it was a foregone conclusion that the United States—Israel’s only true ally—would use its veto power as one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to block the move, despite the fact that the motion had an overwhelming majority of member states supporting it.

This time around, with a revised goal of observer-state status, vetoes are not possible; it is a clear vote by the General Assembly.  The vote yesterday was 138-9 in favor of admission, with 41 abstentions and 5 absences.

The “yes” votes included the Security Council members Russia, China, and France; and major nations such as India, Pakistan, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, New Zealand, Indonesia, Spain, Italy, Austria, all of Scandinavia, nearly all of Latin America, the entire Muslim world, nearly all of Africa, etc. etc.

The 41 abstentions included NATO and other U.S. allies such as Australia, the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany, and South Korea, as well as NATO and other western-leaning countries in eastern Europe which are known for their slavish adherence to U.S. foreign policy: Poland, the Baltic States, Slovakia, and so on.  But even these countries would not go along fully with the U.S. denial of the arc of history.

The eight “no” votes were the U.S., Israel, Canada, the Czech Republic (see “slavish adherence,” previous paragraph), four former U.S. colonies (Panama, plus the quasi-independent Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau), and Nauru, an eight-square-mile speck in the Pacific which is the third-smallest country in the world.  If there were ever any doubt that the U.S. was on the wrong side of history on this question, this pathetic list drives the point home once and for all.

How U.N. member states voted on Palestinian statehood this week.  “Yes” votes are in green, “no” votes in red, abstentions in yellow, and absences in blue.

So what does this mean in practical terms?  Not much right off the bat.  Palestine already enjoys diplomatic relations of a sort with much of the world and deals, to all practical purposes, as a sovereign state with nearly every country—even those that do not recognize it diplomatically, including Israel.  But now all of the things Israel does to Palestine—bombing its cities, blockading its ports, building illegal armed settlements in its territory, assassinating its leaders—are acts of aggression by one state against another.  So, of course—and very justly so—are Hamas’s rocket attacks on Israeli civilians.  No longer can Hamas hide behind the legalistic ambiguities enjoyed by “non-state actors.”  In the long term, this is the best thing for the Israeli people and the Palestinian people both; their fates are intertwined, and they both deserve equal amounts of dignity and recognition—and responsibility for being peaceful global citizens.

Meanwhile, not only the terrorists of Hamas but also Israel’s bloodthirsty generals, its unaccountable and amoral intelligence agencies, and its ultra-right-wing fanatical West Bank settlers—who do not represent the Israeli people as a whole, it should be said—all of them are stomping mad about what happened yesterday.  That’s perhaps the surest sign that this was the right thing to do.

Happy birthday, Palestine.

[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.]

Puerto Rico Votes for Statehood—or at Least for Some Kind of Change

While the world’s eyes on November 6th were on the United States’ election and the reelection of Barack Obama as president, very quietly, to the south of the U.S. mainland, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico held, on election day, an historic plebiscite on the very nature of its relationship to the U.S. which may well be putting Puerto Rico on the road to statehood.

First, some history ...
Puerto Rico was a possession of the Spanish Empire until 1898, when the United States stripped Spain of many of its colonies in an unmitigated act of aggression, an unapologetic war of conquest.  Other war booty from the Spanish-American War included the Philippines, Guam, and (de facto, briefly) Cuba.  Puerto Rico is still very much a U.S. colony.  It has its own legislature, but Puerto Ricans, though U.S. citizens, have to move to one of the 50 states or D.C. if they want to have a say in who is president.  They have one non-voting delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives and send no senators to Washington.

Puerto Rico got its own constitution and commonwealth status in 1952, which made it less dependent, but there was still agitation for Puerto Rican independence, a cause which had been born in the days of Spanish rule and developed alongside the Cuban independence movement in the late 19th century.  During the 1950s and ’60s, Puerto Rican nationalists became more militant and nationalist, and the U.S. responded in kind, using subversion and counterintelligence to suppress the separatist threat.

A 1967 referendum on the status of Puerto Rico presented three choices on the ballot: independence, statehood, or a continuation of Commonwealth status.  The vote came out with only 0.6% for independence, 39% for statehood, and 60.4% to maintain the status quo.  Though the small turnout for independence seemed almost inconceivable, and bolsters credible contentions that the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) interfered with the plebiscite, the results took the wind out of the sails of both the statehood and independence movements, which then, despite significant popular support, stalled for years.

Another vote, in 1991, was more modest in its aims, merely asking voters to approve a new constitution which guaranteed citizenship and language rights and pointed the way to a move away from colonialism, with a guarantee of the right to choose statehood or independence.  Almost incredibly, this constitution was defeated 53% to 44.9%.  This seems odd, since on the face of it the proposed constitution offered only guarantees and no losses or tradeoffs.  One explanation is that many Puerto Ricans were confused by the overly complicated proposal and worried that their citizenship status would be degraded.  Others, more reasonably, worried about language in the proposal calling for a choice between three alternatives, which raised the possibility that a choice between independence, statehood, and the status quo would split the dissatisfied-with-colonialism vote and actually postpone or eliminate the chances for statehood.

Sure enough, a three-choice referendum held anyway in 1993—drafted with the heavy participation of the U.S. Congress—created just such a split.  A minority, 48.6%, wanted the status quo, while those wanting more autonomy found their votes split between those supporting statehood (46.3%) and those supporting independence (4.4%).  Those most people wanting change were in the majority, the status quo was deemed the winner.

In 1998 there was a five-choice referendum, in which statehood proponents, again, fell just short of a majority, with 46.6%.  Independence got 2.6%, while only 0.29% voted for “free association” (like what the former U.S. possessions in the western Pacific have: the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of Palau).  Commonwealth status, the status quo, got only 993 votes, not enough to be counted as above 0.0%.  However, a whopping 50.5% chose “none of the above”—an expression of discontent, surely, but hardly a mandate for anything.

So this year Puerto Ricans were given a two-phase ballot.  The first question was whether the voter was happy with the current territorial commonwealth status.  Then, voters were asked to choose among statehood, independence, and Micronesian-style sovereign free association.  Though the “no” votes for question one constituted a surprisingly small majority, 51.70% (to 44.04% who were satisfied), the second question, which voters could answer no matter how they replied to question one, was a clearer message: 61.13% for statehood, 33.33% for free association, and 5.54% for independence.

With such a mandate, does this mean Puerto Rico will now become the 51st state?  Not really.  States can join the union only with the approval of Congress.  And since our two-party system favors parties moving to the political center and thus creating narrowly divided legislatures, this means that any admissions to the union will need to be negotiated between the two parties.  This is an old pattern, going all the way back to the wrangling between slave states and free states as territories became states in the antebellum period.  Similar considerations plagued the contentious admissions of Arizona and New Mexico, and in 1959 the admissions of Alaska and Hawaii were carried out more or less in tandem so that reliably-Democratic Hawaii and reliably-Republican Alaska would not disturb the balance of power in the Senate.

Something similar will be in play should Puerto Rican statehood come before the U.S. Congress.  But the question is: which party dominates Puerto Rico, or, more to the point, which will dominate it in the future?  If Puerto Rico is to be regarded as bringing the promise of two Republican senators, then Democrats would insist on, say, the overwhelmingly Democratic District of Columbia being admitted simultaneously.  Puerto Rico, for the moment, is a “red” (Republican) territory.  Its governor is a conservative Republican and the center-right, pro-statehood, New Progressive Party (P.N.P.) overwhelmingly dominates both chambers of Puerto Rico’s territorial legislature.  But does it need to be? And why is Puerto Rico Republican?

There are a few reasons for this.  Although Puerto Rico has a strong and vigorous tradition of radical leftism, most Puerto Ricans also are Catholic and tend to be anti-abortion, many find Republican invocations of “family values” appealing, they are overrepresented in the military and thus find Republic rhetoric of patriotism and Republican-led foreign adventurism appealing, and, perhaps just as crucially, Puerto Ricans, like Cuban-Americans in Florida, identify strongly with the Cuban people’s resistance to the single-party dictatorship of Fidel Castro—an issue on which the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis lead many to regard John F. Kennedy as having failed Cuba (though that is less true of Cuban-Americans as time goes on).

But how strongly Republican is Puerto Rico likely to remain?  Certainly it is not as certain to stay in the Republican column as D.C. is likely to stay in the Democratic one.  This is connected to the larger question, plaguing the Republican Party currently, of whether American Latinos in the U.S. are likely to become more Democratic or more Republican, which demographics indicate will be a deciding factor in the future balance of power in the U.S., with Hispanics being decisive populations in swing states like Florida, New Mexico, Nevada, and even North Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin—with Texas and Arizona even possibly headed for swing-state status as Latino populations grow.

Puerto Ricans do not have everything in common with the Mexican-American and other Latin American groups that dominate the Hispanic population in the 50 states.  For one thing, immigration is not as dominant issue for Puerto Ricans, since they are Americans, not immigrants.  But a shared culture makes for many shared concerns.  George W. Bush made inroads into the Latino vote in the 2000s, but these Republican gains were more or less erased (along with Republican appeal to American Indians) with the advent of Barack Obama in 2008.  But is the Democratic surge for Obama an artifact of the appeal and romance of seeing a candidate of color?  If the 2016 election features an Anglo for president on the Democratic ticket, and even possibly an Hispanic Republican such as Mark Rubio, could things flip again?  This is what is at stake for the two parties as they contemplate, as they may soon do, Puerto Rican statehood.

Certainly, the 2012 election campaign does not bode well for Republican fortunes in Puerto Rico.  For one thing, the long, drawn-out Republican primary campaign, where candidates struggled to appeal to the overwhelmingly-white right-wing base of the party, racist and xenophobic rhetoric surged.  Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum condescendingly lectured “black people” (or “blah people,” as Santorum later claimed he actually said) to get off welfare and work for a change.  Candidates tried to outdo each other in how draconian they would be on undocumented immigrants—and Puerto Ricans, though this does not apply to them directly, could certainly detect the whiff of racism in many of those pronouncements.  Santorum himself famously told Puerto Ricans that he would support their ambitions for statehood but only if they dropped Spanish as an official language—which Puerto Ricans found deeply offensive.  Rick Perry (himself a sympathizer with independence for Texas) seconded that opinion.

Oh.  My.  God.  Think how close we came to having the Addams Family in the White House.

When the primary campaign ended, and Mitt Romney shifted his rhetoric to try to appeal to Latinos as well, he seemed to hope that Latinos have a memory depth of about two weeks.  They don’t, and Obama this year claimed one of the largest shares of the Latino vote ever.

More news about idiot gringos.

If one feels that Puerto Rico is headed for being a Democratic constituency, then Congress may decide that Puerto Rico must be admitted in tandem with a 52nd state that would be reliably Republican, such as Guam, with its heavily military population, or American Samoa possibly (but not necessarily), or maybe even one of the proposals for a red state created through partition, like South California (the southern and inland Republican areas of what is otherwise solidly Democratic California) (as discussed in an article in this blog), or the State of Superior, which would hive off the Republican-dominated Upper Peninsula of currently-Democratic Michigan, and possibly the northern part of the swing state of Wisconsin as well.  (Another possibility, of course, would be to keep the number at 50 by jettisoning a state of the appropriate political orientation.  Texas is the candidate I proffer, and many Texans agree (with apologies to all the Texas I love: tell you what, we can attach Austin to Louisiana, with a narrow corridor connecting the two—or something like that).

But those partition movements are non-starters, for various reasons.  And the Guamanian statehood movement is not nearly as strong as the Puerto Rican one.  More likely, then, mainland politicians will all say they support statehood for Puerto Rico, but Congress will do everything to avoid voting on it.  This will, undoubtedly, lead to more bitterness and resentment in Puerto Rico, and may even in the longer term strengthen the independence movement.  That’s my prediction anyway.  I could be wrong.

More to the point, though: if Puerto Rico becomes the 51st state, what will that do to our flag?  Huffington Post ran a piece on this question the other day, offering some proposals.  Some of them look a bit silly ...

... or a lot silly ...

... as does this proposal, from another source, ...

... and some of them, though they make a certain amount of sense, for some reason make my eyes hurt ...

But this question has been tackled before.  In fact, in an article earlier this year about proposals to make the constituent territories and republics of Siberia new U.S. states, I provided a link to the mathematician Skip Garibaldi’s attempt to come up with a formula for forming new star grids as new states join the union, and to a delightful online widget for generating flags for each number of states up to 100, keeping to a strict rule for more-or-less-nicely-shaped grids and sticking to either rows of equal length or rows of alternating lengths differing only by one star.  Though, unfortunately, that link is now dead.  However, this is the proposal that would probably prevail:

For the time being, though, Puerto Rico is likely to remain in a disenfranchised limbo.  Puerto Rico has never gotten a good deal from the U.S.  It deserves better.

[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 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.]

Yee-Haw (Again)! Texas Patriots Ready to Defend Their State against O.S.C.E. Election Observers

Recently in this blog, I reported on the judge and sheriff in Lubbock County, Texas, who committed themselves to defending their square-shaped scrap of desert from the jackbooted United Nations in case Barack Obama is reelected.  On that occasion, I opined that the jury was still out on whether there’s something in Texas’s air or soil that makes people stupid, or whether stupid people just tend to move to Texas.  Well, we’re no closer to answering that question, but here is further evidence to consider.

An image from a right-wing website commenting on the O.S.C.E. “issue”

Texas’s Republican attorney general, Greg Abbott, raised the alarm this week about election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (O.S.C.E.) monitoring polling places in Texas during the November 6th national elections.  Abbott wrote on October 23rd to the O.S.C.E.’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (hmm, sounds kinda socialist, don’t it?) to voice his objections.  In fact, such election observing is actually part of a long-standing and completely routine exchange of observers among nations in the 56-member O.S.C.E. (which includes the United States).  The O.S.C.E. observed U.S. elections at the invitation of Pres. George W. Bush during his administration, for example; meanwhile, the alliance serves to try to hold recalcitrant young democracies like Uzbekistan and Belarus to a higher standard—and educate all member nations about how democracy is going in other member nations.  No one is actually policing or enforcing anything.

Texas attorney general Greg Abbott struggles with some big words on a cue card,
with the Ten Commandments as a backdrop.

Laudable, no?  Not to Abbott, whose letter stated, “Our concern is that this isn’t some benign observation but something intended to be far more prying and maybe even an attempt to suppress voter integrity,” and he made vague threats that observers could be prosecuted.  Please note—and I cannot sufficiently emphasize this—this is not a sheriff or judge in some shit-ass Texas county in the middle of nowhere.  This is the attorney general of the entire state of Texas.  He has a law degree from Vanderbilt University, no less.  Presumably, he can even read and tie his shoes and stuff.  To add to the fun, Texas’s tiny-brained Republican governor, Rick Perry, has commented on the subject too, tweeting, “No U.N. monitors/inspectors will be part of any TX election process”—confusing, in typical fashion, the O.S.C.E. with the dreaded diabolical satanic United Nations.  As you can imagine, Hillary Rodham Clinton gets singled out for demonization quite a bit as well in comments on this controversy in the online redneckosphere.

Meanwhile, Daniel Miller, president of the Texas Nationalist Movement (T.N.M.), which supports secession from the United States, said that his organization “condemns the outright contempt of the sovereignty of Texas by the Obama regime, its partisan support groups, and international N.G.O.s.  These three have conspired to attack the foundation of our republican form of government which is rightly guaranteed to Texans in the Texas Constitution under Article 1, Section 2.”  The T.N.M. will be sending its own observers to polling stations, Miller stated, promising citizens’ arrests if O.S.C.E. observers try anything funny.

“Citizen’s arrest!  Citizen’s arrest!”

Silly?  Well, yes and no.  This non-issue is a useful one for Texan politicians eager for votes this election year, since it erects a phony composite enemy made up of all the different things that most Texan Republicans hate: democratic checks and balances, confident professional women, pointy-headed intellekchels, ferners, and black people.

And don’t even get me started on those jack-booted thugs from Unesco.  You jes’ try ’n’ declare the Alamo any kinda commie/socialist/hippie “world heritage site” ’n’ we’ll rip you two new assholes.  Darn tootin’.

[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.]

Okies Call Cops on Indians with “Tomahawks”—or Sacred Eagle Staff as It Turns Out

Wild-west fantasies die hard among the ignorant.

Residents of Kay County, Oklahoma, called police September 5th in alarm over Native Americans “running down the road with weapons and tomahawks.”  Police arrived, drew firearms, and handcuffed a citizen of the Mohawk Nation who was running with a sacred eagle staff as part of a Peace and Dignity Journey marathon run, held for Native and non-Native participants alike.

Apparently residents had phoned police because they were concerned about a recent rash of break-ins—because of course we all know that whenever American Indians decide to break into a house and steal things, they first run through the center of town in a large group, in full ceremonial regalia, carrying sacred eagle staffs.  A local Indian newspaper called the incident “typical of the type of ‘law enforcement’ our indigenous citizens endure in Oklahoma.”

[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.]

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.]