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.]

South Ossetia Update: “Independent” Elections in an “Independent” State—Russian Style

Things in South Ossetia have reached a crisis.  Increasingly angry crowds are demanding that the candidate who clearly won the election, Alla Dzhioyeva, be allowed to take office as president.  In fact, her supporters claim that she is president, after winning 56.7% of the vote in the November 27th election, and that the outgoing authoritarian regime’s annulment of the results, because of supposed irregularities by Dzhioyeva’s supporters, is illegitimate.

Russian and South Ossetian officials are trying to calm the crisis, but it is beginning to look a lot like Ukraine’s 2004-05 “Orange Revolution,” when street protests reversed a corrupt election which had tried to place a Moscow-backed candidate into office.  That revolution was a defeat for Vladimir Putin in his goal of preventing Ukraine from allying itself with the west, and Putin has never really gotten over it.

South Ossetia, recall, is the autonomous region which most of the world recognizes as part of the Republic of Georgia but which, along with another such region, Abkhazia, had been a de facto independent state for many years.  No one can agree who fired the first shots in the 2008 South Ossetia War, but the upshot was that Georgia tried to assert control over the two territories, but a Russian invasion prevented that, followed by Russia formally recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states.  Currently, only Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and Nauru recognize the two countries.  The last three Pacific island nations are doing so merely to court Russian investment, while Nicaragua and Venezuela are interested only in thumbing their nose at the United States.  Not even the most toadying Moscow lapdog client-states like Belarus and Serbia are sending diplomats.

Ironically, South Ossetia and Abkhazia were freer before they were formally declared “independent.”  At least then, they were just the dangerous neighborhood in Georgia where even the cops didn’t want to go.  They ran their own affairs.  But instead of just repelling the Georgian forces and restoring the status quo, Russia has turned them into Soviet-style satellite states.  The tacit understanding, from Putin’s perspective, has seemed to be, “Do whatever we say and remember that you couldn’t even exist without us.  And we’ll both pretend that this is ‘independence.’”  But Putin never factored in one possible wild card: the South Ossetian people.  The peoples of the Caucasus in recent decades have been fractious and ineffective, almost laughably so.  Georgia has been falling apart, while Dagestan rivals Somalia as one of the world’s worst multi-ethnic basket cases.  No one thought that South Ossetians would have their shit together sufficiently to use people power to reject Russian influence in the way that Baltic, Czech, Hungarian, Ukrainian, and other peoples have during the fall of Communism.  But now they are.  And no one quite knows how to react.

It seems that South Ossetia would like to be independent in the full sense of the word.  The next few days may determine whether they will be able to, or whether Putin will use the scorched-earth policy he used in Chechnya to keep North Caucasus nations within his empire.