“Captain Moroni” and “Y’all-Qaeda”: Why the Armed Standoff in Oregon Is Being Mishandled—or, Rather, Not Handled at All

Back in spring of 2014, I wrote in this space about the armed confrontation in southern Nevada led by the extremist Mormon rancher Cliven Bundy.  He was in serious arrears for grazing fees on federal land and hit upon the idea that he didn’t have to pay them at all because his family had become owners of the land through “pre-emptive rights and beneficial use” (similar, ironically, to arguments used by radical leftists against absentee landlords in Latin American land-reform movements).  Federal agents arrived to confiscate his cattle in accordance with the law, but he and hundreds of armed supporters, including snipers and wielders of automatic weapons, stood their ground until finally the feds backed off.  Bundy never did have to pay those grazing fees.  I warned at the time that this would embolden future libertarian and anti-government militants.  And just last week I opined in my annual round-up article “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2016” that the rise of the Republican Party’s far-right extremist frontrunner for the presidential nomination, Donald Trump, would further inspire anti-government demonstrations and siege situations.  I was not pessimistic enough to think that I would be proven correct so soon, but events in Oregon this week have brought not just anti-government militancy, but the Bundy family in particular, back into the news.

Cliven Bundy in Nevada in 2014

On January 2nd, a group of armed militiamen led by three of Bundy’s fourteen (!) children took over a complex of administrative buildings on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon, near the town of Burns.  The events began with the imprisonment of two Oregon ranchers, Dwight and Steve Hammond, charged with arson on federal lands that are administered by the United States federal government’s Bureau of Land Management (B.L.M.).  The Hammonds and their supporters claimed to be managing invasive plants with the burns; others say they set fires to destroy evidence of their illegal poaching; but no one disputes that they broke the law, and, as laws go, arson is a serious one.  The charges against them came under anti-terrorism provisions as well, since the Hammonds had repeatedly threatened authorities with violence.

The Bundy family took up the Hammonds’ cause and publicized it among the vast network of local right-wing extremist militias that have proliferated over the past several decades in rural America, but especially whenever Democrats are in the White House.  Last month they organized a “Committee of Safety” (using language from the American Revolution), which they proclaimed as a “a governmental body established by the people in the absence of the ability of the existing government to provide for the needs and protection of civilized society.”

Some Three-Percenters with their flag (not a scene from this week’s standoff)

Ammon and Ryan Bundy, accompanied by members of the anti-government “Three-Percenters” militia (including Jon Ritzheimer, a celebrity in the militia world who rails against Muslims and had been kicked out of the Oath Keepers hate group in Arizona), took over several buildings on the wildlife preserve and set up roadblocks.  The occupiers of the buildings, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, claimed initially they numbered 150 people, later revised to 20 or 25, but that has not been confirmed.  There are possibly “no more than a dozen” of them, according to one reporter.

Ammon and Ryan Bundy

It is also unclear what role the Bundy family’s conservative Mormonism may play in the ideological stew of white supremacism, anarcho-libertarianism, firearms fetishism, and good-ol’-boy frontier mentality that informs this mini-movement.  One activist in the occupied building who spoke to the media identified himself only as “Captain Moroni, from Utah.”  Some observers think that this nom de guerre is a “dogwhistle” directed at Mormons who will recognize the reference to the figure of the same name in the Book of Mormon who rallied the Nephites (a fictional ancient tribe, supposedly a remnant of the Lost Tribes of Israel who migrated to the New World) against the corrupt King Amalickiah under a flag called the “Title of Liberty.”  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has already issued a statement saying that “this armed occupation can in no way be justified on a scriptural basis.”  But what else would they say?  And even Cliven Bundy told media that the current occupation is “not exactly what I thought should happen.”

Captain Moroni with the Title of Liberty flag, from an L.D.S. illustration

The standoff is ongoing, and it is clearly about more than just the Hammonds (who began their sentence yesterday in a Los Angeles prison).  Ammon Bundy says the protesters will not leave until “the federal government ... give[s] up its unconstitutional presence in this county.”  They also point out that they are against the whole idea of federal wildlife refuges.  In the words of David M. Ward, sheriff of Harney County, where the standoff is occurring, “These men came to Harney County claiming to be part of militia groups supporting local ranchers, when in reality these men had alternative motives, to attempt to overthrow the county and federal government in hopes to spark a movement across the United States.”

A scene from the 2014 Nevada standoff.  Note t-shirt with “baker’s apostrophe.”

In fact, “standoff” is hardly an appropriate word for the situation, since there is no visible physical response by law enforcement to the occupation whatsoever.  It is not clear who, if anyone, and at what level, is issuing “stand down” orders, but authorities are giving the occupied buildings a very wide berth, despite state police command centers far away in Burns and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s claims that they are on the case.

A special Oregon version of the Gadsden (“Don’t Tread on Me”) flag
on display in Harney County this week

Given how heavily armed the occupiers are, this is quite astonishing, and more than one observer has pointed out that if, say, radical Muslims or Black nationalists were occupying those buildings, all of Harney County would be a glowing crater by now.  When the Black nationalist organization MOVE was involved in a similar standoff in Philadelphia in 1985, the city government bombed the neighborhood, destroying 65 homes and killing eleven people, including five children.  When anti-government members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) set up an armed encampment at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973, President Richard Nixon sent in the army—the only time the U.S. military has been deployed against U.S. citizens on U.S. territory since the Civil War.  Some also wonder why the media is so hesitant to call the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom (dubbed by social-media wags as “Y’all-Qaeda” or “Vanilla ISIS” and as “yee-haw-dists”) a terrorist group, and wonder if the term terrorist, as it is actually used, has more to do with people’s skin color or religion than with how armed and dangerous they are.

Philadelphia, 1985: what happens to armed protest encampments if you’re black

The White House said yesterday that President Barack Obama was monitoring the situation and that “this is a local law enforcement matter.”  In fact, that statement is not correct.  Crimes committed on federal property are a federal matter, but the federal government has decided not to enforce the law itself—just as it declined to do a year and half ago at Bundy’s ranch in Nevada.  As Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.), an organization which monitors militias and hate groups, put it, the Bundys in 2014 “were emboldened by their ability to run federal officials off at the point of a gun.  Now, a year and half later, there have been no prosecutions whatsoever.  Pointing a gun at a federal officer is a crime.”  Clearly, the Obama administration fears a confrontation that could spin out of control, like the ones at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1993 (three dead) and at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in 1994 (86 dead, including children).  Those events became recruiting bonanzas for the increasingly widespread and angry right-wing militia movement across the U.S.

The Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in 1994

Certainly, it is true that leaving the occupiers alone, not allowing anyone else in, and waiting for them to run out of food and surrender is among the more peaceful ways to end the conflict.  If nothing else, there aren’t even any police visible to shoot at.

Is that a Nazi salute, or is he just showing people where the port-a-potties are?

On the other hand, the message the authorities are sending militias is that they have more or less free rein to take over federal facilities without opposition.  Believe me, they will take us up that invitation.

[Thanks to Jeremy Appleton and Anna Reynolds for alerting me to sources consulted for this article.]

[You can read more about right-wing militias, the American Indian Movement, Black nationalists, and other 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.]

Liberland’s Empty Promises to Syrian Refugees Scorned by Other Micronations

In the midst of the Middle Eastern refugee crisis roiling Europe, an unrecognized “micronation” on a chunk of no-man’s-land between Serbia and Croatia is trying to market itself as a haven for tens of thousands fleeing civil war in places such as Libya, Iraq, Yemen, and, especially and most tragically, Syria.  The so-called Free Republic of Liberland was declared April 13th (as reported at the time in this blog; see also article here) on three nearly empty square miles of grassy fields, thickets, and riverbank along the Danube River, one of several shards of intersecting claims by Serbia and Croatia as a result of the shifting course of the winding Danube over the decades.  Neither side presses its claim, but both are clear that Liberland has no right to set up shop there.  The republic is intended as a libertarian utopia, founded by Vít Jedlička, a 31-year-old officer in the Czech Republic’s small libertarian Free Citizens’ Party (Strana svobodných občanů).  Croatian and Serbian police and border agencies have quietly foiled attempts by Jedlička to do more than raise a flag there.  Meanwhile, despite Jedlička’s big talk to the contrary, the chances of any kind of international recognition are close to nil.

Vit Jedlička

Indeed, even among the hundreds-strong community of micronations around the world, Liberland is an outcast.  As far as I can tell, only the risible Kingdom of North Sudan—founded last year along the border between Egypt and Sudan by an American from Virginia so that he could make his seven-year-old daughter a “princess” (as reported at the time in this blog)—has extended diplomatic recognition.  They have also gotten an endorsement from Switzerland’s libertarian Unabhängige Partei (“Independence Party”) (which uses the exclamatory acronym UP!); much of Liberland’s support and organizational energy seems to come from Switzerland.  (Unlike many libertarian parties which pander to the xenophobic right, UP! supports abolishing all restrictions and controls on movement across any borders.)  The reaction from other micronational leaders, who tend, at least in Europe and Australia, to be more left-leaning than Jedlička, has been cold.  Now Jedlička is raising more hackles by wading into the debate over the flood of migrants to the Balkans by offering citizenship to anyone willing to pay his $10,000 passport fee.  A couple weeks ago Jedlička told media that among the 380,000 or so citizenship applications received since April are now 20,000 from Syria and nearly 2,000 from Libya.

“Bring us your tired, your poor, your hungry ...
and we will take every last penny they have and then turn them out into the cold.”

This is not surprising.  Other micronations, such as the Grand Duchy of Flandrensis, a Belgium-based micronation project which administers no territory (though it claims some islands off Antarctica), report a sharp increase in applications from the Middle East.  Doubtless this is because of desperate and ill-informed war refugees grasping at straws and not realizing from their web-surfing that some online citizenship-application forms are not from physically existing countries.  On September 22nd, Niels Vermeersch, the Flandrensisian grand duke and head of state, posted on his Facebook page, “On a weekly basis we receive requests for the Flandrensisian citizenship from the Middle East with often sad stories.  Those people are so desperate that they are willing to try everything and they don’t seem to know that Flandrensis is only a micronation.  We believe that every human being has the right to a home and a decent life.  That is the world we want for our future generations to come!”

Big plans for Liberland

Thus the news out of Liberland particularly infuriates Vermeersch. “Where do they plan to put them?” the post continued.  “How will they feed them?  Where will these people work & live?  ...  Liberland used this crisis to get press and it is cruel to give those people false hope, using misery of refugees to make money.”  Georg von Strofzia, foreign minister of the Kingdom of Ruritania (the fictional nation from The Prisoner of Zenda, asserted to be within the Czech Republic), added, “Three square miles!  That’s 7 square kilometers!  This isn’t Dubai.  There is no treasury to pay to import food for these people.  The sanitation problems would be a nightmare.”  This, of course, despite long-term plans to erect a futuristic city on the spot.  (See the artist’s rendering at the top of this article for one such plan.)

Alleged scenes of Liberlandic nation-building can be found on YouTube.
But it’s not clear if anything is actually being built there.

Prince Jean-Pierre IV, of the Principality of Aigues-Mortes, a high-profile micronation in a walled Medieval city on the Mediterranean coast of France, agreed, writing September 30th on the “Micronations and Alternative Polities” Facebook group, “We all agree that Liberland is a scam and that it gives a very bad image of micronationalism.”  And Olivier Touzeau, Emperor of Angyalistan (a French-based micronation whose territory is “the horizon”), added in what became an official communiqué on behalf of the Organization of Microfrancophony (Organisation de la MicroFrancophonie) and co-signers from Aigues-Mortes, “The micronations who publish passports are faced with the serious problem of the refugee crisis and the actions needed to give hope to humanity without fooling anyone.  Liberland just did exactly the opposite of what can be hoped from a serious micronational project.  We strongly condemn the despicable initiative of the leader of the free Republic of Liberland, offering Syrian refugees to come to his claimed territory for $ 10,000.  The free Republic of Liberland is a media smokescreen that throws ridiculous and vain shadows at the expense of human distress on the ideals of most serious micronations and shows thus the full extent of the intellectual swindle it stands for.”  (See my recent blog article for more on these micronations.)

Flag of the Grand Duchy of Flandrensis

So far, several other micronations have signed on to Emperor Olivier’s declaration, including, in addition to Aigues-Mortes and Flandrensis, the Cyanocitta Cristata Principal Republic (an environmental project; Cyanocitta cristata is the scientific term for the bluejay), the Principality of Hélianthis, Ladonia (on the coast of Sweden), the Empire of Lemuria (not to be confused with either the Indian Ocean protocontinent or the mythical “sister city” to Atlantis), Lykosha (an online community which gathers under a lupine banner), the Republic of Navalon (an ecological “floating island” project), the Republic of Padrhom, the Holy Empire of Réunion (declared by citizens of Brazil on the eponymous French territory of the African coast), Ruritania (see above), the Kingdom of Ruthenia (not to be confused with Transcarpathian Ruthenia, a.k.a. Ukraine’s Transcarpathia (Zakarpattia) oblast, discussed frequently in this blog—e.g., articles here and here), the State of Sandus, the Republic of Saint-Castin (located within Quebec), and the Consulat of Surland (five islands in the Moselle River, in France).

Jedlička even went so far as to host, at a hotel in Istanbul, a Liberland recruitment drive on September 16th.  Turkey is the point of transit for most European-bound refugees from Syria and elsewhere.

H.I.M. George II, Emperor of Atlantium

George II, Emperor of Atlantium (which is surrounded by New South Wales, Australia), thundered, “Liberland is a financial scam dressed up in the language of ‘freedom’ that is used by libertarians and other conservatives to deliver the exact opposite: the entrenchment of power and privilege and the denial of opportunity.”  (His comments remind me that I lament still that he was unable to attend this summer’s 3rd PoliNation conference and micronational summit in the Italy-based Republic of Alcatraz (attended by this blogger and reported on in this blog), where his presentation was to have been titled “Reclaiming Micronationalism: How Libertarians Ruined a Good Thing.”)

Liberland’s one building.  It doesn’t look like it can sleep 10,000.

Jedlička may or may not have his heart in the right place, and he may or may not believe that he will really build a shining city of freedom on his little plot of land.  But at the very least he needs to scale back his big talk, and not raise false hopes among desperate people.

Swiss volunteers scouting Liberland for a good spot for a refugee camp

[Thanks to Emperor Olivier, Michael Cessna, and Queen Anastasia for information for, and corrections to, this article.]

[You can read more about many micronations 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 interview for more information on the book.]

Bulgarian Declares Mass of Floating Pumice off New Zealand “Principality of New Atlantis”

It’s being reported this week that a 59-year-old businessman from Bulgaria has declared what he hopes will be the world’s newest independent country: the Principality of New Atlantis (Нова Атлантида).  The businessman, Vladimir Yordanov Balanov, has chosen as New Atlantis’s location a giant mass of floating volcanic pumice in the South Pacific measuring about 26,800 square kilometers—a bit smaller than Haiti or Belgium.  (See the nation’s website here.)

This rocky mass, generated by an underwater volcanic eruption, was first reported in 2012 by New Zealand’s navy, but it is not in that country’s territorial waters.  It is at approximately 168ºW and 38ºS, due east of the country’s large North Island and due south of the self-governing overseas New Zealand territory of Niue.  It even lies significantly outside New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone.

The approximate location of “New Atlantis” in relation to New Zealand’s marine boundaries.

Balanov originally tried to convince his native Republic of Bulgaria to annex it—there are even indications he travelled there to plant a flag—but he got no expressions of interest either from Sofia or from the European Union (E.U.), of which Bulgaria is a member.  (Bulgaria has never had any overseas territories.  The E.U. does not have overseas territories itself other than overseas territories of specific member states.  Some overseas territories of E.U. member states, such as French Guiana and the Canary Islands, are part of the E.U., while others, like Greenland, the Falkland Islands, Curaçao, and French Polynesia, lie outside the union while still being tethered to their mother countries.  Nor has any Eastern European country had overseas colonies, except for one: the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, a part of modern Latvia which enjoyed quasi-independence from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries and briefly established colonies on Tobago in the Caribbean—now half of independent Trinidad and Tobago—and on St. Andrews Island off the coast of what is now the Republic of the Gambia.  (St. Andrews has been renamed Kunta Kinteh Island, named for a fictional ancestor of African-Americans in Alex Haley’s 1976 novel Roots, later played on television by LeVar Burton.))

The flag of Liberland

Other citizens of New Atlantis include, in addition to Balanov himself (who, the published constitution implies, will be New Atlantis’s founding hereditary prince), Balanov’s wife Galina, as well as Hristo Radkov, vice-president of the Bulgarian chapter of Mensa, the international organization for high-I.Q. individuals.  Balanov said that he was partly inspired by the establishment in April (reported at the time in this blog) of the tiny libertarian micronation of Liberland, on the border between Serbia and Croatia—a project headed by a Czech but largely, it seems, funded and staffed via Switzerland.

In this map of disputed and unclaimed areas along the Serbian-Croatian border, the green area (“Siga”) is “Liberland,” while “Pocket 1” is the proclaimed territory of the Kingdom of Enclava (see below).

Liberland is situated in a 3-square-mile area consituting one of several no-man’s-lands along the disputed border.  The Liberland project had already inspired one other micronation: a group of tourists from Poland later that month declared a Kingdom of Enclava along the border between Croatia and Slovenia.  But the Slovenian foreign ministry quickly pointed out that “Enclava” was not terra nullius but was actually undisputed Slovenian territory, even though admittedly the two states have not finalized the demarcation of their border.  Enclava’s founder, Kamil Wrona, calling himself King Enclav I, then relocated his 134-citizen project to one of the true no-man’s-lands on the Danube River near Liberland (see map above).  But Croatian and Serbian police have consistently done everything they can to shut down Liberland’s publicity stunts and flag-raisings.

The U.K.’s Sun tabloid has covered the Enclava story, since Britain, which has a large Polish population, is home to some who are connected the project.

The Bulgarian founders of “New Atlantis” may yet prove to be making the same mistake that Liberlanders, Enclavans, and many other micronationalists have made—assuming that because a scrap of land is technically unclaimed, no state will interfere with the founding of an independent entity there.  A libertarian Lithuanian-American real estate mogul named Michael Oliver made this mistake in the early 1970s, when he barged tons of sand from Australia to the Minerva Reefs, a set of low seamounts between Fiji and Tonga which did not poke above water for enough of the tidal cycle to be classified under international law as “territory.”  But as soon as the reef was built up enough to pass legal muster, Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, Tonga’s king, claimed it, and sent a naval vessel to eject Oliver and his nascent Republic of Minerva.  (Today, the reefs have eroded away once again to nothingness, but rival claims are still being made by Tonga, Fiji, and one “Prince Calvin,” an American who says he is the “island’s” monarch.)  Oliver’s similar “seasteading” project in Palmyra Atoll, a United States territory near Hawai‘i, got even less far.

Spidermonkey Island, a floating island off the coast of Brazil invented by Hugh Lofting for the Doctor Dolittle novels, would not qualify as “territory” under international law because, like the New Atlantis pumice patch, it is not anchored to the ocean floor.  Here, some whales under Dolittle’s command help move Spidermonkey Island to a more convenient spot.

The “New Atlantis” mass of pumice stays above water throughout the tidal cycle, but it is not legally “land” either, since it is floating, not anchored.  Whether New Zealand, its nearest neighbor, will tolerate any state-building there remains to be seen.  Certainly, with no source of freshwater and no supply ports anywhere near by, it would be difficult to colonize.  Perhaps Balanov was also inspired by the recent Image Comics series titled Great Pacific, which envisions a do-it-yourself nation called New Texas founded atop an (actual existing, sadly) floating mass of plastic in the northern Pacific Ocean.  The comics series, however, remains silent on many of the insuperable logistical barriers to such a project.

Balanov and compatriots may also want to consider a new name for their principality.  The term New Atlantis may well derive from the use of the name Atlantis in Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel-format libertarian manifesto Atlas Shrugged, in which it, along with Galt’s Gulch, was a label for the hidden mountain refuge in Colorado where the world’s leading industrialists relocated themselves after dropping out of society so that they could live in peace and prosperity while the greedy, lazy “second-handers” bent on the redistribution of wealth suffered the utter implosion of the rest of the world’s now rudderless economy.  (Just to clarify: in Rand’s novel, these industrialists were supposed to be the good guys.)

Vladimir Balanov posing with the Bulgarian and New Atlantean flags

Also, this isn’t even the first use of the name New Atlantis.  In 1964, Ernest Hemingway’s brother Leicester Hemingway founded his Republic of New Atlantis on a bamboo raft lashed to an old Ford engine block floating off the coast of Jamaica.  And in 1624, Sir Francis Bacon published a description of a fictional utopian “New Atlantis” on an island called Bensalem off the coast of Peru.

The flag of Leicester Hemingway’s Republic of New Atlantis (1964)

But the oddest thing about the name is that New Atlantis is not in the Atlantic but in the Pacific.  Why don’t they call it New Lemuria?

The original, original New Atlantis, as envisioned by Sir Francis Bacon

Thanks to Peppino Galiardi of the Kingdom of Cavaleria for alerting me to some sources and information for this article.

[You can read more about the Republic of New Atlantis 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 special announcement for more information on the book.]

Liberland: Czech Libertarian Declares New State on Danube Disputed by Croats and Serbs

This past week a new nation was declared, on a spot of land in the murkily demarcated border zone in the region of Slavonia where the Republic of Serbia and the Republic of Croatia meet.  But it is not a Serb or Croat behind the project, but a Czech one, and it is more ideological than ethnonationalist. The founder, Vít Jedlička, on April 13th, announced the independence of the Free Republic of Liberland (Svobodná republika Liberland) on a parcel of land on the west bank of the Danube (the mostly Croatian side) around Gornja Siga, an area which is a de facto no-man’s-land since neither side asserts a claim on it.

Gornja Siga, in green, is only one of several parcels of land
along the Croatian–Serbian frontier with no clear status.

In 1991, Croatia successfully seceded from the ethnic-Serb-dominated Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was subsequently whittled down of all of its peripheral republics until it became simply the rump Republic of Serbia.  Croatia is in the European Union (E.U.), but Serbia is still on a rocky road to normalization with the West.

The self-declared President Jedlička—a 31-year-old local official of the Czech Republic’s marginal, libertarian Free Citizens’ Party (Strana svobodných občanů), which is hostile to Czechs’ membership in the E.U.—admits that there are no “facts on the ground,” as it were, in Gornja Siga itself, only a declaration made from afar.  There was also an impromptu, unauthorized flag-raising on Liberlandic territory.  But although, as Jedlička told Time magazine, “it started a little bit like a protest, ... it’s really turning out to be a real project with real support.”

A Czech ZZ Top tribute band rocked a recent Free Citizens’ Party rally.

The three-square-mile statelet is to have no enforced taxation and no military and seems to be modeled on libertarian ideas that would be familiar to, for example, followers of Ron Paul and Rand Paul in the United States.  “The objective of the founders of the new state,” says Jedlička, “is to build a country where honest people can prosper without being oppressed by governments making their lives unpleasant through the burden of unnecessary restrictions and taxes.”  Apparently, there are already 20,000 applications for citizenship, being processed by seven volunteers working around the clock, but Jedlicka plans to cap the on-paper population at 3,000 or 5,000 for the time being.

One of the few requirements for citizenship is a lack of a Nazi, Communist, or “extremist” past.  (Presumably, radical anarcho-libertarianism is, for these purposes, not classified as “extremist.”)  It is unclear at this point whether anyone currently lives in the designated territory of Liberland, but aerial photos suggest that it its status as terra nullius is de facto and not just de jure.  The Serbian and Croatian governments have not yet responded to the declaration, though Egypt’s foreign ministry has already warned Egyptians against trying to move there.  Bitcoin, reportedly, is to be the national currency.

Originally, Jedlička’s idea was borne of frustration at the marginalization of libertarian ideas in the Czech Republic—even though his country is more committed to free-market principles than almost any in the world.  The Free Citizens’ Party has one seat in the mostly powerless European Parliament and none in the Czech legislature.  “I’m still going to be active in Czech politics,” he added.  “I would probably resign and let somebody else run Liberland for me if there was a chance to do political change in the Czech Republic.”

Most high-profile micronations can be found in the English-speaking world (especially Australia, for some reason) and Scandinavia, with some in the rest of western Europe as well.  The Balkans have vanishingly few so far.  But the Czech Republic is no stranger to the phenomenon.  In 1997 a Czech photographer named Tomáš Harabiš founded a Kingdom of Wallachia (Valašské Kralovství) in the republic’s Moravian Wallachia region (not to be confused with Romania’s region of Wallachia), and the noted Czech comic film actor Bolek Polívka was crowned King Boleslav the Gracious (later deposed). There are, on paper, 80,000 “Wallachian” citizens.

Moravian Wallachia’s King Boleslav the Gracious

More flamboyantly, a 16th-century castle in Černá, in the central Czech Republic, in 1996 became the physical site of the Other World Kingdom (O.W.K.), a micronation based on the B.D.S.M. (bondage-and-discipline/sado-masochism) subculture, in particular the “femdom” (female domination) branch of it.  Really a glorified sex club, it touted itself as an absolute matriarchal monarchy under Queen Patricia I, with institutionalized male slavery.  The O.W.K. now exists only online.

Four worthless vermin—I mean, citizens—pay tribute to Queen Patricia I in the erstwhile Other World Kingdom.

It is no accident for the Czech Republic to originate what may yet prove to be the most prominent libertarian micronation movement.  During the Cold War, Czechoslovakia was arguably the most culturally Western-leaning part of the Communist, Soviet-aligned East Bloc, possibly even more than East Germany; Prague, after all, is farther west than Vienna or Berlin.  The country’s leading dissident, Václav Havel, who became president after the 1989 revolution, was an unabashed Americophile, obsessed with the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol.  His successor, Václav Klaus, was one of the most ardently pro-free-market heads of state—more Thatcherite than Margaret Thatcher herself.  When a dissident-spearheaded set of mild reforms known as “socialism with a human face” (socializmus s ľudskou tvárou) led in 1968 to the brutal Soviet invasion and crackdown known as the Prague Spring, it understandably soured many Czechs on the idea of the mixed-economy social-democratic approach halfway between socialism and capitalism which was the emerging model in western Europe and in places like Poland, where dissent took the form of organized labor.  And, as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, Czechs were influenced by free-market economists such as Austria’s Ludwig von Mises of the Austrian School of economic theory and two Nobel laureates: the Viennese-born Prussian–Bohemian aristocrat Friedrich Hayek and the dwarfish Milton Friedman (author of Free to Choose), who was (like Andy Warhol, funnily enough), the son of immigrants from the old Czechoslovakia’s eastern region of Carpathian Ruthenia (now an increasingly contested part of Ukraine, as discussed elsewhere in this blog).

Milton Friedman (left; actual size) also had Czechoslovak blood in his veins.

But Liberland is hardly the first libertarian experiment in the annals of micronationdom.  In the 1970s, a Lithuanian-American real-estate tycoon named Michael J. Oliver attempted to take advantage of the unrest accompanying two separate British colonies’ independence days with libertarian insurrections.  First, in 1973, he played on the fears of black rule on the part of the large white minority on the Abaco Islands portion of the Bahamas to try to declare a separate free-market utopia, with the help of white-supremacist activists and C.I.A.-linked American mercenaries, including Larry Flynt’s alleged personal hired hit-man.  Then, in 1980, as the United Kingdom and France’s shared “condominium” rule came to an end as the New Hebrides, in the South Pacific, became Vanuatu, Oliver tried to piggy-back his cause onto a separatist movement among the cargo cults of the archipelago’s northern Espiritu Santo island, which he wanted to call the Republic of Vemerana.  He even strung the French government along for a while with the idea.

Oliver’s most tragicomic attempt at a libertarian state had been in the early 1970s, when he barged tons of sand from Australia to the Minerva Reefs, a set of low seamounts between Fiji and Tonga which did not spend enough of the tidal cycle above water to be classified under international law as “territory.”  But as soon as the island was built up enough to pass legal muster, Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, Tonga’s king, claimed it, sent a naval vessel to eject Oliver and his nascent Republic of Minerva.  (Today, the reefs have eroded away once again to nothingness, but rival claims are still being made by Tonga, Fiji, and one “Prince Calvin,” an American who says he is the “island’s” monarch.)  Oliver’s similar “seasteading” project in Palmyra Atoll, a U.S. territory near Hawai‘i, got even less far.

Another libertarian seasteading pioneer was Werner K. Stiefel, an American drugs mogul who in 1969 tried to start a utopia by fomenting a rebel movement in the uninhabited Prickly Pear Cays during a brief separatist rebellion in the British colony of Anguilla.  After British troops put an end to that, Stiefel tried landfilling to seastead something called “Operation Atlantis” on Silver Shoals, disputed specks of land between Haiti and the Bahamas.  Atlantis was a name for the invisibility-cloaked libertarian refuge in the Rockies in Ayn Rand’s influential 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged.  (For more on seasteading, see articles from this blog on the Principality of Sealand, here and here.)

An artist’s rendering of the planned Principality of New Utopia, in the western Caribbean

Similar attempts in the Caribbean were the Wall Street swindler Robert Vesco’s “Sovereign Order of New Aragon” territory, on Barbuda, and the Principality of New Utopia, founded on reefs between the Cayman Islands and Belize in the 1990s by another shady Wall Street type, Howard Turney (using the pseudonym Lazarus Long, borrowed from Robert A. Heinlein’s libertarian sci-fi novels).

Would you buy a used micronation from this man?
Robert Vesco was never a big fan of government regulation.

Other projects have included, in the 1950s and ’60s, the nation of Taluga (a.k.a. Aphrodite), on the unclaimed Cortes Bank off the coast of Baja California; recent plans to build free-market city-states in Trujillo, Honduras, and on Belle Isle, a park on a riverine island between Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario; and a west Texas community called Paulville, after Congressman Ron Paul, though Paul himself wants nothing to do with it.  Even Silicon Valley has (as I’ve written about in this blog) gotten into the act, with plans either to split the region off California as an autonomous state free of government economic regulations or found a free-market “floating city” just outside northern California’s territorial waters to be called Blueseed.

Of all these past attempts, President Jedlička might do well to note the fate of the Republic of Minerva.  He chose the Minerva Reefs because they were pieces of “land” that had fallen between the cracks of two established states, Fiji and Tonga, which were not claiming them.  But then as soon as the project got rolling, the neighbors changed their minds and wanted in on the project.  That ended badly.  Imagine how much uglier it could get if Jedlička not only lost his utopia invaded but found himself literally in the middle of a renewed territorial battle between Serbs and Croats.  Liberland might be in a pretty spot, but it’s one of the most volatile borders in recent history.

Thanks to Trena Klohe and Alexander Velky for first alerting me to this story.

[You can read more about many of these 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.]