Southern National Congress

Unless you are brain-dead or sunk deep in denial, it has become abundantly clear in the past few weeks that the U.S. Government has become irredeemably corrupt, Godless, and mired in staggering debt that will never be repaid. It is not our friend but our enemy. It is not the defender of liberty but its attacker. It is not the guarantor of prosperity but its destroyer.

The crisis in the financial markets and broader economy has shown us the true nature of the Regime. The big money cartel, allied with big government, has plundered us, our children, and our children’s children in a manner so blatant and predatory as to defy belief. The ongoing expropriation of taxpayers’ wealth, the largest in history, is no longer being carried out with any attempt at disguise or pretense of the public good; and the Government’s looting rewards the authors of the present disaster (and the worse to come) for their monumental greed, fraud, recklessness, irresponsibility, and arrogance.

Now we see what the power elite have in store for us. They’re for “free enterprise” as long as they can enrich themselves with obscene salaries and bonuses, but suddenly they demand our wealth for a Government rescue when their fraudulent deals turn sour, as such deals must in a morally-ordered universe. Yet the trillions of new debt charged to the taxpayer to rescue these criminals from their crimes and fools from their folly are not working. Corruption and stupidity on such an unprecedented scale still threaten to suck the whole financial structure of the globe down the accelerating vortex. As we lurch from one emergency to another, there is no longer any firebreak against the nationalisation of whole swathes of the economy via bailouts, rescues, and stimulus packages. But it’s “money” the US doesn’t have, with our annual budget deficit approaching $1 trillion and our massive trade deficit hemorrhaging wealth overseas to China and the oil exporting states. The unfolding result is recession (or looming depression) and increasing inflation. Our fellow Southerners are losing their jobs and their homes. Three of the ten States with the highest unemployment in the U.S. are in the Old South – North Carolina, South Carolina, and Mississippi. And even if our compatriots have a job, their paycheck buys less every month because of the Government’s policy of inflation, a more subtle but just as deadly form of expropriation.

This fusion of Big Money, Big Corporations, and Big Government is the very definition of fascism. We have it on good authority, the dictator Mussolini himself, whose alternative name for fascism -- the merger of state and corporate power -- was “corporatism.” And if the economic component of fascism was imposed with so little regard for the welfare of the American people and over their intense opposition, can the rest of the fascist apparatus be far behind? As the economy produces more hardship, followed by growing dismay, anger, and protest, we can expect to see further criminalising of dissent, suspension of constitutional rule and civil liberty, and eventual martial law and dictatorship. The stage is set; the legal and administrative machinery for dictatorship is already in place. All that’s needed to invoke it is a “national emergency,” including an economic crisis.

What then should we Southerners do? Throw up our hands in despair? Wait for the dollar to collapse and hyper-inflationary depression to usher in a dictatorship, in the same way the Great Inflation in Germany in the 1920’s set the stage for Adolf Hitler?

The best antidote to despair is action; but it must be informed, intelligent action, based on historically proven principles that get the most results from our limited numbers and resources by leveraging our relative weakness at the strategic margin. These operational principles are the same our Patriot forefathers used to win their liberty, and they will work now to preserve ours.

First is the power of exercising our sovereignty. We all possess a limited degree of personal sovereignty, even in circumstances in which we may appear to be powerless. It consists of a choice over our words and deeds -- whether we will acquiesce or resist, whether we will behave morally and humanely or selfishly and cravenly. This is not to suggest there are no consequences for acting rightly, and a prudent person must weigh the possible consequences against the cost of doing nothing. But at least we do have the choice.

The second principle is the power of our withholding our consent, and its correlative, transferring our consent to our own legitimate institutions. Tyranny depends on fear, to be sure. But tyranny also rests on the willingness of its subjects to submit. If enough people exercise their limited sovereignty by withdrawing their consent, that government forfeits its legitimacy and must either defer to the consent of its people or fall. The relatively peaceful end of the Soviet Union is a recent case in point. It did not fall from armed revolt but through internal collapse once the Communist system had lost its moral authority in the hearts and minds of the people, who then withdrew their consent.

The SNC is an initiative that unites these vital principles, allowing us Southerners to take charge of our own destiny in these perilous times. The Southern National Congress is not just another organisation, not an academic symposium, not the usual conference of speakers. The Congress will be a representative assembly of citizens of the Southern States, providing an alternative, legitimate forum to express Southern grievances and advance Southern interests. It will be an active session in which Delegates actually debate and approve measures that:

• remonstrate (a form of protest aimed at righting wrongs by re-affirming principles that have been violated and calling for a return to their observance); and
   

• petition for a redress of grievances, as provided for in the U.S. Constitution (not that the Regime pays any attention to the Constitution, but that in itself is a grievance for which we need to call them to account).

First, there are no restrictions based on race, creed, or sex. Formal qualifications are as follows:

• A Delegate must be a resident of one of the 13 Southern States cited above.
   

• A Delegate must be 18 years of age on the date of the initial session of the Congress, December 5, 2008.
   

• A Delegate must be willing to affirm the following: I believe that I have a duty to my home State. I believe that the Southern people are a distinct people. I believe in the right of voice, the right of preservation, and the right of recognition, for the South and her people.

Informal qualifications are also vital, as they relate to the character of the individual Delegates, and that will determine the character of the broader institution. We need people with maturity, discernment, good judgment; an attitude of service and self-abnegation; courage, both physical and moral; realism, and a spirit of charity toward all others. We need people with vision, who can dream dreams of what is possible, whose hearts are stirred by the challenge of the times and the call to a great adventure.

If you’re that rare individual who meets these formal and informal requirements and you wish to become a Delegate, and have not done so already, please fill out the form at: http://SouthernNationalCongress.org . We will forward your name to the SNC Registrar for your State who will contact you.

A few Delegate seats remain, but applications must close by mid-November. Come join us in North Carolina in December. Our destiny is up to us, subject to God’s mercy and providence. We must take responsibility for ourselves through informed, intelligent principled, collective action or else forever bear the reproach of history that we understood but lacked the courage and vision to act.