Southern National Congress Convenes
Florida Delegates Take Part
(from page 1)
SNC News Service
 HENDERSONVILLE, NC; December 7 -- The first Southern National Congress convened at the Kanuga Conference Center near Hendersonville, North Carolina. Delegations were organised from Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland. Each of these States had one vote in the initial 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.
It is equally clear – unless you’re brain-dead and sunk in denial – that the two-party monopoly political system is broken. It offers no remedy. In fact, politics as usual is only making things worse. With a few honourable exceptions, Congress is the bought creature of the corporate interests, as witnessed by their approval of the Great Robbery in the face of overwhelming voter opposition. Never was it more clear who Congress really represents. And in 2008, two-party monopoly politics offered us the most dismal choice for President in history. There may be surface differences between Obama and McCain, but on the major challenges facing America, they’re cut from the same bolt of statist and imperialist cloth. The victory of either one bodes ill for the country in general and the South in particular; for what’s left of the South’s Christian-based culture, our Anglo-Celtic spirit of independence, and Jeffersonian tradition of liberty will be marked for final extinction.
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 final principle is an obvious one, the power of collective action. Our sovereign voices raised together obviously have more impact than single voices. Speaking collectively gives our speech synergy; makes it greater than the sum of the parts.
The Southern National Congress 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 is a representative assembly of citizens of the Southern States, providing an alternative, legitimate forum to express Southern grievances and advance Southern interests. The first session held December 5-7, 2008 was an active session in which Delegates actually debated and approved measures that:
remonstrated (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
petitioned 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).
Our proven, successful, historical model comes from America’s own history – the First and Second Continental Congresses, meeting in 1774 and 1775. The Crown-authorised governors and colonial assemblies were still the “legal” governments at the time. But these institutions represented the exploitative mercantile interests of the British ruling class, not the interests of the American people. Our colonial forefathers had to create their own alternative, parallel, legitimate forums to represent their interests and collectively voice their grievances. Our primary task at the first session was similar, bringing into being an independent forum with moral authority and legitimacy because henceforth it will reflect the true interests of the Southern people – the preservation of their liberty, prosperity, and unique culture and identity. |
