“Our Hope Is Disunion: Cutting to the Root of the Matter”

EDITORIAL by Ian Baldwin, Publisher

Recently I read a speech that cuts into the meat of our day, here at the American table:

“Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war… So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children… What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them…? We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops… Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness… We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know . . . that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved… I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours… If we do not stop our war against [them] immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands . . . we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure….I am convinced…we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift . . . to a person-oriented society . . . [or] the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

That speech was given 40 years ago, on April 4, 1967. Spoken before concerned clergy and laypersons assembled in New York's Riverside Church, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” linked fulfillment of the social justice movement to the success of the peace movement and made Martin Luther King an enemy of the state. Exactly one year later, on April 4, 1968, the anniversary date of his Vietnam speech, he was shot...in the throat.

Where have we come, as a nation, in two generations, since Dr. King spoke openly, boldly for justice and peace? Forty years later, are we less materialistic? Less racist? Less militaristic?

Struck by this inability to change, to learn, to surrender our addiction to fighting brutal wars in countries thousands of miles from our borders, are we not compelled to look in the mirror, and ask ourselves: Who are we? What gives? For those of us content with easy answers, the mirror might reply: It's the Republicans, taken over by those war-mongering Neo-Cons. Or, it's this crazy president (whom we nonetheless elected, at least allegedly, twice). Or, it's the rule of world corporations, the military-industrial-congressional complex and their brand of global capitalism? Or, no, in the end it's us Americans; we're just a warlike people; we like to fight wars and win 'em, always have. We like to convert people to the American Way of Life – and we're a “can-do” people.
Ask again: None of the above. That is, none of the above is the primary cause for the intransigence of our militarized system, now expending about one trillion dollars annually on national “security.” (In FY 2006 U.S. national security outlays – only slightly more than half of which is in the defense budget, the rest being hidden in several other departments' budgets – reached $935 billion, “exceeding,” according to Chalmers Johnson, “the combined sum spent by all other nations on military security.” (My italics.)

What then is the primary cause for our misery, the endless flow of blood of our native sons and daughters, the agony of our un-winning ways?

In his seminal work, The Breakdown of Nations, Leopold Kohr reminds us that “the danger of aggression arises spontaneously, irrespective of nationality or disposition, the moment the power of a nation becomes so great that, in the estimate of its leaders, it has outgrown the power of its prospective adversaries.” When in December 1991 fifteen republics suddenly sprouted and peacefully seceded from the once-impregnable Soviet empire, the world confronted a great power vacuum. This was the moment to strike an irretrievable blow for secession worldwide, to downsize the other empire (ours), and create a global system of small states, each too weak to wage wars of mass destruction.

It did not happen. Instead we got the Project for a New American Century. As Kohr would have predicted, the remaining super-state adopted a grand policy of unilateralism to bend the entire world to its own “peaceful” – “freedom-and-democracy-for-all” – ends. Kohr admonishes that “Nearly all wars have been fought for unification, and unification has always been represented as pacification… [T]hrough union or unification, which enlarges bulk and size and power, nothing can be solved. On the contrary, the possibility of finding solutions recedes in the ratio at which the process of union advances.”

The Lord's Prayer, written by an ancient king who knew a thing or two about nations and war, pleads: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” The great, the insuperable temptation of states, their singular and inexorable pathway into evil, is to grow bigger. Period. Tyrants and tyrannical ideologies may flourish at any moment – they always have and always will – but by themselves they cannot wreak widespread havoc if they are saddled with a small state and are surrounded by comparably meager states.

No matter what the circumstances, human beings may be expected to always yield to temptation, including the ever-lustrous temptation of power, whenever it materializes. Therefore the essential objective of all politics must be always to keep power bounded, by whatever conniving methods human ingenuity can devise (the U.S. Constitution, for its first 70 years, was one such masterful effort). But no matter how clever the design and devices of government, if a state grows too large, sooner or later it will yield to temptation, and deliver itself, and its people, unto evil.

That is the tragedy of America. It is, in the end, a tragedy of scale. And it is still not understood by most of us, even the best among us, such as Dr. Martin Luther King.

Five hundred years ago there were perhaps 10,000 “natural countries” in the world, a natural country being a place where “the people have a common language and cultural history, with borders drawn by them and their neighbors,” according to Richard Maybury, an astute observer of history and contemporary affairs. The era of European conquest and expansion “unified” this natural highly diverse global human political landscape into “about 220” countries, of which 193 are currently UN members.

We must return to a world of 10,000 nations. Until we do, we shall not have the possibility of widespread peace (not total peace, but pervasive peace), nor shall we have a world in which an individual human being may sense about her- or himself: aloha, I am sovereign and free.

Our hope is disunion – and right now the world is sniffing this hope in the air. The tiny secessionist movement in little Vermont has in the past two months miraculously and inexplicably attracted unprecedented national and international attention, with coverage from the Washington Post, the Associated Press, CNN, BBC Radio, and three different Fox TV news shows.

And so, may the spirit of 1777, of independence and small scale, once again seize all Vermonters – and all the world.

Ian Baldwin
Publisher