14 Years Since Waco Massacre/ Seceding from the Empire...
A few comments from Carol Moore in DC:
1. It will be 14 years tomorrow since FBI tanks rammed into a the Branch Davidian home and church causing a fire that killed 76 of them, mostly women, children and elderly. Libertarian Party members railed against this trampling of 1st and 2nd Amendment rights, against the BATF police brutality (including shooting from helicopters) and resultant police coverup (FBI destruction of building to destroy evidence), and against the kind of militarization of law enforcement that the whole planning and execution of the attack and the resultant siege represented. Let's not forget though the massacre happend in the first months of the Clinton administration, this militarization was the result of 12 years of Republican presidential policies.
As my book THE DAVIDIAN MASSACRE (see details below) pointed out, one reason the government felt free to attack and after the fire felt free to prosecute those attacked was because they were people who wanted their "own country," who wanted to secede from the United States! As secession was a long cherished part of libertarian thinking included in the Libertarian Platform, this was just one more indignity.
2. We must remember that after the cold war, the government was looking for new "enemies" to give them an excuse to ramp up military and police agency budgets. They focused first on the relatively tiny militia movement and after 1999 on the "black bloc" window smashing street fighters.
Bill Clinton tried to satisfy the government's need to create foreign targets by attacking Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Al-Queda's Osama Bin Laden and Serbia's Sloban Milosevic. But the Republicans in Congress opposed his efforts to create a legacy for himself through any larger foreign efforts.
However, once Republicans got Bush/Cheney in there in 2000, they gladly welcomed back all the criminals, war mongers from the worst days of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagans. These fellows had re-labeled "neoconservatives."
And whatever your theory of who know what before hand about the September 11 attacks, and whether they let it happen or made it happen, no true libertarian can deny that Bush and the international and domestic militarizers fully took full advantage of the attack to increase the power of government and the profits of Bush/Cheney cronies. "War is the health of the state" and these neoconservatives have created an incredibly robust state.
If they attack Iran with nuclear weapons, assuming it does not result in world nuclear war -- see http://youtube.com/dontbombiran -- the'll have a great excuse to declare martial law and send any one who protests straight to the camps.
3. In fact, it has become SO robust that even liberal peace activists are starting to look at SECESSION as the only way to withdraw from a murderous, bloodsucking empire! The "blue state" secession movement that started as a joke after Bush allegedly stole the 2004 election, has taken root.
The April 2, 2007 Washington Post Sunday section included an article on the potential secession of Vermont - *The Once and Future Republic of Vermont* As the authors write: "Vermont did not join the Union to become part of an empire."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/30/AR2007033002076.html
And, as I like to say, if gun-grabbing HILLARY CLINTON is elected president in 2008, the Red States will join them in their own secessionist movement -- even if she does continue all of Bush's military policies.
4. The first No. American Secession Convention was held in November 2006 in Vermont. See
http://middleburyinstitute.org/secessionconvention2006.html Check out the whole web page, produced by radical decentralist author Kirkpatrick Sale and Second Vermont Republic members.
5. My YouTube video OBEY THE CONSTITUTION -- OR WHAT? video about the http://givemeliberty.org March 20 V for Vendetta protest at the White House got almost 14,000 visitors in 9 days. People LOVED it. The theme? �Or What� means - right to alter or abolish government -- including secession, as note in the end credits. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oaKZrDCYYQ
6. Checked out http://secession.net yet? I describe community-based libertarian/decentralist secession on my website and frequently at my blog http://carolmoorereport.blogspot.com/ Subscribe to the blog and encourage me to keep posting about Transcending God and State!
7. Should the LP run a secession candidate for President in 2008? Or at least PUT THE SECESSION PLANK BACK IN THE PLATFORM?? Read the old one here: http://secession.net/LP_Secession_Candidate_2008.html
8. My book THE DAVIDIAN MASSACRE is a systematic analysis of ATF and FBI crimes. It draws on government and news sources, trial and 1995 congressional transcripts, and interviews with experts and participants, including extensive contacts with Davidian survivors and prisoners.
It is a mass market paperback, 487 pages, plus 20 pages of graphics and incriminating FBI photographs, as well as photos I took of federal perpetrators from the 1995 Congressional hearings.
THE DAVIDIAN MASSACRE is only $12.00 first class USA. $9.00 each for 2-4 copies. Email me for other discounts. Use paypal which takes credit cards and tell me how you want it signed!
Details at http://carolmoore.net/waco/ or
http://www.carolmoore.net/waco/TDM-order-form.html
Reviews:
"Carol Moore has done more research on Waco than anyone else. Her book pulls together many of the most shocking details of government abuses that a reader cannot find anywhere else." James Bovard, author of Lost Rights ....
"I am indebted to Carol Moore's well-documented work, The Davidian Massacre: Disturbing Questions About Waco Which Must Be Answered (1995)". Ambrose Evans-Prichard in notes in his The Secret Life of Bill Clinton