This is something I have been seriously reflecting upon for over thirty years. The major problem with secession (.pdf) is two fold and it all relates to the myth of nationalism. It relates to how American history has been taught in schools for numerous decades, putting forth the myth of nationalism; that the history students learn was inevitable, that what happened was the only course of actions that were possible, that there could not have been alternative consequential paths or results from the inevitable chain of events as taught. Combine this inevitability of historical “forces” and down play human agency or the impact of individual persons shaping history and what we get in school and the media shaping our most basic elemental perceptions is a rank unquestioning determinism of nationalistic inevitability.

School children have this mantra drilled into their heads each and every day when they unconsciously recite by rote the Pledge of Allegiance, which was originally composed by a socialist minister Francis Bellamy after the War for Coercive National Unification, known in textbooks as the “Civil War.”  The great Walter Karp dissected this long ago in a must read essay in Harpers, Republican Virtues.  Students are then drilled that secession by the southern states was totally based on racism and defense of slavery and is the most egregious crime imaginable and can never be permitted again to disrupt the sacred nation-state reconsecrated by Lincoln at Gettysburg. This is our national civic religion of Statolatry.

The people residing on the North American continent described today as the United States of America were never united in a homogeneous consolidated nation but were always separated into decentralized pluralistic regional enclaves based upon geography, ethnocultural and ethnoreligious, economic elements. From the earliest days of colonization this was apparent to keen observers both north and south. These early areas of colonial North America was peopled by very different persons from very different areas of Great Britain. This was most clearly pointed out in the the seminal book, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, (epub edition) by historian David Hackett Fisher. New England Puritans were never content to coexist with Southern Cavilers or the borderland Scotch-Irish and their Cracker Culture. The numerous waves of subsequent immigration by disparate peoples have acted to only further accentuate these ethnocultural differences and folkway distinctions. Only in unceasing barrages of nationalistic propaganda, especially in time of war or crisis, has this unitary mass media homogeneous construct of “one people” gained traction, to the utter dismay of progressives and neoconservatives who form the self-anointed clerisy of the Statolatry.

This American disease of nationalism lies at the core of every dilemma or problem we face.

The Best of Charles Burris