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Introduction



Black Nationalists are approaching a tipping point. The window is closing to develop an impactful plan to preempt Donald Trump and the white power movement's plots to seize the federal government by a stolen national election, coup, or civil war in 2024. 

The urgency of the moment is compounded by new opportunities that have emerged to alter the current political state of play. The New Black Nationalist Network is thereby releasing its recommendation that Black Nationalist forces adopt a "National Divorce Initiative [NDI] as a highly serviceable strategic framework to argue to a wider national audience that any negotiation to dissolve the American Empire must include self-determination to create a sovereign Black nation-state.       

What is the National Divorce concept? It is a hypothetical scenario in which the United States splits into two countries along political lines. It could involve Republican or Red States seceding from Democrat or Blue States or a portion of a country breaking away and declaring independence. The term is often used to express the deep divisions and polarization in American politics and society. 

Since the mid-2010s, the National Divorce concept popularized by fringe Libertarians has moved from the margins into the national spotlight as the escalating partisan divisions between Democrats and a Republican Party that has embraced white nationalist and authoritarian ideology led to an attempted coup on January 6, 2021. Increasingly, in left and right circles, National Divorce is emerging as the last bulwark for an amicable separation between Red States and Blue States to prevent a bloody civil war or another coup attempt. A national divorce arrangement, similar to the breakup of the former Czechoslovakia, and former Soviet Union nations from Russia would negotiate a division of all the national assets and resources between the partitioning republics. 

The idea of National Divorce or a voluntary breakup of the United States federal system isn't new. Nations change, contract, expand, absorb and lose population centers, adjust borders, and endure civil wars. There is no American Exceptionalism in this regard. New England Federalists tried three times between 1800-1815 to secede, and the Lakota Republic in 2007 sought to establish a five-state nation in the Great Plains. Quite the opposite, secession is a profoundly American cultural marker. 

As currently articulated, the locus of National Divorce revolves around three themes: 
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1) The political, cultural, and racial differences between red states and blue states are so irreconcilable that maintaining a unitary government within the current constitutional framework is no longer tenable. Most people feel they already live in two different countries. 

2) The level of acrimony and hatred between red states and blue states and their political representatives is inexorably leading to the institutional collapse of America's governance structure and civil war is inevitable.    

3. To avoid a governmental collapse, social conflagration, and civil war, red states and blue states should engage in an amicable and consensual separation of the nation into a concert of sovereign nations.   

​Against this backdrop, "altering the political state of play" for Black Nationalists means entering a national conversation to reconfigure American Empire. It means diverting the discourse to one in which Black self-determination moves to the center of the discussion.  With some polls showing 65% of Republican voters being open to some form of secession, and 48% of Democrats feeling likewise, a new political wave is gathering force offshore and preparing to make landfall. Black Nationalists must surf the crest of this new wave.  

National Divorce presents a breakout opportunity to move the discussion of creating a Black nation-state beyond the familiar topography of the Black Liberation Movement and Marxist political spaces to broader sections of the political mainstream. This independent initiative also creates separation that clarifies Black Nationalists break with the Democratic Party and Black Social Democrats on the issue of patriotism. 

New Black Nationalists claim no ownership or authorship of America's failed experiment and imperial venture. We arrived here as subjects of British and American Empire, first as slaves, then as provisional citizens not of our own choosing, but ensnared in the yoke of the 14th Amendment. 

In our view America emerged as a predatory empire--thirteen vastly different colonies that formed a military alliance to defeat the British. America was never a nation conceived in the blast furnace of culture, history, and blood, but a mythical universal republic created by its founders out of a rationalist Enlightenment document called the Constitution. 

America's animating ethos was the individual pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness measured in wealth, not the collective destiny of a people. Even its Puritan religious ethic dictated the rewards of hard work was prosperity in a spiritual shell. Its independence movement was ignited by the colonist's' aversion to paying taxes and garrisoning troops of its mother country Britian--hardly an ennobling human endeavor.  

Created as a compromise between Northern commercialists and the Southern slavocracy, the bond intensifying agents that have sustained American Empire are commerce, white supremacy, and violence to maintain dominion over non-white populations, especially Black people. 

Now, as American empire spirals into freefall and collapse, Thomas Paine's quip that “even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their own families," reminds us the coming social conflagration is ostensibly a white man's war. Black and Brown people may be castigated as the cause of the crisis and targeted as its collateral damage, but this time it simply won't work.  

New Black Nationalists are not separatists. In the majority Black-led polities we seek to create, all ethnicities and races are welcomed to construct a republic that vibrates to a profoundly different algorithm.  As for the America built by the lords of capital: you may have it. We seek exit and our due in land and just compensation. We mean to have it, one way or another.            

That said, entering the political fray now as the National Divorce ideal gains altitude affords Black Nationalists an opportunity to recalibrate the debate.  This opportunity exists because libertarians, antifederalists, white nationalists, independents, and most white leftists typically characterize National Divorce in partisan terms of Republican red states versus, Democrat blue states.  

The second dominant trend calls for partitioning the country into five or six major geographic regions that approximate NCAA college football conferences. What these red state/blue state and regional models share in common is substituting political parties and regions as a proxy for race. Let it be known that the Black Commons won't be replaced or substituted for--by proxy or otherwise.   

Ironically, Alt-Right intellectuals (Yes, there is actually such a thing) like the Counter-Currents website are among the few that concede a five-state Southern Black Belt homeland for the Black Commons [Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina]. Most Alt-Right models also include a Southwest Territory for Mexican Americans and Hispanics, and blue state regions on the West Coast, New England and the Mid-Atlantic. 

By what quirk of circumstance do Alt-Right intellectuals concede a Black Belt homeland adopted by the Republic of New Afrika in 1968, which was derived from the U.S.S.R.'s Sixth Comintern Black Belt Thesis of 1928?  

It's because Alt-Right theorists know a long civil war with an uncertain outcome isn't worth the mass bloodshed, chaos, and destruction of property whites would suffer. Simply put, they don't like the risks associated with the cost benefit analysis.  

New Black Nationalists conception of creating new majority Black-led polities is more varied, dynamic, and nuanced than the orthodoxy of a single Black nation-state in the Black Belt South. 

Our assessment of the current political and geo-political configuration of American Empire, envisions a modified, Black-led nation-state within the Black Belt South region, the formation of independent, Black-led city-states in metropolises like Detroit and Baltimore, and an autonomous Black region in California. 

New Black Nationalists are not naive about the prospects of peacefully concluding a National Divorce arrangement. Trump's white power militia forces are spoiling for the fantasy and glory of civil war to reclaim the white supremist 'lost cause. '

No sooner were the Sons of Odin presented with an opportunity to give battle; did they charge up Capitol Hill with Trump's banner on the flagpoles bludgeoning capitol police officers. Such was the measure of their resolve to sacrifice for 'blood and soil.'  "As Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Tse-Tung once stated: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."  Should Trump's legions remain intractable on question of civil war, then let it come.   

That said, in the interest of exhausting peaceful means to process the dissolution of American Empire, Black Nationalists enter the National Divorce conversation to argue four essential themes. Together, these issues define the transition from today's fast-evolving pre-revolutionary period to an existential crisis in which the collapse of American Empire's governance structure could occur as early as the 2024 national elections. 

The National Divorce Argument: 

1) On extra-constitution measures to seize power, coups, and civil war

Donald Trump, the Republican Party, white militias, and white power intellectuals are actively conspiring to establish a white power authoritarian government by extraconstitutional means. They are prepared to use any means available to them, including a stolen national election, violent coup, civil war or some combination thereof.     

2) Is National Divorce a realistic option?

Yes. An amicable and consensual agreement to partition the United States into multiple sovereign nations based on partisan, non-partisan, racial, and political considerations would be difficult but not impossible. It is also possible to achieve a National Divorce agreement in a contentious environment with certain levels of violence preceding or occurring simultaneously with negotiated settlements and treaties.    

The argument that an equitable division of debt, economic resources, business assets, pension plans, and military assets like nuclear weapons is an insurmountable task is a false argument. All these issues and others have been resolved in the breakup of empires like the Soviet Union, and multiple secession movements from the division of the former Czechoslovakia to America's independence from Great Britain.

3) Reparations for Black national polities 

New Black Nationalists hold that reparations in the form of awarding land and cash payments are owed to the Black Commons to make amends for the U.S. government's legal abomination of enslaving Black people, and the subsequent century of legalized unequal Jim Crow segregation. 

In as much as New Black Nationalists support majority Black-led multi-racial polities in the form of a nation-state, independent city-states, and autonomous regions, we envision reparations as a formula awarded primarily for land and home ownership for the Black commons. In recognizing the principle of reciprocity and honorable population transfers for non-Blacks wishing to relocate to other sovereign states, a compensation fund for homes, personal property and businesses would be included as a contingency fund of a reparation agreement.    

4) Is secession legal? 

​The assertion that secession of a single state or states from the U.S. federal government is illegal according to the 1869 Supreme Court Texas v White decision is a spurious claim. 

Regarding the centrality of Texas v. White as the controlling Supreme Court case regarding the legality of secession, we quote author Richard Kreitner's brief summary of the issue in his 2017 publication of Break it Up. 

"Seeing the need for a final statement on secession's constitutionality, the Supreme Court stepped in. The new, pro-Union government of Texas wanted to reclaim U.S. bonds that its Confederate precursor had sold. The case, Texas v. White, turned on whether the state had actually seceded or remained in the Union throughout the war. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, a founder of the Republican Party and Lincoln's former treasury secretary, seized the opportunity to enshrine in law what the war had seemingly settled in fact."   

In one paragraph, Chase ruled against secession. 'The constitution, in all its provisions,' Chase wrote, 'looks to an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible states.' Texas, therefore, had never left the Union; the sale of bonds by the Confederate-era state government, like all actions of that 'unlawful combination of individuals,' was null and void."

The Texas v. White decision came four months after the U.S. government refused to prosecute Jefferson Davis, President of the secessionist Confederate States of America. They were terrified of the prospect that a Richmond, Virginia jury would acquit Davis, or worse still, a jury including newly freed slaves vested with citizenship convicting him. 

The hypocrisy of Chief Justice Chase's ruling that Texas never left the Union was underscored in February 1870, when the Texas legislature ratified the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution to be readmitted to the Union. We could go on and talk about Chief Justice Chase's sleight of hand distinguishing between the standing of Texas as a state, and the illegitimate status of its elected confederate state government after seceding from the Union. But is that necessary?   

In truth, the question of the legality of secession has never been tested at the Supreme Court level. In our view, secession remains an open question. 

Moving Forward with the National Divorce and Black Secession Initiative 

New Black Nationalists foresee this initiative as a two-year mass education and advocacy campaign to inject a Black Nationalist perspective into the political mainstream.  Preventing an authoritarian white power seizure of the U.S. government, crafting a National Divorce framework that maximizes opportunities to create majority Black-led polities, and arguing for self-determination are complex issues with a galaxy of moving parts.  

Over the coming weeks and months, NewBlackNationalism.com will be devoting its pages to informational and analytical articles on National Divorce, secession, reparations, and self-determination. 

We invite you to join us in this initiative. As always, we look forward to your comments @VeseyRepublic.   



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Secession Forum
Natlonal Divorce Forum
The National Divorce Initiative
Reparations Forum
lllll
09.05.2022
Call to the Black Liberation Movement​
NewBlackNationalism.com
New Black Nationalists Framework for a National Divorce Initiative
NewBlackNationalism.com 10.13.2022

National Divorce and Black Reparations
NewBlackNationalism.com 11.18.2022

National Divorce, Secession, and 'Lost Cause' Mythology
NewBlackNationalism.com 09.05.2022

The Case for American Secession
by Michael Malice - 6.29.2016

Separate or Die
by Freddie Franklin, Libertarian Mises Caucus - 8.6.2022

The Clarity Act Bill C-20
An Act to give effect to the requirement for clarity as set out in the opinion of the Supreme Court of Canada in the Quebec Secession Reference - June 2000

Red Wave Was A Mist- Time For National Divorce?
11.12.2022  redvoicemedia.com


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