A Dixieland Manifesto

We the people of Dixieland (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia) do hereby declare ourselves a separate and distinct people from the rest of the United States of America.  We come from diverse ethnic, religious and social groups, but we are united in language, culture and history.  We repudiate the moral abominations of slavery and segregation that were thrust upon us by the prevailing political and economic forces of their time.  We stand together in Christian fraternity and charity toward our fellow man.  We pledge to each other our Christian faith, our undying loyalty and our sacred honour.  For it is in this context alone that true and equal freedom enters into the lives of men.

For one and a half centuries our lives have been dominated by the prevailing influence of the United States federal government's imperial power.  Upon exercising the rights defined under the U.S. Declaration of Independence, our ancestors were met with the most fiendish hostility perpetrated against our people by a government sworn to protect those rights.  Never in the history of North America has such savagery been unleashed by the sons of European Christendom.  Even the British showed far more civility when dealing with their rebel colonies.  What followed this American apocalypse was a period of occupation, wherein the rights of our ancestors were stripped for a generation, and the ability to govern ourselves was made a mockery.  What followed this was a century of repression that goes on to this day, wherein our history is maligned, our symbols outlawed, our language mocked and our children propagandised to despise their own heritage.   These evils alone were insufficient to crush the tolerance of a Christian people.  For over a hundred years we pledged our allegiance to the American empire, we raised her banner proudly to prove our patriotism, we sang her anthems and sent our sons to die in her wars.  We have done everything humanly possible to demonstrate we are 'good Americans,' far more than any other quarter of the empire, and we have quietly dismissed the words of intolerance and mockery that have repeatedly been uttered against our people and our heritage.  In every way imaginable, for one-hundred and fifty years, we have followed the command of our Lord and Saviour to 'turn the other cheek' and 'carry the cloak two miles instead of just one.'  For this we were met with the following.

During the last generation the American empire, with its power seated in Washington DC, has levelled an absolute war of legal oppression against our Christian faith and our Dixieland culture.  This warfare began in the federal courts, denying our children the right to pray in public schools.  This later extended to the suppression of all religious expression on all government owned properties.  Everywhere the government advanced, religion was forced to retreat, and so it seemed as time passed, the government was advancing everywhere.   Then again in the federal courts, the government stripped our states of their right to regulate and prohibit infanticide in the form of surgical and chemical abortion.  This has resulted in a holocaust of death that has most severely affected our black population in what can only be compared to a form of racial genocide.  Under the guise of 'compassion' our people have been heavily taxed by this imperial regime, and their wealth 'redistributed' through government agencies, to create a welfare dependent class of people, which again has disproportionately affected our black population, re-enslaving them in what has come to be called the 'government plantation.'  Through all of this, the churches have been robbed of their God-given commission to feed and care for the poor, relegating many of their religious duties to social events.  This combined with the imperial regime's refusal to allow states to regulate profanity and obscenity on the public airwaves, has led to a moral and social decline that is unprecedented in Western history since the fall of the Roman Empire.

Now with all this under way, this imperial regime which reigns over us, with the threat of the most malignant force should we dare to assert our political independence again, has taken its warfare against our faith and culture to the most extreme levels.  Under the auspices of 'tolerance' churches are forced to shut down their charitable programs.  Christian pastors face the threat of prosecution for reading portions of the Bible that contradict this new government sponsored 'politically-correct' orthodoxy.  Homosexuality is promoted as 'normal,' even 'desirable,' and those who protest are labelled 'intolerant' and 'hateful,' forced to fear government reprisals should they dare to resist.  Public school children are suspended or expelled for expressing their Christian beliefs or cultural heritage, and these are just the beginning of human rights violations.  Over the last half-century this American empire has become a worldwide superpower, and so has thrust its weight into the far corners of the earth.  Today the empire heavily taxes her people, most especially the sons and daughters of Dixieland, to pay not only for its colossal welfare state, but also for its police actions around the world.  What it lacks in tax revenue it supplements in money printing through the unelected and unaccountable Federal Reserve banking system.  This creates inflation which acts as a double tax on our people, impoverishing us even further, and robbing our children of any hope for the future.  With these revenues the empire intervenes in the affairs of other governments across the globe, inciting their hatred of us, and provoking their retaliation against our people, leaving us nothing to show for it but a massive national debt that can never be repaid.

The empire has also waged a war against small family-run business, granting favours to large corporations, thus destroying the very fabric of our independent economy.  Our people have become 'wage-slaves' to large national and international corporations, that pay us barely enough to survive and place many of our people on government program dependency for food and medical necessities.  To complain against these unfair business practices is to be told we are 'lazy,' as we are forced to send our wives and older children into the workplace just to keep our households solvent.  Meanwhile the few good paying jobs that exist are exported overseas, as the empire tells us this is a 'good thing' for America citing reasons that are simply unintelligible to us. For all of our loyalty, for all of the imperial flags waved across Dixieland, for all the anthems we have sung and the pledges we have made, for all the blood spilled by our sons and daughters in the empire's endless international wars, we are left with this?  This is our legacy?  This is our inheritance?  We are left struggling for financial solvency, apologising for our culture and fighting for our religion?

We are disgusted with the outcome of this venture into American imperialism and are forced to conclude, after a century and a half, that the surrender of the Army of Virginia at Appomattox was a mistake.  We are left with the sad realisation that our people would have fared much better had General Robert E. Lee taken his troops into the hills and fought a perpetual conflict of guerrilla warfare, rather than surrender to superior Union fire power.  We are heartbroken that after one-hundred and fifty years of promising and proving our fidelity to the empire, we have once again become her enemies, simply for being what we are and for no more than that.

Therefore, without resorting to acts of violence, which contradicts our Christian virtue, we individually and communally pledge to undertake the following measures...

1. We shall no more hide the symbols of our identity in shame.  We adopt the Confederate Naval Jack as the symbol of our people and our struggle, pledging to display it whenever possible, in the most honourable and dignified way.  This 'Christian Cross of St. Andrew' shall be the sign of our resistance.
2. We shall in every way identify our land as Dixie or Dixieland, and our people as Dixians, Dixons or as the citizens of our respective states, so as to separate ourselves from the directional designation of 'Southerners' which geographically ties us to the United States.  We must in every way assert ourselves as a separate and distinct people.
3. We shall seek to restore the manners and chivalry of Christendom in our homes, neighbourhoods and religious congregations.
4. We shall endeavour to persuade our local and state elected officials to enact laws that enforce the virtues of Christian civility.  
5. We shall likewise endeavour to persuade our local and state elected officials to unceasingly petition the empire (Washington DC) for provisional self-governance, with the long-term goal of full independence.  This pressure must continuously be applied to the empire even if Washington's answer is always 'no.'  Likewise, we should make sure this call for independence is well known in the United Nations and the international community, thus making our struggle an international embarrassment to the empire.
6. We shall culturally adjure the realm by cutting off our families from the popular media.
7. We shall remove our money from national and international banks, supporting local credit unions instead.
8. We shall refuse to shop at 'big box' superstores owned by massive corporations, endeavouring instead to keep our money local, finding locally owned, or worker-owned (cooperative) places to do our business.
9. We shall endeavour to press our local and state politicians to break up monopolies, allowing for cooperatively owned competition in energy production and manufacturing.
10. We shall in every way seek a return to a simpler way of life, honouring the religion of our antebellum ancestors, showing Christian charity toward our neighbours, impartial to race, colour or creed, as we attempt to restore a remnant of Christendom for ourselves and our posterity.