Violent Secession?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/anger-over-iraq-and-bush-prompts-calls-for-.htmlssion-from-the-us-for-vermont-396025.html

"There is some doubt that the secessionist movement will ever be taken seriously by Americans."

"What insanity it is to reopen this issue," says Pauline Maier, professor of American history at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Secession is not possible today without violence," she told the online magazine Salon.com. "To assume something different is mad. It's to follow the example of the Southern secessionists who thought that they could just leave the union peacefully – and, nuttier still, get a part of the unsettled territory as a parting gift. It's almost as crazy as the idea that once you topple a dictator, democracy happens, much as weeds appear on a ploughed field. Isn't it time that Americans began learning something from history? Or must we again bleed ourselves into wisdom?"

So saith a member of the American academy. A predictable sentiment indeed. But these comments do raise an interesting question. If secession without violence is not possible, what about secession with violence? This may not be quite as farfetched as some may think. Recall how during the LA riots of 1992, the LAPD, one of the largest and best trained police forces in the world, simply went on strike. Remember how the New Orleans PD deserted en masse during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Recall how a demoralized Russian army refused to fight on behalf of the dying Soviet Union in 1991.

So if a genuine insurgency were to emerge in North America, it might well be quite likely that law enforcement agencies would retreat when faced with a hitherto unpredented challenge. And will the rank and file soldiers of the US armed forces continue to uphold a regime that has burdened them with endless, needless foreign wars? What if Peoples' Militias started to move and retake America county by county, city by city from the tyrants in Washington, D.C., and their accomplices in state houses and city halls? Indeed, the world's foremost military history and theorist Martin Van Creveld believes that non-state armies are the wave of the future so far as military organizations go. The resistance forces in Iraq have certainly show the superiority of fourth generation private armies to traditional state militaries. The stars seem to be lining up.