Caribbean Project: The South Atlantic System

Caribbean

We have spent a lot of time this summer (while there is nothing else to do during the American election season) discussing the cultural origins of the Lower South and deconstructing the myths of Americanism.

It is already very clear that the idea of a homogeneous American people who existed in some kind of mystical perpetual union either before or starting with the 1776 Declaration of Independence is absurd.

The Yankee experiment in New England had nothing to do with the emergence of the Southern colonies – Southerners didn’t come over on the Mayflower and break bread with Squanto.

Instead, it is very clear that the type of society that would later that spread across the Lower South can be traced back to South Carolina, and from there it can be traced back to the British West Indies.

The “Deep South” and “Tidewater” (to borrow Colin Woodward’s terminology for the SC and VA-based subcultures) are really the northern most cultural extension of the “South Atlantic System”:

“As emerging Caribbean plantation economies became incubators of what the historian Philip Curtin (1969, 3) influentially defined as the South Atlantic System – “a complex economic organism centered on the production in the Americas of tropical commodities for consumption in Europe, and grown by the labor of Africans” – a truly horrific social experiment began to unfold.

Colonial control by the great European powers was integral to the South Atlantic System. Conquering the native Caribbean peoples and forcing them to work, exploiting the islands’ valuable minerals, producing high-value agricultural staples, and, when it became necessary requiring the overseas deployment of organized institutionalized force on an unprecedented scale. As the Spanish, English, French, and Dutch sought to obtain wealth and geopolitical influence, only the military and related commanding devices of colonial states could muster the necessary force and legitimacy. State power, disguised at first by private capital when the first European colonists arrived in the Caribbean, invariably expanded in scope over time.”

That explains a lot.

The Golden Circle was the sum of the “South Atlantic System” which the American South – as a slave-based and race-based plantation society, and exporter of agricultural commodities like rice, indigo, tobacco, and long staple and short staple cotton to Western Europe – had always been a part.

The American Revolution artificially severed the Southern colonies from the British West Indies and created an unworkable republican Union with the Northeast whose licentious egalitarian culture and economic interests were naturally opposed to our own.

The South was ruled from Washington whereas the British West Indies, Spanish West Indies, French West Indies, and Dutch West Indies were ruled from London, Madrid, Paris, and the Hague.

The inability to shake off metropolitan rule and negotiate from a position of collective strength would later doom the whole region to utopian liberal social experiments which would destroy their prosperity.

All this makes sense to me.

Note: The excerpt above comes from Stephen Palme and Francisco Scarano’s mammoth The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples.

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16 Comments

  1. I have read this blog with much interest. And have learned much history. As a Canadian I have some familiarity with the question of separation. Things were to play out as you desire with a re-independent south, have you considered the enormous logistic problems this would entail?
    For example : shares of federal debt.
    Control of military assets.
    Removal replacement refunding of former federal programs ie post office
    Issuance of new passports
    Citizen issues
    Blacks – citizens or returned to slavery
    The task could be almost impossible
    Trade and diplomatic relations with foreign nations inc the new smaller union states
    The list is almost endless, the task couldbealmost

  2. Here’s what I would argue:

    (1) A peaceful breakup of the Union on the model of the Velvet Divorce between the Czech Republic and Slovakia would be mutually beneficial for the Republic of Dixie and the United States.

    (2) As things stand today, Americans hate their government because the United States is too heterogeneous to govern effectively. Americans are no longer a nation with a common culture and have interminable debates over social issues and economic policies because of this.

    (3) The issues raised above – military assets, federal debt, passports, ethnic minorities, establishing trade with foreign countries – were no real obstacles to the break up of the Soviet Union or the British Empire and could be handled in a similar way in the United States.

    (4) If secession is good enough for Kosovo, Panama, Taiwan, or South Sudan, then it is good enough for the United States.

  3. In that case the Yankees would keep the Army, Navy, and all the nukes plus all the major bases in the South like Hampton Roads/Newport News, Fort Bragg etc… Just like England and Russia did. Do you want to be dependent on the Yankees for defense?

  4. The vast majority of native-born whites in the American South, identify simply as Americans. The only states that have slimmest chance of leaving the Union, are Alaska — because of it’s physical distance and separation from the US mainland & and it’s abundant natural resources, and Hawaii — because it’s necessity as a forward operations base in the Pacific will lessen as the America’s military dominance in the world declines. Both are recent additions into the Union anyway.

    I would love for Hunter or Palmetto Patriot or someone other Southerner on here, to travel across the South from Texas to Vrginia and take an objective survey among native-born white Southerners of all ages, from every state, among all income brackets, among both political parties — being as thorough in sampling as possible, and see just how many of them would support independence from the Union.

    I’ll bet most would rather stay American.

    Anyone want to take my bet?

  5. Webley

    With a peaceful separation, none of those things would really be an issue. It could all simply be divided by population and divvied out accordingly and some kind of payment plan worked out for assets not so easily split. There are post offices and passport offices in the South. They would simply handle a new kind of stamp and a different looking passport

    The military would be the trickiest I think because of how Southron and rural it is. A quick check with some of the yankees here on this post, they’d wanted to stay in the military and in the South. Small sample size but…

    You would lose Chris. Most Southrons respond favorably to a New Dixie when asked. They don’t advocate it like we do here, but you don’t hear folks dismiss the idea. And by Southron I mean Southron, not transplants or negros and the like. Although according to my little brother, more transplants are staring to see a free Dixie as the way to go. It’s a sign of how feed up with BRA people are becoming, even the ones who don’t see things as BRA.

  6. make that a peaceful split, with a debate and a plan… Most would ditch the usa in a heart beat once it’s explained how certain issues like immigration and exploring for gas off our coast is killed by yankee/ left coast political alignments and the vote would be heavily in favor of secession among Whites.

    a violent split would get and has very little support.

  7. Could be John, a certain strain of transplants fit that. It’s an odd thing, really race is an odd thing down here too. Heritage and negros unite a lot of Southron people.

    From what I can tell, transplants are fickle people, its why they fled the north, no family ties etc and would go which ever way they see best for them, even the ones who are anti Southron to minor degrees. It’s human nature. A number are anti-Southron to a large degree and they cause most of the problems. Some part of me feels 80% of transplants are anti Southron, but 50% of those keep their mouths mostly shut. Then there are the other 10%. My bother swears this number is growing. He does high end brick and stone work. Does a fair amount of work for transplants all over the state. His company logo has out flag in it. He says the number of complements on the logo has gone up.

    Heritage is a bigger unifying factor them most yankees get. When I wear my pro Confederate shirts, anywhere in the South, Louisiana, the hills, tidewater, I get all kinds of smiles and nods of approval. The caveat is, I’m sure they all had it preached to them or read up on it themselves. The schools are yankee controlled so they get it at home, from friends, family or learn it on their own. Once they do, it takes off in a mans soul.

    Race is also a big unifier down here as in, no one likes the negros or the newest wave mexicans, few folks bitch about the small numbers of gooks, jibs etc that we have, and the gooks jibs etc bitch about the negros and mexicans

    Strange but true and I don’t rightly know what to make out if most days. All folks like seeing their heritage continue, just like my German friends smile and enjoy me butchering their language and drinking songs, and yet… it just isn’t right either.

    Strange days

  8. Without the evolutionary impulses of whites the world is a brown stagnant pool of feces. We live in the Hindu fantasy of people wanting to be white but sooner rather than much later.

    But we allowed the feminine nature to rule since 1945 because we were rich and could afford a little nonsense and so we turned our lands into day care centers for unruly children, and true to form all the children are unhappy because there is no order.

    The transplants are feminine, they want the order but they don’t want the responsibility nor the thankless task of discipline, and if order begins to breakdown they side with the whiners over the behaved.

    Now if all those Southron men could learn how to deal with the one word that scares the wimmin an chillins so much then these men could do more then discuss the Battle of Gettysburg. That word is “racist”, deal with that effectively then the Connie Chastains and her entourage of gay bitches will be in the kitchen baking pecan pies, and damned happy too.

  9. True enough RRS, true enough. Once men take the red pill on one topic, the rest normally start to fall in line

  10. Believe it or not chortling John, but the question isn’t whether nations have been separated before. Sudan comes to mind as a recent example. Rather it’s how many have done so peacefully and how many of that fraction were ofthe size and complexity of the US.

    It may not be impossible, but probably difficult and almost assuredly not amicable. Try and remembr how the West treated apartheid SA. Now imagine the new South announces it will be an apartheid state.

    International trade may tank as you become an outcast state. I am not anti at all
    Just pointing out it could be a hard slog and most people are lazy and apathetic.

  11. Hawaii is essentially non-White, once shorn of the military and a few retirees and descendants of early colonizers and corporate employees. Personally, I think that provided we are left a perpetual lease on Pearl Harbor and Hickam AFB, Hawaii’s departure from the United States is a good thing. Whites should leave Hawaii voluntarily or left alone to be thrown off, as they will be. Hawaii should not be White: it isn’t conducive to White development. If a vote were taken, secession would be very likely were it not for the haole’s welfare checks. It should be encouraged. Whites will still be able to safely vacation on the beaches, as is possible even today in Mexico provided one stays at a hotel that can afford to bribe the local constabulary and Federales to keep the gringos safe on the property itself and its adjoining beachfront.

    Alaskan Whites are largely GRQ’s, people there to Get Rich Quick, and there is no small Alaskan Secession movement now, again restricted by the flow of money from the lower 48. However, Alaska has oil, tons and tons of it, and ample land to build refineries and prison camps for negro and mestizo miscreants, among other things. Letting Alaska go is more precarious. Still, it will probably wind up that way.

    And of course, kicking Puerto Rico out before it can be tikkun olam’ed into a State, complete with bilingualism a la Quebec, is simply a no-brainer. Independence or reunion with Spain are the only alternatives we can even sanely contemplate offering them.

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