Southern National Congress Statement on Just War and Defense

With the American Empire currently waging unnecessary, illegal and unconstitutional wars on three fronts:  Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, I am republishing the 2008 statement made by the Southern National Congress concerning Just War and Defense.

Remonstrance and Petition for a Redress of Grievances

Just War and Defense 

We, the Delegates of the Southern States, in Congress assembled, make the following Findings and Affirmations:

The Southern States and People of the nascent United States played a pivotal role in the War of Independence. Without their contribution and sacrifice, America’s freedom from England could not have been won. Thereafter, Southerners have faithfully served in every conflict, representing a disproportionate share of the enlisted ranks and officer corps of the U.S. Armed Services, and sadly, of the killed and wounded as well.

Although subjected to unjustified aggression in the War Between the States and cruel exploitation thereafter, the Southern People, at the urging of their former Confederate leaders, embraced the obligations of citizenship and have proven to be among the most loyal and patriotic Americans.

Southerners have won a reputation for courage, valor, and martial prowess in all the country’s conflicts. We have rallied to the colors whenever called with an intensity of devotion that has been an example to the rest of the country and cannot be doubted.

Regrettably, since the beginning of the twentieth century and most recently the so-called Global War on Terror, the United States Government has embarked on a path of imperialism and military adventurism that has not brought us greater security but has actually made us less secure. This policy of aggressive war abuses the willingness of Southerners—indeed, of all Americans—to risk our lives in defense of the country. Moreover, these endless wars are as staggering in their costs as they are tragically unnecessary, with an enormous human price in dead, maimed, and displaced; and in untold billions of dollars, contributing to the current economic crisis that threatens the very foundations of our society.

Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution grants the exclusive power to declare war to the U.S. Congress. But the President and Executive Branch have usurped this power and levied aggressive war without just cause and through deceiving the People as to the threats, necessity, and costs of these conflicts. The Congress has failed in its Constitutional responsibility to check an imperial Executive, while improperly authorizing the use of force and appropriating funds for an unconstitutional, undeclared war.

The right of the People to petition the Government for a redress of grievances is recognized by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Therefore, we, the Delegates to the First Southern National Congress, remonstrate against unnecessary war and the use of armed force to establish American hegemony across the globe, and petition the Government of the United States to:

Refrain from the use of deception and fear to institute aggressive, unjustified, and undeclared military actions.

Restore the sovereign authority of the States and the People and obey the Constitution by levying war only with a proper declaration of war issued by the U.S. Congress.

Observe moral law and the long-established law of nations regarding just war, under which conflict is exercised with a just cause, right intention, probability of success, proportionality, and respect for the immunity of non-combatants.

______________________

Adopted 6 December 2008 by the First Southern National Congress at Hendersonville, North Carolina and ordered to be transmitted to the Delegations to the United States Congress of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia; to the President of the United States, and to the State Governments of these Southern States.

On Behalf of The Fourteen States, Officers, and Board of Governors of The Southern National Congress

Thomas Moore
CHAIRMAN

Learn more at the Southern National Congress website:  http://www.southernnationalcongress.org/

Resolution from the Third Southern National Congress

Third Southern National Congress in Session - Dickson, Tennessee

It was my privilege and honor to be a Tennessee delegate to the Third Southern National Congress which was held November 12-14, 2010, at the Montgomery Bell State Park near Dickson, Tennessee.  The following resolution was debated, refined, and presented by the Congress, with 150 Southern men and women delegates representing the 14 Southern states.

We, the Delegates of the Southern States

IN CONGRESS ASSEMBLED, MAKE THE FOLLOWING FINDINGS:

In the year of our Lord 1789, the newly independent and united States of America formed a federated Republic by agreeing to create the Federal government for the mutual benefit of the sovereign States and their Peoples. The original Constitution of the united States was meant to embody the will of the several States and their Peoples, uniting them in a common political and social contract amongst and between themselves, and also between the States and the central government, which was the fiduciary agent and servant of the several States which created it.

After independence, and in full possession of the sovereign powers afforded them as free and independent States by the Law of Nations, which rests on the Laws of Nature and Almighty God, the original Thirteen States delegated to the central government specifically enumerated powers. They also limited those powers by Amendments IX and X of the Bill of Rights, an inseparable part of the political and social contract uniting the States. They explicitly reserved to themselves or their Peoples all sovereign powers not specifically granted to the central government they had created.

Therefore, the Federal Union was a voluntary, delimited association of the free and sovereign States and their Peoples for the sole purpose of protecting life, liberty, and property. However, many Founders, especially the Anti-Federalists who were mostly Southerners, warned that the United States Constitution contained the seeds of despotism by creating a strong central government. Their warnings have come true. Embarking on a systematic transformation of the original federated Republic, the central government began to usurp the rights and powers of the several States. This transformation began soon after adoption of the Constitution, was consolidated by the Northern victory over the South and the violent suppression of her right to self government in 1865, and has accelerated unto the present day. This process has changed the original federated Republic into a centralized, unitary state ruled by a consolidated central government which claims for itself virtually unlimited powers, just as leading Southern statesmen predicted.

With both national Parties in collusion, today’s Washington-based regime has destroyed all pretense of constitutionally limited government and replaced it with an oligarchy ruled by crony capitalists, the big money cartel based on Wall Street, banks and corporations, the major news and opinion media, and misanthropic globalists bent on radical dreams of a New World Order.

The central government of the United States consistently violates the Constitution, including the protections of the Bill of Rights. Its despotism has grown to gargantuan proportions since the terror attacks of September 2001, a convenient pretext for undeclared, perpetual, impotently pursued wars. It has exploited the so-called War on Terror to create a surveillance-and-police state ruled by fear and by criminalizing of dissidents and patriots, especially Southerners who dare to defend their tradition of limited government and ordered Christian liberty.

Under the mask of promising financial security and prosperity to all, the fiscal and economic policies of the central government instead foster dependency and debt-slavery. The central government has granted to a private banking cartel, the Federal Reserve, an outrageous monopoly to create public money. The Federal Reserve’s fiat money violates the moral requirement of an honest unit of exchange, undermining the irreducible standard of morality necessary to civil society. This dishonest money threatens us with hyper-inflation and the future collapse of the currency, reducing to penury all Americans whose life savings and assets are denominated in U.S. dollars.


The central government is allied with and controlled by the financial cartel and powerful corporations. It rewards them for exporting America’s true wealth-producing enterprises and employment offshore, and empowers the banks to rob us through money creation and bail-outs, the greatest acts of mass plunder in history. Its confiscatory income tax and the hidden tax of inflation rob us of what little wealth remains. The government’s wealth transfers to its politically-favored clients foster a soul-crushing dependency. Today more than half the people of the Southern States derive their income from the central government, directly or indirectly, even though Federal money de-capitalizes and eventually impoverishes those who receive it. Profligate Federal spending indentures our children to foreign financial interests, only to support the continued immorality of the welfare-warfare state; and places all us at risk of economic ruin and political servitude.

This pattern of repeated abuses and usurpations evinces a clear design to reduce the American People generally, and Southerners in particular, under absolute despotism, accompanied by poverty, dependency, and servitude.

THEREFORE, WE THE DELEGATES TO THE THIRD NATIONAL CONGRESS,

do hereby resolve and declare:

that the central government of the United States, by defaulting on its obligations to protect the inalienable rights of the People to life, liberty, and property, is in breach of the Constitution the basis of our fundamental social contract that once bound the People and the several States to the Federal Union;

that the central government no longer serves the States and their People as their agent for ensuring justice, but instead has become the purveyor of mass injustice, tyranny, oppression, and violence; and is the manifest enemy of dignity, freedom, prosperity, and a decent moral order;


that the central government pursues the destruction of a distinctly Southern culture and identity, traducing our heritage, distorting our history, and attempting to coerce us into becoming supine subjects of an Empire that is alien to our hallowed traditions and well-being;

that the central government is not worthy of the respect, much less the obedience, of any People who claim the title of free men and women.

TRUSTING IN ALMIGHTY GOD AND IN THE JUSTICE OF OUR CAUSE, we further resolve and declare that all free Southerners should consider their States and the People of their States absolved of any moral obligation of obedience to the unlawful acts of the central government of the United States. In such circumstances, we encourage all Southerners to devote their primary efforts to their States and local communities in order to reconstitute a free, just, and prosperous civil society.

Adopted 13 November 2010 by the Third National Congress at Dickson, Tennessee

To learn more about the Southern National Congress (SNC) you may go to their website:  www.southernnationalcongress.org