Texas Separatists Find New Freedom-Loving President: Vladimir Putin

Turns out there's a heck of a lot of support for Texas secession. Not so much in Texas -- where, despite all Rick Perry's talk of skedaddling, only about 18 percent of residents wanted to secede in 2009 -- but in Russia, where there's at least a lot of rhetorical support for Texas's becoming America's first Breakaway Republic. You sort of have to read Casey Michel's wonderfully weird piece in Politico Magazine to believe it.

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Nathan Smith, the self-appointed "foreign minister" of the Texas Nationalist Movement, was warmly received at a recent gathering of European wingnuts in St. Petersburg, where he wowed a Russian newspaper with his insistence that his movement has 250,000 members, including every single Texan in the U.S. Army. He's pretty sure Texas secession is on the way any day now, since U.S. America is "not a democracy, but a dictatorship."

Not that Russia is likely to rid us of this turbulent state; most of the Russian fascination with a "Free Texas" seems to be revenge fantasy for America's perceived role in the breakup of the USSR and the loss of the country's prestige. Plus, if Texas wants out of America, that makes a good case for arming the brave lads who want chunks of Ukraine to be reunited with Mother Russia, or something. As Michel puts it:

[Over] the past 15 months there has been a sudden, bizarro uptick of Russian interest in and around the American Southwest, most notably Texas, where secessionist sentiment never seems to entirely die out[.]

Russia has been bullish on independence movements that don't involve Chechnya or other Russian regions; Russian media has been an enthusiastic booster of separatist movements in Venice, Scotland, and Catalonia. Now Texas appears, to fans of Western breakups, like it could be the best candidate to start the disuniting of the USA, and Texas secessionists are happy to hear they've got supporters, especially from a country with a real manly leader like Shirtless Vlad.

One of the weirder episodes Michel recounts is a speech by Dukuvakha Abdurakhmanov, the speaker of Chechnya's parliament, who promised that if the U.S. keeps arming the Ukrainian government, maybe Russia ought to "begin delivery of new weapons to Mexico” and "resume debate on the legal status of the territories annexed by the United States, which are now the U.S. states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming." Take that, Mr. James K. Polk! Abdurakhmanov explained that Russia could deliver its armaments to "guerillas" somewhere in either Mexico or the southwest states -- maybe the ones hiding out in the secret ISIS bases in New Mexico. 

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Even Putin has brought up Texas, decrying the USA for "grabbing Texas from Mexico" back in the 19th century, which means that Russia's president is likely to do about as well as the average American high school student on a U.S. history exam. (If you want to be all technical about it, Texans broke away from Mexico so's they could have slaves, then petitioned to become part of the then-slavery-friendly USA.) But that has a lot more to do with justifying Russia's generous annexation of Crimea than it does with actually making a case for Texas secession. Even so, if it means the occasional Texan Nationalist can take a trip to a fancy get-together of neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists, the secessionists are delighted for any support they can get.

Now if we can just find a way to convince Louie Gohmert to take up the post of Texan Ambassador to Moscow ...

[ Politico ]