THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

We are becoming more and more an atomic society, a society in which each person is a separate unit. A person can sit at home with television, he can buy about anything on his computer, or he can talk to almost anybody on his computer or on the phone. Our jobs are becoming more and spread out, and we no longer all go to a single central city for anything.

By the time we attain independence, technology will have moved forward another computer generation or two. If we are to look to our future as an independent South, then, we must think in terms of that world. We may find that our present demand for devolution is outrun by technology.

Instead of having a problem with the basic unit of society being too big, like the Federal Government, we may well find we have problems uniting something as large as the South into a single meaningful unit.

This is a reversal of the historical trend. For thousands of years, we defined civilization in terms of large size. The very word "civilization" means nothing but "city-ization." The history we learned in school ignores the advances made in Northern Europe that did not involve cities. With all the great praise of the Roman Empire and groaning over its collapse, it was the northern "barbarians" who advanced European welfare with a huge leap in the middle of the so-called "Dark Ages."

In the seventh and eighth centuries, these "barbarians" DOUBLED the output per acre of land in the former Roman Empire of the North. Output per acre had stagnated for centuries before then. In fact, there had been precious little advance in this area since the beginning of agriculture millennia before.

These "barbarians" introduced the first real plow. Brilliant Roman civilization had used the same poking stick they had inherited from a thousand years before. The "barbarians" invented the horse collar, which replaced the primitive Roman harness that had been choking horses for centuries. The "barbarians," again in the "Dark Ages," invented the horseshoe and the three-field system.

All that we learn in history courses is that everything collapsed and ignorance ruled when the Roman Empire was driven out of Northern Europe. The fact is that real production and the real standard of living went up for the mass of people.

To us, the development of civilization means the pyramids, the empires of the Middle East, the huge slave-based societies like Imperial China or Rome. Historians go where the records are, and the records are where the masses are forced together and enslaved. All this leaves us completely unprepared to deal with real history.

And being unable to deal with real history makes us unable to deal with the real future. The real future will have little room for city-ization.

Today, the only reason we have cities is because our technology is still primitive. The city is rapidly losing all of its old functions.

I remember very well when you had to go downtown to get almost anything you couldn't buy in a general grocery store. A general grocery store back then had about what you would now find at a convenience store. Any Wal-Mart or K- Mart in a small town today has more than the whole city of Columbia could offer in 1955.

The big cities offered as much as Wal-Mart or a shopping center today has, and they had entertainment as well. But even a big city did not have all that you can get on cable today.

And remember we are talking about a society that is still absolutely primitive in terms of a few decades from now.

There are those of us who will always be dissatisfied if they cannot go to a live play or hear a live orchestra. That is charming and all, but let's discuss reality here. Most people, even the ones who claim all those artistic preferences, will not go to such performances when we get better-than-live performances in our homes.

In the Old South, if you said you needed to talk to someone, it meant you had to wait until the weather was good, get dressed, get out the horses and hitch them to the wagon, and go and see if whoever you wanted to see was at home. Now you call.

Have you seen the New York hit play, CATS? I have. I saw it on PBS, and it is coming out on tape. Actually, I saw the part I wanted to see. I wasn't in the mood, and I wasn't stuck in a New York theater seat, so I'll see the rest if and when I feel like it.

It has been years since I bought anything in the downtown part of Columbia where we used to buy pretty well everything. I simply do not remember the last time I HAD to go downtown to buy anything. In fact, the only time I have to make a trip to buy something is a trip out to Columbia Mall, which is well out of town.

Meanwhile the cities are becoming havens for communities of people who simply don't belong out there in the countryside. "Inner city" has an unpleasant connotation. But the inner city is also being taken over by homosexual communities and other groups who need to cluster. I am all for their clustering, myself

1) I do not want them near me, and

2) I do not want them to be miserable, so, in a truly Southern way, I act accordingly.

3) I segregate myself and those I identify with.

No longer do we need to live together and tolerate each other for the sake of production or marketing. We will all deal with the whole world from our living room, via computers and virtual reality.

There will be very little you CAN outlaw on the virtual reality Internet. Because one will be a direct part of the world via the virtual reality Internet, enforced "multiculturalism" should be totally abandoned in terms of where one has to live. Since everyone can reach everywhere from where they sit, there is no reason to force people to live in "multicultural" groupings.

In this as in other areas, the Confederacy will first be distinguished by what it does NOT do. The Confederacy will not, for example, begin with the things other countries all did first. Some examples of the first things we have traditionally expected every new country to do: 1) set up a post office and issue national stamps, a first sign of sovereignty, 2) print its own currency, 3) set up embassies in other countries.

The Confederacy will NOT have a post office. The government-run post office, whether it is run outright by the bureaucrats or is a state-granted monopoly as in the United States, is an expensive, cumbersome dinosaur. Whereas every other form of communication is open practically 24 hours a day, for example, our outdated postal monopoly makes people form lines from 9 to 5 for postal business.

The only reason we still have a Post Office is because we have a law which says that only the Post Office is allowed to deliver first class mail. By simply not passing such a law, the Confederacy will have the world's first private, truly efficient, and TAX-PAYING mail delivery service.

As for money, more and more transactions will be by machine with plastic. But even plastic is soon going to be replaced by handprint or voiceprint identification.

Nor does it look like there will ever be any Confederate embassies. Embassies were developed back in the days when communication was slow, and an ambassador had to reside in a foreign capital to represent his country's interests. Today, Paris can deal directly with Washington.

As Ross Perot has pointed out, traditional embassies are pretty well passe. International relations should be handled by teleconferencing or other means. "Face to face" meetings of leaders are staged affairs, and do exactly the opposite of what they should do.

It would be far, far better if leaders met more regularly by simple teleconferencing.

Our present political setup was developed to deal with the world as it existed before all these changes. Things were organized on a clear, step-by-step continuum. If you lived in the middle of South Carolina, and you wanted something that was available only in Atlanta, you ordered it through a store in Columbia. To express your opinion, you elected delegates from your county, who in turn elected delegates from the state, who in turn went to national conventions.

Now, what we do more and more is simply to email Washington, DC. Under earlier technologies, our work determined where we lived. We had to learn to deal with whoever our job put us into contact with. Now, more and more, we can determine where we want to live according to our preferences.

What I would like to do is to be able to live in a community of people I feel comfortable with, regardless of how that may upset Politically Correct people. In earlier ages, this would have limited a number of my horizons.

In a few years, I can have all the advantages of dealing with any kind of people I choose, and still live in the kind of community I choose.

In my opinion, this will lead many of us evil whites to live in evil, overwhelmingly white communities, just because we want to. Since nonwhites no longer have to live with us in order to obtain the advantages of dealing with us, this takes nothing from them.

Liberals point to poll data and tell us that all whites want desperately to live in mixed communities. If this were the case, Charlotte would not have just signed its umpteenth agreement to force integration onto its people. If this were true, we would not have this insane national policy of chasing down whites with busing and "low-cost" housing, then white flight, then more busing and "low cost" housing, and so forth. (Please see my February 13 article, "When Are You Integrated?") As I said in an earlier article, I think the rise of super terrorism is going to put all the theories of multiculturalism up against a test they cannot pass. (See November 21 article, "Superterrorism")

Nor is superterrorism the only reason we may have to divide up into widely separate units. We have new diseases like the Ebola virus and the AIDS virus, both of which are mutating. There is also the fact that old infectious diseases are becoming immune to all of our present antibiotics.

The only sane policy is for us to spread out into self-contained communities. I like that idea. In any case, the new reality is that an individual will be a part of the world community by virtue of the new technology.

There will be no natural, step-by- step units between him and the world in general. He will not deal through local cities and local governments and then to higher units. The individual will be part of the world.

That is one end of the new duality technology is producing. The other end is that the individual will be dealing with that world directly and ALONE. He will not go to the state convention as part of his county group.

So we have a person who is part of the world through technology. He can deal directly with government through technology. But he also needs a sense of belonging to a community. His entire sense of community will come from where he lives, so where he lives must be entirely his own choice. The world of the future should be a set of communities, united on a voluntary basis.

The function of such a voluntary unity is one for which our Confederate mindset is admirably prepared. We are, in fact, the only modern political thinkers of our age. This is because we are the only people who are accustomed to thinking in terms of bringing separate units together voluntarily under one umbrella. Every other group today can only think in terms of all the units being brought together into one unit by some kind of force. This includes the libertarians.

Under libertarians or liberals or the Christian Coalition, you must have one society, obeying a single law. Libertarians want open borders and open communities and open markets, and they will do anything they have to make this happen everywhere within their domains.

Confederates are very used to thinking in terms of local areas which only have very limited obligations to the central state and the central market and the central ideas that are supposed to govern everybody in a single area.

In other words, you pays yo money and you takes yo choice. Your community must help provide for the common defense.

And that, boys and girls, is the way everybody is going to have to learn to think. Technology is making us, at the same time, a single society and a fragmented society. With each year that passes, the potential for a single person to kill anybody within miles of him is becoming simpler and simpler and more and more available. With each passing year, it becomes less necessary for voluntary communities of several thousand people each, the population of a town or apartment complex, to live within miles of each other.

We will have to have compact, voluntary, trustworthy groupings of people. No matter how much libertarians may cry about it, these communities must have strict control of physical access.

None of this will limit our economies or our interaction with the rest of the world in any serious way. We will be able to live among those we choose to live among and deal with anyone we choose to.

As Confederates, we have no universalist ambitions as to how everyone should live. But we do have very, very strong opinions on what should be allowed in our own communities. So the society of the future will come naturally to us.