Wirkman Netizen está decepcionado con Estados Unidos, pero no cambiaría su proceso fundacional por el de Canadá. Su réplica a la tesis anti-secesionista de Stephan Kinsella enfatiza el aspecto simbólico e ideológico de la Revolución Americana y su posterior narrativa. Copio su comentario casi entero (énfasis mío):
Had American colonials resisted their impulse to resist the petty and overreaching nature of the British imperial government, they may very well have settled down into something like Canadian servility. I much prefer belonging to a tradition that, at the very least, hypocritically raised the standard of freedom to a tradition that never bothered to do even that.
The great thing about the language of the Declaration of Independence is that it condemns the crimes of the American state and the American people.
And yes, the bulk of the greatest crimes in early American history were private crimes: chattel slavery and land theft.
And hey, that brings me to a point that Stephan Kinsella doesn’t make: It is not just the American state and its government that cry out for moral condemnation, it is the American people. America was not corrupted by government alone. Americans leapt to corruption and slavery and murder and thievery as a way of everyday life. The early pioneers were — not to a man, of course, but far, far too often — criminals worthy of the noose. George Washington, we should remember, tried to find some way to treat the Indians as separate nations worthy of treaty rights and all that. But the American people themselves — and the state of Georgia, itself — largely scuttled that emprise.
To my mind, it was well worth seceding from Britain. But afterwards, a much more difficult revolution was necessary, a moral enlightenment that did not come. Instead, America endured a series of religious revivals that (like religion often does) distracted the moral attention from the here-and-now to the hereafter.
(...) Liberty was discovered, in part as an excuse, in the course of practical political fights in the 18th century, in part in reaction to the devastation of religious tyranny and warfare of the preceding centuries. But liberty’s discovery cannot and must not be seen as tantamount to liberty’s efflorescence. That’s just demagogic folly.
Liberty is something that must be fought for even today. Always the temptations of power and usurpation trump the moral weight of equal freedom. It is up to us to fight the naming of trump, over and over. America’s history is not admirable for its few successes, but for its appropriated ideals. And the ideals themselves justify the move to secession in 1776. They do not justify, however, all the things done in its name. It is our job to make these careful distinctions.
July 4 is the one American holiday an honorable person may celebrate, with something like full clean conscience. Not because the state the colonies’ independence bequeathed us was and is just, but because the cause they adopted in the course of their struggles was.
Wirkman no tiene en cuenta un aspecto que sí menciona Lew Rockwell: en Canadá hay menos militarismo y nacionalismo beligerante, quizás resultado de su pacífica secesión.
En cualquier caso, el argumento de Wirkman no basta para justificar la guerra de la independencia (las guerras no pueden justificarse únicamente en función de las ideas que contribuyen a promover). Sí aporta razones para pensar que su legado fue, en balance, positivo para la causa de la libertad (aunque tampoco estoy totalmente convencido de esta tesis).
