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Okay. Getting bck to Rage's initial question,a dn ignoring the shitstorm that's developed here...
Separatism has no place in progresive politics because it's a fundamentally anti-progressive idea—it's inevitably regressive, in fact, catering to a nostalgia for the Good Old Days when things were simpler and there were no nasty darkies skulking around the bus stop and you could take a walk in the park at night et cetera.
The longest-lived and most successful separatist groups in America are the religious separatists—the Amish and Mennonite communities of Pennsylvania spring to mind. They're lovely, lovely people, of course, and I won't hear a bad word said about their lifestyles... but they're not exactly pointing the way forward, are they?
Separatist communities can work, for a time, but they cannot thrive indefinitely: cultures and communities grow strong by interacting with other communities—it's evolutionary biology writ large, where small homogeneous breeding stocks lead to mutations (not the cool X-Men kind, though—we're talking nasty stuff like congenitl diseases and birth defects), and the best hope for a robust population is unrestricted access to as large a community of potential mates as possible.
Ideas are like communities: they thrive and grow robust by doing all the things that cultures do—interacting, trading, assimilating, sometimes conquering each other. A separatist community—a community that by definition all believe the same things—spells death for intellectual growth.
The Amish are likely to be extinct as a distinct cultural group within a few generations, as their young people assimilate, their elders die off, and genetic damage caused by generations of inbreeding continues to wreak havoc on the children. That's the end result of sepratism, undertaken with the noblest of motives.
It cannot work: it cannot last: there's no returning to Edens past. Evolution demands forward motion (that's why they call it "progress"): the brave new world will be a mash-up.
So, yeah, seapartism may be radical in that it goes against the dominant progressive evolutionary paradigm: but it's also, by definition, doomed to failure. |
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) but I am aware of the danger of hating a group of people you don't know just because they're not in your clique/gang/nation/race (Orwell's 1984 hate sessions etc.) 
:P 