Kirkpatrick Sale

[Dave Monroe]

Intelligence Report
Summer 2008

North Meets South
Vermont Secessionists Meet with Racist League of the South
By Heidi Beirich



>From 1777 until 1791, Vermont was an independent state complete with
all the trappings — a constitution, a flag, even a mint to pump out
its own money, the Vermont copper. But in 1791, Vermonters happily
joined the new United States. Now, some of the locals want out.

In 2003, the Second Vermont Republic (SVR) sprang up to push for the
independence of Vermont, a tiny, idyllic Northeastern state with fewer
than 630,000 residents. In its seemingly quixotic quest, SVR took up
the mantra that small is beautiful, arguing that secession would lead
to sustainability, ecological balance, an end to military
entanglements overseas, and a better life. SVR activists designed a
new green flag for Vermont and started selling T-shirts, particularly
popular with the state's many tourists, that read, "U.S. OUT OF VT!"

But in recent months and years, SVR's actions have gone from way out
to worrying. Starting in 2005, SVR leader Thomas H. Naylor — along
with SVR's very close ally, the Cold Spring, N.Y.-based Middlebury
Institute that is headed by longtime leftist Kirkpatrick Sale — began
openly collaborating with a collection of Southern extremists to build
a national secession movement.

[...]

Naylor's leftist credentials were enhanced greatly by his close
friendship with Kirkpatrick Sale, whose Middlebury Institute he helped
found in 2005. Sale, a contributing editor at the left-wing journal
The Nation and a chronicler of the militant, 1960s-era Students for a
Democratic Society, is best known as the author of The Conquest of
Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, a 1991
history that was the first to denounce Columbus for "founding" the New
World and ushering in the destruction of its native peoples. Between
1965 and 1968, he was editor of The New York Times Magazine. Thirty
years later, in 1995, Sale was named as a "visionary" by the Utne
Reader, a liberal journal. Sale also is known for his hatred of
technology, once famously smashing a computer to bits on a New York
stage.

[...]

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=915

   In 1958, two Cornell undergraduates imagined a dystopian future, a
time when computers would be carried in shirt pockets and corporations
hailed as infallible, and they called it 1998. Writing almost ten
years after George Orwell wrote 1984, the young authors, one an
engineering major turned toward English, the other the editor of the
Cornell Daily Sun, vamped off Orwell's chilling vision of a monolithic
totalitarian state, but theirs is a tale more of humor, horniness,
Beatniks, and song. The result of their collaboration is a lascivious
Luddite satire called Minstral Island. Perhaps it is but one of many
technology-loathing, future-fearing, copulation-adoring musicals of
the 1950s, but most certainly it is the only one penned by Thomas
Pynchon and Kirkpatrick Sale....

http://www.themodernword.com/Pynchon/paper_gibbs.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0910&msg=143331