The Lakota Nation secedes from the U.S.

I can't believe this didn't get any attention at all in the Mainstream media. According to the AFP,

The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us," long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old. [..]

The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free -- provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Means said.

The treaties signed with the United States are merely "worthless words on worthless paper," the Lakota freedom activists say on their website.

The treaties have been "repeatedly violated in order to steal our culture, our land and our ability to maintain our way of life," the reborn freedom movement says.
[link | More from Fox and USA Today]

Tax-free? nice. The Lakoites(?) will also distribute their own passport and driving licenses. Now possibly this is the work of a minority of activists (afterall they are descendants of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse) trying to declare independence on their own. But it never cease to amaze me how other countries treat the notion of secession than ours.

It's probably to do with the fact that the threat of secession is more real here than other places, but in this year alone the Scottish National Party ran on a platform of independence and won that election. Nobody got shot, abducted or got over-worked up over it. But when the British High commissioner to Sri Lanka made these comments,

Let me be clear. I am not saying that the political aspiration for Eelam is illegitimate, any more than I would argue that the Scottish National Party’s goal of an independent Scotland is illegitimate. Similarly, I see nothing illegitimate in some crackpot demanding that Yorkshire or some other English county should become an independent state. What is crucial, however, is what methods are used by the SNP or the LTTE to achieve their goals. And the LTTE’s methods are simply unacceptable.

The media, the JVP, and other self-described patriots were screaming their heads off.