Northwest Territorial Imperative | |
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The proposed flag of the Northwest American Republic.[1] | |
The Northwest Territorial Imperative (often shortened to the Northwest Imperative) was a white separatist idea put forward in the 1970s–80s by white nationalist, white supremacist, white separatist and neo-Nazi groups within the United States.[2] According to it, members of these groups were encouraged to relocate to a region of the Northwestern United States—Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Western Montana—with the intention to eventually turn the region into an Aryan ethnostate.[3] Some definitions of the project include the entire states of Montana and Wyoming, plus Northern California.[4][3]
From this idea, Harold Covington founded the organization the Northwest Front in the 1990s, which is now inactive.[5] Harold Covington died at the age of 68 on July 14, 2018, and his death marked the end of the Northwest Front organization and website.[6]
Several reasons have been given as to why activists have chosen to turn this area into a future white homeland: it is farther removed from Black, Jewish and other minority locations than other areas of the United States are; it is geographically remote, making it harder for the federal government to uproot activists; its "wide open spaces" appeal to those who believe in the right to hunt and fish without any government regulations; and it would also give them access to seaports and Canada.[7]
The formation of such a "White homeland" also involves the expulsion, euphemized as the "repatriation", of all non-Whites from the territory.[8] The project is variously called "Northwest Imperative", "White American Bastion",[9] "White Aryan Republic",[7] "White Aryan Bastion",[10][11] "White Christian Republic", or the "10% solution" by its promoters.[12] White supremacist leaders Robert E. Miles, Robert Jay Mathews and Richard Butler were originally the main promoters of the idea.[4][8][9]
The territory which is proposed by the Northwest Territorial Imperative overlaps with the territory which is proposed by the Cascadia independence movement,[13] and the two movements share similar flags,[14] but they claim to have no ties to each other.[13]
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