Journal rk's Journal: The fall of the United States? 10
MOSCOW -- For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.
Read on for the rest of the article.
Personally, I won't say that a prediction that the current central state called "The United States of America" will break down and collapse in the not-too-distant future is out of the question. If you'd told me in 1979 when Soviet tanks and troop transports were rolling into Afghanistan that the Soviet Union would collapse in 11 years, I'd have laughed at you. So, I'm not going to say it can't happen and it may well one day.
On the other hand, I think this guy probably had just a wee bit too much vodka when he came up with the regional divisions he's made. I mean, Utah and California together, seriously? New Mexico and Georgia? I don't think so. In addition, he's parceling out these regions to other countries seems a bit unrealistic. Given that he predicts Alaska to go back to Russia, I think it's more an ultra-nationalist "Boundless Russia" wet dream than anything based on intelligence reports.
Still, it's an interesting mental exercise to think how various political unions would reforge from a federal collapse. What sort of map would you envision in such a (maybe not so) hypothetical future?
comrade's been playing Risk too much (Score:2, Insightful)
(Quotes being from TFA)
So he says we'll split along ethnic lines, and then he shows the country split instead along geographical lines (humorously, as you mentioned, lumping in Utah with California), divying out the parts to the closest foreign powers in that direction. As if it would go down like the rules of the game of Risk, where more powerful forces gang up and surround a weaker force, but chomp at it only on the side they're
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Culturally and geographically, Oregon and Washington have MUCH more in common with Idaho and British Columbia than they do with New York.
So I think even the blue states would split up.
Well, Here's Some More Examination (Score:1)
What about the map at the top of this one?
http://kk.org/ct2/2008/12/breakup-of-the-usa.php [kk.org]
I would take time to read the "Collapse Gap" presentation by Dmitry Orlov:
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/23259 [energybulletin.net]
Clearer, every day.
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And DELIBERATE!
The serendipitous quote on the ./ fortune?
"I have ways of making money that you know nothing of."
-- John D. Rockefeller
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The "American Mindset" is something you see on Telly. And in movies.
Not on the streets and malls of the most lied-to-people on earth.
The theory fails (Score:1)
to account for the federal government using the combined armed forces to ensure control.
Withhold funds? How? Who collects them now? Who runs the banking and finance system (actually that is a good question) - but the Fed (bank) and Feds (gov) can easily takeover the states banking activities. Unless the USD hyperinflates and becomes worthless - don't think the premise of a state based funding crisis can be supported.
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Though the one problem is, these armed forces come from various states. Hell as I drove by the local armory today, I couldn't help but wonder what kind of firepower was packed into the various buildings... even the nukes are ultimately controlled by people who consider themselves residents of one state or other.
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1) the Red Guard is the most example I can think of immediately of people turning against others of their own local/ethnic groupings
2) indoctrinating the US armed forces to conquer wholesale the US might be hard, but slamming hard the first people to try it might set an example others don't want to follow
3) Yankees didn't have a problem killing Southerners (or vice versa)
4) if local commanders can set off nuclear weapons the chain of command is fucked already
5) an army marches on its stomach and the locals
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Nukes could only fail to be deployed due to the loss of command and control. It's all classified, but because setting off nukes requires some precision detonation timing, it is presumed that at least part of nuclear weapon arming codes includes encoded timing data for the fuse system. Without that data, you might be able to make a small dirty bomb style boom, but getting a full detonation to work without a team of experienced nuclear weapon engineers to reverse engineer the timing would be close to impossi