Scientific prediction: Total collapse of USA is inevitable.
Brief summary:
"If I predicted this collapse in 2008, I would agree with you that it is obvious, but I made this prediction in 1998 in the city of Linz, Austria, where Hitler was born, and where Hitler wanted to gather all the art works of the world into a museum. It is beautiful city, and I attended a conference called "Information war". There were 400 attendees, I was the only one from Russia, there were 150 experts from United States. And this huge conference I presented my view on USA, by showing a map of USA split in regions as you see here, I had no idea how I would be received, but the map was greeted with a wild vocal response, and when I walked off the stage I saw that a very large Austrian guy was following me, I thought he was going to beat me up, but he put his arm around me and praised my presentation saying that "You are brave to, to speak about what we were thinking". I am basing my prediction on the fact that since 1945, United States had only three annual balanced budgets, and that situation has not improved since than. As you know I do like United States of America, and have visited it more than any other country. I did not think that I would come to such conclusion, until I reviewed the findings of my other colleagues”…
Igor Panarin
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 break up of the U.S. -- very seriously.
In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," says Prof. Panarin. "But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger."
Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. He is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.
But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin's views also fit neatly with the Kremlin's narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.
A polite and cheerful man with a buzz cut, Mr. Panarin insists he does not dislike Americans. But he warns that the outlook for them is dire.
"There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur," he says. "One could rejoice in that process," he adds, poker-faced. "But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario -- for Russia." Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.
Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control.
In addition to increasing coverage in state media, which are tightly controlled by the Kremlin, Mr. Panarin's ideas are now being widely discussed among local experts. He presented his theory at a recent roundtable discussion at the Foreign Ministry. The country's top international relations school has hosted him as a keynote speaker. During an appearance on the state TV channel Rossiya, the station cut between his comments and TV footage of lines at soup kitchens and crowds of homeless people in the U.S. The professor has also been featured on the Kremlin's English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today.
Mr. Panarin's apocalyptic vision "reflects a very pronounced degree of anti-Americanism in Russia today," says Vladimir Pozner, a prominent TV journalist in Russia. "It's much stronger than it was in the Soviet Union."
Mr. Pozner and other Russian commentators and experts on the U.S. dismiss Mr. Panarin's predictions. "Crazy ideas are not usually discussed by serious people," says Sergei Rogov, director of the government-run Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who thinks Mr. Panarin's theories don't hold water.
Mr. Panarin's résumé includes many years in the Soviet KGB, an experience shared by other top Russian officials. His office, in downtown Moscow, shows his national pride, with pennants on the wall bearing the emblem of the FSB, the KGB's successor agency. It is also full of statuettes of eagles; a double-headed eagle was the symbol of czarist Russia.
In post-Soviet Russia, Mr. Panarin got a doctorate in political science, studied U.S. economics, and worked for FAPSI, then the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. He says he did strategy forecasts for then-President Boris Yeltsin, adding that the details are "classified."
More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/04/igor-panarin-us-will-coll_n_171725.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a3sayDZz.QKc&refer=us
http://www.usnews.com/money/blogs/capital-commerce/2009/0
Forum
Pages: 1 
