Which Countries Will Topple? Place Your Bets Right Here!
By SusanUnPC on January 15, 2009 at 1:50 AM in Current Affairs
Placed your bets below in the comments. It depends on who you read. The U.S. military’s — yes, the U.S. military — Joint Operating Environment (JOE 2008) report puts both Mexico and Pakistan at high risk for collapse, Mexico to its criminals and drug cartels and Pakistan to its extremists. (Then there’s Mexico’s predatory credit card lending racket.)
Then U.S. News & World Report offers up the odds on the U.S. of A. going belly up, going on the rocks, going to ruin, being taken to the cleaners, losing one’s shirt, and not least, going to pot (which might be a new source of revenue, if we just look the other way at the number of pot-growing operations ongoing in our national parks, yes, our national parks — because, thanks to cut-backs, we have insufficient park rangers to guard and protect our nation’s parks):
… According to Russian foreign policy expert Igor Panarin, it’s America that is supposed to collapse. And when that happens, according to a Wall Street Journal interview with Panarin, "Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence." Confusing. But it looks like Canada will be the big winner in all this. Then again, maybe not.
And who is this Igor Panarin, you ask? He’s the Russian who predicts the “End of the US by 2010″:
The world is abuzz with Russian professor Igor Panarin’s prediction that the US would end in 2010, even though its something that he has been saying for the past 10 years or more.
While most turned a deaf ear to his arguments for the better part of the decade that he’s been repeating his warning, Panarin says that an economic and moral collapse would trigger a civil war within the US and would result in its breakup. Now, with the media having picked up on his views, he has a much wider audience for his theory.
The 50-year old former KGB analyst is dean of the Russian foreign ministry’s academy for future diplomats, and is well connected across the Kremlin, besides being a lecturer to students, author, and an “expert” on US-Russian relations.
The Wall Street Journal carried a report that said Panarin’s theory fits well with the Kremlin’s narrative about Russia returning to its “rightful place” on the world stage after its own weak period during the 1990s, during which similar theories of it breaking up into separate territories were abound.
“There’s a 55: 45 per cent chance right now that disintegration will occur,” he was quoted as saying.
“One could rejoice in that process, but if we’re talking reasonably, it’s not the best scenario – for Russia.”
Panarin says that though Russia would become more powerful in the global arena, its dollar and US trade-dependent economy would suffer. He says that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation would trigger a civil war by around next fall, and that the dollar would collapse.
In an end-November interview to the respected daily Izvestia, Panarin was quoted as saying that the dollar was not “secured by anything”. He said foreign debt of the US has grown “like an avalanche, even though in the early 1980s there was no debt”. Panarin said that around 1998, when he made his first prediction, US debt exceeded $2 trillion, and is presently over $11 trillion. “This is a pyramid that can only collapse”, he was reported as saying.
Panarin initially made his prediction at an international conference around a decade ago, when the US economy appeared strong. However, the way 2008 has played out, the retrospective view of the year gone by seems to support his theory.
In September 1998, at a conference on information warfare held at Linz, Austria, Panarin talked about the use of data to edge out a rival, and more importantly, presented his theory to 400 fellow delegates. “When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise,” he remembers. He says most in the audience were sceptical. “They didn’t believe me,” The Wall Street Journal quoted him as saying.
Panarin, according to paper, based his theory on classified data supplied to him by Federal Agency of Government Communications and Information (FAPSI) analysts. In his theory, he says that economic, financial and demographic trends will create a political and social crisis in the US, and when push comes to shove, the wealthier states would withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union.
Economic collapse
Thereafter, a social unrest would precede a civil war, that would cause the US to split along ethnic lines, with foreign powers moving in. … [There's much more at domain-b.com.]
So maybe my dream of being invaded by Canada may come true in my lifetime! (If you’ve ever spent time in Canada, as I have, you quickly realize that the people up there are just plain nicer than we are. They also take life a bit slower than we do — they breathe a little — and they’re more even-handed and humane in social and medical services.
As an example of them living life more slowly, I had the experience, a few years ago on vacation with relatives, of having to hunt for hours for an open restaurant on Christmas Day. Everybody closes up on Christmas Day to stay at home with their families! The newspapers don’t even print an issue that day! Yes, the Canadian stores have sales after Christmas, just like in the U.S., but they don’t advertise on Christmas Day because there are no newspapers printed — they print their ads the morning after Christmas.
Anyway, I digress. Who do YOU think is going to collapse?
by Ronald Scott
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