It may be mostly schadenfreude, but Russian economist Igor Panarin is convinced that the current economic crisis has a political component which will eventually break the United States apart into as many as six separate nations. He's not alone in this belief. It has long been a staple belief of racist extremist groups and is now being predicted by some on the religious right who are ready with plans for how to rearrange the nation in the face of the Obama presidency. Conspiracy monger Alex Jones even got in on the act on his radio show this weekend, suggesting that there is an active globalist plot to weaken America by breaking it into several smaller nations.
On Russia Today Panarin predicted the outbreak of a civil war in the United States by 2010. Panarin has developed some following as a trends forecaster, and while his predictions may seem outlandish, he is not alone in subscribing to the idea that a breakup of the US in a civil war might be the outcome of the current economic crisis. Panarin blames the impending crisis on poor monetary policy and the US abandonment of the gold standard, a concern which he shares with many on the extreme right in America. He sees a collapse in America equivalent to the Russian collapse of the 1980s as the economic crisis leads to infrastructure failures and a backlash from outraged citizens.
Panarin is not alone in his beliefs. Trends forecaster Gerald Celente from the Trends Research Institute is also predicting tax rebellions, food riots, and the potential for civil war by 2012, largely as a result of the Obama administration's policies which he believes will accelerate economic collapse. Celente has made some successful trend predictions in the past, though his predictions seem to be directed largely by a far-right political ideology which includes the now-standard hatred for the Federal Reserve system which is common among Ron Paul supporters.
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Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Clavos
Nearly twenty years ago, I read a book, The Nine Nations of North America, by Joel Garreau.
Your discussion here reminds me a lot of it, but with a very different perspective, in that his "Nine Nations" were postulated on "clusters" (my word) of culturally related groups splitting off from all three North American countries to form smaller, more culturally cohesive nations than the existing three.
It was an interesting book, especially back in 1989.
As is this article.
2 - Dave Nalle
I didn't get into it in the article, but I don't think the country breaking into autonomous regions or at least the reduction in the power of our current federal system would necessarily be a bad thing. Our founding fathers certainly didn't intend for the federal government to be nearly as strong or play as large a role in government as it does today. Taking power away from the central government and returning it to the states might be the solution to a lot of the problems we currently face, many of which stem from the role the federal government has played in mismanaging financial policy on a national level.
Dave
3 - Baritone
My question is, if the country does break up into north, south, west regions, etc., will there be a playoff?
B
4 - Ruvy
Baritone,
if the country does break up into north, south, west regions, etc., will there be a playoff?
The question is not if there will be a playoff, but what will the game be? One senses, if all this does come to pass, that it will not be football.
5 - bliffle
How silly.
This howler is flagrant: "...while the Blue States have come out on top politically, the Red States are much more self-sufficient in resources and infrastructure."
The biggest state in the Union, California, defies this notion. Without the Blue state of California the union couldn't survive.
6 - Brian aka Guppusmaximus
My question is, if the country does break up into north, south, west regions, etc., will there be a playoff?
LMFAO!!
7 - Ruvy
Threee years ago on 2 December 2005, I made a big prediction, one I was very worried would come true:
(This is the biggie - here I am going out on a limb.) Reality has begun to become unhinged. What this means is that events are leaving the path we define as "normal" and taking another path. This process will accelerate after Jan. 1, 2006. This is also 1 Tévet 5766, the day that G-d begins executing judgment against non-Jews (according to Rav Yehoshua Friedman).
I'm here to say, that looking at this article, I'm seeing that prediction coming true. I take no pleasure in this: but Dave is not off his rocker, even though some of his analyses may be off. En fin, he is reporting the words of someone else.
That someone else may be off his rocker. That could be true. "Trends" predicters often are wrong. But according to economists who should know these things, the United States is not only in a recession, but has been in one for a year. The banking system is bleeding profusely. The construction industry is in trouble. The big three car companies are in trouble. And the government is transferring wealth that doesn't exist to make it all didn't happen. Heck, if I could get a millionth of one percent commission of the "money" flying around in bandaids, bailouts and subsidies, I'd be as rich as Croesus.
But my sense of reality says that even if I could get that millionth of 1%, the money would not be real.
The whole house of cards is beginning to look just like that - a house of cards. And it appears to be collapsing. The news of this Russian's prediction is not particularly new. And on 20 January, unless events take a radical turn before that, a new president will be inaugurated and it will appear that a new sense of unity, hope and apple pie will have come over the States.
And it will all be delusory.
It is easy to laugh off what Dave Nalle writes; it is easy to laugh off what I write. But if this Russian is right, the last laugh will not be from the mockers of today.
Cato said at the end of every single speech he made before the Roman Senate, "Cartago delenda est," Carthage must be destroyed. For years they laughed at him. Then one fine day, Carthage was destroyed.
Take note.
8 - Dave Nalle
The one thing I'll say for trend forecasting is that it's more reliable than biblical prophecy.
And Bliffle, California may vote blue (barely), but it will still be one of the hardest hit states if it comes to a nationwide crisis, and when it gets called on to contribute to bailing out the non-functional states it will turn red faster than you can blink an eye.
Dave
9 - Baritone
Dave, and I'm sure others have thought about this long and hard (no pun intended - well maybe just a little.) Whenever this sort of thing comes up I find that there is an element of wishful thinking by the respective, uh, bringer uppers, and certainly in this case, with Dave.
He seems to gaze dreamily at the prospect through his died-in-the-wool libertarian perspective, seeing in it a more perfect world.
But, of course, a large number of people with similar longings - to break up the union - to eliminate the Federal government are those who spend their week-ends playing army in their camouflage fatigues out in the wilds of Michigan, or, presumably, of Texas and elsewhere. Their great vision includes a good deal of violence as such a division of the country would, at least in part, involve revenge for some real or imagined slight done them by the evil Feds and other government functionaries.
Some have grandiose delusions of their rising to be recognized as some great leader, a deliverer, A MESSIAH, who will bring true peace and harmony to the land via the use of individual arms and tactical weaponry. Some see themselves as the next Che Guevara, some as the next Fuhrer.
Does Dave believe that a break up of the country of any kind would not involve a great deal of violence, a great deal of death and destruction? Or does his lofty dream justify the means?
B
10 - Brian aka Guppusmaximus
I totally agree with Baritone & it has me wondering if Dave has been reading the Unabomber Manifesto recently.
As for Ruvy, the more posts of his that I read, the more clear it becomes that he is some sort of religious nut job. AND, I am all the more happy knowing that he doesn't reside here in the United States.
Next,maybe, we will hear a word or two from Nostradamus?!
11 - Jet
Why don't we just forget the whole thing, pack up all the malcontents to Dave's ranch, and then give Texas back to Mexico and be done with it.
On second thought, we could give Sarah Palin and her sucessionists too, back to Russia, then she really COULD see the USSR from her window!
12 - Jet
Dave; at least with the GOP out of power, it won't be fought with Freedom fries and Freedom toast!
13 - bliffle
What strange ideas Dave has: "...California may vote blue (barely), but it will still be one of the hardest hit states if it comes to a nationwide crisis, and when it gets called on to contribute to bailing out the non-functional states it will turn red faster than you can blink an eye."
California voted Blue for Obama so solidly that none of the candidates even campaigned in California.
CA has been supporting the rest of the nation with tremendous food output AND CA only gets about $0.75 of Federal money for every $1 of Federal tax sent to DC. Contrast that with the deadbeats in Alaska, who get about $3, and the shirkers in Wyoming who get about $2.
14 - Dr Dreadful
Cato said at the end of every single speech he made before the Roman Senate, "Cartago delenda est," Carthage must be destroyed. For years they laughed at him. Then one fine day, Carthage was destroyed.
Ah, good old Cato. The Trent Lott of the Roman Senate.
15 - Dr Dreadful
The thing to remember about California is that it consists basically of two megalopolises and a lot of rural hinterland.
Outside the liberal Bay Area and LA-San Diego corridor (and the SD end isn't even all that blue), the Golden State is surprisingly conservative.
16 - Jet
I hear prospective governor candidates are even practicing their German accents!
17 - Baronius
Dread, you've got the right thread. Pull on it a little more and Dave's whole argument unravels.
It's not just Calif. that's urban/liberal and rural/conservative. It's most every state in the union. Philadelphia is closer to Austin than it is to Scranton, if you look at it politically. (It's also closer according to my new GPS mapper, which I think is broken.) So how do you redraw the map? Rural New Jersey is conservative; urban Georgia is liberal. There are no red or blue states.
There's a reason for this balance within states. Young, irresponsible people live in the cities and ruin them. Then they get married, and move away to good school districts. No one wants to be young on the farm, or old in the city. With that in mind, there's no way to split the US into ideologically-compatible regions.
Clavos, I've read some of that Nine Nations book, and I think it's culturally illuminating. Do you think that those cultural bonds would be strong enough to keep areas politically intact if the US failed?
18 - Marcia Neil
But will we be able to digest the corn, and the article gives us clues that maybe we can't -- people purposely growing corn with applications of human-breath CO2, as one reason, together with the fact that a female U. S. President has not yet been spun into elected office as poltical action so purposefully engaged yet so woefully misinformed. That specific regions of North America tend to lock out immigrants, or phase out their descendents, is fairly routine such that the nation as a whole seems to be breaking up yet all the while actually absorbing foreign bloodlines.
19 - Glenn Contrarian
Dave -
Your post strongly reminds me of the early '80's when my pseudo-survivalist friends and I were stocking up on weapons and making plans for what would happen when WWIII broke out. In retrospect I see how silly our paranoia was...and how that paranoia kept us from striving to better our personal lives. Instead of completing our college education or trying to start businesses or increasing our quals in the military, we were too busy being afraid of the bombs that never came.
I've seen such paranoia before, and every single time it's been from someone who held strongly conservative beliefs.
If you really want something to be paranoid about, pay attention to global warming - which is a reality and will (if left unchecked) be more destructive to humanity than anything short of an all-out nuclear war (which might happen) or a comet or asteroid strike (which WILL happen sooner or later). In the big picture of humanity's future, all else is really small potatoes.
20 - Dr Dreadful
Baronius, that's a broadly true model, but relying on it too much is the sort of thing that gets folks like Dave (and Bliffle) into trouble.
A better measure is how urban a particular state is. California is (by land use) largely rural, but it also contains two huge metropolitan areas in which most of the population live. Then there's Illinois, which consists of Chicago and some stuff. On the flip side we have Texas, which contains two major cities in Dallas and Houston but is also the size of a small galaxy, so that those urban areas are lost in a sea of gun-totin', GOP-votin' good old farmer boys.
Even then there are always exceptions. Think of Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire, which can hardly be described as urban but which are nonetheless doggedly liberal. Conversely there's Ohio, which has some major urban areas (Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus) but which seems to have barely controllable Republican tendencies.
On the micro side, there's me. I buck the trend. I grew up in one of the world's great cities and was very conservative when I was younger, but later moved to rural California and have become progressively more liberal with age. I intend to grow old disgracefully, retire to San Francisco and trash the place.
21 - Baronius
Glenn, maybe you're not old enough to remember the paranoid gun-toting hippies of the 60's, who evolved into the Weathermen and Black Liberation movement. But if you're familiar with the environmental movement, you've probably run across paranoid people there, quite often tied to anarchists and the anti-globalization crowd. There's lots of paranoia on the fringes.
22 - Dr Dreadful
If you really want something to be paranoid about, pay attention to global warming - which is a reality and will (if left unchecked) be more destructive to humanity than anything short of an all-out nuclear war (which might happen) or a comet or asteroid strike (which WILL happen sooner or later). In the big picture of humanity's future, all else is really small potatoes.
There was a documentary on TV earlier this year which looked at and rated the ten things most likely to bump us off. Soberingly, nuclear war is still rated as the most likely cause of our demise, followed by global warming, a massive pandemic and (I think) an asteroid strike.
The others, like a supervolcano (most likely Yellowstone) eruption, a nearby supernova, a gamma ray explosion, a passing black hole and other delights most assuredly will happen, but they are unlikely to do so in the relatively tiny window of time in which our species exists.
Personally, I'm skeptical of the notion that we'll ever be so suicidally stupid as to unleash an all-out nuclear war. I do, however, think that a terrorist group getting hold of and using a nuclear device is just a matter of time. How the world reacts to that will be the crucial thing.
23 - Clavos
...retire to San Francisco and trash the place.
Get in line. There are already millions ahead of you, doing so.
24 - Dave Nalle
Once again a great many people seem not to have managed to read past the first page of this article. I raised the issues you read on the first page and then in the subsequent 2/3 of the article I go on to explain why I believe that such a breakup of the US is NOT likely.
But by all means go ahead and call me paranoid and a survivalist and someone who is dreaming of the country breaking up into its composite parts, despite the fact that this is exactly what the article does NOT say, you lazy one-page reading bastards.
Yes, I would like to see a reduction in federal authority and the return of a lot of responsibility to the states, but I don't think breaking up the union is likely or to anyone's benefit. I'm with Daniel Webster in the final quote from the article which none of you bothered to read.
I do think that a rapacious wealth and resource redistribution policy will turn a lot of the red states redder and push some of the marginal states like California into the red column, but that will take more than a year or two, and by the time people really start feeling the pain, we'll have an election and we can boot the Democrats out of power. That's why we have periodic elections.
Dave
25 - John Titor
There was once a person in early 2000's that said he was a time traveller from our future. Ironically, a lot of this article deals with the same things he said would happen. Look up www.johntitor.com The civil war part is the most interesting of what John Titor had to say.