29 December 2008

2010 - - Good-Bye: USA Hello: Split America

This is the way the US is supposed to split around the year 2010. As you can see, every part of the former USA will soon be under the control of other nations -- including Mexico, Canada, the EU, Russia, China, and perhaps Japan. Oddly, Cuba did not end up with southern Florida, which by all rights it should possess after such a split.

This remarkable prediction is being made by a former KGB analyst, and current professor and dean of Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for foreign diplomats. It is not the first prediction of a violent split-up of various parts of the US, nor will it be the last. It is only remarkable due to the seriousness with which it is being taken inside Russia.
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."

...The professor says he's convinced that people are taking his theory more seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right. He cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. Mr. Todd is famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union -- 15 years beforehand. "When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him," says Prof. Panarin. _WSJ
A lot of the details of the coming split remain to be worked out. For example, what happens to US military bases, ships, planes, submarines, and other hardware? What would make a sane and intelligent person believe that such a catastrophic dissolution of the world's largest economy would leave the rest of the world in any position to step in and "pick up the pieces?"

I would certainly not deny the possiblity of such a breakup. It would occur over a much longer time span than one and a half years, and would involve a great deal more collateral damage among the other great and small powers of the world than Panarin appears to comprehend.

The divisions suggested by Panarin appear unlikely in the extreme. A more likely graphic of a post-breakup USA can be found at this PDF document, Civil War II. In other words, a breakup along ethnic lines appears more realistic than Panarin's scenario, probably occurring in connection with a worldwide violent conflagration that results in the breakup of most other large nations and unions of nations, including China, Russia, the EU, and probably Mexico and other Latin American nations.

As long as the world-scale violence leaves significant areas of reasonably intact areas of production and education in advanced nations, the resulting regional states, or even city-states would likely re-establish trade routes and maintain as large a "zone of order" as they could manage under the circumstances. Piracy and lawlessness would be severe across most of the world, of course. Any recent graduates of North American university social science departments would likely find themselves enslaved or killed, unless they were lucky enough to find themselves inside a surviving enclave of much maligned western civilisation. Feminists would probably be fed to gasification plants to provide biofuels, a la Oynklent Green [OTC:OYNK].

The world has never been so broadly civilised as it is today. And, of course, it cannot last. The internal schisms within civilisation are simply too great. But there are some regions that are more likely to survive relatively intact than others. I am happy to report that there is still time for most of you to locate some of these regions, and to learn how to make yourself useful and competent enough to survive. It's your time. Don't waste it.

H/T Dennis Mangan and Half Sigma

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10 Comments:

Blogger Loren said...

Firefox is picking up the period with that link, making it not work if you just click on it.

So much to read and so little time to do it in. At least read it and keep up with college and other life necessities. I was unable to do more than skim the pdf, but the map I'm putting together for a fictional book I'm writing is slightly different than that, and very different than the one the Russian suggests:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v202/kunkmeister/RockyMountainConfederacy.gif
It still needs work, I've not really started doing the research that really needs to go into the project, but I believe both the Russian and the author of that book miss social and political themes that will bind otherwise different people together, and create areas such as my Confederacy that they are missing. It'll be an interesting tale if I ever finish learning and bother to draw the comic I want it to be.

Tuesday, 30 December, 2008  
Blogger al fin said...

Thanks.

Your Rocky Mountain Confederacy does make some sense. To round it off, you should also assign the rest of the US and Canada to their different new allegiances.

Look for pockets of competence that different confederacies could coalesce around.

If such a breakup ever happens, it will be because all hell has broken loose elsewhere in the world, and the central US government has been strained beyond its ability to cope. Like the city of Detroit currently, or the state of California in the near future.

Tuesday, 30 December, 2008  
Blogger SwampWoman said...

About 2010, hunh? Glad I'm living in a place where Wal-Mart will be my new overlord.

The idea that some of those states, such as Utah, will break away in order to join California is ludicrous. The states around California are filled with California refugees that didn't like the direction California was taking.

Nevadans will probably sneak across the border and rustle their livestock.

Hell, eastern Oregon doesn't even want anything to do with the fruits and nuts in western Oregon.

Tuesday, 30 December, 2008  
Blogger yamahaeleven said...

Hi Al,

One name comes to mind after reading this: Buckminster Fuller. Some time ago he predicted large countries, such as the Soviet Union, would break up into more regionally oriented governments. His main argument was that the larger the government, and the more area it covered, the less effective it was at meeting local needs.

It seems very unlikely to me that any outside country would be direct overlords of any part of a broken USA. I would hazard that they may simply be closely affiliated with those outside countries.

Tuesday, 30 December, 2008  
Blogger Ugh said...

With (fresh) water becoming a huge concern in the world today I can see the Great Lakes Region becoming very Saudi-like.

Let the water wars begin!

Places like Ohio, PA and upstate NY become a huge battleground as the upstream lakes are drained when the eastern states start selling the water. Huge damns would be put in place to stem the depletion. Depending on where the western border is I can see Minnesota becoming a battleground for access to Lake Superior and its vast sums of fresh water. My Lord this sounds like a plot for a novel...

Tuesday, 30 December, 2008  
Blogger SensibleEnergy said...

America will never split. You don't have to look any further than the civil war.

What is America? It is a collection of states bound together by the Constitution. The Constitution deliniates the separation of powers but does not describe what the powers stand for. That is described in the Declaration of Independence.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

That is the substance of America. America will never die, because no state will ever deny that truth.

Tuesday, 30 December, 2008  
Blogger Richard Sharpe said...

In a novel written in 1985 called "Privateers", Ben Bova also predicted the demise of the US (although not its fragmentation). He was wide of the mark because he expected that the former Soviet Union would cause the demise of the US.

However, he did write this probably prescient paragraph:

"... thinking of the vast sea of unemployed and unemployable Californians. Half the state stood in welfare lines while the other half stood behind desks ministering to them."

Thursday, 01 January, 2009  
Blogger Audacious Epigone said...

AF,

Would you support the secession of the Southwest in the future? Unless the current voluntary movement of illegal Hispanic immigrants back to their countries of origin is made a one-way trip by action in the US, I see southern California, much of Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico, and southwest Texas as not worth keeping.

Friday, 02 January, 2009  
Blogger al fin said...

SE: Obama is dedicated to a radical overhaul of the US Constitution.

Richard: Yes, a lot of people who dwell on the future have given the issue some thought.

AE: I understand the problem of people from more primitive cultures thrust into modern societies automatically losing their moral/ethical compass and reverting to crime and low life behaviours.

The US, like most of the west, is between the old religious ethical dominion and whatever post-religious ethical dominion is to come. The transition is hard on almost everyone except the rich, the well prepared young, and the strong.

To answer your question, no I would not support the secession of the SW US. Not yet. Eventually the country will split into much smaller fragments than are portrayed on the map. Hopefully we will be ready by then.

A lot of very bad things are going to happen all over the world, and the US will not be immune. Smart people will be acquiring the tools to carry them through -- now, in a time of relative affluence and order.

I was hoping the "coming anarchy" could have been postponed a bit longer -- for a few decades. But Americans suddenly got the taste for a super - helping of "hope and change." They are going to get more than they bargained for.

If Obama does even 75% of the things he has promised to do, expect very serious problems within ten years, problems that will make the current economic recession look like utopian cornucopia. At that time, secession will not help. You will just need to be able to run faster from the bear than the person next to you. Every single time.

Friday, 02 January, 2009  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The topic of US fragmentation is amusing, for an Italian like me.
But I suggest people to think what would happen after this.
One or two of the biggest chunks of the USoA would start war and conquer the others.
The central part of the US would need to control a corridor to the ocean(s) for economic reason, or they will fall under the economic/political control of the west or east costs.

My main scenario would be the west/central of the US split under racial lines (willy/nilly) then it will be a matter of time before there will be only one.

These conditions will raise the fertility of women (nothing work well like a war) and white Europeans could have a chance to reconquer all the previous ground and clean up the land of the conquered peoples.

If this break down happen, I suppose many groups will try to take over (muslims for sure) a part of the land. This will make them targets and enemies of the others.

Friday, 09 January, 2009  

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“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act” _George Orwell

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