Is the United States in danger of collapse? A Russian academic and a now defunct Nashville hip hop group say it is possible.
It’s really hard to stay positive with so much bad news flying about. So the apocalyptic overtones of a December article in the Wall Street Journal entitled ‘As if Things Weren’t Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.’ certainly aren’t helping to brighten my day.
However, daily accounts of the economic implosion we are enduring hit much closer to home now. The signs have been prevalent here in Detroit for quite some time, but even more people are losing their jobs amid what is now a global economic crisis. Can we even consider the possibility that the United States as we know it may soon disappear from the face of the map?
According to the Journal article, Russian professor Igor Panarin has been predicting the collapse of the United States for a decade. Former KGB analyst Panarin says economic strife will cause the nation to disintegrate.
He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.
California will form the nucleus of what he calls “The Californian Republic,” and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of “The Texas Republic,” a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an “Atlantic America” that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls “The Central North American Republic.” Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.
The Journal article implies that a good dose of anti-American Russian nationalism informs Panarin’s scholarship, but the news from the frontlines isn’t so good these days. Detroit is ground zero for the economic meltdown, and we must report that things aren’t going well here. Companies have been shedding employees like snakes shed their skins, and the outlook for a recovery in late 2009 may be wishful thinking.
A series of bailouts by the federal government have failed to change the downturn’s direction. Even Democrats fear that President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package doesn’t go far enough. Meanwhile, GOP lawmakers are concerned that there aren’t enough tax cuts in the bill.
I won’t harp on what I believe to be the causes (The Pirate Class led by the Bush/Cheney administration and their wholesale plunder of the U.S. Treasury for one), but if we are to reverse course, and avoid the fate Panarin predicts for us, we’ve got to make some radical changes. Obama’s centrist approach may create unity among the U.S. elite, but will it really solve the problems the rest of us are facing.
This question brought to mind a musical fable created by now defunct and sadly underrated Nashville hip hop group Utopia State. “Death of Sam” from their epic 1999 album “Where Y’all From” speaks of the destruction of “Samuel” who falls victim to his own greed.
Is the Unites States in danger of collapse? What do you think?
Utopia State: Death of Sam
Wall Street Journal – As if Things Weren’t Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.’
I completely agree with this prediction, though I disagree about why the US economy is collapsing, and the delineations of the new nations that would emerge from this breakup. The Russian professor correctly states why this breakup would occur: productive, tax-paying people will grow fed up paying for non-productive tax-consumers. Thus we should predict that states — and parts of states! — dominated by productive, law-abiding, self-sufficient people will form into new nations.
The “Central Republic”, thus, may very well contain MOST of Michigan, but not Detroit. And the “California Republic” would not contain the large California cities that, like Detroit, include huge populations of deadbeats.
The new countries — at least some of them — forming out of this mess would be led by people who want small, sensible, simple government, marked by a flat and modest tax structure, no bailouts or subsidies, and a hands-off approach to the lives of individuals. These liberty nations will have tight borders, but won’t really need them, as immigrants who come to work and improve themselves and their communities will have a safe place to do so; deadbeat criminal immigrants will find no social programs to enable their destructive lifestyle.
Opposing this movement will be leftist intellectuals and hordes of yammering deadbeats that the leftists strive to “save” and “help”. They will want what you say Obama isn’t “going far enough” with. They will share your view of corporations as “snakes”, and your belief that government deficit spending can drive economic growth and provide all residents with “affordable” healthcare and housing.
“The “Central Republicâ€, thus, may very well contain MOST of Michigan, but not Detroit. And the “California Republic†would not contain the large California cities that, like Detroit, include huge populations of deadbeats.”
You’re just being funny. Seriously, Detroit’s location would be prime for any new republic. What do do with the people? That would be a different story. Large numbers of people have been forcibly removed in times past…
“The people” in Detroit is, sadly, the problem. The impetus I see for a possible secessionist movement would be to seek nationhoods based on the original founding principals of the US, as outlined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. That essentially amounts to libertarianism, which excludes both the “original sins” of racial and gender subjugation (which the document neither explicitly forbade nor ordained) and the current rapidly expanding welfare state (welfare for poor poor Detroiters, affluent farm-state residents, and huge corporations).
I grant you of course that Detroit proper offers many exciting resources, such as its vacant vintage architecture and international waterway, connected via train to now one of the best international airports in the world. The people also offer a potent potential resource (no, I’m not being redundant!). However, they collectively seem determined to neglect their potential, and to remain married to intrusive, anti-prosperity government policies. So the people I see as seeking secession would forsake Detroit’s resources in order to divorce themselves from the very inspiration for their move: interlinking themselves with fellow productive people, and governing themselves with a minimum central authority.
The people driving this hypothetical secessionist movement feel that they are individually working harder to create the wealth that “takers” are demanding to obtain for themselves such resources as education for their children, housing, and healthcare. I realize that you disagree with this view, but this is the view that many Americans have. Some large fraction of voters around Michigan outside of Detroit feel like they are exercising good judgemnet in their lives, refraining from having children that they can’t afford, for example, so why should they pay to educate and feed the kids that others are having haphazardly?
These same people are also sick of having their tax dollars pay affluent people in rural Illinois to “not raise corn” and to build a Cowboy museum Arkansas. They would like to start the US all over again, from scratch.
Of course, I disagree with your assessment of the people in Detroit. There are a lot of positive people in the city. There is a lack of leadership, a lack of resources and a lack of jobs.
A stronger education system and better management of the city would help a lot. But there is a strong community of people who want to see Detroit improve, and who are working to make that a reality.
Now whether we’re too late for the city or for the United States is a different question. But there has to be a change in culture if we are going to avoid disaster.
Just curious: have you seen the Zeitgeist Movie? http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/