McFEATTERS: Through a Russian looking glass

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By Dale McFeatters

COMMENTARY:

A gentleman described as "a leading Russian political analyst" - and how acute do you have to be to analyze rigged elections? - says the United States is in the throes of a collapse that will result in us fragmenting into six separate nations.

Professor Igor Panarin is said to have made these predictions in an interview with Izvestia, and it must be true because it's all over the Internet and featured on the Drudge Report. There's even a photo of him on the Russia House Web site, a stolid-looking guy with a burr haircut. What more proof do you need?

He is said to be a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs - not an institution I'm readily familiar with, but we might have sent off an application on behalf of one of our kids as a fallback school.

Assuming Mr. Panarin is for real - and he apparently has been predicting our imminent implosion for 10 years - it is only fair to warn him that he is treading into dangerous literary territory.

There is a large body of literature on the collapse of the United States, predicated on several doomsday scenarios - we are swamped by immigration and become North Mexico; we are swamped by the Chinese economy and become a wholly owned subsidiary of Beijing; Al Gore was right and we make the whole country uninhabitable through environmental carelessness; we are enslaved by space aliens.

But wrecking the United States is the province of American authors, and they're not going to look kindly on some Russian interloper.

Mr. Panarin says the dollar will soon be worthless and that, as a precaution the United States, Canada and Mexico reached a secret agreement in 2006 - an achievement that President Bush somehow neglected to mention - to scrap their currencies and replace it with something called the Amero. You know that's not true just because the name is so stupid.

Here's the relevant part of his theory:

"He predicted that the U.S. will break up into six parts - the Pacific Coast, with its growing Chinese population; the South, with its Hispanics; Texas, where independence movements are on the rise; the Atlantic Coast, with its distinct and separate mentality; five of the poorer Central states with their large Native American populations; and the Northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong."

That's so ignorant it's breathtaking.

Mr. Panarin also claims Russia only leased us Alaska and should get it back. Get this straight, Igor: Sarah Palin is ours.

There were some tongue-in-cheek - maybe, with some people, semi-serious - postings on the Internet after the 2004 election that the country should be divided along electoral lines: The Blue states - the West Coast, the Northeast and Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota - should join with our northern neighbor to form the United States of Canada, and the Red states would become Jesusland.

After this last election, however, the appeal and the size of Jesusland seem to have dimmed.

With the United States no longer the world's dominant economic power, he was asked, who would regulate world markets? China, he said, which someday might be sort of plausible, and "Russia, which could play the role of a regulator in Eurasia."

Earth to Igor: Given the Kremlin's recent history of confiscating foreign-owned assets and investments in Russia, no one will trust Moscow to hold the money - unless, of course, it's Ameros.

Dale McFeatters is a columnist for Scripps Howard News Service.