here.
One of my favorite still on-going comics (though, it's been kinda shitty recently, but that's a whole other post...) is Brian Wood's DMZ, which portrays a future America fractured between the Federal Government and "The Free States"--an uber-conservative rebellion. In Brian Woods's future, The Free States have taken vast swaths of the country, and Manhattan is a lawless demilitarized zone, stuck between the Free States in Jersey and the United States in mainland New York.
Sounds ridiculous, right? Well according to this prominent Russian academic and ex-KGB analyst, not so much.
Nick Baumann at Mother Jones has the scoop:
For more than a decade Dr. Igor Panarin, a Russian academic, has been predicting that sometime around 2010 the United States will collapse, splintering into separate states, some of them controlled by foreign powers. Outside of Russia, no one's put much stock in his crackpot and stereotype-based theories—until now, that is. Who are the newest members of the Igor Panarin fan club? Tea partiers who’ve rallied against the Obama administration's policies and blasted the president for pushing a "socialist" agenda. And he's especially big among tea party activists in Texas, who have hosted Panarin and promoted his work.
[...]
According to Panarin, the US will collapse within the next year because of its economic problems and deep racial and ethnic divisions. He changes the details from year to year, but here's the general gist: the South, "with its Hispanics," Panarin says, will break away from the union and merge or ally with Mexico. The rest of America will split into several other countries, some becoming the protectorates of other major powers. Alaska, naturally, will go to Russia. The Chinese will take over the West Coast. (Why? Panarin points out that most Californians' laptops are made in China and that the West has a "growing Chinese population.") "Five of the poorer central states, with their large Native American populations, and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong," will compose two other countries, he explained in Moscow last year. The Northeast, he says, will fall under the sway of "global capital and finance" based in London—an idea, no doubt, that appeals to those tea partiers who worry about nefarious international forces exerting influence over the US economy.
Since the Drudge Report first highlighted his theories last November, several conservative websites and blogs have featured him. In September, Chuck Baldwin, a perennial far-right presidential candidate on the Constitution Party ticket, observed that Panarin's predictions of "some sort of break up of the United States in the near future" was a "very realistic probability." (Columnist and MSNBC analyst Pat Buchanan linked to Baldwin's article on Panarin.) Joseph Farah, the founder of the arch-conservative website WorldNetDaily, which is famous for promoting "birther" allegations questioning Obama's citizenship, wrote in December that he wasn't "buying into Panarin's entire prediction" but that "there's something to it." More than half of the nearly 3,000 WND readers who responded to a poll attached to Farah's piece agreed that "the US is on course to break up soon, and another 18 percent said they thought the United States wouldn't break up, but would 'continue to lose sovereignty to the UN and other global entities.'"
I should say first that World Net Daily is a really crazy place, and I think they have more than 3,000 readers, so I doubt that poll's reliability. I'd imagine, too, that there's some serious self-selection bias at work here, too. That is, I would hypothesize that those who would click on that poll are those who are predisposed (out of the "tea party crazies" set) to believe that the US will break up soon.
Keeping that in mind, I still believe that this is pretty serious anecdotal evidence that a finge-within-a-fringe has been radicalized by Obama's election, which is not a good thing.
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