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If you believe this story....

MOSCOW - If you're inclined to believe Igor Panarin, and the Kremlin wouldn't mind if you did, then President Barack Obama will order martial law this year, the U.S. will split into six rump-states before 2011, and Russia and China will become the backbones of a new world order.

Panarin might be easy to ignore but for the fact that he is a dean at the Foreign Ministry's school for future diplomats and a regular on Russia's state-guided TV channels. And his predictions fit into the anti-American story line of the Kremlin leadership.

"There is a high probability that the collapse of the United States will occur by 2010," Panarin told dozens of students, professors and diplomats Tuesday at the Diplomatic Academy - a lecture the ministry pointedly invited The Associated Press and other foreign media to attend.

The prediction from Panarin, a former spokesman for Russia's Federal Space Agency and reportedly an ex-KGB analyst, meshes with the negative view of the U.S. that has been flowing from the Kremlin in recent years, in particular from Vladimir Putin.

Putin, the former president who is now prime minister, has likened the United States to Nazi Germany's Third Reich and blames Washington for the global financial crisis that has pounded the Russian economy.

Panarin didn't give many specifics on what underlies his analysis, mostly citing newspapers, magazines and other open sources.

He also noted he had been predicting the demise of the world's wealthiest country for more than a decade now.

But he said the recent economic turmoil in the U.S. and other "social and cultural phenomena" led him to nail down a specific timeframe for "The End" - when the United States will break up into six autonomous regions and Alaska will revert to Russian control.

Panarin argued that Americans are in moral decline, saying their great psychological stress is evident from school shootings, the size of the prison population and the number of gay men.

Turning to economic woes, he cited the slide in major stock indexes, the decline in U.S. gross domestic product and Washington's bailout of banking giant Citigroup as evidence that American dominance of global markets has collapsed.

"I was there recently and things are far from good," he said. "What's happened is the collapse of the American dream."

Panarin insisted he didn't wish for a U.S. collapse, but he predicted Russia and China would emerge from the economic turmoil stronger and said the two nations should work together, even to create a new currency to replace the U.S. dollar.

Asked for comment on how the Foreign Ministry views Panarin's theories, a spokesman said all questions had to be submitted in writing and no answers were likely before Wednesday.

It wasn't clear how persuasive the 20-minute lecture was. One instructor asked Panarin whether his predictions more accurately describe Russia, which is undergoing its worst economic crisis in a decade as well as a demographic collapse that has led some scholars to predict the country's demise.

Panarin dismissed that idea: "The collapse of Russia will not occur."

But Alexei Malashenko, a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center who did not attend the lecture, sided with the skeptical instructor, saying Russia is the country that is on the verge of disintegration.

"I can't imagine at all how the United States could ever fall apart," Malashenko told the AP.



By MIKE ECKEL Associated Press Writer

LMAO. I think he forgot to figure in the fact that each state could basically hold its own against any army (this factors in every person with a gun). Especially the states with avid hunters. Hell right now if i started making phone calls i could have no less than fifty people in an hour in full camo armed with just about every gun type.

As Admiral Yamamoto said "You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass."

Yeah... the road would be a hard one to AZ, or up north to re-enforce. Fres, thnk i could make my way out your way SHTF? I could use the friends.

If you can make a detour to Oregon count me in.

Well, thankfully I know some Russian already thanks to my mother. If we get fubar'd into this divide by some Congressional bullshit move, I'm buying all the guns I can before the Ruskies or Chinamen ban them from ownership.

Fortunately, all I have to do is get up the hill from Sacramento to Placerville, and my friend's grandpa's house can serve as a stronghold, provided we grab enough food on the way. The guy's an ex-Marine, so he'll know what to do.

Unless I am mistaken I quite freely signed on. I was only requested to aid someone on one occasion and turned that request down due to a lack of details and strong implications of potentially illegal activity.

Wasn't gaia supposed to fix the guild systems fall of 08? Well when they get around to doing that they should make a search function so old threads are easier to locate.