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I think it's safe to say that most people would rather be poor then a battlefield casualty, so I don't see a civil war breaking out due to our economic problems. The only thing I could see causing a civil war was if they ever tried to bring back the draft.
This is the greatest premise for a war ever, Ozzie! On one side, the U.S Government; on the other, a bunch of 18 to 30-something pacifists outraged at the notion of being forced into combat. What lies in the balance? Their right to not fight in a war if they don't want to!
Request thread title changed to: The Harry Turtledove Plot Leak.
For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously.
(snip)
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.
Of course, my first reaction after reading this piece was to laugh out very loudly indeed. The face of it looks much like wishful thinking on the part of a quack Russian academic. And he was in fact treated like a quack for the better part of a decade.
But! My interactions with lurker in chat have proven to me that I know absolutely nothing about how Americans believe. Thus, while I may personally think that such an outcome is ludicrous, perhaps I might be mistaken in my belief!
So, I hereby pose this question to the people who live in America, who work in America, and who know America best. Is there, in fact, a "45-55% chance" that such a thing will happen next year?
Well the country is long-overdue for a revolution, but as it is I don't foresee anything that could lead the US to fall apart unless we hit another depression. If we fall into a depression though, then I won't be surprised in the least if something like that happens.
But if we get absorbed into other countries I expect Canada and China will get a bigger chunk than what that guy's predicting, especially since the two countries own our ass as it is. Not like I'll care, if I think we're getting close to a civil war I'm heading to Canada. No way in hell am I putting my life on the line for this place.
Jam it back in, in the dark.
Last edited by AtomicDuck; Feb 19, 2009 at 01:26 AM.
Reason: Mouse was over the send button and the cats hit it, thus posting my post before it was done
The European Union almost rejected Turkey due to it not being a part of Europe, so what makes this Russian professor think that the European Union would accept the Northeast? And screw Europe, by the way, I'm from the Northeast and I would rather not be thought of as having the same mindset as one of the strange Americans this professor surveyed/stalked.