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http://www.voltairenet.org/article158933.html

Meme si cette crise n’est qu’un symptome de la crise generale de notre civilisation, comme il ne faut pas oublier de se le rappeller, et que l’on ne saurait s’abaisser a en examiner la forme. il est quand meme interessant d’avoir une vue un peu plus analytique de la question.

dans le monde virtuel, quand on vous dit qu’on va “ouvrir les frontières”, c’est qu’on va fermer à triple tour les frontières. C’est le plan de Abbas et Dayan, avec l’aide de notre Sarko et par l’entremise de Moubarak.
C’est un peu ce que dit le Hezbollah, mais c’est sûrement plus juste encore dans ce que disait déjà depuis hier (avant qu’on sache pour les paramilitaires de Dayan), le lien VoltaireNet :

http://www.voltairenet.org/article158933.html

ce qui explique pourquoi Le Caire maintient obstinément fermée l’entrée à Gaza des aides médicales, médecins et soignants. La méthode USA contre les sioux (les répartir dans des camps, sous contrôle et jusqu’à extinction) , preuve du manque total d’imagination de ce pays, est allé séduire les israeliens, les blair, les sarko, mais aussi les dictateurs arabes et les corrompus par bush

plan voué à l’échec, parce que déjà décodé par les populations. Mais pas encore par ici

Peut-être faudrait-il que je regarde un peu plus les infos, j’ai sans doute dû rater quelque chose ; mais Blair n’est-il pas sensé être le premier à s’intéresser à la paix en Palestine ?...

Le secrétaire général du Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, considère que la finalité des manœuvres israéliennes est de réaliser l’annexion de Gaza par l’Égypte et l’annexion de ce qui reste par la Jordanie.

Voilà qui peut élargir les perspectives stratégiques de l’opération en cours: il s’agit bien de créer un vide du pouvoir à Gaza, pour ensuite le combler par un transfert des responsabilités vers l’Egypte, qui contrairement au Hamas, est un acteur “solvable” politiquement, envers qui les leviers de la politique fonctionnent.

La même manœuvre fût esquissée au Liban avec l’ALS. Certes ce fût un échec, mais parce que le plan comportait un gouvernement libanais pro-Israélien, qui n’exista que sur le papier, qui devait contrebalancer ce que la Syrie offrit aux adversaires d’Israël, cette profondeur stratégique, qui permit de faire s’effondrer les illusions israéliennes, et l’ALS avec.

On a déjà parlé d’une force d’interposition à Gaza, l’ONU, l’OTAN… Parions que bientôt, une force d’interposition Arabe sera sur le tapis. Des kapos égyptiens au service d’Israël, voilà un objectif politique qui s’accorde bien avec les évènements, et dont vous trouverez l’intérêt évident…

Je me permet d’ergoter sur votre expression « justifier l’existence de leur pays aux yeux des occidentaux ».
Israël EST un pays occidental. C’est bien là le problème, c’est un corps étranger dans la région.
Même l’Israël biblique est occidental : on ne peut pas comprendre l’espace occupé dans les conscience par l’antique royaume d’Israël autrement que par l’intérêt que lui porte le monde chrétien occidental. Il est avéré scientifiquement que le royaume de Salomon n’était qu’un ensemble de petits villages, dont la population ne connaissait pas l’écriture, et dont la renommée ne dépassait pas quelques kilomètres. Comparons cela à l’image que l’occident s’en fait : combien d’œuvres d’art, de livres, de commentaires… L’Israël mythique est un produit occidental, qui a généré l’Israël moderne, dont l’idée a été formulée déjà par Cromwell, et fût concrétisée par des juifs occidentaux puis par les nations occidentales.
Le pays occupe un territoire que contrôlaient les occidentaux, il fût industrialisé par les réparations allemandes, sa bombe atomique est un cadeau français, son armée est financée par les subventions américaines… Et combien de ses citoyens ont une double nationalité, ou son émigrants de pays occidentaux ?

Concernant l’article:

L’opération de Gaza est menée selon les mêmes prétextes (légitime défense, libérer les libanais, sécurité d’Israël) et selon à peu près la même tactique (meurtres et destructions) que la guerre au Liban en 2006. N’est-elle pas une excuse à destination de Winograd ? Sachant que les chances de « succès » de l’opération sont infiniment plus élevés qu’au Liban, ce sera la démonstration que la stratégie fût bonne, même au Liban, et que seules les contingences n’ont pas permis de déclarer victoire. En d’autre termes, ne cherche-t-on pas une exonération politique pour le Liban en tapant sur Gaza ? Dès lors, non seulement les affaires deviennent étroitement liées, mais le sens politique, aussi lâche et immonde que sa concrétisation, se retrouve plein et entier. Nous sommes en période électorale en Israël, ne l’oubliez pas. Et les gains des commanditaires sont déjà patents (Barak, +20points).

Devant l’ampleur du déficit budgétaire américain dans les années à venir, Obama commence à suggérer de tailler dans les dépenses inutiles:

“I’m going to be willing to make some very difficult choices in how we get a handle on this deficit”  “[American people] were demanding that we restore a sense of responsibility and prudence to how we run our government.”

Le pentagone ne se sentira sûrement pas concerné...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/us/politics/07obama.html?_r=1&hp

January 7, 2009
Obama Warns About Years of Trillion-Dollar Deficits

By JEFF ZELENY and EDMUND L. ANDREWS
WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama on Tuesday braced Americans for the unparalleled prospect of “trillion-dollar deficits for years to come,” a stark assessment of the economic condition facing the country that he said would force his administration to impose tighter fiscal discipline on the government.

Mr. Obama sought to draw a distinction between the need to run what would likely be record deficits by any measure for the next several years and the necessity to begin bringing them down substantially in following years. Even as he prepares a stimulus package that is likely to total in the range of $800 billion in new spending and tax cuts over the next two years, he said he would seek to make sure that money is used wisely and that he would work with Congress to implement spending controls and efficiency measures throughout the federal budget.

“I’m going to be willing to make some very difficult choices in how we get a handle on this deficit,” Mr. Obama said, speaking about the dire fiscal outlook as he met with his top economic advisers for a second straight day. “That’s what the American people are looking for and, you know, what we intended to do this year.”

Mr. Obama sought to reassure lawmakers, as well as the financial markets, that he is aware of the long-term dangers of running huge deficits. Big deficits force the government to borrow more money, saddling future generations with large financial burdens. The problem is especially acute now because credit markets, which at times in recent months have been all but frozen as the financial system has been buffeted, could be further strained by the need to finance the huge deficit.

The Congressional Budget Office will release its latest budget estimates on Wednesday, which will provide the first official predictions of the built-in shortfalls tied to the economic slowdown and the collapsing financial markets. Mr. Obama’s team of economic and budget advisers have spent nearly two months scouring the budget, preparing to submit their first budget.

“When the American people spoke last November, they were demanding change — change in policies that helped deliver the worst economic crisis that we’ve see since the Great Depression,” Mr. Obama said, speaking to reporters on Tuesday. He added, “They were demanding that we restore a sense of responsibility and prudence to how we run our government.”

Behind Mr. Obama’s reassuring message about fiscal discipline is the government’s need to borrow a staggering amount of money over the next two years without driving up interest rates in the process. Analysts predict that the federal deficit will hit a new record of at least $1 trillion this year, which would be not only be more than double the previous record in 2005, but would also overtake the previous record for deficit as a share of the gross domestic product.

Diane Rogers, chief economist at the Concord Coalition, a non-partisan organization that supports fiscal discipline, estimated that the deficit this year would hit 7 percent of GDP.

That deficit, which could easily be duplicated in 2010, will occur just as the government will have to grapple with the much bigger and more intractable long-term budget problems tied to soaring costs of Medicare and Social Security for retiring baby-boomers.

Most economists agree that Mr. Obama and the Congress have no choice except to ignore short-term deficits and place top priority on fighting the country’s worst economic downturn in at least a half-century. But the short-term budget short-falls are big enough to pose serious headaches in themselves, especially if bond investors start demanding higher interest rates.

In just the first three months of the 2009 fiscal year, which began on Oct. 1, the government spent $408 billion more than it took in. About one-third of that short-fall stemmed from the Treasury Department’s rescue program of injecting capital into banks, which the government will book as an “investment’“ rather than “spending.”

The recession itself will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit. Even before Congress adds any new stimulus measures, higher outlays will climb for existing unemployment benefits, food stamps and other social programs. Tax revenues will fall because of rising unemployment, falling corporate profits and huge investment losses in the stock and bond markets. Mr. Obama’s stimulus program could add another $400 billion in each of the next two years.

As the latest budget estimates are released on Wednesday, the good news, at least for the moment, is that the Treasury’s borrowing costs are as almost as low as they have ever been. Short-term Treasury rates are hovering just above zero, but the rates on 10-year Treasury bonds are below 2 percent.

To some extent, the government can lock in those low rates by selling long-term securities. But it will still have to refinance hundreds of billions of dollars a year. As a result, its annual debt-service costs could be hit with a double-whammy: a big increase in total debt and an eventual increase in interest rates as they recover from their current rock-bottom lows.

Goldman Sachs recently estimated that government debt will balloon by $1.75 trillion in 2009. But Goldman analysts were optimistic that borrowing costs will remain low, partly because they predicted that the United States saving rate is likely to soar as both consumers and businesses hold back on spending.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/01/willem-buiter-calls-for-less-us.html

loin des conspirations et leurs cohortes de commentateurs exaltés, un économiste (blog ft.com) qui empoigne les fondamentaux et les propulse au-delà du court terme plutôt que de se limiter à décrire l’état lamentable des affaires du moment

merci de tenter d’intégrer ces paramètres dans votre analyse si régulièrement pertinente

et de voir si le rôle de la Chine n’est pas un élément sous-évalué de sa réflexion

cordialement

et quand l’holocauste sera accompli, que les combats auront cessé, que verra t’on? qu’entendra t’on? réponse rien ou presque dans la partie occidentale, celle où les puissants interets ont muselé la presse et les politiques, on ne verra presque pas d’images et on écoutera des fables.

on ne verra pas ces images qui auront tout de l’holocauste, ou des images désincarnées, pas plus qu’en 2006 au liban, ces images mauvaise conscience ne circuleront certainement pas

ces crimes de guerre, ces bombardements d’écoles, d’infrastructures, d’hopitaux, de mosquées, d’immeubles hlm, de maisons de rétention, ces bombes au phosphore (pas à l’uranium appauvri, ça polluerait les futures plages israeliennes) on n’en entendra pas parler

on parlera reconstruction, pour qui la reconstruction? pour, comme depuis toujours, par ce prétexte faire arriver des millions et des millions de dollar vers l’économie israelienne

israel avait emprisonné gaza pour faire mourir les gazouites à petit feu, sous le pretexte de statu quo, par bouclage et par blocus, affamer la population, c’était le plan de sharon, et le discours dominant dans nos journaux était, c’est surréaliste, protéger les populations civiles

la honte et l’opprobre seront pour toujours sur l’état sioniste, mais aussi ses lâches habitants, mais aussi nos propres lâches institutions, nos propres partis politiques. c’est fini le mythe d’israel, restera un état nazisioniste, mais le monde feindra de ne pas le voir, pour ne pas accepter la cumpabilité.

et on préfèrera écouter encore leurs fables, mais en se pinçant le nez

»Having the Saudis, Jordanians, Egyptians, Americans, and Europeans impose a solution can’t be worse than what we are seeing today.»

La dernière fois qu’on nous a trouvé une “solution simple et logique” dans ce genre , c’était autour de 1948 avec la création de l’état israélien et on a vu le résultat depuis.

C’était déjà virtualiste et il a fallu que les occidentaux aient été sous l’emprise d’une sacrée euphorie d’après-guerre pour avoir cru le projet viable à terme.

Aujourd’hui, les zones stratégiques se déplacent vers l’Asie centrale d’abord puis l’Asie et l’Afrique d’une façon générale et le verrou israélien posé sur le moyen-orient perd de son importance, voire devient nuisible puisqu’il empêche l’entente avec les arabo-musulmans face aux nouveaux géants que sont l’Inde et la Chine (à noter au passage la réponse, furieusement virtualiste, de Sarkozy à la situation : l’Union Pour la Méditerranée )

Les israeliens en sont conscients et agissent en conséquence puisque

- ils ont tenté depuis 2001 de raviver les tensions avec l’Iran pour recentrer la géopolitique mondiale sur la région et justifier l’existence de leur pays aux yeux des occidentaux.

- ils ont été derrière les préparatifs militaires de la “guerre russo-géorgienne” pour tenter encore une fois de se fairee reconnaître une utilité possible dans la région élargie.

Les israéliens n’auraient pas pris de tels risques s’ils n’avaient conscience de la précarité de leur position actuelle, au moment où on sent que l’ère du pétrole est en train de passer (qu’on le veuille ou non).

Peut-être faut-il chercher une explication du côté économique pour comprendre le but de cette attaque.

Je crois savoir que les palestiniens ne peuvent s’approvisionner qu’en Israël.  Une bonne partie de l’aide aux palestiniens doit donc aboutir là, du moins quand le Hamas n’en a pas le contrôle.  L’économie israélienne ne va pas très bien en ce moment et rétablir (ou renforcer) le commerce avec Gaza ferait sûrement très bien.

Un classique, inégalé à ma connaissance, du genre : ce topo de Dimitri Orlov comparant, en 2006, l’effondrement de l’URSS à celui qui ne faisait alors que se profiler aux US :
http://www.orbite.info/traductions/dmitry_orlov/combler_le_retard_d_effondrement.html
On ne s’en lasse pas.

Ce n’est pas difficile de considérer comme une folie cette dernière campagne militaire israelienne.
Il est tout de mème surprenant de décider de bombarder un quasi -ghetto, soumis à un blocus particulièrement choquant depuis des années, soit disant pour y éradiquer “le Hamas et le terrorisme”..
Il est évident qu’une boucherie est en cours, et qu’en terme d’image, ce sera catastrophique pour Israel (particulièrement après les bombardement de 2006 sur le Liban)..
La surprise et l’incompréhension grossissent quand on voit désormais sur les sites de nos journaux bien pensant de belles photos montrant nettement des explosions de bombes au phosphore… dont on sait l’horreur quand elles tombent de façon indiscriminée sur toute population s’y trouvant. Bombes bien sûr interdites depuis longtemps..
Le pompon: le CRIF appelle à manifester en faveur des “victimes israéliennes ” cet après-midi à Paris..
C’est grotesque, voire injurieux. Ca sent très fort la provocation..
Voilà de quoi impliquer -volens nolens- toutes les populations juives de France et de Navarre dans la boucherie de Gaza!

On en vient à se demander si dans certains cercles du pouvoir il n’y aurait pas des adeptes au programme décrit dans cette mythique lettre “de Pike à Mazzini”, de 1871?

Je suggere de regarder l’original sur wsj.com, avec les cartes:  Il a méme repris les couleurs de la carte de Ralph Peters. 
   
As if Things Weren’t Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.
In Moscow, Igor Panarin’s Forecasts Are All the Rage; America ‘Disintegrates’ in 2010
DECEMBER 29, 2008
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html?mod=todays_us_page_one#printMode

By ANDREW OSBORN JAN 03. 2009

MOSCOW—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. Now he’s found an eager audience: Russian state media.

In recent weeks, he’s been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. “It’s a record,” says Prof. Panarin. “But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger.”

Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.

But it’s his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin’s views also fit neatly with the Kremlin’s narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.

A polite and cheerful man with a buzz cut, Mr. Panarin insists he does not dislike Americans. But he warns that the outlook for them is dire.

“There’s a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur,” he says. “One could rejoice in that process,” he adds, poker-faced. “But if we’re talking reasonably, it’s not the best scenario—for Russia.” Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.

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—with Alaska reverting to Russian control.

In addition to increasing coverage in state media, which are tightly controlled by the Kremlin, Mr. Panarin’s ideas are now being widely discussed among local experts. He presented his theory at a recent roundtable discussion at the Foreign Ministry. The country’s top international relations school has hosted him as a keynote speaker. During an appearance on the state TV channel Rossiya, the station cut between his comments and TV footage of lines at soup kitchens and crowds of homeless people in the U.S. The professor has also been featured on the Kremlin’s English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today.

Mr. Panarin’s apocalyptic vision “reflects a very pronounced degree of anti-Americanism in Russia today,” says Vladimir Pozner, a prominent TV journalist in Russia. “It’s much stronger than it was in the Soviet Union.”

Mr. Pozner and other Russian commentators and experts on the U.S. dismiss Mr. Panarin’s predictions. “Crazy ideas are not usually discussed by serious people,” says Sergei Rogov, director of the government-run Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who thinks Mr. Panarin’s theories don’t hold water.

Mr. Panarin’s résumé includes many years in the Soviet KGB, an experience shared by other top Russian officials. His office, in downtown Moscow, shows his national pride, with pennants on the wall bearing the emblem of the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency. It is also full of statuettes of eagles; a double-headed eagle was the symbol of czarist Russia.

The professor says he began his career in the KGB in 1976. In post-Soviet Russia, he got a doctorate in political science, studied U.S. economics, and worked for FAPSI, then the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. He says he did strategy forecasts for then-President Boris Yeltsin, adding that the details are “classified.”

In September 1998, he attended a conference in Linz, Austria, devoted to information warfare, the use of data to get an edge over a rival. It was there, in front of 400 fellow delegates, that he first presented his theory about the collapse of the U.S. in 2010.

“When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise,” he remembers. He says most in the audience were skeptical. “They didn’t believe me.”

At the end of the presentation, he says many delegates asked him to autograph copies of the map showing a dismembered U.S.

He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says. 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.

“It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska; it was part of the Russian Empire for a long time.” A framed satellite image of the Bering Strait that separates Alaska from Russia like a thread hangs from his office wall. “It’s not there for no reason,” he says with a sly grin.

Interest in his forecast revived this fall when he published an article in Izvestia, one of Russia’s biggest national dailies. In it, he reiterated his theory, called U.S. foreign debt “a pyramid scheme,” and predicted China and Russia would usurp Washington’s role as a global financial regulator.

Americans hope President-elect Barack Obama “can work miracles,” he wrote. “But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles.”

The article prompted a question about the White House’s reaction to Prof. Panarin’s forecast at a December news conference. “I’ll have to decline to comment,” spokeswoman Dana Perino said amid much laughter.

For Prof. Panarin, Ms. Perino’s response was significant. “The way the answer was phrased was an indication that my views are being listened to very carefully,” he says.

The professor says he’s convinced that people are taking his theory more seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right. He cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. Mr. Todd is famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union—15 years beforehand. “When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him,” says Prof. Panarin.
[Igor Panarin]

Write to Andrew Osborn at

Related News From the Web

  * et aussi:      As If Things Weren’t Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End Of US DEC 29. 2008   huffingtonpost.com

—————- et sur le washingtonpost—————-
Russian’s Prediction Spurs Celebrity, Scorn

By Joel Garreau Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 3, 2009; C01  
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/02/AR2009010202401_pf.html

For seriously predicting that the United States will break into six parts in June or July of 2010, Igor Panarin has suddenly become a Russian state-media celebrity. Hardly a day goes by without another interview or two for the KGB-trained, Kremlin-backed senior analyst. The clamor in Russia for his ideas is growing, he says.

Panarin’s disintegration divination comes complete with a map. In it, Alaska goes to Russia. Hawaii goes to Japan or China. “The California Republic”—the West from Utah and Arizona to the Pacific—goes to China. “The Texas Republic”—the South from New Mexico to Florida—goes to Mexico. “Atlantic America”—the Northeast from Tennessee and South Carolina up to Maine—joins the European Union. And “The Central North-American Republic”—the Plains from Ohio to Montana—goes to Canada.

Few Americans paid any attention to his novel views until this week, when the Wall Street Journal trumpeted them on Page 1. Within hours, the U.S. media began the counterattack.

This is preposterous, Time magazine said in a blog.

“The man knows nothing at all about American regional differences,” wrote Justin Fox, Time’s business and economics columnist. South Carolina is like Massachusetts? Tennessee will join with France? Idaho will find something to love about California? Wyoming will snuggle up to Ottawa? Alabama will happily report to Mexico City? “Yeah, right!” Fox wrote. “Has this man ever been to the United States? Has he never even heard of ‘The Nine Nations of North America’? . . . Igor, do your homework!”

Ahem, yes, that 1981 “Nine Nations” book I myself wrote. Well, I was young. I needed the money.

The regional bloggers who find it useful to view the continent functioning as if it were nine separate economies or distinct cultures that pay little regard to state or national boundaries have been loudly a-chirp about Panarin for a while.

Their complaints are similar to Time’s. They’re not so concerned about some Russkie anticipating American disunion, devolution, revolution, fratricide and overthrow of the government. What the hey, we celebrate those every Fourth of July. Never uncommon in North America is the geopolitical urge to take a walk for a pack of cigarettes. At any given time, there are as many as a dozen secession movements ongoing. The one getting the most press currently is the Second Vermont Republic.

Such unhappy places usually want to secede because they are marginal, cheated, powerless, sparsely populated areas neglected by the big urban centers that control powerful states. The reason their secession movements are thoroughly ignored is that they are marginal, cheated, powerless, sparsely populated areas neglected by the big urban centers that control powerful states.

The regionalists’ problem with Panarin is that he couldn’t be more clueless about where the real fault lines of culture and values are.

Las Vegas beats with the same heart as Portland, Ore.? Detroit is the soul mate of Bozeman, Mont.?

Good Lord, Richmond is the same place as Fairfax?

One possible explanation for how Panarin’s hypothesis is being eagerly lapped up in Russia is that the Kremlin is projecting its own insecurities onto the United States.

“What may be clouding Mr. Panarin’s crystal ball is the mistaken belief that U.S. citizens view themselves in the same way that residents of the old Soviet Union viewed that state,” e-mails Thomas J. Baerwald, an investigator in a project called “Beyond Borders” and past president of the Association of American Geographers.

Just before the breakup of the Soviet Union, four Soviet and five American geographers started “Beyond Borders” to map within the Soviet empire the human values that endure—those that have taken centuries to produce and are not likely to change precipitously. Their approach was based on the idea that all countries have underlying patterns of pasts, futures, loyalties, industries, climates, resources and politics. These functional cultural regions, in turn, frequently are far more significant than the arbitrary boundaries and surveyors’ mistakes that usually make up politically defined borders.

To take one former Soviet example: The European gateway of St. Petersburg, across from Scandinavia, is profoundly different from all those Muslim “-stans” north and east of Iran, from Uzbekistan to Kyrgyzstan, that declared their independence from the Soviet Union the first chance they got.

Those departures still burn some Russians who hate the loss of empire. Perhaps they would like to shed crocodile tears at the idea that history might repeat itself near the U.S.-Mexico border.

When the Soviet Union broke apart, 14 independent countries emerged in addition to Russia. Quite a few of them instantly and desperately turned to Europe for their futures, including Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia and Ukraine—not to mention all those Warsaw Pact places from Poland to the late Czechoslovakia. Might it warm a few cockles in Moscow to think that Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey or New Hampshire could go the same way?

Oh, and be still my Kremlin heart: those shooting wars in the Caucuses, in Chechnya and Georgia? If only those would erupt in the Rockies!

“I really see Panarin’s argument as Russia looking in the mirror and projecting that onto the United States. ‘Here they speak Spanish. Of course this can’t hold together. Of course this will fall apart when the economy tanks,’ ” says Kathleen Braden of Seattle Pacific University, another member of the “Beyond Borders” team.

“The Russian mentality is, ‘There are ethnic borders, and they won’t go away. The only thing that keeps this melting pot together is money.’ There’s also a sense of ‘Our empire broke up; why shouldn’t theirs?’ “

“We constantly were corrected when we tried to use the term ‘Soviets’ as a catch-all phrase for residents of the U.S.S.R.,” Baerwald says. “People firmly told us that they were Russians or Lithuanians or Estonians or Ukrainians or other terms that identified a region or subregion that described their own geographical identity. In contrast, if you ask U.S. residents what term describes who they are, an enormous majority will reply ‘I am an American.’ Even in those places where regional loyalties are especially strong, such as Texas, loyalties to the U.S. are far greater than they are to states or regions.

“I suspect this would be true even had the U.S. not had the powerful reinforcement of national identity that followed in the wake of 9/11. But one can compare the way that U.S. citizens have dealt with the Iraqi war in comparison with the way the nation was torn by an equally unpopular war in Vietnam four decades earlier, and sense that there is a very strong belief among a very large percentage of Americans that while we may have problems and differences, the best way to attain a positive future is to remain solid as a united nation.”

We can hope that Igor Panarin is offered the opportunity for a long road trip in these parts, either before or after his 2010 deadline for the end of the federal empire.

Perhaps he would discover what the acutely perceptive Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville did in the 1830s, as he wrote in “Democracy in America”: that we Americans are an extravagantly creative people in how we generate social forms.

“Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations,” he wrote. “In democratic countries, knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others.”

Indeed, Tocqueville noted, community here was rarely the same thing as formal government.

I have never thought that North America is flying apart, or that it should. But I once talked with someone who did: Archie Green, a University of Texas professor, folklorist and regionalist.

What he liked about the observation that North America was made up of quite real, tangible and long-lived civilizations such as the breadbasket or the Pacific Northwest is that if Washington, D.C., were to slide into the Potomac tomorrow under the weight of its many burdens and crises, the result would be okay. The future would not be chaos; it would be a shift. North America would not suddenly become a strange and alien world. It would be a collection of healthy, powerful constituent parts—for example, Dixie—that we’ve known all our lives.

Green saw this as a resilient response of a tough people reaffirming their self-reliance. It’s not that social contracts are dissolving; it’s that new ones are being born.

Check it out, Igor. In addition to the Mississippi Delta not being Belarus, you might find these real places nothing like your imagination.
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bonne remarque (qui en appelle d’autres) et excellent lien

le “réhaussement”, décidé sur initiative sarko en catimini et au mépris total de la démocratie européenne, doit être stoppé.
Au contraire le boycott des institutions israeliennes, en tous domaines, doit être engagé, sans délai, comme il fallait boycotter les national socialistes dans les années 30.

Si on établit une relation entre ces deux articles :

-  Albion soupçonne Super-Sarko de bien vastes ambitions

- Des USA aux DSA, l’hypothèse finale

l’hypothèse de Lyndon Larouche concernant une conspiration britannique visant à restaurer l’Empire Britannique sous la forme d’une confédération globale gérée en sous-main par les britanniques et quelques comparses fortunés, n’est pas si idiote que cela… D’autant plus que la globalisation qui est le plus formidable instrument de destruction des états qui ait été inventé est une idée européenne et plus spécialement britannique qu’une idée US.

Dans cette hypothèse, les US (le pays) est plus victime que coupable alors que seule une partie de son élite économique, celle justement qui s’est royalement servie dans le trésor US pour couvrir ses pertes lors de la crise des subprimes, paraît avoir partie liée avec ces “conspirateurs britanniques”.

Ajoutons à cela le rôle trouble que joua Blair auprès de Bush avant de reprendre ses billes pour tenter de se faire nommer président de l’U.E. et le tableau commence à furieusement ressembler à la caricature de LaRouche.