More than a decade ago, Igor Panarin, current Dean of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Moscow’s Diplomatic Academy, launched what would become a series of increasingly entertaining predictions about the imminent dissolution of the United States. It wasn’t until the current financial crisis, however, that Panarin’s conjectures gained a touch more relevance and, therefore, more airtime. Unsurprisingly, Russian state media are all over the guy, but Panarin’s name has also garnered celebrity in the West thanks to the likes of Fox News and The Wall Street Journal, who apparently get a kick out of fueling those cold, cold flames. And who can blame them? So this Tuesday, apparently operating on the no-publicity-is-bad-publicity principle, the Russians invited the Associated Press and other foreign media outlets to feast on Panarin’s latest thoughts.

Here's what they heard: that Barack Obama will declare martial law before the year is over, that the U.S. will crumble into six autonomous regions by 2011, and that Russia and China will rise to the occasion in the aftermath, working together to replace the soon-to-be obsolete U.S. dollar. Before turning to the economy, Panarin cited America’s school shootings, stuffed prisons, and large homosexual population as evidence of the country’s psychological fracturing. The prophet didn’t take any questions after the lecture, saying he would respond to written queries by mid-week at earliest.

That's great, since we've got one: Dear Prof. Panarin, you run seminars on waging "information warfare," for money. Seriously, your own site promises to teach "top managers of state structures and heads of public relations departments" to stage "special information events" to fuck with peoples' (that's whole peoples', not individual people's) heads for 17,000 rubles plus VAT. After that, isn't going off and doing a lecture on the fate of the U.S. with American reporters in attendance a little like trying to sell someone a watch you just lifted off them?

Oh oh oh, and we have a follow-up: when the U.S. collapses, who will run the radar they have built in Norway to hypnotize Russians?

Russian Scholar Says US Will Collapse Next Year [Associated Press]
Panarin Seminars [Official Site]

Original graphic courtesy of Freedomsphoenix.com