Mexico and USA - failed states to be?

Mexico is teetering into failed-state status:

A Drug Cartel Just Defeated The Mexican Military In Battle

The idea that a nation of 120 million people with whom the United States shares a 2,000-mile border and ever-increasing economic ties might spiral into collapse has not seriously occurred to the American people. We’ve had a century of relative peace on our southwest border, and aside from dealing with an occasional surge of illegal immigration, we have assumed that it will continue. It will not.

Culiacan should be a wake-up call that the war now underway in Mexico will not stay there, and that we’d better start thinking about what that will mean for America.

 Wall 2.0: Might Have to Put Machine Guns On the Wall (Just in Case)

You may have read the news just a few days back: the Mexican military captured not one but two of El Chapo’s sons in the heart of Culiacán, the Sinaloan capital. One son freed himself—which is to say his entourage and retainers at hand overpowered and killed the soldiers at hand—and then, in a decisive riposte, seized the entire city center of Culiacán to compel the liberation of his brother.

 The forces that emerged were in the literal sense awesome and awful. Heavy weaponry that would be familiar on any Iraqi, Syrian, or Yemeni battlefield was brought to bear. More and worse: custom-built armored vehicles, designed and built to make a Sahel-warfare technical look like an amateur’s weekend kit job, were rolled out for their combat debut. Most critically, all this hardware was manned by men with qualities the Mexican Army largely lacks: training, tactical proficiency, and motivation.

Then the coup de grace: as the Chapo sons’ forces engaged in direct combat with their own national military, kill squads went into action across Culiacán, slaughtering the families of soldiers engaged in the streets.

Same post: "You might think nothing could be worse than ISIS. You’d be thinking wrong."

After about three months of training it was time for the “final exam,” which involved “cutting people up a special way,” Capache explains. Recruits took turns administering a specific, byzantine series of stabs and slashes to a live victim—usually a thief or petty criminal the cartel deemed deserving of such punishment. The first series of ordered knife cuts was meant to torture for information without killing. Then to strike fatal blows. And at last to cut up the body by hand for disposal. — In Mexico’s Drug Cartel Country, a Murderer Who Kills Murderers Tells His Story  Trust me, you don’t want to RTWT  ]

A state entering the preliminary stages of "failed": Yes, antifa is the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis.

Last weekend [in August] in Berkeley, Calif., a group of neo-communist antifa — “anti-fascist” — thugs attacked peaceful protesters at a “No to Marxism in America” rally, wielding sticks and pepper spray, and beating people with homemade shields that read (I kid you not) “No Hate.” The Post reports how one peaceful protester “was attacked by five black-clad antifa members, each windmilling kicks and punches into a man desperately trying to protect himself.” Members of the Berkeley College Republicans were then stalked by antifa goons who followed them to a gas station and demanded they “get the [expletive] out” of their car, warning, “We are real hungry for supremacists and there is more of us.”

The organizer of the anti-Marxism protest is not a white supremacist. Amber Cummings is a self-described “transsexual female who embraces diversity” and had announced on Facebook that “any racist groups like the KKK [and] Neo Nazis . . . are not welcome.” The protest was needed, Cummings said, because “Berkeley is a ground zero for the Marxist Movement.”

As if to prove Cummings’s point, the antifa movement responded with jackboots and clubs — because their definition of “fascist” includes not just neo-Nazis but also anyone who opposes their totalitarian worldview.

And let’s be clear: Totalitarian is precisely what they are. Mark Bray, a Dartmouth lecturer who has defended antifa’s violent tactics, recently explained in The Post, “Its adherents are predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists” who believe that physical violence “is both ethically justifiable and strategically effective.” In other words, they are no different from neo-Nazis. 

Well, the Nazis were socialists, but saying that provable historical fact makes progressives' heads explode.

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini invented the word fascist as the name of his post-World War 1 party, which he symbolized with the ancient Roman symbol, fasces, a bundle of reeds tied together with an axe, used by the Roman magisterium to symbolize the power of Roman law over life and death.

The Roman fasces, symbol of the Italian fascisti party of the early 20th century. 

In 1932, Mussolini defined Fascism for the Italian Encyclopedia. It included this nugget:

The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, th`e Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State....

...The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone....

Sound familiar? It's almost a transcript of the Democrat debates so far.

Mussolini's street enforcement arm were called the Blackshirts, who were,

...originally the paramilitary wing of the National Fascist Party and, after 1923, an all-volunteer militia of the Kingdom of Italy under Fascist rule, similar to SS in Nazi-Germany. Its members were distinguished by their black uniforms (modeled on those of the Arditi, Italy's elite troops of World War I) and their loyalty to Benito Mussolini, the Duce (leader) of Fascism, to whom they swore an oath. 

Hitler copied the concept with the National Socialist Sturmabteilung, SA, who unofficially were called Brownshirts. In the early stages of the Nazi movement the Brownshirts were simply paid street thugs. Later Hitler put them under military-like discipline and they carried out planned, focused violence against Jews, communists, trade unionists and others.

So who is Antifa? They are the street thugs of the American Left, committing violence against Americans of other political persuasion. As for the Democrat party, if I had a dollar for every time a prominent Democrat or presidential candidate denounced Antifa and its violence, I would be, um, broke.

But Antifa is well funded and its leaders, at least, are paid, according to the LA Times, which also points out that paid protesters are not exactly a new thing in American politics. Most of Antifa consists of "useful idiots," but the ranks of trained and very capable Antifa blackshirts (for black is their preferred color of dress) are growing.

This is simply the socialist-left template. Military theoretician Carl von Clausewitz said that war is a continuation of politics by other means. For socialists, violence is a continuation of politics - but not by "other means," for the Left defines politics in  warring terms: "class struggle," "rising up," "workers' revolution," and such. Politics and violence therefore are not separate activities. Politics is simply a continuum that encompasses both non-violence and violence.

This is why I have maintained for three years that there is a new American civil war coming, no matter who is declared the winner of 2020's election. If Trump wins, organized, pre-planned Antifa violence will erupt the same day. If Warren or another Democrat wins, violence will follow later, as the fascisti victor turns toward emplacing socialist rule over Americans.

Mexico is already a nation at war with itself. It is on the precipice of failed state status. And as Mexico is now, the United States will be in only 13-14 months. I pray we will not come to a sauve qui peut state of affairs.

Update: These, too.

The Rethink We Need to Avoid America’s Collapse, by Robin Burk.

Our Revolution’s Logic, by Angelo Codevilla

In 2010, Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo Codevilla reintroduced the notion of "the ruling class" back into American popular discourse. In 2017, he described contemporary American politics as a "cold civil war." Now he applies the "logic of revolution" to our current political scene.