6 ms·
Quite a few on many different sides -- Venezuela is a de-facto narcostate at this point, and they're in deep with everyone from the Mexican cartels to Islamist
by exelius 8y ago
Quite a few on many different sides -- Venezuela is a de-facto narcostate at this point, and they're in deep with everyone from the Mexican cartels to Islamist terror groups in North Africa. The military is getting rich off drug money while the people starve, and a starving populace can't revolt. Unless the US intervenes, there is a lot more money on the side that wants to keep Maduro in power. You're not wrong about the mercenaries, thus the side with the most money is the most likely to win.
- gcb0 8y agolol. you either mean Colombia or oil money. otherwise nothing you said make any sense.
- exelius 8y agoAs the oil money has dried up (thanks to mismanagement, incompetence & corruption) they’ve replaced it with drug trafficking. Because again, you don’t need much other than a large group of men with guns to make a ton of money from drugs; but you do need a relatively functional domestic economy to produce oil.
- sverige 8y ago> a starving populace can't revolt It has nothing to do with starving. It has everything to do with having all their personal firearms confiscated by the government a few years ago.
- vkou 8y agoHow exactly did Eastern Europe revolt during the fall of the iron curtain? The first thing that the communists did, when they sized power after WWII, was take away everyone's guns. And yet, as soon as the USSR stopped guaranteeing the security of the Warsaw pact states, their regimes fell like dominoes.
- sverige 8y agoBy that point, though, the people who had guns (i.e., the military) supported the overthrow of the existing order. It certainly wouldn't have happened with their active opposition.
- int_19h 8y agoElites lost the will to use violence to suppress dissent. Back when that wasn't the case, things worked like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novocherkassk_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novocherkassk_massacre
- tormeh 8y agoOrdinary civilians with guns don't have a great track record in modern history. They lack logistics and organization, so they are usually just slaughtered. Admittedly it's a bit better when the army is domestic, because domestic armies have sympathizers and has less appetite for killing, but the odds are not great.
- DuskStar 8y agoI think the examples provided by the Vietcong and Taliban would disagree. Picking the irregulars out of a city of civilians is really damn hard, and 'kill all the civilians' is not typically an acceptable solution, for better or worse. (There's some evidence from Russia that 'kill a bunch of the civilians in the area housing terrorists while going after the terrorists' reduces total casualties by removing cities as safe areas)
- rebuilder 8y agoThe viet minh and taleban were hardly ordinary civilians dusting off their rifles from their closets.
- A2017U1 8y ago> they're in deep with everyone from the Mexican cartels to Islamist terror groups So basically US foreign intelligence in the 80's? :)