Spain's fascist repression against Catalonia knows no bounds

Do not cry for a land that fights, fight for a land that cries!

Today several Catalan politicians were jailed on accusation of "sedition" or "rebellion", what is a nonsense because they never used violence to overthrow the status quo but the Spanish Inquisition (Supreme Court in this case) is making things up and twisting the law all they can in order to step up the repression. 

One of them, the Secretary General of Catalan Republican Left (ERC), Marta Rovira, chose to exile herself to Switzerland, joining a growing number of Catalan political leaders in exile, either in Switzerland or in Belgium. 

Another of those imprisoned today was Jordi Turull, who is the only candidate for the Presidency of the Catalan Government (Generalitat de Catalunya), vote that was being held today (he did not get enough votes because the decisive Popular Unity List (CUP) abstained on grounds of wavering republicanism and lack of a social program). 

Also imprisoned were Carme Forcadell (former President of the Catalan Parliament), Raul Romeva (former head of the Republican unity list Together for Catalonia), Josep Rull and Dolors Bassa (former consellers or ministers).

This every day looks more like Turkey. 

But the streets are angry, very angry.

Not only because of Catalonia, there are many other open conflicts feeding into each other, notably the retirees have been staging massive protests in the last weeks against the effective pension cuts while police salaries are increased, military expenditure doubled as Trump demanded, corruption cases keep showing at every corner like mushrooms and the illegitimate debt to save the Spanish banks and other private ventures like useless highways, i.e. to save German and other international banks for slightly longer, is being increased every day. 

The Precariat is also angry and starting to get organized and protest. Also a synchronous conflict has been happening in Murcia City between working class neighbors and the state who illegally is imposing that the bullet train (TAV, another useless waste) goes through their neighborhoods, right by their homes in many cases, above ground, cutting the city in two. The government went so nervous that police was seen patrolling with loaded guns just a couple of days ago, something unseen since ETA began its disarmament process. 

But where anger is really spilling over is in Catalonia, always in the nonviolent manner they have conducted their independence process so far. I do not have yet all the info but I know that semi-spontaneously, organized by the Comittees of Defense of the Republic (CDR, popular assemblies working in national network), there have been many demos and pickets. Notably they have cut the train traffic at the station of Lleida, the border with France at Puigcerdá, and have walked out in most towns across the country, in several cases suffering violent police repression. 

Popular picket at Lleida train station (and some cops)

demo in Barcelona

police brutality today in Catalonia (credit: Jordi Borras)

These images (from FB group We Stand in Solidarity With Catalans) aren't but a tiny relation of what has been happening today again in the forbidden Catalan Republic. And I suspect that it is only the beginning of something huge, because the general mood is clear: if they jail our leaders, they will have to jail millions of us. 

There are informal calls for long-standing general strike, for repeated road, railroad, airport and harbor blockades. Not sure what exactly will come out of this but it looks that, once again, we are in a proto-revolutionary scenario, at the very least in Catalonia. 

And let's not forget that Catalans are 7.5 million people, 16% of the population of the failed state of Spain, and also one of the most vigorous economic areas in spite of Madrid sucking every single large company or almost. 

As a side note, the government can't even pass the budget, because they can't muster a majority to do so, they are resorting to pointless resistance by means of the state apparatus, dominated by fascist currents like the greedy Catholic order Opus Dei, but they lack any sort of coherent governance beyond last trench repression without any sort of compromise with common sense and social consensus. 

The situation is anything but under control: the failed banana kingdom is one step or several closer to total collapse. And I will applaud when that finally happens, because in order to save the Spanairds (by force or grade) Spain must be destroyed, razed to the ground and power returned to the peoples. 

Gora herrien borroka! Long live the struggle of the peoples!

IMNSHO: Spain is about to collapse

*IMNSHO = "in my not so humble opinion"

Where do I begin at: Catalonia?, the irreversible PASOKization of the centenary labor party PSOE?, the upcoming reelection of the boss of the mega-corrupt and reform-fascist PP?, Greece?, Yugoslavia?, Haiti maybe?

Maybe I will begin better with the infamous lapsus linguae of the Secretary General of the People's Party (PP), María Dolores de Cospedal:

We have worked very hard to loot this country

This lapsus linguae or betrayal of the subconscious happened to Ms. Cospedal not once but twice in two separate speeches in two different years. She is the second highest ranking officer in the PP, just after President Mariano Rajoy, she has been President of her region, Castilla-La Mancha, and she is most likely to be appointed minister, maybe even vice-president in the new government to be formed in the next few weeks. 

As top commander of the PP, she is of course involved in all kind of corruption scandals, of which it seems only the tip of the iceberg is known and under trial, including the destruction of key evidence.

Their discourse is almost far-right: strongly in favor of the privileges of the Catholic Church, against human rights (for example they passed the "muzzle-law" by which police can arbitrarily impose huge fines, without any judiciary supervision, on anyone protesting or filming police repression, journalists included), high taxes for the poor and extremely low for the rich, austericide (massive cuts and privatization of social services), histrionic pseudo-patriotism in order to rally the dumb around police, the army, the king and the monuments to Franco and his minions) and lackeyish serfdom towards the banksters, local or international, including their extremely irregular dictatorship on the European Union, the so-called Troika. 

Their real intentions are not always obvious, typical politicians are illusionists after all, but sometimes they do commit revealing errors like this one, stating what they are really about: to keep Spain as a Banana Kingdom they can plunder at whim, as their ilk has done always, since at least Roman times, when the colonial entity named Spain (Hispania) was first established. 

They have a problem though: the younger generations are having nothing of it, they have been deceived so much with the "European dream" that they truly believe they are entitled to be like Germany or Denmark, and not as Greece or Haiti, are they are scheduled to be by the powers that be. And, unlike some Eastern Europeans, they have absolutely no ill feelings towards "communism", even the Soviet-style one, which they acknowledge at least provided jobs, homes and progress, and a quite loved sister country such as Cuba. More moderate versions of radical social-democracy like those experimented with in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia or Ecuador are seen with even more sympathy. Language and personal connections do help with that, naturally.

However the bourgeois-owned media and, critically, the older generations are much less adventurous: often they have their lives solved (and theirs may well be the only income supporting several unemployed or underemployed younger relatives) and, as most older people, don't think that taking risks is a good idea. Because of high unemployment and low natality in the last many decades, the demographic pyramid is almost reversed and the old are way too many voters. This delays change but cannot impede it in the mid-run, also it prevents the reactionary forces from forming shock squads, as the retirees are not really for that kind of action (and when they are, they rather take the other direction: that of protests and solidarity with the younger generations). Their only force is in an ever shrinking voter power, not just shrinking because of the unavoidable deaths but also because even they are every day more aware of being deceived. 

They have another problem: separatism, particularly strong in Catalonia and the Basque Country, with Catalonia set decidedly in the course of unilateral separation. This the Spanish nationalists are trying to use as rally point for the rest of the peoples of the state and also, as they have always done, as distraction from the other much more serious problems, which are the forced application of the Troika's designs, of austericide, in all the state and not just in Catalonia. 

The latest development, with the "opposition" PSOE (literally Spanish Socialist Worker Party, often shortened to "Spanish Party" to make justice to their real policies) shooting itself in the head in order to allow the right to govern for the banksters, is that these will "abstain" in the relevant vote. In practical terms it means that the party has been kidnapped by a, mostly Andalusian, authoritarian provisional administration, whose aim is to delay sine die any form of internal democracy (the militants are very upset) while allowing the PP and Brussels to do what they will. They will try to posture maybe but they most likely will do almost everything that the Troika and the local oligarchs demand. 

If you hear "Susana Díaz" these days in relation to the political situation in Spain you can translate it as "Venizelos", same thing.

So Spain is like Greece in its sad fate by design of the Big Capital, like Yugoslavia in its complex and hardly solvable inter-ethnic conflicts, that can go extreme at any moment now, and like South Korea in population and GDP. It is much bigger than Greece and much more "strategically relevant" than Yugoslavia, holding two key US/NATO bases that control the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea and the British enclave of Gibraltar. 

It is very large in size (one of the largest European countries, after Russia and France) but its army, not popular at all, after ruling the country in successive coups for most of the last two centuries, is quite small however: 50,000 army troops (half of them officers) and other 50,000 military police, plus some navy (one aircraft carrier, 11 frigates, 18 patrol ships) and air force (138 combat airplanes). It used to be much larger in times of Franco and up to the mid-90s, with up to 300,000 forced recruitment soldiers, but we made sure they would not be able to count on us anymore by a long and very successful campaign of civil disobedience. 

So how is post-military Spain going to be able to impose itself and the Troika against millions of people (more than five million, most of them young, have voted to Podemos and their allies; the pro-independence demonstrations in Catalonia have gathered sometimes almost two million people). Are 25,000 soldiers enough? It depends on how brutal they are willing to go, I guess, but the more brutal they are the less legitimacy they will have left, both inside and abroad. 

So, while it is conceivable that they can occupy Catalonia (just as Serbia did with Kosova for more than a decade -- but with a much larger army, total control of the media and widespread use of state terrorism, all of which are not available for the Spanish case), they are only bringing themselves to a cul-de-sac which they cannot control. Much more likely is that Catalonia effectively establishes its effective independence, maybe with some difficulty at first, and remains unrecognized like Somaliland for some time (too important to be ignored forever). 

But we will see now, because Rajoy has declared that his first goal will be to impose "the law" in Catalonia and that means "war" (not necessarily outright open war, not yet surely, but a situation of unsolvable conflict which can only evolve perilously). 

This is of course the main pretext for the PSOE to shoot themselves dead in support of their alleged "rival": intransigent nationalism. The real reason however is to keep the "cordon sanitaire" around Podemos and allies so the international bankster mafia and the Troika remain in charge and continue applying their austericidal policies in all the state of Spain, as well as elsewhere in Europe. 

Spain has never gone through a successful revolution but I have the strong feeling that now is going to experience one: with 50% of youth unemployment (and the other half in precarious jobs or emigrating) and no light at all at the end of the tunnel (actually the global crisis is going to explode again any day), and no constructive reforms whatsoever being done, there is just no other option, no other way ahead. Only inertia keeps it from exploding in ways even more radical than Greece but the Catalan conflict is a keystone, not in restoring the power of the corrupt and decadent "regime of 1978" but in accelerating the process of change in ways that, as in all revolutionary processes, are too unpredictable. 

And it is a process that is going to affect heavily the rest of Europe. Maybe right now, north of the Pyrenees, the tendency is towards demagogic authoritarian and racist nationalism of the worst kind (Le Pen and the likes) but that is no solution at all, only mindless scapegoating. It may remain relatively strong for some time, it may even make a breakthrough in some particularly backward states like Poland or Austria, but there is absolutely no future in that, they offer no solution but more of the same (but worse: more violent and stupid even). If Europe is going to survive this crisis it needs a totally different attitude: one that is daring to experiment and that is willing to make sure that those that are responsible and cooperative are not the victims of the heartless psychopaths that make up the ranks of the oligarchy.

In Spain the parties of the regime have cut all links with common sense and are heading ruthlessly towards the increase of the conflict at all levels (both against Catalonia and against Spain itself, against its own core population). And they lack the legitimacy nor the real forces for doing that, so it's going to be a major implosion sooner than later.

Let us brace ourselves because it's going to be really harsh.

Impressions from the spiraling crisis of the state of Spain

Yesterday it was news that the glued-to-the-chair Spanish President Mariano Rajoy has been meeting with all-Spain political parties in order to rally them around his brittle figure against the Catalan process of independence and in defense of the Franco-blessed "sacred unity of Spain". 

Of course not a single relevant Catalonia-only party or coalition (nor even Catalan regional leader of an all-Spain party) was called to La Moncloa Palace. It is being dealt as a Castilian problem, totally ignoring the will of 7.5 million Catalans. There will be a token Catalan politician meeting today but his party (Unió) has been eliminated from the political competition in the last elections, so they are totally irrelevant. 

Shamelessly President Rajoy declared to the press that "we are all together in this", meaning that the all-Spain unionist parties PSOE and Ciudadanos back him: a very narrow meaning of "all". He declined to even mention the dissident Podemos party, addressing it as "that party that you mention", which is clearly off line. The other major state-wide left-wing coalition, United Left, will attend today but again they are clearly not in line with the hardcore unionist dogma of the Weimar Coalition, which is the same as the Commission Majority at European Union level (minus Convergencia, which is affiliated to the liberal ALDE bloc, along with the unionist Ciudadanos). 

The idea that transpired is that the threatened state of Spain (Greater Castile) will act in force against the secessionist threat, even suspending the autonomy status. The relative weakness of the Weimar Coalition was also apparent even if Rajoy insisted in using the word "all", meaning actually some, mostly Castile-only, forces. 

Police raids against Catalan anarchists and Galician nationalists

I think that it is very symptomatic that the Spanish political tribunal Audiencia Nacional (alias The Inquisition, created by dictator Franco under another name) has been rounding political dissidents in both Catalonia and Galicia these days. Dozens of people have been arrested in both countries accused of being loosely related to anarchist direct action groups (in Catalonia, in spite of the alleged attacks taking place in Madrid and Zaragoza) or to Galician leftist independentist guerrilla. 

The raids can be taken as an instance of saber rattling, not the first one. However in Catalonia it has become a political issue because the autonomous police force Mossos d'Esquadra has taken part in the operation, raising the anger of a key independence process actor: the Popular Unity Lists (CUP). These quickly criticized the autonomous government for obeying dictates from Madrid, precisely when they have proposed a roadmap for independence, which implies actively denying Spain any further authority in Catalonia by means of political and social disobedience.

The Catalan process conundrum

The radical independentist bloc CUP is crucial to form an independence government in Catalonia, as Junts pel Sí (Together for the Yes) coalition does not have a majority. They are making sure that their program is incorporated to the process and that it won't be a any feint for mere continuity with previous Convergencia-led governments, under strong judiciary pressure for corruption but also under political criticism for being way too bourgeois and not prioritizing the popular classes and human rights. 

The CUP, as I say, has proposed a roadmap for independence via serious political disobedience. The proposal is at the moment blocked by means of a technicality: the new Parliament has not yet convened because the PP is delaying its constitution all it can. But it's clear that it will be put to vote as soon as the Parliament is formed. It is plausible that it will be approved, although maybe slightly amended, because it is a pre-condition by the CUP in order to continue negotiations to enable the formation of a government. 

The CUP is also demanding that the new President is not considered to be the President of an autonomous region of Spain but of the Catalan Republic. 

Yesterday it was also leaked that some councilors of the current government considered these demands to be unacceptable. However President Mas seems to have shrugged and stated the obvious: without the CUP there is no government and there is no independence process. As the Junts pel Sí list is mostly made up of independents, rather than members of the backing parties Convergencia and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, it is likely that the opinion of possible dissidents within Convergencia will have only limited weight in practical terms.

So the most likely outcome is that the CUP will succeed in the essence of their demands, which are set to make sure that the process of independence can't be reversed, that the bad practices of previous governments are not repeated and that the general program of the new government is more left-leaning. Although still not discussed, almost certainly the new President won't be Artur Mas but someone with a more leftist profile. 

As a marginal note, the support of half of the Catalonia Sí que es Pot list (Catalonia Can Indeed, participated by Podemos and United Left, as well as independents) to the election of the new President of the Parliament has been taken by some as a sign pro-independence leaning among many of its members, reinforcing the pro-independence majority in the Catalan Parliament. 

Another note is that the Catalan Government announced yesterday that it cannot pay the cost of medicines to pharmacies, what is in practical terms a signal of bankruptcy. This is in turn may be affected by the fact that Catalonia does not manage its own finances in full within the current status.

Forecast

My expectation is that a provisional government of the Catalan Republic will be invested in short term, surely even before the all-Spain elections of December. This assuming that Madrid takes so long to suppress the autonomy and that the civil disobedience plan does not work well enough to allow for the constitution of such government. 

Madrid will, almost without doubt try to suppress the Catalan democratic institutions for the first time in many decades, creating an unprecedented situation that is in almost everything identical to what happened with Kosova (Kosovo) in 1990. However Catalonia is much more important economically than Kosova, not just in GDP but also because of its strategical position as nexus between the Iberian peninsula and continental Europe, and also has several times the population of the Balcanic country. 

Not at all accidentally, Spain is one of the few states of the European Union that does not recognize Kosova as an independent state (the others are Romania, Greece and Slovakia). The obvious reason for this anomalous stand is that Spain fears similar processes of unilateral independence taking place within its own territory and does not want to deal with such problems in a constructive and democratic manner but rather by means of imperialism and militarism, Milosevic-style.

While the lack of popular militias or any form of widespread gun ownership precludes a war, at least in the short term, it is also clear that the military means of Spain are relatively modest. Half of its land forces are the military police corps Guardia Civil (80,000 troops, mostly already busy in regular law enforcement), the rest of the Army having only 75,000 effectives, way too many of them officers. Other land troops that can be used are 5000 marines.

It is unclear to me how a military occupation can solve anything. In fact, we can only expect the situation to deteriorate, as a repression-disobedience stalemate consolidates between the majority's independence will and the relatively powerless occupation forces, while the conflicts spread unavoidably to other parts of the state. 

Even within the wider European Union, such a situation will be hard to manage and, in any case, it is part of the growing spiral of conflicts that it faces as it degenerates into anti-democratic ultra-capitalism at the service of an ailing Empire.

Kiev Junta losing control

The illegitimate Ukranian de facto President A. Turchinov admitted that they have effectively lost control of East Ukraine, currently under popular rule. It just cannot be a coincidence that yesterday a Nazi horde of some 1000 thugs was defeated by the people of Donetsk in a battle that left some 15 wounded, or that, after the proclamation of the People's Republic of Lugansk some days ago, the masses of this city have taken control of government buildings. 

But more interesting is this declaration of the Junta leader:

Our primary task is to prevent the spread of the terrorist threat to other regions of Ukraine.

By "terrorist", the IMF puppet means those who oppose a regime that has absolutely no legitimacy whatsoever, being "elect" only by massive voting fraud under the supervision of Nazi militias, in order to serve the International Bankster Mafia and squeeze the blood of Ukrainians to pay the debts acquired by the local oligarchy. 

Naturally Ukrainians are already feeling the pain, as pensions and salaries have been dramatically slashed, and they can't but feel sympathy for those in East Ukraine or elsewhere, who oppose the new bankster puppet regime.

In Kiev itself, the citizenry opposed a small but heavily armed Nazi march through Independence Square, what resulted in a street battle. Shots and explosions were heard and it is believed that several people were injured.

Turchinov admitted that the attempting to subdue the popular uprising by violent means is useless, something that, while very realistic, must sound to treason in the marble halls of the international bankster mafiosi. If they can't impose their totalitarian blood-sucking will on the masses, how are the bourgeois oligarchs to rule the world?

However he also threatened the military with sackings, talking of "helplessness" and even "treason". This may get the military to revolt against his unjustified rule, turning the power situation in Ukraine even more confuse and disorganized. 

Ukraine is right now a failed state, sharply divided between a pro-Russian and antifascist East, a pro-NATO and very much Nazi West (Galitzia in essence), and a huge area, which includes most of the country, where sympathies and antipathies are split. 

Many things can happen now but if you want my bet, I'd say that the Army will depose the government in a matter of days or weeks, because no other possibility looks reasonable at all.

What is clear is that, as forecast, the Kiev Junta has been unable to impose their pro-IMF version of order against the massive popular discontent. This is important because it may set the path for future similar developments elsewhere in Europe, once the populace rises up against IMF tyranny. What is happening in Ukraine is a testing ground for all Europe.

Honduras: 70,000 armed private guards (UN report)

The UN estimate is of 60-70,000 armed "security guards" in Honduras, what is a figure much greater than the Armed Forces (20,000) and police (12,000) together. And they are not even counting illegal militias nor armed gangs. Often these armed units are involved in murders, as this blog has denounced repeatedly, but invariably the judiciary fails to properly investigate the cases, with more and more not being even denounced anymore.

The situation of Honduras is worse than that of a banana republic, where the structures of the state are corrupted by the influence of corporations: the state has effectively collapsed for all practical purposes reaching a stage of Fascist-Libertarian dystopia, more commonly known as "failed state". 

Source: LINyM[es].

Maju's Failed State Index (II - Europe)

Continuing with my own version of the Failed States Index (see here for background and methods), here we have the Europe map (including Caucasus, Cyprus and Turkey but not Central Asia):

Notice that I may have used somewhat different criteria in the cases of Serbia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Moldova and Cyprus, all them affected by the formation of separate ethnic states by means of foreign intervention. In the cases of Azerbaijan and Georgia I considered the conflicts opened and the states subject to foreign military intervention (by Armenia and Russia respectively), in the cases of Moldova and Cyprus I considered the conflict contained and the states subject to foreign military intervention (by Russia and Turkey respectively), in the case of Serbia I considered Kosovo as a de facto separate state (even if Serbia is reluctant to accept the status quo, it is not likely that will do or even will be able to do anything about it either). These decisions, admittedly subjective and arguable, have probably affected to some extent the stability index of these countries (re-evaluate at will).

We can in any case say that Serbia without Kosovo is more stable than with it. Even if it still has latent ethnic conflict in Vojvodina and a small town at the Kosovan border, this is not enough to damage its stability overall. But with Kosovo it'd be quite different: Serbia would be more unstable, possibly even as much as Georgia.

And vice versa: Georgia might want to sign peace with its breakaway nations and Russia in order to improve its stability, though this would also ask for greater democracy and income distribution. 

Beside these peculiar cases, what I see is that two factors are crucial in Europe: ethnic homogeneity and to a lesser extent foreign military presence (typically as NATO bases). I understand that military bases equate to a mild foreign occupation and show that a state is either too weak to defend itself on its own means or too weak to put down the demands of imperialist powers. 

But the crucial element seems to be open ethnic conflict, which we find in Spain, Turkey, Russia and the other states mentioned above. 

Still there are not obvious failed states in Europe but there are some in the Caucasus that are close and others that are weak enough to be blown to pieces by an intensification of the instability currents eventually.

Maju's Failed State Index (I - America)

You may have heard of the Failed States Index. Admittedly I had not heard of it until a few weeks ago... but today it has hit the news. This index is created yearly by a US think tank, which looks suspicious to say the least. 

I say suspicious because when you look at their index in some detail, it is obvious that it is nothing but a forgery made up on the wishful thinking lies of US imperialist propaganda in most cases. 

Why would be Nicaragua worse than Honduras (maybe because it is ruled by a Sandinista government elected democratically instead of by a military junta with a constitutional varnish?), Costa Rica worse than Canada (with all its barely contained ethnic conflicts)? Colombia comparable to Ecuador (where there is no guerrilla nor death squads)? It is obvious that the parameters and specially evaluation given to each of them by the "think tank" are in many cases at least arbitrary and nonsensical. 

So I decided to do my own index. In order to avoid excessive complexity I established the following parameters:

• Ethnic strife:
• 0 - Ethnically homogeneous
• 1 - Ethnically heterogeneous at peace
• 2 - Contained ethnic conflict
• 3 - Armed ethnic conflict
• 4 - Open ethnic war

• Income inequality (measured by Gini coefficient):
• 0 - < 34
• 1 - 34-43.9
• 2 - 44-53.9
• 3 - 54-63.9
• 4 - > 64

• Lack of democracy:
• 0 - Highly reputed democracy (Switzerland, Iceland, Costa Rica)
• 1 - Other acceptable democracies (most)
• 2 - Formal democracy but authoritarian (Morocco, Colombia, Russia...)
• 3 - Autocracy (China, Iran, Cuba...)
• 4 - Worst dictatorship (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Myanmar...)

• Guerrilla or Civil War:
• 0 - No
• 1 - Rare instances
• 2 - Intermittent
• 3 - Persistent but weak
• 4 - Persistent and strong

• Foreign intervention:
• 0 - No
• 1 - Foreign military alliances
• 2 - Foreign military bases
• 3 - Foreign intervention
• 4 - Extreme foreign intervention (outright war)

Results:

• Strong state: 0-3
• Stable state: 4-7
• Unstable state: 8-11
• Very frail state: 12-15
• Failed state: 16-20

Of course all this is arguable but as I'm a one-person think-tank, I have no one to contradict me (feel free to drop a line or two in the comments section).

And this is my first regional result: America:

All states/dependencies in grey were not evaluated for several reasons (lack of Gini coefficient data or I could not care enough)

Surprises? Chile is weak, Cuba is strong, Haiti is not failed. Chile is weak mostly because of the Mapuche conflict (added to a poor income equality); Cuba is strong because it scores 0 in all categories but democracy (3); Haiti is not failed because it is ethnically homogeneous and has no kind of civil war (the negative score is therefore in income inequality and foreign intervention). In fact Haiti would surely do fair enough without US/UN "help".

Colombia, as anyone knowledgeable would expect, ranks as truly failed state, Nicaragua is more stable than Honduras (what is a fact) and Canada is not that strong (a mere idealization that ignores the Native-Creole conflicts and also the Quebec-Federation ones, as well as the presence of US military bases).