Americans and Western Europeans have no idea what it means to come from a country where the government can’t maintain a monopoly on violence, and when you say stuff like this it comes across as complaining about “first world problems.”

What’s happening in South Africa is a phenomenon that happens around the third world. And it’s an enormous tax on half of the human population, even in relatively affluent countries like Mexico. Even in many of the countries that don’t suffer from internal destabilization by non-state actors, the solution has been dictators like Saddam Hussain in Iraq or El-Sisi in Egypt. It’s a subject that warrants thoughtful analysis and problem solving by people in the first world. We need you guys to think about how you overcame those problems so those lessons can be applied to countries that desperately need the help.

The first world overcame those problems by extracting obscene amounts of wealth from the third world to make their populations handsomely rich. When you have everything and lead a comfortable life you're more likely to spend your free time at the pub than go enlist with some private gang or militia. If you look at all the places where organised crime is rampant, the common denominator is always extreme poverty. People living a wretched life, unable to meet their basic needs, with no glimmer of hope for their future are just begging to be recruited into a gang for even the smallest of incentives.

As someone who was born in Russia and lived there in 1990s, I have quite a good idea of this arrangement. This was not mafia state yet. The mafia state is the modern Russia, where former organized crime groups became fully integrated into the government. Technically, the state retains the monopoly on violence. Practically, violence comes from influence of competing groups within the state. And yes, US is moving towards the same regime type. This is clearly visible to me, from my Russian experience, but I don't understand how to convey this to Americans.

He said "mafia state". Italy was/is a non controversial example of that. Firmly in Western Europe.

> Americans and Western Europeans have no idea what it means to come from a country where the government can’t maintain a monopoly on violence

I’ve seen enough white Christian men shoot up schools and mosques in my lifetime to roll my eyes at this statement.

Americans are still getting lynched.

> We need you guys to think about how you overcame those problems so those lessons can be applied to countries that desperately need the help

We have studied this problem ad nauseum. The West knew the answer until about a century ago. Europe became orderly through shame culture, executing criminals and destruction of clan culture.

El Salvador is a modern example.

The remedy is violent, unkind, and not communist so we get indefinite unbounded suffering instead.