As IF Times

Who doesn’t despise politicians? It’s a profession as ancient as the “oldest” one and the similarities are quite striking. They both claim to make your life better; they tell you things you want to hear; but in reality, they both cost you money and in many cases, you’re actually worse off.  In reality, the true purpose of both of their jobs is to get you to use them again.

Nothing has changed much in our lifetime except that the compensation for being in the political racket has vastly outpaced the compensation from the more pedestrian ‘oldest’ profession. In fact the ability to enrich themselves is quite a remarkable skill since politicians are able to parlay somewhat nominal salaries into improbable fortunes during their terms.  They all seem to have miraculous money management skills; at least personally.

In practice, politicians come and go, at least in so-called democracies. The premise is that if the citizens are not amused with the activities of the incumbents, they get tossed out at the next election; provided of course that they actually hold an election.

If only it were that simple.  What politicians leave behind, even as they leave the active theater of politics are often an enormous legacy of bureaucrats that continue to operate without controls.  People who populate bureaucracies are fully aware that once a trajectory has been initiated on a program, then it becomes almost impossible to stop, even with changing political faces.

Bureaucracies have become effectively a fifth column. While ostensibly created to facilitate the wishes of politicians, with time, they become their own arm of influence, not accountable to the electorate.  This reality was brought into stark focus recently with the revelations of the expenditures of USAID, an organization created to “spread American goodwill”. There’s more than enough discussion of disclosures involving their expenditures over the decades in previous articles and elsewhere, so no need to enumerate them here.

Bureaucracies are a social and economic malaise that infects all nations of course.  In the possibly future 51^st state of Canada, the growth of public sector employees between 2019 and 2023 grew by 13 percent; 3.6 times the growth in the private sector. These kinds of bureaucracies serve to make life difficult for those having to deal with them.  Think the motor vehicle licensing station on a super scale.

But the activities of another more dangerous bureaucracy has revealed itself recently and that is the European Union.  Some may be aware that originally this body was formed to look after the economic interests of the nations within the European Union.  The main purpose was to ensure economic activities passed smoothly between nations and to create internal rules for such.  How big need this body be?  Each nation sends a few reps and you get some accountants to work the numbers.  That would seem logical.  But in a recent interview with Viktor Orban, the president of Hungary, he revealed that the EU bureaucracy now numbers over 30,000 employees.  So for each of the 27 nations represented in the EU, that amounts to over 1100 bureaucrats per nation. As an aside, the number of employees estimated at another world bureaucracy, the UN, numbers over 133,000.

Well you may say, it’s Europe, they love their bureaucracies, their holidays and their social systems, so it’s no big deal.  Of course, we can accept that, since they can spend their money as they wish.

Of more sinister issue is that the EU have expanded their area of influence to dictating policies to their member states that have nothing to do with trade, or that  involves non-members such as Ukraine.  Suddenly, the unelected bureaucrats are now directing political and military policies as well. Thus, rather than permitting member nations to retain their own identity, they are all being forced to comply with edicts issued by the unelected tyrannical bureaucrats effectively removing nations’ constituents from decision making.  This was starkly demonstrated recently when they decided to suspend Hungary’s voting privileges for reasons of ‘solidarity’; ironically supposedly fighting for European democracy.  They have confused themselves with NATO.

Suddenly, an organization that was formed to police agricultural and marketing policies internally are now mandating military expenditures to fight the imminent existential threat of Russia! The EU, a trade organization, has been allowed to morph into a political entity not beholden to the wishes of their own member nations.

As we’ve observed here in the US, the taking back of power and influence from entrenched bureaucracy will not be easy. The structures took generations to build and they cannot be dismantled without severe pushback from entrenched interests. We’ve seen the image of Musk wielding a chainsaw to this monstrosity in the US to the horror of bureaucratic beneficiaries.  It would appear that a bit of horror is needed at the EU.

After three years of fighting, the spotlight has returned to the ongoing war between Russia and The Ukraine.  With human losses on both sides continuing to mount along with the financial toll, a possible end to fighting is now at least on the horizon.

But even as some kind of détente is being negotiated, an even more serious war has emerged among players who were notionally ancillary to the actual conflict. What is surprising is that the conflict is now among heretofore allies in geopolitics.  Schisms have now appeared within the fraternity of the ‘Western nations’.

There is great umbrage in the West among those with dated notions of the East versus the West carried over from the alliances after the last Second World war, now 80 years past.  For these people, East is still the enemy and the West are the good guys.  They still think, better dead than Red. Any kind of détente between these two ideologies can never be accepted by the black and white mindset of those thus convinced.

If we consider the fundamental reason for the division between the East and the West, it is grounded in the vastly different political ideologies pursued by either side.  The East, principally Russia, are presented as authoritarian states without the benefit of free democratically held elections,  without freedoms of expression and the general constriction of individual freedom of movement.  They are widely perceived as surveillance states in which citizens are under constant watch and forbidden to criticize the government.   They are portrayed as bleak, sad places where people are kept in poverty and oppressed.  Though Putin is still the strongman of Russia, the nation is in fact a Christian one without the rampant religious related crime plaguing the West.  We don’t see the squalor in the large cities as we’ve become accustomed to in the advanced West.

Thus, it was with great furor among the heretofore champions of the Western nations, the UK, France and Germany among others, when they responded to what can only be described as a wake-up speech by Vice President J.D. Vance at a security conference in Munich. Vance boldly pointed out that the principles of civilization that made living in the West preferable over living in communist regimes such as Russia, had been abandoned by the erstwhile champions of freedom.

Ironically the very things for which Russia is criticized were being implemented upon their own domestic citizens.  The City of London has the 3^rd largest number of surveillance cameras in urban centers in the world. This statistic is even worse when you see that virtually all of the other ones in the top ten are in communist nations.  Russia doesn’t even appear on this list.

Why are these cameras necessary? The only reason is to monitor the explosion of crime that has taken place in London and other British cities over the past decade or so.  Who is responsible for all this crime?  What has changed in the past few years?

It’s certainly clear that in most European nations, the populations have changed significantly by the addition of immigrants from non-Western nations.  But to even suggest that there is any link between this and the uptick in crime is to risk being set upon by the national governments since this may be considered hateful speech.  Such was the gist of Vance’s speech: That the influx of so many immigrants that do not share and will never share the values of the West are endangering the very existence of Western culture.  As most are probably aware, even being seen to be practicing a silent Christian religious observation is considered an offense in today’s Britain.

Thus we have the reality of Western nations suppressing the opinions of those that would protest against the dilution and diminishment of their native societies.  They are threatened with censure at the least and imprisonment at the worst. After Vance’s speech, a German official labelled it as being unacceptable. The irony of not supporting freedom of speech, the foundation of Western societies was totally lost on him….as well as most of the EU nations.  We now have governments monitoring individual’s social posts for language deemed offensive. There is even a movement to ban the X platform from the UK if not Europe for its role in spreading hate speech.

Thus we have the many EU nations circling the wagons to defend ‘Western values”, which includes defending the Ukraine, but which they don’t defend in their own nations.  It’s lost on most EU leaders that they have become the totalitarian  society that they have always considered the enemy Russia to be.  To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, the US didn’t leave the West; the West left the US.