As IF Times

There’s an old saw that says “people get the government that they deserve”. The reason that old saws reflect wisdoms is that they are proven to be correct again and again through time. This is to say that while times change, people and the predictability of human nature does not.  In our current modern era, it’s conspicuously evident that a large contingent of heretofore ‘free and democratic’ states are experiencing situations which are anything but free and democratic.

If you observe the nations where the populace is most strongly at odds with government policies, it happens to be in the nations which were once most revered for their attitudes towards personal rights and freedoms. This includes France, The United Kingdom and Canada which have all devolved into states which oddly resemble those totalitarian regimes that they notionally abhor.  They resemble Orwellian states where freedoms are vaunted but not really allowed.

One may argue that all of these governments were democratically elected and thus, must represent the collective will of their people. This would be a specious argument since in the majority of cases, the selection of political parties is usually restricted to either a bad choice, or a worse one. As discussed in a previous commentary, the choice of political parties is really created by a very small contingent of political operatives.  Thus, the choices are for the people to be democratically oppressed by villain party A or by incompetent party B.

Recently in Canada for example, there were at least 2 representatives of the opposition party not in power who crossed the floor to side with the party that is presently in power.  This was probably not how the democratic process was designed to work.  Thus, if you had cast your vote to have someone represent your views, you’re out of luck.  Welcome to the Uniparty. We shall see if this finally engenders real outrage in a docile Canadian public.

But how do politicians push policies that are so out of sync with the wishes of their constituents?  We can all guess of course.  The usual influence of money and power are probably always at the root, that’s Occam’s Razor.  But no one votes to have their lives oppressed by excessive taxation, by restriction of their movements and speech and by curtailment of their activities.  I’m pretty sure no one votes to have their online activities monitored under threat of jail, for removal of long term property rights, for wanton taxation and for cancellation of legal protests.  Unless of course you’re a New Yorker.  Say what you want about their new Mayor Mamdani, but he was at least explicit on what his agenda and platform. He may be misguided, but he is not a liar.  He got the people to believe him.  Thus, the people got what they wanted; or deserved.

In the case of the other nations mentioned above, it’s pretty certain that no one ran on the platforms that they’re trying to enforce today. Politicians learn pretty quickly what works and what works is that you pander to soft sensibilities, promise everyone a chicken in every pot and then instead give them an old shoe once elected.  Thus is perpetuated the age-old game of bait and switch.  They promise to rid your home of pests, which sounds good, but then they kill your pets too,

Recently, nations with lesser traditions of ‘democracy’ have moved en masse against their oppressive overlords, with great effect.  We saw this in Nepal, Madagascar, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Peru and now recently in Bulgaria. The fact that this hasn’t been replicated in the West is because of their traditions of lawful conduct.  Of course, the goalposts of ‘lawful conduct’ are moved all the time by Western governments, thus it may be just a matter of time.

The idea of democracy was that people in given society were to be given a voice in how the underlying society would be run. Thus, people who had a long term stake in a society would have people represent their views.  Somehow, this model has perversely turned the other way with elected people enacting programs directly at odds with their own constituents. This can be remedied if the populace decides that it must.  As is the case with any task that you hire someone to do, politicians must be made to explicitly state their goals and strategies.  ANY contradiction of these goals MUST be grounds for removal from office, not by the end of the term, but immediately. The people themselves must DEMAND this.  They cannot expect things to just work out.   Otherwise, they really do get the government they deserve.

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.