Labor strikes and fiery riots dominate French news after King Macron's imperial decision to raise the nation's retirement age without any vote from parliament.  In reaction to spiraling inflation, German transportation workers shut down the country on Monday in one of the largest European walkouts in decades.  In the Netherlands, a new anti-globalist, pro-farmer political party fighting back against the World Economic Forum's climate change–obsessed "Great Reset" agenda just dominated Dutch elections.  In "defiance of establishment elites," Italians chose Giorgia Meloni to free the nation from subjugation to Brussels and "defend God, country, and family."  And as left-wing protesters in Israel threaten civil war, Prime Minister Netanyahu has been forced to temporarily suspend his efforts to reform the nation's powerful Judiciary, which operates largely free from competing checks and balances.  Clearly, revolution is in the air.

If you thought incendiary political turmoil threatened to combust only in the United States these days, then you have missed the growing protest movements throughout the collective West.  From belated pushback against government COVID tyranny in New Zealand and Australia to percolating hostility across the European continent stemming from the ruling class's "Build Back Better" pipe dreams, State-sanctioned illegal immigration, and costly "green" energy–induced inflation, there is a powder keg of popular resentment against governing authorities just one spark away from a history-altering explosion.  

If one were to diagnose the source of this amalgamating revolutionary fervor as succinctly as possible, two words come to mind: government haughtiness.  Western governments today have committed themselves to expanding centralized authority and global institutions, while dismissing individual nations' concerns and the public's cries to have their wants and needs be heard.  Rather than recalling the lessons from two disastrous world wars that demonstrated, among other things, the dangerous consequences of glorifying empire at the expense of respecting personal freedoms, Western nations are galloping once again toward a renewed era of popular confrontation and rebellion.  

Far from the delusions of dreamy internationalists and Big Government disciples who believe that "good intentions" and devotion to "public service" will generate policy decisions that cultivate "progress" for the "greater good," government agents will always act to protect and expand their own powers without regard for the deleterious effects those actions might have upon the people.  Only when the risks of public blame and accountability outweigh the attraction of new power will government agents temper what otherwise is their constant pursuit of stealing liberties from the people for personal gain.  Government bullies use fear to expand control, and they use control to keep the public in a constant state of fear. 

Just look at the politically toxic scandals in the U.K. surrounding revelations that high-ranking officials routinely broke "COVID rules" to party and play among themselves.  The scandal is not that government administrators pushed nonsensical and harmful mandates that destroyed lives and livelihoods; it is that they got caught proving that government agents are devoid of "good intentions" and care nothing for "public service."  COVID mandates were a con for expanding illegitimate government control, but successfully reusing that con again and again depends upon official duplicity remaining hidden in the shadows.  "Government, even in its best state," as Thomas Paine so wisely averred, "is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."  Western governments do not generally teach young students that invaluable truth anymore.

Perhaps most dangerous for Western stability is governments' absolute refusal to accept any accountability.  Ordinary citizens did not empower central banks to print money and manipulate markets, so as to create a ticking financial time bomb that will almost certainly unleash the world's worst economic depression — governments did.  Ordinary citizens did not spend taxpayer funds on biological weapons programs that may or may not have led to the release of COVID from a Chinese lab — governments did.  Ordinary citizens did not choose to throw out common sense, the Scientific Method, and an elementary school–level understanding of medical ethics to impose draconian lockdowns, mass surveillance, and coerced experimental injections on a global scale before either the pathogenic disease or its reputed "vaccine" could be properly studied — governments did.  Ordinary citizens did not choose to have their businesses shut down and livelihoods destroyed — governments did.  Ordinary citizens did not choose to eviscerate Western economies in the name of "science" — governments did.  Ordinary citizens did not choose the largest welfare and stimulus programs in world history, nor the unprecedented levels of inflation that were the obvious consequence — governments did.  And ordinary citizens have certainly not chosen to have the World Economic Forum's Western acolytes scoop up farmland, ban hydrocarbon mining, and impose strict carbon limits that have logically unleashed runaway food and fuel prices, economic insecurity, and depleted savings — that self-defeating strategy was the brainchild of Klaus Schwab and his merry band of WEF arsonists.  Yet from COVID to currency collapse, Western powers insist on escaping blame.

The natural result of so much Western government malfeasance coupled with so much personal misery for ordinary Westerners is the rise of resistance movements that refuse to go away.  If competent leaders were in charge, they would recognize that warning sirens are blaring.  Instead, the West's leaders will no doubt double down.  

Mass movements for national self-determination preceded and followed both world wars, so it should come as no surprise that hundreds of millions of Westerners are once again pushing back against their governments, just as U.S.-NATO, Russian, and Chinese belligerence threaten to start a third.  Sort of makes you stop and think about the history of the last century, does it not?  Do global wars naturally arise during times of heightened national friction, or do national governments seeking to extinguish public uprisings find usefulness in starting world wars?

War in Ukraine has exacerbated a European energy crisis, spiked inflation, surged transnational migration, and set off new cultural clashes.  U.S.-NATO's insistence on fighting a proxy war with Russia right up to its territorial borders has reignited the threat of nuclear conflagration.  The decisions of the U.N., IMF, E.U., and Bank for International Settlements to use the legal and financial institutions of the U.S.'s precious "rules-based international order" as instruments for executing a hybrid war against Russia's economy have had a cascading boomerang effect across the globe as developing nations unwilling to be at the mercy of Western domination seek alternative alliances, market relationships, and financial networks.  And while the CIA engages in information warfare to redirect blame for the industrial sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines, connecting Russia and Germany, to Ukrainian explosives experts, it is almost universally accepted throughout the world that the Biden regime destroyed critical infrastructure owned not just by Russia, but also by Germany and other NATO allies.  

Perhaps most troubling for Western governments, their choice to engage in tit-for-tat brinkmanship with Russia — while China speaks more brazenly about conquering Taiwan and Chinese economic influence grows across the Middle East, Africa, and South America — has left U.S.-NATO in the strategically vulnerable position of fighting two lethal foes at once.  Abandoning — through negligence or hubris — a half-century of foreign policy directed toward keeping communist China and strongman Russia from ever joining forces, the West has instead taken one misstep after another these last two years to ensure that former adversaries become bonded allies for at least the next generation.

What ordinary Westerners really need is an alternative to China-Russia-WEF where they can decouple from tyrannical government control and forge a new path dedicated to personal liberty, private property, religious tolerance, free speech, free markets, limited regulation, and respect for families.  Too many tired, beaten down Westerners now view those basic rights as out of reach.  Powder kegs and sparks, however, have a tendency to change the direction of history.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.