By J.B. Shurk
The same Western leaders who speak endlessly about “protecting Democracy” continue to rig elections, outlaw political parties, and prosecute candidates. Germany has declared Alternative for Germany — now the country’s most popular party — an “extremist group” on par with domestic terror organizations. The European Union helped Marxist globalists in Romania invalidate a presidential election and ban the winner from office. France and Brazil have followed the U.S. example of bringing ludicrous criminal charges against popular anti-Establishment politicians, and while President Trump overcame the sham prosecutions targeting him, Marine Le Pen and Jair Bolsonaro are fighting just to survive.
Let’s not forget either that the Ukraine-Russia War drags on today only because U.S. and European forces helped overthrow the legitimately elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, back in 2014. His transgression? Yanukovych’s government was pushing back against the EU’s efforts to absorb Ukraine into its continental empire. The same NATO and EU talking-heads who denounce Russia’s conquest of its neighbor are mostly mad because they hoped to conquer Ukraine first.
It’s a disorienting time for Westerners who once respected their civic institutions. The Cold War mentality of the twentieth century created clear distinctions between closed, communist systems and rights-based, free societies. In the West, people could freely practice the religious tenets of their respective faiths; in communist societies, people were expected to obey the quasi-divine strictures of the State. In the West, people could own property and freely exchange goods and services; in communist societies, people owned nothing and received only what the State gave them. In the West, people could speak their minds and publicly debate new ideas; in communist societies, people adhered to politically correct ideology under the constant threat of arrest, torture, and even death. The West was supposed to err on the side of individual freedoms, even when those freedoms permitted awful people to say awful things.
Western societies did not always live up to the principles that distinguished them from totalitarian regimes, but respect for personal freedom did serve as an effective guardrail that kept Western governments from careening toward totalitarianism, too.
What’s going on today is entirely different.
Western governments treat religious faith as a disease that must be cured. The faithful (particularly Christians and Jews) are quarantined from the rest of society and expected to hide their beliefs in public spaces. Law enforcement agencies in the U.S., U.K., and continental Europe arrest Christians praying silently outside of abortion facilities. When churches and synagogues are vandalized or burned down, those crimes are often excused and rarely solved. In Canada, arsonists have largely been given a free pass due to the government’s borderline hatred for the Catholic Church. During purported Catholic Joe Biden’s presidency, the FBI spied on Americans who celebrate the Traditional Latin Mass. Politicians casually blame Jews for genocide (a slander that is sickeningly ironic) and speak of Christians as “nationalists,” “fundamentalists,” “far-right extremists,” “fascists,” and “Nazis.”
The combined effect of these government-sanctioned attacks against people of faith is threefold: (1) religious freedom is undermined; (2) the State’s worldview is elevated over all others; and (3) religions not explicitly partnering with the State are deemed national security threats. These characteristics aptly describe the former Soviet Union’s hostility toward religion. They aptly describe the Chinese Communist Party’s hostility toward religion. And they aptly describe the West’s hostility toward religion today.
What about property and free markets? Most Westerners are in debt. They rent apartments or live in bank-owned homes. They make just enough to pay for their expenses each month and have no real savings. A substantial portion of their income is confiscated indirectly through government regulations or directly through a panoply of government taxes. Most Westerners receive some kind of government welfare in the form of subsidies, entitlements, healthcare, or retirement income. An ever-increasing share of the Western population depends almost entirely upon the State.
Even those with assets are kept under the government’s thumb. Fiat money (government-issued currency not backed by a physical commodity such as gold) and central banks are antithetical to truly free markets. By threat of violence, governments force citizens to buy and sell goods and services using innately worthless paper bills (or digital ones and zeroes) as a medium of exchange. Those currencies retain value only so long as a government’s threat of force maintains the State’s monopoly over legal tender. Gold doesn’t require a government agent with a gun to establish its value. When central banks manipulate the money supply, they effectively distort all markets. They create economic “winners” and “losers” by decree. That’s a hallmark of a State-controlled economy, not a free market. By increasing the money supply over time, central banks decrease the value of State-enforced currencies. Conversely, they artificially raise the currency-denominated valuation of homes, stocks, and other real assets.
What is the end result? Personal savings rates decrease because fiat currencies kept under a mattress depreciate over time. Instead, consumers spend their money or invest it in assets that are artificially juiced. People with retirement investments become dependent upon the government’s money-printing because without such blatant market manipulation, the artificially-created value of their homes and investment portfolios would disappear. Western governments have effectively enslaved citizens to central banks and set in motion a financial doom loop that requires new government spending, cyclical bank and industry bailouts, and regular intervention in consumer markets. There’s nothing “free” about that.
Whereas the majority of Americans in 1900 lived in rural areas and small towns, the twentieth-century push toward urbanization has forced most people into ever-smaller spaces. Rising property and inheritance taxes and costly government regulations have crushed most small farms. Those family farms still struggling to survive must constantly fend off attacks from agricultural conglomerates, domestic and foreign saboteurs, Chinese shell companies, and land baron billionaires such as Bill Gates. Similarly, the European Union’s ridiculous “net-zero” carbon regulations and destructive obsession with “climate change” socialism are bankrupting private farmers on the other side of the Atlantic. Western governments don’t want private citizens to own land. They don’t want private citizens to grow food or to be self-sufficient. They have been actively cultivating a future in which government bureaucrats and a small number of multinational corporations will control every acre. That kind of world embraces collectivism. Nothing about it encourages citizens to be free.
What about free speech? It turns out that Western governments’ commitments to free speech were only as strong as their relative control over the principal sources of the public’s information. When a small number of national publications, radio stations, and television news studios maintained undue influence over public opinion, governments could indirectly shape society by discreetly controlling the content of mass communication. They did this by regulating broadcasts over the “public’s airwaves,” pressuring news publications to self-censor, intervening in matters involving “national security,” and outright funding the very news institutions that falsely portray themselves as independent guardians of the free press.
As this institutional monopoly has come crashing down with the advent of the Internet and the rise of social media, Western governments have become openly hostile to forms of mass communication that empower the broader public. Since the ‘90s, we have seen the steady criminalization of speech. “Hate speech” laws have proliferated. Government agencies dedicated to fighting so-called “disinformation” have taken form. Police forces in the U.K., Germany, and elsewhere arrest citizens for expressing unapproved opinions online. Effectively, Western governments are targeting any information that threatens their monopoly over official “narratives.” The most effective way to do so is to intimidate and silence prospective speakers. No country that criminalizes thoughts and words is a friend to free speech.
In the West, the masks have come off.