On June 28, 1914, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated in Sarajevo, igniting a chain of events that quickly exploded into World War I. Simmering tensions had nations and people on edge, waiting for the chance to settle differences. After five years and millions of dead, the Treaty of Versailles was meant to end the war, but instead only paused the violence, creating the catastrophic economic and social conditions of the interwar period that led to an even larger, more devastating war.
A few weeks ago here at WND, I wrote of an impending “trigger event” during our present time of increasing tension in the U.S. and Europe, noting the failure of authorities to keep civil order and the increasingly violent antagonism of ordinary citizens and communities by leftist agitators. One can only speculate what unforeseen event might be the spark that ignites the simmering tensions of the past few decades that have reached a fever pitch over the past year. But, unlike the tensions of a century ago, the struggle is not between nations but between two competing worldviews within Western nations.
In recent decades, Western leaders have charged headlong into a collectivist, globalist method of governing, with or without the consent of their citizens. While U.S. and European leaders promised their reluctant countrymen unlimited prosperity at the end of the rainbow for initiatives such as the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement and other globalist schemes, the end result was a massive wealth transfer from the middle class to the wealthy.
Trade agreements led to jobs moving to poorer nations with cheap labor, while open-borders policies resulted in a flood of immigrants into Western nations, depressing wages for the jobs that remain. All of this has created previously unimagined levels of both public and private debt as well as cultural clashes across the West. The left’s never-ending push for increased mass migration, and demonization of those resisting the flood of immigration, is ironic considering their denunciation of Western colonialism that resulted in the independence movement among European colonies after World War II. And, while the middle class struggles in this New World Order, poverty programs have increased dramatically at the same time a new billionaire-class of the ultra-wealthy increases their fortunes to historic levels.
This disconnect between wealthy elites and ordinary citizens has fueled the internal conflicts of the past few years, typified by the election of outsider Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency and the U.K.’s “Brexit” vote to leave the European Union. Globalists’ refusal to accept these electoral results and sabotaging the peoples’ efforts to restore national order has degenerated into a “cold civil war” of words, demonizing their own citizens with insults and accusations of every kind of immoral motives. As their grand schemes failed to produce the promised utopias, and hateful slurs lost their impact, globalists turned to tech censorship, street violence by Antifa and BLM rioters and used coronavirus as an excuse to slam the brakes on the economy and turn police into health enforcers against ordinary people.
The obvious election fraud, demonstrated most explicitly in the simultaneous, middle-of-the-night ballot-counting stoppages in Democrat-controlled cities in key swing states followed by miraculous (greater than 100% voter turnout?) vote totals giving Joe Biden the win, was a demonstration that globalist elites will no longer allow self-determination of the people. The left’s refusal to honor electoral outcomes or permit anything to interfere with their agenda is creating the economic and social conditions for a historic reaction. There are several important events happening this month in our nation’s capital – court decisions, congressional votes, planned gatherings – with the potential to cause any number of potential chain reactions. The breach of security barricades on Capitol Hill by protesters is just the latest event moving us closer to a reckoning of competing and irreconcilable worldviews in Western nations. Sadly, leftists can be expected to use this as an opportunity to flex their new control of the levers of power and tighten the vice on their political opponents through legislation, the courts, increased censorship by friendly tech companies and the increased weaponization of institutions. This will leave few civil options for response.
Our natural inclination is to see history as a series of events in the past. But history is a continuum. Individual events, by themselves or in combination with other events, create the conditions for subsequent events. We are living in historic times.
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