“Divide and rule” tactics are as old as human conflict.  Instead of building consensus among the members of a tribe or nation, rulers exacerbate grievances that exist between social groups.  By doing so effectively, a military or political leader with only minority support can maintain control over a much larger group of people who refuse to work together.  

Julius Caesar used this strategy to conquer Gaul.  The Ottoman Empire ruled over a great number of tribes using the same technique.  The British Empire controlled the Indian subcontinent in much the same way.  Turning potential enemies against one another enables an otherwise insufficient force to seize and preserve power.

Modern Western politics is an endless “divide and rule” operation.  Rarely do political leaders speak in terms that will unite strong majorities of their peoples.  Even more rarely do they speak of their nations as families or articulate ways for everyone to get along.  Instead, they divide society into groups of “oppressors” and “victims” and explain to anyone suffering why it’s someone else’s fault.  

In parliamentary systems across Europe, there are so many political parties that national leaders rarely have majority support.  Floating political alliances often produce legislative results that the public could never have predicted.  For many years, I have regularly asked European friends and associates whether they view their national identity as more important than their European Union identity.  I’ve asked them point-blank, “Are you willing to give up national sovereignty for a single, continental government?”  Every single time — regardless of how pro-E.U. the person is — the answer is the same: “My nation comes first.”

Regardless of those expressed personal feelings, the European Union barrels ahead toward a single super-state.  What started out as a post-war trading bloc exercising few real powers has grown into a continental government with its own currency, president, debt, and growing budgets.  If the Eurocrats can successfully use the Russia-Ukraine War to scare member-states into action, there will soon be a single European military force.  WWI ended several historic empires on the continent.  WWII ended German dreams of a pan-European empire.  Eighty years later, a single European empire looks all but certain.

How did that happen?  Well, it certainly didn’t come from a Europe-wide referendum in which the half a billion citizens were asked whether they would agree to dissolve national borders and elect Ursula von der Leyen as president.  It came from steady incrementalism over many decades, during which local divisions were used to the political advantage of one overarching European government.  Don’t like your national government or local representatives?  Put your faith in the European Union, and all your problems will disappear.  

There’s a reason the European Commission spends so much money on “democracy” movements within the borders of member-states: It has a vested interest in riling up the locals and diluting anti-E.U. sentiment.  These days, European Union officials tell the continent’s inhabitants that to be “anti-E.U.” is to be “pro-Putin.”  Europeans who prefer national sovereignty are dismissed as “dangerous nationalists” who spread “Russian disinformation.”  It’s a cynical yet effective way to build a European empire.

In the United States, two major political parties generally vie for power.  This means that a majority of citizens usually supports the elected president.  It does not mean, however, that the “divide and rule” dynamic is any less pervasive.  When discussing current events in the United States, corporate news talking heads are stuck on endless repeat: racism, white supremacy, Christian nationalism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, fascism, and hate.  Everything that news corporations publish is meant to turn Americans against one another. 

Why would international corporations spend so much time working to divide Americans?  Because if American citizens are busy calling one another “racists” and “bigots,” then they’re not paying attention to how the federal bureaucracy is spending trillions of dollars in taxes.  We watch Republican and Democrat members of Congress call one another vile names leading up to an election, and then we watch those same politicians laughing with one another once they’ve been handed another term in office.  

Republican and Democrat senators don’t despise one another.  They despise the American taxpayer who might object to whatever new spending boondoggle they have planned.  If you can keep Americans at one another’s throats, then nobody notices how many wars are being funded; how many corporate donors are being rewarded; or how much wealth is being transferred from middle-class households to “non-governmental” organizations, family foundations, foreign countries, and other profit-chasing special interests.  

As for the vast federal bureaucracy that acts as a permanent government in the United States, it benefits when Americans are too busy yelling at each other to notice what its members are doing.  The CIA, FBI, IRS, and EPA, and the hundreds of other agencies, departments, and governmental bodies that enforce their will upon ordinary Americans, prefer for voters to waste all their energies screaming about pronouns and historic grievances.  While the politicians divide voters by relative “victimhood,” the permanent bureaucratic government rules over the people with little opposition.  While the politicians speak about “democracy,” America’s unelected bureaucratic empire grows.

For several decades now, European and American officials have used mass illegal immigration as the primary engine for their “divide and rule” operations.  The politicians justify their open border policies as humanitarian efforts to assist foreigners escaping oppression.  They even insist that Western nations are responsible for those claiming “asylum” by blaming “global warming” on Western capitalism and calling waves of unvetted migrants “climate refugees.”  All of that is just propaganda for the corporate news institutions to cycle on loop.

In reality, the endless arrival of foreign migrants supplies endless possibilities for manufactured social division.  How do you “divide and rule” a Christian nation?  Relocate millions of Muslims into the country and lecture the native population on “white supremacy” and “Christian nationalism.”  Celebrate “oppressed” cultures and condemn Western civilization as “imperialist,” “patriarchal,” and “racist.”  Accuse all those who love their country’s history of being “hateful bigots.”  Redefine traditional values as forms of “hate” and then criminalize “hate.”  Mass illegal immigration has become Western governments’ preferred “divide and rule” currency.

All of this engineered division within Western societies does raise an important question, though: If there is nothing left to unite us, how will we ever defend ourselves from civilizations that wish us harm?  If Western citizens see their neighbors as enemies, how will they ever work together to fight back real enemies?  Or do Western governments plan on dividing us until there is nothing left and America and Europe can just be handed over to Islamic conquerors and Chinese communists?

If submission to foreign powers is not the goal, then Western leaders need to throw their “divide and rule” playbooks in the fire and find ways to unite Western citizens once again.  Western self-hatred has one outcome: Western immolation.  If we do not rediscover the ties that bind us, we will be scattered to the wind.  If we do not remember how to honor our ancestors and our cultural history, those who do cherish their history will one day conquer us.  The European Union can scream about a looming Russian invasion all it wants, but it will not matter if other civilizations are allowed to invade its member-states. 

At some point, Western nations must stop manufacturing division.  If they don’t, they will perish, and it won’t much matter who is ruling then.

Image via PickPik.