Since the moment the votes were totaled in the June 2016 Brexit referendum there has been nothing but handwringing about what it implied. The Brexit vote showed, quite clearly, that growing political unions were unsustainable.

It was the first in a series of electoral losses where the people finally said enough to an expanding EU.

Four months later the US voted Donald Trump, of all people, into the White House, again throwing into the air another ‘two fingers up’ to the Western political establishment that wanted to break down borders and blur the lines between nation states.

Trump’s first moves were to nullify the Paris Accord on Climate Change and both the TTIP and TPP. These are all globalist, transnational treaties designed to usurp national governments and put control of the world economy into the hands of corporations with little recourse to the courts for those harmed.

In 2017 Catalonia held an independence referendum against the wishes of Spain’s government which used force to stop it from happening. Today the leaders of that independence movement are convicted felons in exile facing more than a decade in prison while the streets of Barcelona are filled with outrage.

In Italy, dire conditions there thanks to the euro, Angela Merkel’s immigration policy stemming from a failed bid to atomize Syria and the growing EU political integration, ended the 2018 election with two Euroskeptics from opposite ends of the political spectrum forging a populist government. This was eventually betrayed by one party, Five Star Movement, through the undemocratic process of refusing new elections because the polls had shifted further away from the pro-EU position.

The polls have not shifted back even though Matteo Salvini and Lega have been deposed from power.

Germany’s 2017 election ended with another unpopular, and now distinctly minority, coalition forming to stop Euroskeptic Alternative for Germany (AfD) coming to power. The Greens are ascendant as the Social Democrats collapse. Merkel presides over a zombie Bundestag.

And today, three years after Brexit and Trump’s victory, powerful forces are working expressly against the people to overthrow both of these results through cynical and reprehensible acts of political vandalism, hamstringing leadership without a care of the long-term societal damage it is causing.

In fact, I’d argue that the societal damage is the goal of these moves to thwart the people’s desires in the hope that they take it out on each other rather than the ones setting the table in the first place.

The endless maneuvering in the British Parliament to block any form of meaningful Brexit has placed Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the position of having to sacrifice part of his country to have any chance of success.

And what success he’s achieved still leaves Brexit’s fate in limbo. So, in effect, he’s won the ultimate Pyrrhic victory which will leave him in a political no-man’s land after finally getting a general election held where the Tories have to ally with Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party to have a prayer of forming a government capable of governing.

All of these events are symptoms of the real problem which those pulling the strings behind the scenes do not want to admit to, most of the people hate both them and their grand plans.

We live in a rapidly decentralizing age where technology gives us access to information in real time that used to take us months, if not years, to properly disseminate and then it was only to those who were already fellow travelers.

And that has empowered in ways no one currently wielding power is comfortable with.

The reality of reaching out en masse to others along the political and socio-economic spectrum to discuss the merits of changing the course of society was simply not possible even ten years ago.

And today those forces of decentralization are the real problem facing these elites who have enjoyed the illusion of running the world for the past few generations.

But these events like Brexit, Trump, Catalonia and others are castigated as the real problems not the symptoms of the much deeper problems caused by unsustainable political and economic systems based on fraud, cheap money, theft and propaganda.

George Galloway, writing for RT, identified a real divide within the United Kingdom that Brexit has exposed, the fallacy that Ireland is two separate countries.

The six counties of the north east of Ireland were unnaturally torn from the Irish motherland a century ago, but its status was always historically speaking, doomed.

Despite its Gerrymandered borders, tortuously carved to ensure a built-in Protestant (pro-British unionist) majority, and its near-apartheid treatment of its Catholic minority including disenfranchisement of many, the writing was already on the wall. As my own family demonstrates, Catholics simply have bigger families than Protestants. That and the emigration of a steady stream of educated Protestants unwilling to stick around in the thoroughly abnormal statelet they call Northern Ireland. Neither Irish nor British, dominated by a brand of sectarian politics, at least half-a-century an embarrassment, a steady stream of northern Protestants simply voted with their feet and a ticket to England.

George goes on to say that despite the noises from the Scottish National Party (SNP) the likelihood of Scotland trading its current support structure coming from Westminster to the austerity demanded by Brussels is laughable.

I won’t argue with George on that, he knows his people far better than I do. But I will say that the divisions between these countries – England, Scotland and Wales – are deep enough that a breaking point isn’t far-fetched.

What is very clear to me, however, is that even older unnatural agglomerations of ‘countries’ into constructs like the U.K. are showing the strains of holding fast against a world where technology is rapidly empowering individuals to trade across arbitrary political borders.

This is in stark opposition to the arguments for the European Union; that to compete the small countries of Europe need a big common political structure to compete against the U.S, India, Russia and China.

But the reality is that those big countries are all at different points along the same path the U.K. is on with respect to Ireland. From where I sit, the US is becoming multiple regional fiefdoms just like the U.K.

We are quickly becoming peoples separated by a common language, to invoke George Bernard Shaw, which is sowing enmity and division between the states to levels that haven’t existed since the run up to what is commonly misreferred to as the US Civil War.

Properly framed, that war was one fought by President Lincoln to preserve the Union not stave off an attack on Washington by forces that wanted to wrest control of the government. That is a civil war.

The wars being fought today by the leadership in Brussels are similar to the one Lincoln fought. These are political wars fought against the current will of the people to prevent secession from the EU – Brexit, Italeave, Catalonia.

When people are denied their rights through the political process, however, the inevitable next step is through violence. And that is what comes next unless those in power accede to reality.

For his part, Donald Trump is beginning to see this with respect to US occupation of foreign countries like Syria and Afghanistan. In the coming weeks Iraq may try and make that decision for him.

Events there and in Lebanon, thanks to crippling acts of war known colloquially as ‘sanctions,’ bear watching carefully as any resolution which abrogates existing debt and political alliances will have immense downstream consequences for the region.

But between now and then we can bet on more of the same behavior from disconnected and corrupt politicians who are so caught up in their own solipsistic fugue they won’t see the end of their political lives until the guillotines are wheeled into the capitol square.