The Netherlands government has resorted to calling in the nation’s military to intimidate civilian farmers and their supporters, protesting land confiscations in the name of climate agenda “zero carbon” goals.

The use of the military marks a disturbing escalation, with many decrying the abuse of government force to try to suppress and stop the protest, which assembled nonetheless in Brussels this past Friday.

Police estimated that around 2,700 tractors filled the streets of the city, many sporting signs of protest against fertilizer limits and other aspects of the government’s policies, according to Reuters.

Some pointed out the hypocrisy of the restrictions which are forcing Netherlands farmers—among the most productive in the world—to shutter and sell their businesses, while the country’s industrial sector is allowed to expand.

“Our sector is already making a lot of effort and is willing to do so as well, but (the government) expects more and more from us while the industry sector is also expanding”, said Liesje Van Loon, a goat farmer, according to Reuters.

As War Burns Coal, EU Fiddles Over Farms

Even the most ardent supporters of exacerbating and escalating the Russia-Ukraine conflict, admit that the war has destroyed any idea that the most important imperative for the world is to reduce carbon emissions, to blunt supposed unprecedented human-caused climate change.

As a result of the war, Poland and other EU countries are burning more coal, as is China, while Russian gas and oil has found ready buyers in Asia.

According to an assessment by Yale University, the direct environmental damage alone after one year of war has amounted to over 51 billion dollars:

“Some 687,000 tons of petrochemicals have burned as a result of shelling, while nearly 1,600 tons of pollutants have leaked into bodies of water. Hazardous chemicals have contaminated around 70 acres of soil. Water and soil pollution could make it temporarily impossible to grow crops in affected areas, the environment ministry said. Complicating matters further, some 15 percent of farmland in Ukraine has been littered with landmines.”

And it may get a lot worse. The Yale assessment notes that Officials have been worried that recent discharge from the Russian-controlled Kakhovka Reservoir could threaten the nearby Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Water levels on the reservoir are now so low that the nuclear plant cannot resupply its cooling system.

Incredibly, as Ukraine, a major world supplier of agricultural products, remains embroiled in a proxy war led by the U.S., the EU has made no moves to even temporarily ease restrictions which are literally taking food off the table, for the world’s “food security” supply.

Many advocates say the first and primary victims of already ongoing food inflation, disruptions, and shortages are developing regions like Africa and poorer countries of Asia.

But despite the environmental and human costs, political leaders continue rigid policies and heavy-handed crackdowns resulting from suffering and disenfranchisement caused by their agendas surrounding both war and climate change.

In the case of Russia-Ukraine, western countries have sent hundreds of billions in armaments to the conflict, and have embarked on expanding NATO instead of negotiating seriously with Russia.

At the same time, they have punished domestic populations with energy policies that are hamstringing economic recovery badly needed after years of disastrous COVID policies.

TRENDPOST: Our “TOP TREND 2023: CLIMATE CHANGE. GOING GREEN, LIKE IT OR NOT” forecast that governments would resort to extreme measures to impose a green agenda that favored the goals and investments of ideologies and elites. 

The ongoing Netherlands farmer protests are likely to be repeated in many more Western countries, as similar climate agenda restrictions are rolled out more widely.

And as the political jailing and mistreatment of protesters in America, and the extreme measures to snuff out the Canadian Truckers Protest against COVID vaccine mandates have shown, democracy is just a word in the West at this point, not a principled support for expression of civilian rights to protest and seek redress of grievances.

As western countries abuse their own populations with the domestic use of military forces, political jailings, and government suppression of free speech, they are destroying their own legitimacy.

What’s more, it’s a devastating setback for the oppressed and politically targeted in other countries. The leaders of those regimes can increasingly claim that their own policies of repression and control are substantially no different than those of the supposed free western democracies.