The Weaponisation of Money: We Are Fast Approaching The Camp
A government that forces a payment service to close the accounts of legal charities has betrayed the foundations on which our society is based. Such a government has lost its legitimacy.
The Boston Tea Party, 1773
As Dominic Frisby explains in this Money Week article the recent actions of Paypal against Toby Young, The Daily Sceptic and the Free Speech Union are only the first taste of what we can expect going forward. We are experiencing the weaponisation of money, and once central bank digital currencies are in place, governments can exercise full control over all our financial transactions.
Frisby sees free digital currencies as the answer to this. He reminds us how Paypal shut down Wikileaks in 2010, driving donors towards Bitcoin, which later skyrocketed in value, turning Wikileaks into a very wealthy organisation.
This does not however help the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, still imprisoned and awaiting extradition to the US for publishing information inconvenient to the government. We were shocked to witness the case of Alexei Navalny; how after poisoning him the Putin government then imprisoned him on return for having failed to make a weekly appearance at a police station as he was undergoing medical treatment in Germany. The judicial mishandling of Julian Assange is no better; it simply shows how Western governments bend the rules and collude against those inconvenient to them when those they see as their enemies are concerned; in this respect they are in the end little better than the Putin regime.
You go bankrupt gradually, then suddenly, as explained by a character in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben claims Western societies have for a long time been on a slow march towards a permanent state of emergency, which will eventually culminate in full abolition of human rights. For Agamben, the war on terror was a strong signal, but early 2020 he saw the strongest one so far in the Covid-19 response. Back then, hardly anyone believed his dire predictions. But now we know he was right. Looking back over the past few decades we see the shift; what before happened gradually, in 2020 began to happen suddenly, and alarmingly so.
Bitcoin cannot be shut down, Frisby says. They can make it illegal, but they cannot shut it down. But one can only ask, is the creation of an alternative black market economy, such as the one we saw in the Soviet Union, really the answer?
It is well over 200 years since the birth of free democratic society, with the revolutions in France and the United States. Modern democratic society is based on the ideals of liberty, human rights and freedom of expression. While cryptocurrencies, banned or not, may provide a way of survival for the dissidents, this is not a sustainable solution.
A government that forces a payment service to close the accounts of legal charities has betrayed the foundations on which our society is based. Such a government has lost its legitimacy, just like the French dynasty lost its legitimacy in 1789, just like England lost its status as the legitimate governor of the American colonies a bit earlier.
This is the new reality we now face. We must realise the full horror of it. We must find a way to stop it. And we must act before it is too late. For, using Agamben’s analogy, we are now fast approaching the camp. And no-one escapes from the camp.
Our human world society has certainly betrayed the foundations on which is based. I have not problem visualizing what Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would have thought of this. It seems even those who didn't always agree with these two - Presidents John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton would have agreed that the great ongoing experiment of the United States has currently fallen to tyranny. Throwing tea into the waterways is unlikely to move people. Perhaps tossing our cell phones and computers into the waterways might? Doubtful if sending illegal immigrants to Northern Wasp cities will do much. Stand against these tyrants - they will lose.
You didn't add what happened in 1789 in France when the ruler lost his legitimacy! Or what the American colonies did when the English rulers lost their status!
Are the civilised uneducated uninformed peoples of the western democracies really going to follow their ancestors' examples and rise up?
I suspect not. Most people will just go along to get along. Getting poorer and unhappier as they go. Maybe they will rise up when they are in rags, freezing and starving?