“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever,” said O’Brien, the grand inquisitor of the totalitarian regime in Orwell’s futuristic novel 1984.
Alternatively, you could imagine a sandal.
Last month I visited Sutton Hoo, the famous Anglo-Saxon burial site of a king and his ship in Suffolk. A gold coin pendant in the museum caught my eye. It depicted a triumphant Roman standing over a conquered barbarian, his sandalled foot placed firmly on the supine opponent’s chest.
The ship burial probably dates from AD 625, long after the Romans had left. The gold could have been melted down by the Anglo-Saxons but instead it was fashioned into a pendant. Maybe it conferred the prestige of the Roman world onto the wearer, or was totemic of victory. Perhaps it was an ironic reminder that the Romans were gone and every empire has its day.
The Roman on this coin was the Emperor Honorius, who ruled between 395 and 423. Miserably for Honorius, he was Emperor when the Visigoths captured and plundered Rome and when the British Isles slipped from Roman control. In fact, when Romano-British cities asked him for help against barbarian attacks he told them to look to their own defences. You would never know all this from the coin, which is a fine piece of reputational management.
Coins have always been more than lumps of precious metals; they are also a means of propaganda and control.
Early bronze coins depicted cattle, as the state property of Rome was originally comprised of herds of cattle. Then coins featured Roman deities such as Mars, the god of war, or symbols of the state such as the she-wolf with twins. Later in the Republic, images of politicians featured on coins. The first living man to be embossed on a coin was the powerful Julius Caesar. One silver denarius minted around 29 BC shows a Nile crocodile (the symbol of Egypt) with the inscription “Egypt conquered”. And other coins also showed emperors defeating barbarians, gleaming with undistilled power.
Imagine handling a coin which depicts your own subjugation. If you were privileged, hard-working or lucky enough to obtain some of this lucre for yourself, it was nonetheless a reminder of the sandal on your chest. Every time you bought a luxury good, your fingers would slide over the embossed symbol of your defeat. Coins reminded you of your place in the world.
Coins in circulation in the U.K. are at a record low. In fact, not a single one or two penny coin was issued in 2022. Yet there has never been greater potential to use money for propaganda and control.
Digital money and particularly Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) offer the potential for the Government, through the central bank, to see every purchase and transfer you make, in real time. And not just see, but control.
Of course, our governments in the West will say that central bank money in digital form is convenient, safe and stable. They will promise never to use it as an instrument of control, as an authoritarian Government would. Here in the U.K., our cosily-named proposed ‘Britcoin’ would supposedly exist alongside cash.
China, the country that took the lead with lockdowns, has taken the lead with CBDCs. It started researching CBDCs in 2014 and has been running live trials of DCNY (Digital Chinese Yuan) for years, with the size and scale increasing each time. The Chinese Government has tested expiration dates to encourage users to spend their DCNY quickly, for times when the economy needs stimulus. That’s right, an expiry date for people’s money has already been trialled.
The Chinese ‘Social Credit System’ is a broad regulatory framework that is designed to score and incentivise the trustworthiness of individuals and companies. In other words, the Government will either reward or punish various forms of behaviour using real-time monitoring, data gathering and sharing, curate blacklists and red-lists, and use punishments, sanctions and rewards.
A report in 2019 found that 23 million people had been blacklisted from travelling by plane or train due to their low social credit score. In 2018 a student was denied access to university because her father was in debt. There isn’t a centralised and transparent set of rules, instead it’s been operated locally so far, but it has been reported that behaviour such as poor driving, spending too long playing video games, or posting fake news can result in low ratings, as well as more serious matters such as not fulfilling court orders.
You won’t find many Chinese critics of the Social Credit System – there is probably a sanction for criticism of Government policy. You’d think this system would unite Western commentators in horrified criticism, but it is quite neutrally and even warmly described by some Left-leaning writers and think tanks.
We don’t need to look as far as China to understand the implications here in the West. In 2019, Mastercard and Doconomy launched a credit card with a carbon footprint calculator that can switch off your spending when you reach your carbon max. This functionality is voluntary, but it could be an automatic aspect of a CBDC.
Tom Mutton, a Director at the Bank of England, said that the Government would be required to make the final decision on whether a U.K. CBDC should be programmable. Sir Jon Cunliffe, a Deputy Governor at the Bank, said:
You could think of giving your children pocket money, but programming the money so that it couldn’t be used for sweets. There is a whole range of things that money could do, programmable money, which we cannot do with the current technology.
As this quote reveals, CBDCs won’t just alter our relationship with money but with Government. Governments around the world have shown increasingly authoritarian tendencies during the management of the Covid pandemic, and more recently to discourage driving in cities. Behavioural science has been leveraged to manipulate, incentivise and coerce us into behaving as model citizens. Do we want to negotiate with Daddy State to be allowed to spend our ‘pocket money’ as we wish?
An account-based CBDC would give the Government enormous power over your money as your identity is connected to the money. A 2020 Bank of England discussion paper gave examples of programmability, for example that smart cars could automatically pay for fuel directly at the dispensing pump, with automated taxation and charitable donations at point of sale.
That all sounds very convenient. But politicians pushing Net Zero goals on an unwilling population could choose to go a step further. If you insist on keeping your private car, despite the inconvenient 20 mph speed limits, the Ulez and congestion charges, and the Low Traffic Neighbourhood barriers, they could simply dictate a maximum fuel spend in a given time period. Just 10 of your Britcoins on petrol this month, sir, no more driving for you.
Money grants freedom and so it is also weaponised to deny freedom. Domestic abusers restrict access to money, and therefore essentials such as food, clothing and travel. Economic abuse is insidious, effective and subtle, and it leaves no bruises. As with the domestic abuser, the potential is there for the Government to weaponise money to exert the ultimate financial control.
The jackboot and the sandal were graphic symbols of authority subjugating conquered peoples. If programmable CBDCs are introduced, your own digital financial footprint will be used to control you. The means of control change over time but the insatiable desire for total control remains constant.
Laura Dodsworth is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller A State of Fear: how the U.K. Government weaponised fear during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her new book is Free Your Mind: The new world of manipulation and how to resist it. This article first appeared on her Substack page, the Free Mind, which you can subscribe to here.
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Good article. But I take exception to the following:
“Governments around the world have shown increasingly authoritarian tendencies during the management of the Covid pandemic..”
There. Was. No. Pandemic!
We have to keep reminding people of this.
Don’t allow our language to become distorted.
How they despise us, and how convinced they are of their thorough-going virtue and brilliant problem solving abilities (whether there is a problem or not). Escape to another, unaffected country has effectively been closed off. Atlantic Council, no slouch when it comes to advocating “global solutions” has a handy progress tracker. Damn them all.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/cbdctracker/
The question is, what to do about it. Insist on paying or being paid in cash? Develop alternatives to legal tender?
The G20 agreed only a few weeks ago to impliment digital ID’s and CBDCs.
I think the initial recipients will be benefit claiments as they will have no choice, UBI once introduced also, then the gradual transition away from cash.
We are not far away from this ultimate tyranny, the global financial system is on the brink of a controlled and orchestrated collapse, the fiat experiment of 52 years is over (yes thats what is was, when you introduce a system with no knowledge of its outcome it can only be viewed as an experiment), crash and burn, out with the old and in with the new.
There are several drivers here, unlike Fiat, there is zero sovereign debt incurred on a CBDC, it’s the perfect antidote to net zero non compliance, the concept of CBDCs has caused me many sleepless nights over the past decade, it truly is the end game.
What can be done?… If only I knew… For this is the hill I’m prepared to die on.
Ps, this is why Sunak was placed in power….
https://youtu.be/0u8eZcPnWeU?si=CxYoBggTbz-byA6k
What a discussing puppet of a little man
Horrible little sh!t
I think there is much bigger concern over a) technical failure b) foreign state/terrorist/criminal attack. After all there are other forms of money if you don’t want to use it just as there are other forms of money now if you would prefer not to use cash.
I’m more worried about my own state, which now a terrorist/criminal enterprise, attacking me, which it has already done and has plans to do more of.
As for “other forms of money”, if the state which has a monopoly on the use of force and controls the banks, decides what forms of money can and cannot be used, anyone not wishing to comply will be severely constrained.
You and I would ideally live in different countries – you seem happy to be told what to do, and crucially for me to be told what to do on pain of imprisonment. On the other hand, I would like nothing better than to leave you alone as long as you do not directly harm me.
Given our government – whichever colour – and their complete inability to implement any IT system, if this happens, it will take decades.
Regardless, resist it, and refuse to shop if they don’t take cash,
This it true, but misses the fundamental driver in the push for programmable money on central bank ledgers (misleading promoted as Central Bank ‘Digital Currencies'(CBDCs)): the ability to print money without creating inflation through the imposition of negative interest rates and restrictions on where that money flows. After decades of fraud, recklessness and failure to deal with the bad debt of the 2008 Financial Crisis the global financial system is in a very precarious state. All central banks can do is raise interest rates, which will likely trigger defaults on debt, or let inflation run wild with similarly devastating consequences. So-called ‘CBDCs,’ lockdowns, ESG scores and all manner of other nefarious initiatives of the past few years are a desperate attempt to find a way out by controlling the flow of money imho. Ironically, its not too dissimilar to the world of Emperor Constantine when he introduced his gold solidus in the fourth century, a coin that still retained its value by the time of the Anglo-Saxons burial described in the article and for many centuries afterwards. The same cannot be said of today’s fiat currencies, whether represented by pieces of paper or electronic ledgers, programmable or otherwise.
Bitcoin (the real one, BSV – not BTC) is limited in supply. Just like gold.
Cleverly designed to grow organically in line with the economy it supports.
CBDCs are a totalitarian’s dream come true. We must fight to keep cash in existence at all costs.
Agreed, but when they have closed all the banks…
But not THEIR Fiat cash which they can recall at any time.
I was in Austria in February & “all” the shops would only take cash. There has been no mention of this by anybody in the media, nor the public. It is Austria’s fight back against the system & is what we should be doing on a GRAND scale.
Particularly insulting that ‘they’ all speak about this as if it’s a set of local (national) independent initiatives- the digital pound, the digital euro, the digital dollar: as if every country in the world happens, at the same time, to be reinventing from scratch our relationship to money and to the state, without any thought of interoperability or “common standards”. Same as with covid passports – I haven’t looked back at notes but I seem to recall a set of common devpt standards and interoperability formats was available, oven-ready, from UN/WHO, courtesy of the Rockefeller Foundation and/or BMGF. Love to hear (1) how this is all just cock-up/coincidence and (2) where is best place to escape to, if anywhere is left – somewhere with appalling digital connectivity perhaps – Tristan da Cunha, maybe?
WE ARE NOT FREE!
Fat Pig News Investigates!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIO3fJpnXLE
A government / governing body NEVER takes (or is given) power without using it.
They may “intend” never to use it, but eventually they will if circumstances make it useful. The temptation will be too great.
That is exactly what we saw with the Covid Authoritarianism: a clause in the 1984 Public Health (Control of Disease) Act which was intended to give the public health authorities the ability to isolate individuals infected with a communicable disease was instead used to restrict/isolate most of the population, whether they were infected or not.
The Authoritarians running the British State will never resist the temptation to control the population through a CBDC – even if that is their intention, which I very much doubt.
So many fights at so many levels.
All issues boil down to Freedom.
-of speech
-of self determination
The ONLY Conspiracy, is against The People & it’s NOT a Theory
They just don’t have the technology or energy to support CBDCs. What are we going to run BritCoin on? Windfarms and solar panels which last 20 years and cut out at 25 degrees? There is about to be a huge fiscal train crash and we need to make sure we’re not on the train. We are worth in output as a people 2.5TN/year. That’s real money that gets sucked into the 2.7TN debt hole made by the central banks. This taxes us in several ways: Inflation, interest rate hikes and interest on the debt – £50BN/year – on a debt made up in the bank. Nice work if you can get it. If we trade in anything BUT Fiat, such as precious metals, crypto and local currencies, when the crash happens, we can watch from the sidelines. We are the value. The bankers are the debt. Put the two together and here we are. We just need to get rid of the central banks and the psychopaths who control the money supply and stop funding the government (and in turn wars) by holding our taxes in Trusts with the gov as Primary Beneficiary. Look up the Consolidated Fund if you want to know where your tax money (and fines) really goes.