Come back moth and rust – all is forgiven

Toby Young, writing in the Daily Sceptic yesterday, revealed how the Paypal accounts of the Sceptic itself, Young’s Free Speech Union with around 9,000 members, and even his personal, seldom used account, have been closed without. An e-mail in my inbox this morning shows that the same has happened to UsForThem, an organisation set up to campaign on behalf of children, particularly as victims of misguided COVID policies.

Both UsForThem and Young report that not only have the channels of giving for their supporters been blocked for undisclosed ideological reasons by this supposedly commercial company, but assets in their accounts have been made inaccessible, effectively robbing them of their own money. I gather also that there are probably other wrongthink organisations, and individuals, who have fallen foul of this theft, and who may become known to us as the days roll by.

It would seem that now is the time to make at least some small gesture of protest by cancelling your PayPal account – I doubt that alternatives are unavailable for most of us, and we are past the time, I think, when the argument from convenience outweighs the need for protest. It is clear that our slavery is being sold to us under that very banner, “convenience.” But Paypal’s usurpation of authority over our money is just one example of an increasing trend, which has very serious connotations just over the horizon. Three more examples, if I may.

The Canadian truckers, and large numbers even of those who only supported them financially, had their bank accounts entirely frozen by the big banks, purely at the behest of a totalitarian government acting unlawfully. So did those believed by the US deep state to have been in any way associated with the January 6th events. That’s two “democracies” already controlling access to people’s own money using the commercial banks, for political reasons. You may be aware that the collaboration of government and corporations in controlling the people is one of the definitions of Fascism.

The third instance is the sanctioning of the British journalist Graham Phillips for the crime of reporting Ukrainian shelling of civilians in Donetsk, the reporting of referendum preparations, and other on-the-ground events that the Collective West doesn’t want you to know about. It is questionable whether even the freezing or confiscation of Russian citizens’ assets is legal – for example, the seizing of Russian oil tankers at US instigation was ruled illegal quite rightly, because it was rank piracy. But it is doubly immoral to do the same to your own citizens, not least because the blocking or closure of UK bank accounts denies the basic right to seek legal counsel for redress.

So whether it’s supposedly “private” enterprises like Paypal or Patreon policing accounts off their own back for ideological reasons, or public banks doing the same at governments’ behest, the end result is that your money is no longer your own in the care of these institutions: they regard it as their property, and you as a suppliant to be granted access to it, or not, as their gift. This is not not serfdom – a serf owed his lord certain labour duties, but otherwise the produce he grew was his, and if he sold any surplus, the silver pennies were his to spend as he pleased. No – the person whose labour is exchanged for assets over which he has no control is not a serf, but a slave.

This attitude of ownership is also seen (be warned!) in the way that, post-2008, banks have changed the basis of how they are supported as and when their sharp practice leads to the next financial collapse. The traditional idea of a bank, as far back as the time of Jesus, is that you lend them your treasure (in return for safe-keeping and/or interest), and they invest it for profit at their risk.

That ideal has for centuries now been diluted by the universal practice of banks in investing more than they have on deposit, leading to the bank runs and insolvencies of the past. In the 2008 crash, our money was protected by various guarantee schemes, at least in theory. In practice, we paid for the collapse of the banks through taxation and austerity, so that Black Rock, for example, instead of collapsing and leaving its bosses poor, now owns most of the world, at taxpayers’ expense.

But the banks have now changed, with government legislation, to a “bail-in” model, and without realising it you have ceased to be a “lender” of your wealth to your bank at all, but an “investor” in it, with your cash becoming collateral against their failures. In other words, your money is now, in effect, theirs to lose without penalty. And your interest, far below inflation, is merely a token nod to the old model, which we fondly believe still to exist.

All these things acquire truly sinister proportions because it is no conspiracy theory, but established policy, that the central banks and Western governments, knowing that the fiat currencies they operate are backed by nothing and will inevitably collapse soon, intend to replace them with a programmable digital currency, presumably based on the US dollar.

Leave aside, for now, the imposition of universal digital identity and social credit in the ID2020 mould: the mark of the beast in Revelation was always about making buying and selling dependent on compliance with the values of the Empire. In 95AD, this mainly meant the linkage of membership of your trade guild to the Imperial Cult – no sacrifice, no access to capital and trade. In 2022, if USD or sterling collapses and cash becomes worthless, rendering all transactions possible only through a bank running a digital currency, then anyone wanting to use money will require that digital identity anyway just to live.

One doesn’t need to speculate about the establishment of a formal social credit system as, we are told, has been introduced in China. It’s a lot easier to operate the digital currency according to the precedents already being set under the old system, in which access to money can be controlled entirely arbitrarily, without reasons being given or appeal being possible.

At its most benign (!) this means you might find that any attempt to support a person or cause which the bank, or the government, deems unsuitable is simply unsuccessful. There is no reason you would be told why. Somebody, perhaps, decides that Uganda is not toeing the NATO line, and so your gifts to a mission hospital there are blocked. Or it might be that a “friendly” foreign government considers the orphanage you support puts their regime in a bad light, so your bank readily endorses a blockade. Needless to say you would not be allowed to send your money across to a foreign bank, since those not participating in the digital dictatorship would by definition be enemies: already Russia is off-limits.

But there is no reason why, better to enforce compliance, all your transactions might be blocked and all your assets frozen. You would thereby be reduced to penury, except that in 21st century penury, a friend or passing stranger could not slip you a few coppers for a cuppa – your ID would register on his own transaction, and be blocked. This degree of malign control is not even speculation: Toby Young’s personal Paypal account has been shut, this last week, and his money taken, because of his activities unconnected with the account. Substitute “mandatory digital account” for “optional subscription to private outfit” and Toby Young disappears from society, literally starving to death but for criminal sheltering by dissident friends.

I’ve often asked myself how the first century Christians, faithfully refusing the “mark of the beast” by abstaining from offering the sacrifice to Caesar, survived at all. The answer, I suppose, is the gold standard of currency: when money is asset-based, those assets can be used to benefit the afflicted away from prying eyes: St Nicholas was able to slip his gold coins into the poor believer’s house to keep his daughters from prostitution. He could not have done so via the convenience of a digital app on his phone if the bank or its algorithms disapproved.

I wish I had the answer to how free spirits can survive the next few years – though uprooting to a BRICS country might well be one way to go as they return to the gold standard and reject our civilised slave-state. Politically, though, one must use and promote cash even when the fiat currencies tumble like dominoes, and speak out against the whole digital fraud. To that end, having cash under the mattress is probably no less safe than having it at risk of confiscation in an imminent banking crisis. Current interest barely dents the devaluation from inflation anyway, and housebreakers seldom enslave you, at least.

Longer term, I suspect enterprising folks will try to establish local “black market” economies based on trade of real goods and services, or a real coinage based on precious metals purchased before there’s some arbitrary ban on ownership. Where there’s a will, there’s a way – remember that the book of Revelation’s injunction to resist state control is for every century, including ours. “Support your local groat,” and maybe buy some silver coinage to kick start it.

But as so often nowadays, the bad news needs to be absorbed and considered now – a digital currency is the current plan A of the banks (though the non-Western world may yet stymie it by their creation of a real currency alternative), and if such a currency is introduced, it will be used to oppress and control us. Because the old system is being used to do so already.