by John Ward
IT’S SIX MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT FOR ELECTIVE DEMOCRACY IN THE WEST. AT 12.06, RESISTANCE WILL BE SHUT DOWN. THE TIME TO AVOID VIOLENT ANARCHY IS NOW
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As the end of the week draws nigh, we see our legislative, governmental and Alt State ranks marching forth in the manner of Sgt Bilko’s Motor Pool platoon. Directionless and bumping into each other like so many Dobermans and Paparellis, their only concerted goal is to invent and use more ways of ensuring that their will on Brexit prevails, such that the last thing to prevail – whatever it takes – will be Brexit.
Delayed votes, second referendums, and pretty soon no doubt an old kitchen sink. As I keep on saying (and the view is not popular) the only way out now is a snap General Election during which all Brits with a sense of national duty get behind a Sovereign Brexit banner by voting, not for something, but against all of those engaged in the coup against elective democracy.
Tactical voting doesn’t come easily to the British electorate. Neither does rioting, road blocking or indeed much beyond I’m a Garden Makeover in the Sun, give me a Watercolour Challenge. Every day – and I mean every day, at least once – a thousand or more folks on social media opine that “there will be [choose from] outrage, unrest, anger on the streets” and all the rest of it. But there never is. It takes a lot for a British bourgeois to burn a car: usually, we’re far too in love with Top Gear to do it.
Brexit in and of itself may not, in truth, be worth burning one mugger-mounted scooter for. The EU is a vainglorious farce which will one day sooner rather than later implode as a result of its vacuous irrelevance to real people. The issue is no longer Brexit; the issue is one of striking the first telling blow in a counter-revolution. And to be clear, I remain a pacifist: I abhor and eschew all violence. The key to any successful post revolutionary development is to make government functioning impossible for the ruling clique…to render it powerless by peaceful extra-Parliamentary action, and subsequent accountability. (See Ghandi, Walenska, Havel et al)
The purpose of today’s post is not to say how relatively easy, with concerted action, it would be to do that (although it would be) but rather to point out all the ways in which – if we don’t get a move on – it will become impossible to do that.
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A large number of hitech, comms and fiscal systems are being developed now to exploit the “advantages” of electronic over physical life actions. In fact, none of them are of much use to the average citizen at all: the advantage lies, as always, with the unelected power complex spawned by a malleable political class. The most likely end result of these developments will be a phalanx of ways in which dissent can be monitored and starved.
The end of Cash
Across the Western world, electronic payment by smart card (EFTPOS) is forging ahead. In June 2016, global cash payments were still 85% of all transactions. But as of last June in the UK, EFTPOS overtook cash for the first time: shoppers used debit cards 13.2 billion times, while the number of cash payments fell 15% in a year. In the US, smart debit card payment moved over 50% in May 2016 and continues to accelerate. Across the EU (albeit with wild variations by Member State) payment by contactless ‘beep’ between card and merchant processer on small purchases doubled. What started out thirty years ago as a way to save banks money on cash transmission and reduce bank robberies is today something that represents a threat to everyone’s liberty; and yet, to read industry/business sites on the subject of the stats, you’d think we were decades away from being a cashless Western world.
Extrapolate the stats taking account of acceleration rates, however, and it’s clear that by 2026 at the latest, the US, UK and France will be virtually cashless.
Many of you will by now have become accustomed to paying for even the smallest item not just with plastic, but also without ‘contact’ (Pin code). I’ve yet to meet anyone apart from my immediate circle who’s worried about it, and most of those who do worry see it purely in terms of a potential money-grab by the banks the next time they feel the water lapping around their necks.
But for the NSA, CIA, MI5, Interpol and every surveillance jockey inside GCHQ, universal embedded-chip purchase is the soon-to-be-realised wet dream. It will provide the quantitative backcloth to what they already get qualitatively from ISP and social media data online.
Who needs satellite hyper-focus surveillance when you have a steady, realtime 24/7 record of where every Western citizen is and what they’re doing? The average American spends $93 a day on an estimated 11-15 purchases. Who needs thousands of FBI and Special Branch detectives when you get, say, 13 exact data locations a day?
A resistance cell develops. Perhaps it is infiltrated by an agent, or betrayed by social media use in the past. But if from then on you know where they are and in what category they spent the money 13 times a day.
The end of cash is the beginning of the end of any viable, organised resistance to a dictatorial corporate State.
The Universal mobile communicator
“Modern” rioters have for nearly a decade been using mobile phone texts tactically to keep cells informed on the nature of police numbers, and where they are strong or weak as a multivariate disturbance develops. In fact, in 2018 they might as well be burglars taking a selfie while in the act of theft. I’m told that, with newly developed software in Spain for example, senior security officers on the spot can identify who those people are within 11 seconds.
Within minutes, their regular social media location can be pinpointed. Within hours, a full picture of their email associates plus at least half a dozen photos of everyone concerned can be constructed.
Unsurprisingly, the banking system is also keen on the so-called ‘mobile wallet’ whereby payments are instantly verified by user-approved access to bank details. Small independent merchants are, I’m happy to record, slow to adopt such a payment method: but for the professional spook, the only necessity really (once a suspect has been identified) is to obtain tracking data from the telecoms service provider, following which any mobile android owner can be traced 24/7/365 nonstop whether the hardware apparatus is switched on or not. The NSA in the States has been able to do this since the second Obama Administration; in the UK, thanks to Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, GCHQ has been able to do it since 2008.
The habitually universal use of personal mobile communications offers a devastating State spying aperture even if enemies of totalitarianism could somehow get through a post-cash epoch by using barter.
The arrival of Digital Taxation
Under the mercifully brief Presidency of Francois Hollande of France, the powers of the Trésor Public to spy on the cash withdrawals of French bank account holders were massively increased. Equally, the amount that can be paid in cash to a supplier was reduced from €10,000 to €1,000 – a draconian measure designed to reduce the amount of tax-evaded cash sloshing around in France’s economy.
This was not Hollande’s idea: he did it under pressure from a Brussels Commission, Berlin and Frankfurt ECB axis hacked off with France’s seemingly perpetual inability to keep within Eurozone sovereign deficit rules. His successor Emmanuel Macron (a fully paid-up member of that axis) lost no time developing and instituting a Trésor compulsory direct debit system by which all individual citizen and resident taxpayers will have no choice about what they “owe” the State. (Indeed, those of us lucky enough to be taxe foncière payers in the Fifth Republic have already experienced this rather unnerving State power).
Such moves – along with outrageous Macron-inspired increases in the taxation of automotive fuel since Summer 2017 – have helped produce the Gilets Jaunes phenomenon, and landed the new Napoleon in something of a hot potage. But one senses that, come what may, the powers will remain.
The US Congress, the Westminster Parliament, the German Bundestag and the French National Assembly are all notorious for their ability to let heavily-lobbied or Executive sponsored naughties through on the nod when quorums are small and nobody’s paying attention. When Crash2 finally materialises, the near-infinite need to raise taxation to pay for feral banking and bourse antics (and bank creditor confiscations) will be an easy thing to achieve. Remember: in Law, every current and deposit account banking customer is a creditor, and our liability is not limited. £80,000 guaranteed by the State? No chance, chummy.
The disastrous creation of first fiat and now electronic “money” means that, before any resistance to neoliberal madness can get its pants on, financial confiscation will have rendered it impotent around the world.
And the only means of opposition left then really will be riots, guns, Molotov cocktails, water cannon and the eventual triumph of Left extremism.
The window is rapidly closing
Before I left England for good, I used every casual opportunity to engage with the army of Poles, Czechs, Spaniards, Greeks, Cypriots, Slovaks and former East Germans then filling job vacancies as plasterers, brickies, bar tenders, waiters, linguists, clerks, lorry drivers and retailers there.
The most common thing they said to me was, “You have no idea of the speed with which you’re heading towards dictatorship. You think it couldn’t happen here, but you are so wrong”.
Well, Time is proving them right and us wrong. When it comes to creeping surveillance and the perversion of the Rule of Law, we have been given the idiotic adage, “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to fear” line ad nauseam until a sizeable minority has realised that we need to define what the insouciant élite means by “wrong”.
For me, to oppose unelected bureaucratic fascism (be it Red or Blue) with peaceful social resistance is a civic duty, not a sin. But Theresa May has shown quite clearly now on four separate occasions that she feels able to ignore Bagehot – be that in relation to unauthorised bombings, State Pension embezzlement, accountable defence of the Realm and Parliamentary sovereignty. So believe me: whatever peaceful means we use, it will be deemed (or swiftly made) unlawful. She is, lest we forget, a former promoter of the risible term “non-violent extremism”.
There are two problems we face as caring individuals today, and they go way beyond tribalism: we are hopelessly divided, and we are running out of time.
I can only hope that this essay has, for some of you, made this brutally clear.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend.