Russia, we are told, has had recourse to a novel mechanism of political coercion, namely the freezing of bank accounts of those who will not cooperate with the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, especially those being conscripted for military service. Also, fighting-aged men, one Russian national tells me, suddenly could not receive bank transfers of large amounts, in case they were preparing to get out of the country to avoid being drafted.
Apparently, some Russians outside their country are having their bank accounts frozen by the countries where they are currently residing. This is especially concerning, as it is likely that these Russians, like so many, have left Russia for the time being because they do not agree with their country’s military operations and are finding loyalty towards their country increasingly difficult to maintain at present.
China has for some time used this method of political coercion, especially on political dissidents or free-speech activists. But astonishingly, there has been silence about the fact that this method of political control has been introduced in a Western ‘free’ country: last year, Canada—bypassing all due process—authorized banks to freeze the bank accounts of a large minority of its citizens who were involved in the ‘Trucker’s Protests.’ These protests erupted over threats to take away the livelihoods of those employed in the transportation of goods across the country who would not receive the experimental (‘emergency authorized only’) vaccines for COVID-19. The reason given for such pressure on these employees was that the vaccines would help the truckers to protect other people from contracting the virus, even though by the time the protests started it was already demonstrable that the vaccines didn’t prevent transmission of the virus. (Pfizer has recently admitted that, whilst the prevention of transmission was the key reason given for coercing people to take these experimental vaccines, no proof was obtained that these vaccines prevented transmission prior to releasing them on the public).
Those who donated to the truckers through PayPal during the protests had their donated money seized—that is, stolen—and directed to causes that PayPal deemed more worthy. Whilst the freezing of protesters’ bank accounts was not indefinite, with funds beginning to be available again in February of this year, the freeze shows up on credit checks and banking history, and it will likely negatively impact the protestors for the rest of their lives—for taking part in a peaceful protest, something which was widely deemed among the liberties of free peoples until very, very recently.
The important thing, it seems to me, to note in this phenomenon is that it is a completely novel form of political coercion. The political classes of Canada’s allied countries have been absolutely silent on this recent highly unlawful activity against a body of Canada’s citizenry by their own State. In the UK, for example, I am not aware of a single speech made by any parliamentarian highlighting that one of our major allies has, with no due process whatever, prevented members of its citizenry—our monarch’s subjects, as all Canadians are—from accessing their own earnings on the grounds that they have participated in a peaceful protest. There is no precedent for such a species of political coercion in any free country, and yet it has happened with zero uproar from the politicians of all supposedly ‘free’ countries.
Unfortunately, it is not unlikely that the silence of Canada’s allied nations’ political classes is due to them looking over at this innovative model of political control and thinking, “Golly, what a clever idea!” Besides the requirement of due process which—if Canada’s recent actions are anything to go by—now mean little, the number one hindrance to the total success of this method of political control is, obviously, cash. The speed at which we are moving towards a cashless—purely digitalized—economy, then, whilst this novel way of coercion emerges, is somewhat worrying.
I do not know if other countries besides Russia, China, and Canada have had recourse to this new method of coercion, and if so, to what degree it has been deployed. I raise these three examples, however, to illustrate an important point that should not be overlooked.
Russia, it is widely accepted, has an authoritarian regime. Putin strongly rejects political pluralism, directly persecuting any political opposition. He uses strong, central power to preserve his regime, which he wholly expects to see remain for the rest of his life and have conserved in some form thereafter, reducing the separation of powers and democratic voting to something of little consequence. As is typical of authoritarian regimes, Russia politically operates through a balance of autocratic and oligarchic appropriations of power.
China, on the other hand, is much more a totalitarian regime. This is less the case regarding a moral vision for its citizens, and plurality on what are deemed ‘private questions’ is mostly tolerated. Thus, Chinese citizens may have very diverse opinions on issues such as divorce or same-sex relationships. On what it is to be a good ‘public person,’ however, little to no diversity is tolerated, and citizens are largely coerced by a ‘social credit system’ whereby they are rewarded to the degree that they have demonstrated cooperation with the objectives of the Party. China’s social credit initiative is developing a precise record system to track and evaluate the trustworthiness of businesses, individuals, and government departments. At present, there are multiple social credit systems being experimented with in China, using extremely comprehensive and invasive information technology software and the most extensive surveillance system in the world. The ‘national regulatory method’ is based on blacklisting and whitelisting, and it succeeds in frustrating those on the former list and rewarding those on the latter, sometimes via the tampering with—or freezing—of bank accounts. China’s social credit program, at present, focuses mainly on businesses and has not succeeded in attaining for the government the scrutiny of its citizenry to which it aspires, a goal for which new technology and increased surveillance is being developed all the time.
Like apparently all ‘free’ countries of the West today, Canada combines a soft totalitarianism with a soft authoritarianism (especially in ‘states of emergency,’ the reasons for declaring which are increasingly wide-ranging), being especially severe towards anyone who might hold broadly conservative or traditionally religious convictions, principally regarding moral precepts. Those who have exercised their civil liberty of peaceful protest have been branded fascists and neo-Nazis. As noted, donations to the protest were redirected by PayPal and the bank accounts of identified protestors were frozen on the authorization of the State without any due process.
Canada, whilst deploying methods that belong to both authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, shares with other Western countries the regime of progressive liberalism. Thus, it suffers from an acute moral schizophrenia. It insists on the private nature of moral questions, holding that public questions are those concerned with the freedom and regulation of the market and the distribution of competitive goods like property and commodities, whilst in fact publicly funding huge displays of gay propaganda and everything that might undermine the old Christian identity of the country, and moreover funding the export of this (im)moral worldview abroad to less ‘developed’ countries.
The take-home lesson here is that among the world’s politically functioning countries, there are three dominant regimes, namely authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and progressive liberalism, all of which share family resemblances, so to speak. Now, all three contain examples of coercing their citizens by seizing their earnings. That Russia has recently adopted this method of political control is the aspect of Russia’s recent behaviour that has attracted least attention and least criticism worldwide. Why? It is not unlikely that, over the coming years, we will see the seizing of funds and the freezing of accounts become the predominant method of political control. Unless the citizens of Western nations recognise this trajectory, and ramp up some pressure on political parties running for elections explicitly to do so on a mandate to prevent such a method of political control and the rise of a social credit system that is its corollary, we will sleepwalk into such a system, just as we have with so much else.
Frozen Bank Accounts: The New Mechanism of Political Coercion
Russia, we are told, has had recourse to a novel mechanism of political coercion, namely the freezing of bank accounts of those who will not cooperate with the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, especially those being conscripted for military service. Also, fighting-aged men, one Russian national tells me, suddenly could not receive bank transfers of large amounts, in case they were preparing to get out of the country to avoid being drafted.
Apparently, some Russians outside their country are having their bank accounts frozen by the countries where they are currently residing. This is especially concerning, as it is likely that these Russians, like so many, have left Russia for the time being because they do not agree with their country’s military operations and are finding loyalty towards their country increasingly difficult to maintain at present.
China has for some time used this method of political coercion, especially on political dissidents or free-speech activists. But astonishingly, there has been silence about the fact that this method of political control has been introduced in a Western ‘free’ country: last year, Canada—bypassing all due process—authorized banks to freeze the bank accounts of a large minority of its citizens who were involved in the ‘Trucker’s Protests.’ These protests erupted over threats to take away the livelihoods of those employed in the transportation of goods across the country who would not receive the experimental (‘emergency authorized only’) vaccines for COVID-19. The reason given for such pressure on these employees was that the vaccines would help the truckers to protect other people from contracting the virus, even though by the time the protests started it was already demonstrable that the vaccines didn’t prevent transmission of the virus. (Pfizer has recently admitted that, whilst the prevention of transmission was the key reason given for coercing people to take these experimental vaccines, no proof was obtained that these vaccines prevented transmission prior to releasing them on the public).
Those who donated to the truckers through PayPal during the protests had their donated money seized—that is, stolen—and directed to causes that PayPal deemed more worthy. Whilst the freezing of protesters’ bank accounts was not indefinite, with funds beginning to be available again in February of this year, the freeze shows up on credit checks and banking history, and it will likely negatively impact the protestors for the rest of their lives—for taking part in a peaceful protest, something which was widely deemed among the liberties of free peoples until very, very recently.
The important thing, it seems to me, to note in this phenomenon is that it is a completely novel form of political coercion. The political classes of Canada’s allied countries have been absolutely silent on this recent highly unlawful activity against a body of Canada’s citizenry by their own State. In the UK, for example, I am not aware of a single speech made by any parliamentarian highlighting that one of our major allies has, with no due process whatever, prevented members of its citizenry—our monarch’s subjects, as all Canadians are—from accessing their own earnings on the grounds that they have participated in a peaceful protest. There is no precedent for such a species of political coercion in any free country, and yet it has happened with zero uproar from the politicians of all supposedly ‘free’ countries.
Unfortunately, it is not unlikely that the silence of Canada’s allied nations’ political classes is due to them looking over at this innovative model of political control and thinking, “Golly, what a clever idea!” Besides the requirement of due process which—if Canada’s recent actions are anything to go by—now mean little, the number one hindrance to the total success of this method of political control is, obviously, cash. The speed at which we are moving towards a cashless—purely digitalized—economy, then, whilst this novel way of coercion emerges, is somewhat worrying.
I do not know if other countries besides Russia, China, and Canada have had recourse to this new method of coercion, and if so, to what degree it has been deployed. I raise these three examples, however, to illustrate an important point that should not be overlooked.
Russia, it is widely accepted, has an authoritarian regime. Putin strongly rejects political pluralism, directly persecuting any political opposition. He uses strong, central power to preserve his regime, which he wholly expects to see remain for the rest of his life and have conserved in some form thereafter, reducing the separation of powers and democratic voting to something of little consequence. As is typical of authoritarian regimes, Russia politically operates through a balance of autocratic and oligarchic appropriations of power.
China, on the other hand, is much more a totalitarian regime. This is less the case regarding a moral vision for its citizens, and plurality on what are deemed ‘private questions’ is mostly tolerated. Thus, Chinese citizens may have very diverse opinions on issues such as divorce or same-sex relationships. On what it is to be a good ‘public person,’ however, little to no diversity is tolerated, and citizens are largely coerced by a ‘social credit system’ whereby they are rewarded to the degree that they have demonstrated cooperation with the objectives of the Party. China’s social credit initiative is developing a precise record system to track and evaluate the trustworthiness of businesses, individuals, and government departments. At present, there are multiple social credit systems being experimented with in China, using extremely comprehensive and invasive information technology software and the most extensive surveillance system in the world. The ‘national regulatory method’ is based on blacklisting and whitelisting, and it succeeds in frustrating those on the former list and rewarding those on the latter, sometimes via the tampering with—or freezing—of bank accounts. China’s social credit program, at present, focuses mainly on businesses and has not succeeded in attaining for the government the scrutiny of its citizenry to which it aspires, a goal for which new technology and increased surveillance is being developed all the time.
Like apparently all ‘free’ countries of the West today, Canada combines a soft totalitarianism with a soft authoritarianism (especially in ‘states of emergency,’ the reasons for declaring which are increasingly wide-ranging), being especially severe towards anyone who might hold broadly conservative or traditionally religious convictions, principally regarding moral precepts. Those who have exercised their civil liberty of peaceful protest have been branded fascists and neo-Nazis. As noted, donations to the protest were redirected by PayPal and the bank accounts of identified protestors were frozen on the authorization of the State without any due process.
Canada, whilst deploying methods that belong to both authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, shares with other Western countries the regime of progressive liberalism. Thus, it suffers from an acute moral schizophrenia. It insists on the private nature of moral questions, holding that public questions are those concerned with the freedom and regulation of the market and the distribution of competitive goods like property and commodities, whilst in fact publicly funding huge displays of gay propaganda and everything that might undermine the old Christian identity of the country, and moreover funding the export of this (im)moral worldview abroad to less ‘developed’ countries.
The take-home lesson here is that among the world’s politically functioning countries, there are three dominant regimes, namely authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and progressive liberalism, all of which share family resemblances, so to speak. Now, all three contain examples of coercing their citizens by seizing their earnings. That Russia has recently adopted this method of political control is the aspect of Russia’s recent behaviour that has attracted least attention and least criticism worldwide. Why? It is not unlikely that, over the coming years, we will see the seizing of funds and the freezing of accounts become the predominant method of political control. Unless the citizens of Western nations recognise this trajectory, and ramp up some pressure on political parties running for elections explicitly to do so on a mandate to prevent such a method of political control and the rise of a social credit system that is its corollary, we will sleepwalk into such a system, just as we have with so much else.
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