Go, set, get ready for your mark!

The dystopian world of George Orwell’s, 1984, and Aldus Huxley’s, Brave New World, has been creeping up on us for a very long time. Now it’s coming on at a gallop and seems bound to cross the finish line in just a few short strides. Its pounding hooves shake the earth as they grind into dust truth, privacy, human rights, and all that humans hold sacred. The heat and stench from the monsters fiery breath give fair warning that it means to consume whatever stands in its way. Like the temptation of Jesus by Satan, it promises us the world, but at the price of our very souls.

Sow discord and confusion, propagate disinformation, set one faction against another, do things to make people feel angry and afraid, get people to fight among themselves, disrupt their interactions with one another, keep them away from friends and family, take away their favorite sports and pastimes, force them to abandon their familiar ways of doing things, and make them ever more dependent upon official hand-outs just stay alive. That sounds like psychological warfare, or psy-ops, in some dystopian science fiction novel. But, of course, it isn’t fiction, we’re living it today. Divide and conquer is a tried and true strategy of conquerors and despots. There’s never been a better one.

Contrive some sort of emergency that causes people to accept demands they would otherwise reject, including measures that invade privacy and restrict freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly and association, freedom of contract, and the freedom to be left alone. Create scarcity of things necessary for living a dignified life-land, food, housing, energy, health care, gainful and satisfying employment, and above all, the money that is needed to acquire those things, while at the same time inflating the money so that it buys less. Make people dependent upon the centralized institutions that are under your control, like governments, banks, energy companies, medical and health care facilities, news media, and all the mega-corporations that people depend upon to supply the things they need and desire.

For whatever reasons, intentional or not, these are the circumstances that prevail around the world today, conditions that have had the effect of further shredding the social fabric that has been torn to tatters since the end of World War II. Now, from the onset of the “pandemic” just a few months ago, the entire world has voluntarily submitted to oppressive measures that have been dictated by officials from presidents and governors on down to petty politicians who serve as mayors and council members in towns and cities across the globe. In the name of public health and safety, they have ordered people to behave in ways that are unnatural and of questionable effectiveness, all of this bypassing the normal democratic processes of debate and consensus.

We have seen that when consent cannot be manufactured by means of persuasion, the heavy hand of centralized power will be applied. We’ve seen it on the international level in the form of economic sanctions, political subversion, and regime change wars imposed by the US and its NATO allies, and now we’re experiencing it ourselves in the form of the increasingly heavy-handed enforcement of myriad dictates at home. Powerful weapons are being honed to enable the exercise of ever more stringent controls. We are told that we are, after all, in a war to defeat a deadly microbe that will kill hundreds of millions if we don’t take drastic action. It all seems plausible and necessary.

But all of this brings to mind the Biblical prophecies from Revelation, Chapter 13, which I’ve quoted before in my writings, including my 2009 book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization.

13:16. And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
13:17. And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

What could be more effective in controlling people than to control their ability to buy and sell?

As Adam Smith so eloquently put it:
“Every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessities, conveniences, and amusements of human life. But after the division of labor has once thoroughly taken place, it is but a very small part of these which a man’s own labor can supply him.” ( Wealth of Nations).

Since Smith wrote those words more than 240 years ago, labor has become even more specialized, and the control of money, banking, and finance has become centralized in the extreme. We all depend on the exchange of value in the market, and money is the device we need to participate in it.

How remarkably prescient that Bible passage now seems. It’s something I’ve puzzled over since I first read it almost 50 years ago. How could the author who penned those words almost two thousand years ago have known what was to happen in our own day and age? Those who believe that the Bible is the “word of God” might answer that the writer was divinely inspired, while students of history and anthropology might speculate that the writer was merely describing a cycle that periodically repeats itself. Has it all happened this way before? Is it just the same old story playing out once again?

Whatever the case, here it is right at our doorstep. And this time the available technologies promise to make its enforcement easy and absolute. As I’ve been watching these things develop over the years, I’ve wondered about what form the “mark of the beast” might take. Fifty years ago I thought it might be an ink tattoo, then with the development of newer technologies I thought it might be the bar codes that started showing up on everything by the late 1970s, then QR codes, and eventually the tiny RFID chips that could be implanted under the skin. Already in use to identify pets and farm animals and determine their ownership, it seems like the ideal device for positive identification and tracking of humans as well. What a fine replacement for ID badges, or drivers’ licenses, or credit cards that might be lost or stolen or forged. There will be no need to ask your former doctors for your medical records, it will be all be right there on your chip along with every other detail of your personal history that the authorities might demand access to. What convenience! What safety!

Did you know that as of April 6, 2016, all dogs in England, Scotland and Wales must be micro-chipped? The use of chips in HUMANS has already begun. Indeed, there have been numerous cases of people voluntarily choosing to be chipped just for the convenience of being allowed entry to nightclubs or concert venues, and many corporate employers are looking lustily at the possibilities for controlling employee access to sensitive information and secure facilities.

Not that the dangers of abuse have been completely overlooked. A Feb. 4, 2020 Market Watch article reported that “ …It’s been three years since workers at one Wisconsin company voluntarily had microchips inserted in their hands, and it’s likely there are “more companies out there, but they are probably not advertising it…” It may seem encouraging that, as the same article reports, eleven states have passed laws “forbidding companies from forcing workers to implant microchips in their bodies.” But we should not take much comfort in that, knowing that there are other, more subtle inducements that can be applied to gain compliance, especially as jobs become more scarce in the post pandemic economy.

And now there are proposals for a “digital tattoo” coming from the likes of Bill Gates as a means of tracking who has been tested and vaccinated against Covid-19. According to an article in Futurism.com, researchers from MIT, funded by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, “have created an ink that can be safely embedded in the skin alongside the vaccine itself, and it’s only visible using a special smartphone camera app and filter. In other words, they’ve found a covert way to embed the record of a vaccination directly in a patient’s skin rather than documenting it electronically or on paper…”

“The invisible “tattoo” accompanying the vaccine is a pattern made up of minuscule quantum dots — tiny semiconducting crystals that reflect light — that glows under infrared light. The pattern — and vaccine — gets delivered into the skin using hi-tech dissolvable microneedles made of a mixture of polymers and sugar.”

Looking at recent history, it’s easy to see where things are headed. Here are the plans that have been officially revealed and already implemented on a limited basis:

1. Cash (paper currency) will be completely eliminated; money will be entirely digital and take the form of account balances on a ledger or credits in an electronic “wallet.”
2. All transactions will be electronic.
3. Everyone must have an account at a bank or other financial institution through which all payments must flow.
4. Financial privacy must be eliminated. Access to one’s account will be controlled by the government and banking authorities. Account balances may be frozen or seized in response to behavior that is deemed to be suspicious or improper, or if the needs of the government and/or financial system require it.

Here are just a few of the pertinent articles that can be found by anyone willing to look:

Cash is no longer king in Sweden.
Four out of five purchases in Sweden are made electronically, and Sweden’s central bank, Riksbanken, estimates that between 2012 and 2020, cash in circulation will have declined by 20–50 per cent.

India’s coronavirus outbreak is accomplishing what demonetization could not.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has long sought to push digital payments for India, where three in four consumer transactions are handled in cash. In November 2016, Modi suddenly invalidated most of the country’s high-value currency notes — a move aimed at curbing corruption that would also, he later noted, help encourage a move toward digital commerce.

Will we see a cashless society emerge from the pandemic?”
When the World Health Organization earlier this year recommended that people move to cashless transactions to eliminate the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, a number of governments and retailers across the world heeded the advice.

“There’s one very practical reason,” said Winters, who was previously an executive at JPMorgan Chase. “The coronavirus lives on banknotes; why would we continue to handle these things if it’s inconvenient and adding risk?”

Still, in economies that are still very much cash-based, such those in Hong Kong and Germany, Winters acknowledged, “an element of acquired behavioral trends” must be addressed first. Some of the opposition to adopting alternative forms of payment seems to stem from a belief that the government doesn’t need to know how the money was acquired or how it will be spent, said Winters.

“But I do think we’ll get there because it’s convenient, it’s safe, and ultimately I think governments will want to know where the money came from and where it’s going,” he said. [Emphasis added]

If you want to see the bigger picture of what our global leaders have planned for us, a web search will turn up numerous pertinent articles. You might start with this article by Steven Guinness which takes a deep dive into the World Economic Forum, its agenda, and its plan called “The Great Reset.” You can also read Edward Snowden’s article, Governments Are Using Coronavirus to Build ‘the Architecture of Oppression, and Peter Koenig’s article, The Global Reset — Unplugged. “The Deep State.”

Originally published at http://beyondmoney.net on September 8, 2020.