Many thanks to Hellequin GB for translating this article from the Austrian weekly Der Wochenblick. The translator’s comments are in square brackets:

You want total control, but hide it…

Economy as a new pretext: Elites once again drum for “Digital Euro”

The ECB plans for the digital Euro are taking on more and more concrete forms. The Brussels grandees are leaving no stone unturned for their henchmen in the governments to cover up the plan for control over the citizens. If in the end it was the alleged fight against money laundering [Lagarde would know about that for sure, since she was/is after all a laundress], now a reconstruction of the devastated economy in Europe is supposed to serve as a pretext for the totalitarian project.

ECB-Lagarde drives digital Euro

ECB boss and WEF foundation board member Christine Lagarde babbles something about wanting to stand up to the advance of foreign corporations in European payment transactions. In the case of card payments, around two thirds of the transactions are booked by service providers who have their company records outside the EU. The image of heteronomy is intentional: because inevitably the image of influence from Russia, China or — which would of course not matter to the EU grandees — the USA, arises in the mind, although financial strongholds such as Switzerland or Great Britain are also not EU members. All this runs under the euphonious but meaningless slogan “Strategic Autonomy”.

The route is as follows: An investigation phase will run until October 2023 before the final decision on the design of the digital central bank currency is to be made. After that, another three years are planned for the complete implementation of the project. In other words, by 2026 at the latest, the digital Euro should be a fixed point in citizens’ payment transactions. They have long feared another step towards the abolition of cash and tighter controls: in public consultations, almost every second response was concerned about the protection of privacy. [Privacy? What privacy? Slaves do not have that privilege. They have lost the right to choose.]

(In the run-up to the WEF summit in May, Lagarde throws sand into the eyes of the citizens.)

Lindner uses economic arguments

Not that compliance with them is really important to EU actors — after all, the EU wants to be able to monitor the chats of innocent Europeans. But somehow you have to get the people on board for your controversial prestige project. And so on Monday Christian Lindner (FDP) — as German finance minister, after all, patron of the largest economy on the continent [cough, cough] — rode out to butter people up with the prospect of the digital Euro as an “economic engine”. He even spoke of “digital cash”…

Total control only in China?

Incidentally, the model project for the digital Euro can once again be found in China. In the wake of the Corona policy, the E-Yuan was introduced as a test in the Middle Kingdom. At first, only additional services such as the commuter allowance for the lavish civil servants were processed — albeit via an obligatory app if you want to take advantage of the service. And while the West is soothingly downplaying the possibility of control, Western commentators do criticize the central government’s possible surveillance intentions…

In Europe, Sweden was the first country to announce that it would gradually phase out the cash crown in favor of digital payments. In Belgium, all shops and even food stalls must provide a card payment option. Incidentally, a complete ban on cash is not necessary: fines for removing and using it or the payment of social benefits exclusively in digital form could make it unattractive for everyday use. The same applies to the sometimes extremely stringent cash payment upper limits in some southern European countries.

Afterword from the translator:

Anyone who still believes that these people have their wellbeing at heart should buy a pickax and a shovel and start digging their own and their family’s graves, because a grave is ten times better than to be shackled like a slave to the whims of these “Elites”.

I quote once again the immortal words of my favourite 18th-century Scotsman, David Hume: “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. Slavery has so frightful an aspect to men accustomed to freedom that it must steal upon them by degrees, and must disguise itself in a thousand shapes, in order to be received.”

The people of the world need to rise up against this. Not that I’m holding my breath for that to happen, since so many bought into the “convenient” scam.