Banned Propaganda Circulating on Banknotes
https://www.ft.com/content/dc78cc2b-60e7-3bb3-856a-66b9d8613911
http://www.communitycurrency.org/Donate.html
When I was going through the money exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, I saw a propaganda bill created in the aftermath of 9/11. 2001, with information, or conspiracy theory, about how the U.S. initiated 9/11. It reminded me of the Falun Gong (propaganda printed on Chinese RMB when I was younger. The similarity between the two is that they are both information about the failure of the state, and they are all information censored by the state.
Walker (2017: 296) argues that money’s capacity to “straddle” the discrepancy between the “physical object that deteriorates and the immutable substance … which stands in contracts to any matter found in nature” works only because it is “sustained by a symbolic authority.” However, when the credibility of authority becomes doubtful, it is “as if the immutable substance of money itself has been eroded” (2017: 296). While the discredited government led to the Congolese’s denial of the immaterial substance of money, as they now fetishize the materiality of the banknotes, the argument also work reversely in the case of the propaganda dollar notes, as it is by sabotaging the fetishized immateriality of money that the propagandists expose the culpable deeds of the state.
The first website is a journalist piece about the printed Falun Gong propaganda on a one-RMB note, and the second website is created by the propagandists of 9/11, featuring the counterfeit dollar notes that they designed.
Contributed by SiyuTang on 27/01/2020
