Earlier this year, the BBC published a nice article suggesting the revival of the term “bankster” – a Depression-era portmanteau of banker and gangster – to describe the greedy financiers who have thrown us into the current crisis. I think it’s an excellent idea, but it seems the only people who have really picked it up at this point are the conspiracy crowd.
Earlier this summer, Alex Jones’s InfoWars (no relation to William Shatner’s TekWar) picked up a story on the impending imposition of martial law, delivered via a “bankster holiday” in which a run on American banks will be avoided, FDR-style, by simply shutting them down for a couple of days. The government will take the opportunity to ruthlessly communisticize the economy, enabling the implementation of a global currency, leading to global government, rise of the Antichrist, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria:
Bob Chapman’s influential International Forecaster is reporting on the possibility of a so-called “bank holiday” planned for late August or early September. According to Chapman’s sources, U.S. embassies around the world are selling dollars and stockpiling money from respective countries where they operate . . .
Mr. Schultz believes a “bank holiday” would suit the burning desires of the international bankster elite. It will lead to “nationalization,” which is a polite word for brazen thievery. It will allow the government — owned lock, stock and barrel by the global elite and run by their corrupt whores and cronies — to rape secured creditors and bondholders.
The story spread throughout the paranoiasphere, and with the doomsday date of September 9th (or August 26th, depending on who you ask) fast approaching, the prospect of a catastrophic bank holiday is currently a hot topic of discussion on conspiracy boards like Above Top Secret and Godlike Productions.
Still, this isn’t a very popular conspiracy theory – not yet, anyway. The date-setting is probably a red flag for a lot of people, but there’s still a certain appeal – the idea that the financial crisis was engineered will probably gain traction over the next little while as people try to come to terms with what’s happened. Probably the biggest obstacle is that right now, it’s not in anyone’s ideological interest to push it as true. There’s always libertarians, I guess, but they’ve generally got a full schedule as far as conspiracy advocacy goes.
I'm pretty sure octopus isn't even kosher.
But there’s also a lingering nervousness about the topic itself. Like most people, conspiracy theorists in the Internet age are very careful with their dogwhistles – they’re quite conscious of seeming overtly racist, sexist, or antisemitic, and it’s difficult to talk about a conspiracy of “international bankers” without raising some hackles. Troubled times drove Henry Ford to believe in the authenticity of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and “international bankers” became a not-so-subtle synonym for “Jews” in his running soapbox-rag, the Dearborn Independent.
So as a replacement, “banksters” is a good, value-free term – it doesn’t have the antisemitic connotations of “international bankers,” and is instantly understandable even to anyone who hasn’t heard it before (though less so when it is written rather than spoken). And there are a lot of legitimately horrible things that the financial industry has done to drive us into this crisis, though I have to differ from Alex Jones regarding the commu-Nazi globalist Muslim illegal immigrant genocidal environmentalist Reptoid plot to destroy the world’s economy.
So, moral of the story: start throwing “bankster” around if you get a chance. What’s the harm in a little nickname that you can mutter under your breath while kneeling before Ben Bernanke as he sits atop his skull-throne, sipping pensively from a goblet filled with the blood of Christian babies?
