A far cry from the Federal Reserve. (Reuters)
What The Islamic State’s Currency Tells Us About The Bloody Origins Of Money -- Matt Phillips, Quartz
The propaganda war from ISIL, the Sunni jihadist group controlling swaths of northern Iraq and Syria, took a somewhat expected turn last week. The black-clad fighters best known for their months-long jag of mass killings and filmed beheadings suddenly wanted to talk about monetary policy.
On Thursday, the group’s heretofore unknown finance ministry announced vague plans to mint a series of gold, silver, and copper coins for its own currency, to be called Islamic dinars. Accord to a translation from Site Intelligence, a group that tracks jihadist activity, the shadowy leader of ISIL (a.k.a. the Islamic State or ISIS) had ordered such coins to be minted as “it is far removed from the tyrannical monetary system that was imposed on the Muslims and was a reason for their enslavement and impoverishment.”
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My Comment: Some intriguing info on the history of money and war in this short article.
1 comment:
A little reinventing the wheel in this article. A troopie doesn't want to carry any more than he has to, and that includes fun things. Adam Smith in "The Wealth of Nations" called it the unseen hand of self interest. P J O'Rourke paraphrased "In the stone age a tribe of basket weavers met a tribe of spear makers and developed a trading relationship. The spearmakers realized you could carry a lot more meat in a basket than on the end of a spear, and the basket makers had already discovered how difficult it was to beat Wooly Mammoths to death with woven baskets. Each side traded for their own self interest.
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