If you don't agree, you're a racist

“You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists,” President George W. Bush said in a famous statement after the September 11 attacks in 2001. Similar rhetoric was used decades later, when UN Secretary-General António Guterres in 2022 claimed that a lack of collective action would be “collective suicide.”

The pattern repeats across time and borders: today you are expected to be either with Ukraine or for Russia, either with Israel or for Hamas. During the pandemic, skeptics of restrictions or of alleged vaccines were accused of wanting to murder grandma, and now some EU politicians claim that opposition to a digital euro automatically makes you an opponent of the European Union itself. These are not just manipulative rhetorical tricks, but patterns with real consequences.

Such questions assume the world can be divided into either-or pairs, thereby forcing a choice between two alternatives. But reality is rarely that simple. The statements presented in these false dichotomies don’t necessarily constitute opposites. Furthermore, there can be multiple alternatives.

The digital euro - a central bank digital currency, a CBDC - is a new programmable form of money that, among other things, enables surveillance and control in entirely new ways. Some refer to the technology as “PanoptiCOINs”. The message was unambiguous: “we must choose sides,” wrote Aurore Lalucq, chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, regarding the digital euro.

According to her, the right side is apparently “Europe, the euro, and democracy’s.” But if you question digital money that can have expiration dates, be devalued in seconds, be restricted to approved goods, and be switched off with a button press? According to her rhetoric, you are then on the side of autocratic regimes like Putin’s or Xi Jinping’s.

When presented with such a polarizing choice, we can ask ourselves if there truly are only these two alternatives. By doing so, we immediately realize that Sweden’s choice to retain the krona shows there is a third way. Surely Sweden isn’t on the side of autocratic regimes?

The nature of money is fluid; it can be “a little bit of everything,” as former Riksbank Governor Stefan Ingves explained. His point shows that the currency issue is complex and far from simplistic or black-and-white.

Perhaps many of today’s societal debates have actually derailed because we fail to recognize all these false choices (or are we made to not recognize them?) A society that could handle nuance and complexity, instead of getting stuck in such linguistic traps, would be better equipped to handle all sorts of challenges.

Instead of accepting that citizens who question the bureaucracy’s technological projects are compared to traitors, we can remember that the true strength of liberal democracies is said to come from open debate. Shouldn’t a democratic EU welcome scrutiny of power’s new tools, rather than branding it as opposition to Europe itself?