I have often described myself as a human giftschrank. That I keep ahold of the poisonous knowledge that others need to forget to have a happy life, but that it is important to keep around for when we need it. When someone needs to “rediscover” some horrible event to bring cautionary tales back to everyone else, someone like me needs to be around to remember and tell the story. But in a pics or it didn’t happen world filled with misinformation to intentionally make it hard to define ANY history, the giftshrank’s word is not enough.
This is one¹ of the reasons why people collect cursed objects. As I am a coin collector, this is why I have my Evil Coin Collection. A tangible, small, mundane object that is a handhold to understand the enormity of the horrors that happened. Damnatio Memoriae requires destroying all physical evidence to make the memory fade but, as discussed in the Coins of Transition: Revolutions & Civil War, it’s hard to get everything. Also, it’s nice to have props to assist in telling stories, even if people tend to let the coins drop from their hands when they learn enough that they can feel the blood & fire.
The cursed coin that inspired this and that I suggested I should get if I ever had a few extra bucks lying around is the one guinea, from roughly 350 years ago. Starts at $5k at last check, so that one might have to wait for quite a while for enough quarters to accumulate in the sofa. This is the annoying thing about gold coins for me. The thing people want out of them is gold and don’t give much of shit about anything else. Which means they happily melt them down or just throw them in a pile to invest by weight. Shits are not given about what the coin might teach. The guinea, the creation of the Royal African Company for the exploitation of the gold fields of Ghana, is the numismatic representation of the slave trade itself as that was far more profitable than gold. The UK has done their best to erase all memory of it yet while still very much enjoying the spoils. Imagine going through life seeing Elephant & Castle Station on the tube map and never wondering why it’s named that. You’re wandering through the old Company headquarters.
But let’s move on to coins I actually have.
Starting with a real winner, a 50 centimes of King Leopold II of the Congo Free State!
If you’ve read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness you’re already well aware of how the Belgian crown created their protectorate of a “free state”. Something the Belgians would administer for the uplift and education of the local population such that they would be prepared to have a democratic state of their own. This wasn’t colonialism, goodness no, how dare you suggest such thing of noted humanitarian King Leopold II!?!
The corollaries to British justifications of how and why the Mandate of Palestine would work after WWI with the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire are just embarrassing. Perhaps less blatantly racist but not by much. But why did the Congo Free State exist at all? ANSWER: rubber plantations (and whatever other resources they could find to extract). It is hard to do justice to the company town, closed economy, and debt-peonage coerced labor of the Congo Free State’s “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Slavery!” system, but as this is a Coin Rant let’s look at it through the lens of that coin. You’re already in not great conversational territory whenever the word “plantation” comes up, but let’s toss in another one certain to cause arguments when you add a few drinks and That Guy to the dinner table: quota.
The really abbreviated version of Belgian quota system and the all too predictable perverse incentives go like this. You owe a debt to your overseer/company/Leopold II for food and housing that is payable in either money or product. Why do you owe a debt? Well, it seems that the benevolent association now owns the land you’ve lived on since time immemorial and they’re now charging you for the pleasure. Also, all those benefits of European society, like the church for your spiritual uplift and that factory that was just built in here to process the resources of interest, aren’t free. You’re going to need to pay for those things you were made to have too. Much like the minimum monthly payment on a credit card, a the quota was a way to service that debt. In theory, you would be paid money for any resources extracted in excess of the quota.
In practice, this never happened as the quotas were too high to ever meet. For rubber, this was payable in:
- Impossible amounts of rubber,
- 50 centimes, or
- A hand, as a penalty for failure.
Except there was very little coinage in country to pay that 50 centimes with since Leopold had no particular intention on following through on the promise to setting up a functional country. As such, it was only legal for white colonists to possess coinage and the money supply was kept short ON PURPOSE to skew toward payment in rubber. Since the quotas were routinely unachievable, the perverse incentives creates a hand based economy. And let’s not forget the military ammunition resupply scheme: no more ammo unless you can prove every bullet was a kill…by providing the hand of the person you shot. Therefore, you have a conversion rate of 50 centimes to a human hand to a bullet. Raiding parties to go collect hands from other communities. Baskets of hands being turned over to overseers. Behind The Bastards did a couple episodes on the king responsible recently and wow.
I’m not sure you could economically incentivize a genocide more except, in theory, they did want resource extraction. No one ever said that evil had to make sense.
This one is important even though it’s exonumia (not an actual currency) as a voting token. It contains all the horrors of how pay-for-play voting worked within the Nazi party, perversion of charity, it’s the only “coin” with Hitler’s visage, and it marked the Anschluss & end of democracy in Germany and Austria. All in one coin.
What makes it extra terrible to me is that these grew out of the original charity fundraising coins called “Winter Tokens” help buy food and fuel to help starving and freezing people through that harsh Great Depression winters. Later, the Nazis took the old charity system and formalized it into centralized, party based one that made sure all the money flowed through the party and that those in need of charity were dependent on the party…in theory. In theory, this also kept Teh Poors away from the doors of polite society and party members. In practice, that money tend to go nowhere that unless it satisfied the vanity of a party official. This program was such a success that it was adapted to party voting with a “buy more tokens to vote more” model.
If this sounds familiar to folks in the UK, this is exactly what the Tory party conference did in the last two party leader elections. The voting tokens also came a level of door to door coercion of “How many tokens can I put you down for? Your neighbor bought 5. Zero? Are you sure? [makes note for a future brownshirt visit]” Of course they weren’t going to play “fair”, they just wanted to squeeze for cash. Mine is a one vote token. By paying a bit more you could get a ten vote token. Even more than that, a hundred votes! Okay, remember all the party lapel pins with the swastika on it that you see the civilian dress baddies wearing in movies? Those had a base level of 10k votes.
The party liked to sell that anyone could join, anybody could help guide the future of the volk, together! When in reality only the wealthy industrialists and nobility backing the party were going to have any say and, of course, no one got to have more votes than the Führer. As Benny said…
To be clear, these were strictly for party elections, kinda like parliamentary party leadership conferences, except these votes had consequences the whole nation. The point was to negate the value of voting outside of the party, supplanting the government itself. And they did it with these coins.
Oh, the dates on the coin. 13 March 1938 would be when the brand new Chancellor Seyss-Inquart of Austria announced that Austria would be annexed into Greater Germania. 10 April 1938 would be the popular vote for full annexation and transformation of Austria in the Ostmark. And with that, there were no more votes other than Nazi party votes.
As I read what I’d written above again, months later a whole bunch of @zitron.bsky.social newsletters in my head, I realize that the voting token model the Nazis had sure sounds like different classes of stock, and their respective voting rights, at Facebook/Meta. Or OCP and their shareholder-citizens of Delta City.
Yes, I have other coins that make people twitch but I’d like to actually put this post up after much delay. The 1 jiao from Manchuko certainly gets attention when you hand it to Korean or Chinese friends, but that’s drifting back to the Coins of Revolution & Civil War again which can also be viewed as Coins of Occupation. Sometimes occupations become actual governments and nations, but usually not. Their coins are an attempt to legitimize a transitory state that no one particularly wants, though for different reasons.
1: The usual reason to collect such things is mystique of transgression. The whole “I have something I shouldn’t have/is dangerous” or “This would make people mad if they knew” thing. If you have to hide your collection, if you aren’t teaching with it, consider that perhaps you shouldn’t have it.