Thursday, October 04, 2018

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain

--- Mr Weasley, quoted by Oliver Bullough, author of the new book Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World, on the Talking Politics podcast of 26 September 2018, at timecode 42:00

From the podcast transcript:

To my mind the threat is that this dark money, the 10 percent of the global economy which is out there somewhere, is a bit like a sort of malevolent Poltergeist. We can’t see it and we can’t touch it but it can see us and it can touch us. There’s this great line in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which I’m sure you’ve all read intensely, when Mr. Weasley scolds his daughter Ginny at the end because she’s been possessed by a diary which was sort of inhabited by the spirit of Lord Voldemort. And he says ‘How many times do I have to tell you. Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.’ And that’s the thing about dark money, offshore money, is it’s acting, it’s influencing our politics. It’s buying assets. It’s buying houses. It’s paying for the media. It’s paying for, you know, political campaigns, but we can’t see where it keeps its brain.

In the book, Bullough says in his Notes on Sources, p. 289, "The quotation from Arthur Weasley comes from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (London: Bloomsbury, 1998) by J. K. Rowling, and can — in my opinion — be applied to pretty much everything. "