Yet another way to lose your citizenship… in the name of terror.

Throughout history, the issue of citizenship has been a political hot button. Citizens have been made and lost in the blink of an eye by politicians who used the process to enrich themselves at the expense of others.

In the third century, Caracalla issued the Edict of Caracalla in Rome, which racked huge debts for the empire which the egomaniacal ruler couldn’t figure how to pay off.

Within two years, Caracalla thrust Roman citizenship on those in the hinterlands in order to force them to pay taxes to his empire. With the stroke of a figurative pen, hundreds of thousands of people spanning hundreds of miles were subjected to some tyrant’s rule.

Just because he said so.

Today, citizenship is bestowed on us by governments, purportedly as a gift of their benevolence. But as we know here, your citizenship is just a way for one government or another to have a list of tax slaves to rely on for paying off debts they already incurred.

Today’s politicians rack up debts to buy themselves votes and keep the public from realizing just how bad things are, and the next generation serves as an annuity in the form of taxes, merely because they were born on a particular patch of dirt or had a parent who was.

That is why having a second passport and hedging out your citizenship obligations is such an important task to undertake.

Now that governments have set you up to require citizenship to perform any number of every day functions, they know that their power lies in doing the opposite of what Caracalla did.

They know that the power to take, rather than to give, citizenship can be even more powerful.

In medieval times, the concept of exile was powerful. Those who disobeyed the king’s orders were sent outside of the castle walls to live the rest of their life away from the only society they knew.

In 1935, for instance, two new measures were announced at the Nazi Party’s annual Nuremberg Rallies. These measures would become as the Nuremberg Laws and cut off Jews and anyone without a solid family tree of German grandparents from German civic life.

Going beyond existing bans on Jewish businesses in Germany the laws prohibited mixed-race marriages. They also deprived Jews of German citizenship.

And it didn’t take long for the government to expand the law to “Gypsies and negroes”.

By 1941, all of Germany’s “undesirables” either saw their naturalized citizenship revoked or were simply expatriated against their will.

The same measures are being taken today. More and more governments increasingly want you to lose your citizenship for as little as practicing freedom of speech.

We frequently talk about ways your western government is aggrandizing more power to strip you of a passport. A few years back, the US State Department tried to ram through regulations that allowed it to demand the address and supervisor name for every job you had since high school as well as your circumcision records.

That regulation failed, but now State Department officials are working on a similar data extraction.

Today, you can already get your passport cancelled any number of ways. Whether it’s owing some money to the IRS (even if that amount is legitimately disputed), owning as little as one back child support payment, or having one of any number of small time criminal convictions, losing your passport is easy.

But that’s just a passport. If your government refuses to issue you a passport to travel, it may be possible in some cases to pay the IRS or whomever else and move on.

However, just like Nazi Germany, Bahrain, and others, western governments increasingly want to do a lot more than stop you from getting a passport. Stopping you from traveling isn’t enough.

Today, western governments want you to lose your citizenship if you disagree with them.

We’ve talked before about the British national who lost their UK citizenship after their government decided they weren’t worth the trouble. The men had alleged ties to Middle Eastern groups claimed to be involved in some form of terror. But the knee jerk reaction was not to investigate them or put them on trial, but simply to strip them of citizenship and cast them off.

Two of the men were later killed in drone strikes. And by stripping them of British citizenship, the government was able to stand on the sidelines while their former citizens were killed, thrown in dark holes, or subjected to whatever else anyone wanted to throw at them.

Just this week, US Senator Ted Cruz was pushing forward new legislation (because the laws that already exist are never enough) to strip US citizenship from anyone who went to fight with ISIS.

While that may sound reasonable on the surface, the measure was typical knee jerk conservatism acting in the name of “the war on terror”. Filled with holes bigger than a block of Swiss cheese, the measure would have allowed bureaucrats to determine who was fighting with ISIS with little oversight from anyone.

When you consider that merely flying to much of the Middle East will earn you a seat and a cavity search in secondary screening upon your return to the western world, it is not a stretch to think that a government with almost unchecked powers could use the measure to say that anyone visiting or doing business in the Middle East is “fighting with ISIS”.

Heck, the US government already adds more than 10,000 citizens to various no-fly lists every year, based largely on circumstantial evidence of people traveling to countries they don’t like. Perhaps the bureaucrats in Washington have never heard of tourism, or maybe they just don’t care.

While holding US citizenship is increasingly difficult and expensive to do, what with the reduced business opportunities that comes with it, you may struggle just to keep that US own citizenship if you fall out of line.

Remember that it was only a decade ago that the Bush administration was begging for permission to wiretap the phones of anyone they wanted without having to ask. They promised it was all in the name of “terrorism” and that only the so-called terrorists would have their phones tapped.

Today, we know that the US surveillance state extends to every man, woman, and child – and every phone call and email – including hundreds of millions of people who have nothing to do with terrorism.

Other than the fact that, in an out of control regime, EVERYONE is a terrorist. On one side you have the government, and on the other side those the government distrusts. If that sounds far fetched, consider what’s happening right now in Bahrain.

There, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa recently amended parts of that country’s citizenship act to enhance provisions for withdrawal of Bahraini citizenship. A new clause was added that allows the government to strip you of your citizenship merely for “harming the interests of the kingdom” or “behaving in a way that contradicts the duty of loyalty toward it”.

Not only are those clauses vague – guess who gets to determine what constitutes “harming the kingdom” – but they allow for practically anyone who has an opinion that goes against what the government says.

Then consider that Bahrain was often hailed as the most middle class, most democratic, and most open-minded state in the Middle East. Heck, Michael Jackson fled to Bahrain after being acquitted of child abuse almost ten years ago.

We’re not talking about some rogue government run by ISIS. Yet it is just one example of governments who don’t want their citizens to enjoy basic freedoms.

Yet you don’t have to look to the Middle East, Nazi Germany, or ancient Rome to see how the government is taking action against people it doesn’t like.

Even in the United States and Europe, governments are using their own noble-sounding laws to encroach on your rights right now. What starts as a law designed to strip the citizenship of determined by a few bureaucrats to be “supporting terror” eventually expands into a far-reaching witch hunt against all who speak out against the practice.

Just look at how militarized the police have become. How outrageous airport screening by the TSA has become. How Orwellian the surveillance state has become. All in the name of terrorism.

No Constitution will stop a government from taking what it pleases from its citizens, whether it is confiscating their retirement accounts or stripping them of their citizenship.

Governments know that they have rigged the game to the point that not having a citizenship makes you practically impotent. With their system of passports and nationalities in place, they can now start to play political games with those they don’t like.

Just watch the encroachment of citizens losing their nationality at the hands of bureaucrats.

This is why having a second passport in a small, stable country with more limited resources is more important than ever. Getting out of your western country will become increasingly important as the government turns the screws on voices of dissent from within its borders, and another passport is a great way to do that. You can learn more here.

If you’re serious about getting a second citizenship to protect yourself from McCarthy-esque madness in your home country, you should schedule a call with me, where you’ll actually be able to discuss various opportunities. It’s the easiest way to get started protecting your freedom.