hegemo 

On Wednesday 21st May 2025 an article by Kieran Guilber was published on the Euronews site: https://www.euronews.com/2025/05/21/dutch-citizens-advised-to-keep-emergency-cash-on-hand-amid-growing-cyber-threats

Essentially, the article outlined that the Netherlands’ Central Bank (DNB) advised Dutch citizens to maintain an emergency cash amount that should last them three days, amid rising Geo-political tensions. Why? Because integrated digital payments may be impossible in the case of disruptions. What might be the cause for these disruptions? Loss of electricity and hacking.
 

On Wednesday 25th March 25 Euronews published an article by Alice Tidey entitled ‘Brussels asks EU citizens to put together a 72-hour emergency kit to face crises’

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/03/26/brussels-ask-eu-citizens-to-put-together-a-72-hour-emergency-kit-to-face-crises

The EU wants every EU citizen to maintain an emergency pack of essentials, such as medicines and copies of identity papers and other important documents in order to be self-sufficient for a minimum of 72 hours, as part of its Preparedness Union Strategy. Within that Strategy there is a call for stock-piling essential supplies and improved civilian-military cooperation’ (Tidey, A. Euronews, 26 March 2025).

Items that would go into this emergency pack include a portable radio, a torch, batteries, spare keys and warm clothes.

In the article, the EU executive, when quizzed, says it needs over a year to produce a document on how the military and civilian cooperation should be implemented. The Commission calls this a civil-military preparedness framework with clear roles.

None of this is new thinking.

On Wednesday 11th January 2023, Euronews published an article titled: ‘Lithuania launches major campaign to boost emergency preparedness’ https://www.euronews.com/2023/01/11/lithuania-launches-major-campaign-to-boost-emergency-preparedness

‘According to the Lithuanian Interior Minister, civil safety has been neglected while threats to the country have increased.’ (Euronews with EVN, 11 January 2023). Less than 20% of Lithuanian citizens at the time possessed an emergency pack, a survey commissioned by the government found.

Something that Hegemo advocates for, is the retaining of latent technologies and procedures. From the outset, it is clear to us, that constraining any civilisation to electricity and digital integration at the expense of national security and robustness of society is just plain foolish. The suggested emergency kits have almost exclusively analogue equipment in them for a very good reason. There is no interaction between the analogue items in a emergency pack with anything else in the universe except proximity. We ask: Is a digital radio really any use if there is no digital radio station transmitting?

The EU like most bodies has even suggested torches and batteries when candles would be better; quite simply because they also provide heat. But the idea of fossil-fuel usage is just so abhorrent that we must go without light because we will be unable to charge rechargeable batteries or buy new ones – everyone will want them and there will be no deliveries because there is a sole reliance on digital integration for logistics. Who, in their right mind would not want to have naked flames to light fires, to cook food? Or should the EU citizens believe that their weal and woe ends after only 72 hours?

Hackers of supermarkets are successful because the digital integration that businesses use is not compartmentalised. It follows the KanBan principle. If a supermarket retained its sales data and only updated a regional database every two hours, there is less vulnerable time spent on an open connection. If the regional database updates a national database every 30 minutes, there is less time for it to be vulnerable. But this is not enough, we say. Every order must be duplicated with the same order code and each duplication must be routed differently and at different infrequent times. At the receiving end all the duplicated messages and orders are deleted except one, which is filled. Very simple. We go on: duplicate the whole system including the databases and keep this second system as an emergency system. Further, use a different operating system (in-house) for each hub and an entirely different operating system for the emergency second system.

Apparently, email addresses that Marks and Spencer’s lost to hackers were not stored on a removable device. Why not? Because they are backed up to a server that is accessible from the internet. We hear that Marks and Spencer’s stand to lose over 300 million GBP due to their incapacity to understand the vulnerabilities of digital integration, cyber-security protection and reactionary procedures.