"At least Putin knows masks are useless"
"At least Putin knows masks are useless"
A conversation with Lucien Cerise
On February 6, I received an email from French author and commentator Lucien Cerise expressing his displeasure with an interview I had published with Iurie Rosca.
“I'm looking for the ‘alternative’ or ‘provocative’ perspective in this [interview], but it sounds like French and NATO mass media,” his one-sentence message read.
I responded by asking Lucien if he would be interested in expanding on this comment as part of a written interview for my blog. He agreed and we began exchanging questions and answers.
Our interview abruptly came to a halt after I submitted a series of follow-up questions to Lucien in early March. Lucien explained he was a bit swamped at the moment and it might take a while for him to answer. I told him he could take as much time as he needed.
Days passed. Then weeks. Then the seasons changed.
At the end of August, I received an email from Lucien informing me that he would soon send me the “first part of the interview”. He also apologized that he couldn’t do it more quickly. About a week later I received another email from Lucien that included an open letter addressed to me and Rosca that had just been published on the French website cultureetracines.com. The letter was a revised version of the short text that Lucien had sent me back in February as part of our seemingly indefinitely delayed interview.
Needless to say, I was confused.
After asking Lucien what the heck was going on, he expressed interest in finishing our interview.
Editing this interview was no easy task because Lucien didn’t just answer my unanswered questions—he also made changes (in some cases extensive changes) to the answers he had submitted to me in February. This means that some of his answers were written a week ago even though my follow-up questions to these answers were submitted in March. I was not anticipating my interviewee to retroactively change his answers six months after writing them, but I allowed it in some cases.
I have included in brackets the month when a question/answer was written.
Since I gave Lucien the final word, and also waited half a year for this final word, and even let him change his answers, I felt it was reasonable to include some screengrabs of articles that will help the reader navigate the nuances of this stimulating discussion.
Enjoy the interview and have a nice Sunday.
— Riley
Lucien Cerise: Response to Iurie Rosca and Edward Slavsquat [February]
In his latest articles, Iurie Rosca says that he rejects the anti-Putin globalist discourse AND the alternative pro-Putin discourse, in order to propose a third way. In so doing, he is simply joining the anti-Putin globalist discourse in a variant shared by Edward Slavsquat and others, Pierre Hillard, Nicolas Bonnal, etc. They all engage in social engineering, i.e. they work to increase mistrust of Putin and Russia, under any pretext, however tenuous, and sometimes using disinformation. And always by pretending to be a friend of Russia. Social engineering is the usurpation of identity and the abuse of trust - hacker Kevin Mitnick's definition—and it also involves strategically building up mistrust or indifference. Technically, in purely methodological terms, this is also what our globalist Western mass media do.
I’m not making any accusations of intent, I'm not interested in subjectivity, in what’s in people's minds, I’m describing objectively what people do, their empirical behavior. The informational behavior of Iurie Rosca and Edward Slavsquat, i.e. the way they actually process and disseminate information about Russia, is the same as that of the French and NATO media, they are all trying to raise mistrust against Putin and Russia. In France, and in the NATO zone, we have been fed anti-Russian war propaganda 24 hours a day for years, even before February 2022. It really began with the Ukrainian putsch in 2014. I have to say “Stop!” when this brainwashing also comes from the so-called alternative media.
Secondly, I can understand that Iurie Rosca and I have different national interests. My French national interest is to destroy the EU and NATO by all means. The national interest of a Moldavian may be to join the EU and NATO, to try to invade or destroy Russia. This is the old plan of the Collective West, the Great British Game, which goes back to the medieval Drang nach Osten, and passes through Napoleon and Hitler. Each time, it's a Western defeat. Perhaps we should move on, but the anti-Russian storytelling continues, it’s absurd.
A social engineering trick, in the reputation and perception management department, to build up indifference or mistrust against Russia, is to say that Russia is not really opposed to NATO, or that it is at the Davos Forum, even though it was expelled in 2022, and so on. And then there's the complete reconstruction of reality through words, what I call reality-building, following on from Ron Suskind’s famous article on the faith-based community (see appendices).
Thirdly, it is clear that there are two internal threats in Russia. There is a pro-Western liberal globalist fifth column working to integrate Russia into unipolar globalization. And secondly, technology and transhumanism are advancing in Russia, as they are everywhere else. On this point, there is a lot of confusion between politics and technology. Politics is reversible, technology is not. Politics is based on the choices of the human will, technology is stronger than the human will and leaves no choice. In short: technology is not a bus that you get on when you want and that stops when you ask, it's a bus that never stops and that everyone wants to drive.
It’s like the weapons race, no one can escape it, except by disarming themselves and letting the other side win. The proof: to criticize digital transformation in Russia, Iurie Rosca and Edward Slavsquat use the tools of digital transformation. Russia has embarked on the digitization of the world, like Iurie Rosca and Edward Slavsquat, who can no longer live without computers and smartphones connected to the internet and 5G to communicate and spread their anti-Russian propaganda on blogs, social networks and Telegram. International competition is conducted using technological tools, and everyone is using the same ones.
We are all involved in transhumanism, and so am I, so this is not a discriminating criterion, in the epistemological sense, for attacking Russia. But if you are honestly and impartially informed, you will learn that Russia is developing a more conservative and cautious digital strategy than in the West.
Appendices
« Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush », New York Times, 17/10/2004. « The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” » https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html
« International relations scholar Fred Halliday writes that the phrase reality-based community (in contrast to faith-based community) was used "for those who did not share [the Bush administration's] international goals and aspirations". Suskind has maintained his refusal to name the speaker, but the source of the quotation was widely speculated to be Bush's senior advisor Karl Rove. » https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
« Les rapports entre la Russie et la Grande Réinitialisation, par Lucien Cerise (article et vidéo) » https://www.cultureetracines.com/actualites/les-rapports-entre-la-russie-et-la-grande-reinitialisation-i-par-lucien-cerise-n1455
« Russia and the Great Reset » (by Lucien Cerise) https://arcaluinoe.info/en/blog/2023-09-09-0nzpy8fn/
Edward [February]: Let’s start with your claim that I engage in “social engineering” by creating “mistrust against Putin and Russia”. I can’t speak for the other gentlemen you’ve leveled this accusation against—perhaps they would like to respond separately—but I will briefly explain my methodology for “disseminating information about Russia”: I read Russian-language media and commentary (the whole spectrum, from right-wing Orthodox sites like Third Rome to RIA Novosti to neo-Soviet Telegram channels) and identify topics or stories that I personally find to be highly pertinent but for mysterious reasons rarely receive the attention they deserve in Western alternative media.
Lucien [September]: First of all, I’d like to thank you for your work, which is always very well sourced and helps to advance our thinking. However, I think that you often fall into biases and errors of reasoning, which may or may not be deliberate and strategic.
For example, on Western alternative media: they are already very busy correcting the propaganda and censorship of the Western globalist media, it's a full-time job, and they lack the availability to attack the Russian media as well. You live in Russia and you're not subjected to brainwashing on every subject 24 hours a day. So you have the luxury of being able to criticize the Russian media, or Russian politics, and you are very lucky, as are all those who live outside the European Union and the NATO zone.
Secondly, you are quite right to ask about sources. For my part, I don't rely solely on the mass media or alternative media, but also on eyewitness accounts and my own perceptions on the ground. I know people who travel between France and Russia, and I myself have travelled to Russia twice: to Moscow and St Petersburg in 2023, and between Melitopol and Crimea as an international observer of the presidential elections in 2024.
On the subject of health dictatorship: in the spring of 2022, I saw the abolition of all health measures in Russia for the general population. I saw a single vaccination area, a sort of shop in the GUM, but totally empty, with no medical staff or patients, while in France at the same time we were still under daily psychological pressure to get vaccinated and wear the mask, with announcements and advertisements in the street, the media, pharmacies and public transport.
My question is: why are you trying to make people believe that Russia and the BRICS are just as, if not more, committed to globalism than the West? If you want to know what globalism is, come to the West, especially France, which is its chemically pure incarnation, to see the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2024 Olympics. Russia is no more than a pale copy of the West on health and technology issues, and it is attacking globalism head-on in other areas. You are working to create the illusion that there is no difference between Russia and the collective West. When you look at the reality, it's clear that you create a false image of Russia, using social engineering principles that are also known as perception management and reputation management, to create distrust, or at least indifference, i.e. emotional detachment, towards Russia in the targeted population segment, namely its Western sympathizers.
How do you do it? You only talk about trains that arrive late, never about those that arrive on time, always with the bottle half empty, without mentioning the other half. There are problems in Russia, nobody disputes that, because nothing is perfect, and what you report is not always factually wrong, but it is always selective, and in other words, you lie by omission, or by reversing the whole and the part. You put together information that is plausible, but which ends up becoming disinformation. Your mocking and sarcastic style is inappropriate from a scientific point of view, but you are more in the business of literature and pamphleteering, seeking to influence the reader’s emotions in an anti-Russian direction, rather than giving them objective information so that they can form an independent opinion. For example, in a text from 2024, you you write:
Close your eyes and imagine that you’re Herman Gref.
Suddenly, as if by magic, you’ve become very fancy: you’re the CEO of Russia’s largest bank, a former member of the World Economic Forum’s Board of Trustees, and the author of the preface to the Russian-language edition of Klaus Schwab’s The Fourth Industrial Revolution. You co-starred with Tony Blair at Cyber Polygon 2020 and were “involved in the work to create” Sputnik V. You were also one of the first people in the entire world to be injected with Russia’s safe and effective genetic slurry—months before it was approved by the Russian Health Ministry—or so you claim.
This extract is like your work in general: it gives the illusion of a fused relationship between Russia and the globalists at the World Economic Forum. In the real world, not in your reconstruction, Russia and Sberbank were kicked out of the World Economic Forum and the Cyber Polygon in 2022. Why do you insist so much, even today, on creating the fiction of complicity between Russian power and Western globalists?
Edward [March]: I’m not really sure what you’re trying to argue. I can’t write about troubling global developments and trends that are also occurring in Russia, because in your estimation these trends are more prevalent in France? Using that logic, you shouldn’t complain about lockdowns (Melbourne, Australia suffered the longest lockdown) or CBDCs (several countries, including China and Russia, are far ahead of the EU with issuing Central Bank digital currencies). Russia doesn’t have a publicly accessible database for reporting and viewing post-vaccination complications—does that mean that Americans shouldn’t be allowed to complain about lack of safety and oversight when it comes to vaccines? After all, the US has VAERS—far from ideal, but better than nothing. Personally, I don’t like this way of thinking. I don’t find it to be very constructive. That’s just my opinion, though.
Lucien [September]: I’m trying to make the point that we need to distinguish between a number of issues, including globalism, the Great Reset, transhumanism and Big Pharma, which do not have the same causal links. In March 2020, the Russian government fell into the trap set by this branch of capitalism called the pharmaceutical industry, which generates colossal revenues and has been a major force in Russia since it opened up to the market economy in the 1990s. Add corruption, conflicts of interest, the sociopathy of those in power and the sincere naivety of certain conformist leaders, and you have a cocktail that explains why everyone, or almost everyone, has complied with the WHO, in Russia as elsewhere.
What’s more, there is an institutional and administrative inertia that forces us to take certain measures when we run the risk of being treated as irresponsible if we don't take them. In the northern hemisphere, only Belarus and Sweden took this risk in 2020.
If you were in power, at the head of a developed state like Russia, I’m willing to bet that you would have applied the “precautionary principle” and all the measures of a health dictatorship so as not to risk being accused of endangering the health of your citizens.
The relative subservience of Russian power to the WHO, although inferior to that of many Western countries, is worrying, I admit, but it does not make Russia an active member of globalism, which is something else again, an essentially Anglo-American project carried by NATO and the EU, with strong Israeli and Islamist complicity, and which today is embodied in war and terrorism to advance the woke and LGBT agenda.
Russia is engaged in a fight to the death against this globalist project on the battlefields of Syria and Ukraine. As for transhumanism, it's a historical inevitability, in the sense that everyone is responsible for the progress of science and technology, since we use them intensively as soon as they appear. You write that Russia is complicit in the Great Reset. Anyone who uses a computer or a smartphone is complicit in the Great Reset. That goes for you and me. We validate each new technology by applying it, we root it in behaviors and habits, therefore in reality, with the risks that this implies. It's not the banks that develop CBDCs, it's the people who pay with cards instead of cash. The competitive advantages and, above all, the comfort provided by the technological augmentation of the human body flatter our desire for power and, sometimes, our laziness, and make it impossible to turn back the clock voluntarily.
We have to wait for accidents, breakdowns, bugs, problems and malfunctions, before we can start to think critically about the drawbacks of techno-science and change the course of technophile human policies. We spontaneously see only the advantages.
Edward [March]: Your attacks on me—as a liar by omission, etc.—are annoyingly vague. You provide a single example of malfeasance. Apparently I wrote a sarcastic blog post that gives the “illusion of a fusional relationship between Russia and the globalists at the World Economic Forum”. I don’t know how you can deny that Herman Gref (a former member of the WEF’s Board of Trustees, and the author of the preface to the Russian-language edition of Klaus Schwab’s The Fourth Industrial Revolution) continues to push for an agenda that is identical to what they promote at Davos. I wrote an entire article pointing out how despite the fact that Moscow had been exiled from Davos, Gref and other senior officials, who once had very close ties to the WEF, continued to pursue Davos-endorsed policies.
I don’t know how you can accuse me of lying by omission when I bring up this fact (that Moscow continues to pursue policies that closely align with the Davos agenda, even though Russia was booted from the WEF) every time the topic comes up. Look, I even wrote a blog post with the subhead: “Davos’ divorce with Russia”:
Lucien [September]: Thank you for confirming that the policies pursued in Russia are not approved by Davos. If Herman Gref defends a program identical to that of Davos while being excluded from Davos, that is proof that this program does not come from Davos but that it is universal. Everyone's going to go through it—Artificial Intelligence, Smart Cities, contactless payment, QR codes—because everyone wants to go through it, and so do you. Davos is simply putting into words a general process that is also being applied by those who criticize Davos. In fact, the whole world is applying this program for the digital transformation of society because the whole world obeys the determinisms of digital technology.
The digital transformation of the world is explicitly theorized by Klaus Schwab, but it doesn't need Klaus Schwab to exist and be deployed across the entire surface of the Earth. The fourth industrial revolution is neither a project nor a conspiracy. It's an objective, historical phenomenon that epistemology, the history of science, calls a "paradigm", and we're all taking part in it with our computers, our blogs, our messaging systems, our cell phones, smartphones and iPhones, and so on. Our current paradigm is often summarized by the acronym NBIC, for nanotechnology, biotechnology, computer science and cognitive science. In a techno-scientific paradigm, you as an individual can refuse to use a new technology, but you can't prevent its existence, so it will be used by others anyway.
Ever since Homo Sapiens domesticated fire, the human race has been engaged in an unstoppable technological headlong rush. We mastered electricity in the 19th century, then invented the car, aeroplanes and computers. Today, electricity, cars and aeroplanes are everywhere, and no one is willing or able to question this. It's the same for IT and AI, which are now ubiquitous and completely surround us, as if we were mere connected objects. This artificialization of the world is irreversible, because it suits most people.
In an article, you wrote: “You will be tagged and you will love it. The multipolar world will be the most convenient world in world history.” You are absolutely right but it seems that you haven’t yet understood that you are already tagged, identified and traced. You don't need the multipolar world for that, it's already done now with facial recognition on your personal computer’s web-cam and the GPS on your mobile phone. Welcome to the most convenient dictatorship in history, what you call digital gulag too, which began with the advent of the personal computer (PC) in the 1980s, and continued with the Internet for all in the 1990s, then the mobile phone in the 2000s. It is for practical reasons that the masses are becoming technophiles and consenting to digital dictatorship.
The only reason we’ll eventually escape total digital dictatorship and the Great Reset comes from a law of physics: the second principle of thermodynamics, i.e. the temporal alteration of all forms, living and non-living, to the point of loss of information and structure, and thus death, also known as entropy. The Great Reset and transhumanism are fantasies of infinite negation of entropy, hence infinite negentropy, fantasies of immortality, like believing in a deity. Computer science researchers have shown that Artificial Intelligence cannot escape entropy, the inevitable degradation of information over time, what researchers call in their jargon “model collapse”, synonymous for AIs with ageing, then senility, and death.
With Russia excluded from the Davos Forum, it can no longer be said that Russian policies are closely aligned with the Davos agenda. This is purely logical. If policies and agendas are still similar, it is because they obey a common determinism, which everyone obeys. Russian policies and the Davos agenda, and the whole world— you too—all obey scientific research and technical progress, which advance in a decentralized way, driven by international competition, but also in a convergent way, because the results are inevitably the same, the laws of physics being universal, which induces a process of standardization of the world. This is what gives you the impression that Russian policies are aligned with Davos. It’s an optical illusion.
Everyone is aligned with Davos, or more precisely with what Davos talks about but does not own, namely technical progress. And these competing and converging technophile policies and agendas are validated by the people, who are always on the lookout for material comfort. Who can do without a computer or a smartphone these days? It's the prerequisite for keeping up with the pace of information, and for existing in the midst of others. Everyone is doing the same thing, trying to exist in a competitive world, in a movement of mimetic rivalry where we end up looking more and more like our adversary. Increasing conflict, but also increasing interdependence: this is the law of our interconnected world.
Edward [March]: As for encouraging readers to form an “independent opinion”—actually, I am constantly begging my readers to follow Russian media and stop relying on western “experts”. I’ve written two guides to help people get started.
I’m just a guy with a blog who writes about things that concern me (cattle tags, clot-shots, endless wars that cull the peasants while enriching the oligarchs, etc. etc.). I also live in Russia, so naturally the blog addresses these issues as I see them in Russia. If I lived in Idaho, my blog would be called Johnny Potatopants, and it would discuss the same issues, just in Idaho. I would like to use this opportunity to express my solidarity with all the anti-cattle tag activists in that fine state.
Lucien [September]: Yes, we need to form an independent opinion. And to do that, we can bypass the mass media and inform the population on computer blogs, using the tools of digital transformation and the Great Reset.
In his little book of 2020, Klaus Schwab announces the development of working from home. Everything is developing from home. Thanks to the internet and the fourth industrial revolution, you have access to hundreds of independent or alternative media at home. You no longer need to leave your home, information comes into your flat. The risk is that you work only on the screen and forget about the real world. I'm seeing this phenomenon in France, where people who claim to be independent of the mass media are starting to function like them, in other words reconstructing reality on the basis of what they find on the internet. They no longer feel the need to examine the real thing in order to talk about it. The personal and subjective impressions given by the screen are enough. As they are no longer bothered by the real object, which always sets limits to subjectivity, they can give free rein to their personal confirmation biases.
This is the mechanism of hallucination and psychosis, this time generated by virtual technologies. I have written an article on this subject, using examples from the news, in particular French comments on the Worldwide Freedom Initiative.
Edward [March]: I’m very sorry that you think I’m socially engineering people by sharing what Russians are saying about Russia, on topics that are of global importance and concern. The good news is that this is a small blog, and I’m quite sure that it has socially engineered no more than a few thousand people, maximum.
Lucien [September]: Your “little blog with no influence” is an entirely computerized object and owes the possibility of its material existence to the fourth digital industrial revolution. Let’s not spit in the soup we’re eating. Thanks to this computer blog, you are sharing part of what Russians are saying about Russia. This is the critical part of the all-technological and digital transformation, and you are right to support it because we need to keep a critical mind on these subjects, even if we are all players and simultaneously prisoners.
However, there is also another section of Russians who see no problem with the computerization of society and Smart Cities. I was an international observer during the 2024 presidential elections. We travelled around formerly Ukrainian regions that are still very poor, in the oblasts of Zaporozhie, Kherson and Crimea. In these regions, the population is delighted to be attached to Russia because it means the arrival of technical progress and modernity.
When you know the Russian mind, and more broadly the mind of Slavs, especially Belarusians, Ukrainians and Poles, you know that they have a major inferiority complex in relation to Westerners when it comes to economic, technological and even intellectual development. This inferiority complex began to be expressed in the institutional field at the end of the 17th century with Peter the Great, when he decided to modernize Russia by following a European model, which led to the founding of a new Russian capital in 1704: St Petersburg.
In the 19th century, this dominant-dominated complex was theorized by the “Westernist” school of thought, led by Russians who themselves affirmed Russia's backwardness in relation to the West. This race by Russians to catch up with the West seems never to have stopped, and the collective West takes it upon itself to remind the Slavs of its own superiority complex by always speaking of the countries of the East with condescending contempt. This is one of the main reasons for technophilia in Russia.
Edward [February]: Sometimes alternative media makes claims about Russia that are the exact opposite of observable reality. For example: Western alt media either outright lied about compulsory Covid vaccination in Russia or simply refused to cover this issue. In response, I pointed out (citing Russian sources, including official decrees, information published on government websites, and state media outlets) that Russia did in fact adopt coercive injection policies, and that these policies were supported and encouraged at the highest levels of government.
Lucien [February]: I don't see it that way at all. Western alternative media sympathetic to Russia have admitted their disappointment at seeing Russia follow the health dictatorship with such conformism.
Edward [March]: I’m glad to hear French independent media was critical of Moscow’s adoption of QR codes, compulsory vaccination, mask decrees, limiting or suspending routine medical care, and other health-destroying policies that were promoted by the WHO and the IMF (which, strangely enough, predicted the mass adoption of compulsory vaccination decrees in Russia following the State Duma elections in autumn 2021).
Unfortunately, these realities were either misrepresented or entirely ignored in English-language alternative media. One notable example was the popular blogger The Saker, who insisted that Russia had no form of compulsory vaccination. You can read an exchange I had with him in which he denied observable reality.
Lucien [February]: The independent French media that have spoken intelligently about the health dictatorship in Russia are written by French people living in Russia, like Xavier Moreau, Alexandre Latsa, and Karine Bechet-Golovko, whom you know. These French media have been very critical of the health dictatorship in Russia, but they also know how to qualify their comments. However, I have it on good authority that the application of health measures has been less harsh in Russia than in France. I've had several testimonies from French and Russians who travelled between Paris and Moscow between 2020 and 2022 and who have told me that things were very different indeed, whether because of popular resistance or because the Russian government didn't really believe the WHO’s propaganda. Putin himself never wore the mask.
Edward [March]: Putin never wore a mask, but he publicly supported the creation of a federal QR-coded “health” pass. On December 17, 2021, he said that he backed nationwide vaccine passports, “taking into account both moral motivations and the duties of my office”. Thankfully, the initiative was so unpopular that the State Duma shelved the idea.
I don’t agree with your notion that Putin was skeptical of WHO policies, and a review of his statements and actions during the “pandemic” does not support the idea that he was working to stop compulsory vaccination or other “public health” policies.
Even today, in 2024, people have to take PCR tests if they want an audience with Putin. This policy has even been confirmed by the Kremlin.
Lucien [September]: At least Putin knows masks are useless. That’s a point gained after all. I also know that PCR tests are requested at the entrance to economic forums in St Petersburg and Vladivostok. People in positions of power are often hypochondriacs, sometimes to the point of madness, and don't want to take any risks with their health, in Russia as elsewhere.
Without believing in the effectiveness of masks, it may be that Putin really is afraid of falling ill with the coronavirus. After all, he is already 71. He wants to remain totally available and active for his country for as long as possible, which requires a healthy lifestyle and prophylactic precautions to avoid falling ill in general, and not just from Covid-19. And imagine the satisfaction of the political and media powers that be in the West if Putin found himself in hospital with Covid-19.
The anti-Russian war propaganda, after having invented that Putin had cancer or a wooden leg, would become completely hysterical, and above all overjoyed. The Kremlin tries not to give the enemy this pleasure, especially in times of war, and it is careful to give a good image, which would be damaged if Putin fell ill with SARS-COV-2, and this is not the time. In addition, Russia’s human rights commissioner, Tatyania Moskalkova, opposed compulsory vaccination, as did Sergei Lavrov, who also opposed the health passport.
Edward [March]: Did Lavrov’s or Moskalkova’s views on vaccination prevail in Russia? In March 2021, Lavrov expressed concern that an EU vaccine passport system would contradict the principle of voluntary vaccination, and also infringe on the rights of Russians who want to travel within the bloc. Almost a year later, on February 2, 2022, Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development sent an application to the European Union asking for mutual recognition of coronavirus passports.
Lucien [February/September]: For the moment, all these projects seem to have ground to a halt. In fact, there is a tug of war going on within the global technocracy between the advocates of digital health dictatorship and their opponents. You can see this balance of power at the moment with the WHO’s contradictory statements on monkeypox: one day it's very dangerous, the next day it's not so serious, and so on. At national government level, many local councilors have been very lax.
As Russia is a federal state, health policies have been mixed in the different states of the federation. According to my sources, there are at least 3 Russian regions—Stavropol, Ingushetia and Tver—that have not applied any health measures. As a general rule, in your articles, you do not respect these nuances, which gives the illusion that the Russian government is in total agreement with the WHO’s ravings.
Edward [March]: You wrote that according to your sources, there were at least 3 Russian regions—Stavropol, Ingushetia and Tver—that never applied any health measures. I would encourage you to review your sources.
Ingushetia never adopted compulsory vaccination, but it did require QR codes for official or cultural events.
Stavropol adopted compulsory vaccination at the end of October 2021 for “persons over 60 years of age, law enforcement officers, state and municipal authorities, employees of medical and educational organizations, housing and communal services, catering, trade, transport, consumer services, students of universities and secondary vocational educational organizations over 18 years of age and a number of others.”
The policy was canceled in March 2022, according to TASS.
Tver actually had one of the first compulsory vaccination decrees in Russia. On June 19, 2021, the region announced that vaccination was mandatory for “workers in trade, catering, hotel services, multifunctional centers, public transport and taxis, education, healthcare, social protection and social services, housing and communal services and energy, theaters, cinemas, concert halls, and sports facilities. State and municipal employees, employees of government bodies of the Tver region and organizations subordinate to them are also required to get vaccinated.”
On October 26, 2021, Rospotrebnadzor head Anna Popova announced that every region in Russia had adopted some form of compulsory vaccination/QR code restrictions.
The announcement was presented as an accomplishment, not a criticism, which naturally raises questions about the federal government’s involvement in pushing “regional” vaccination decrees (actually, there are no questions: all available evidence clearly demonstrates that these policies were fully backed by federal agencies, as well as the Kremlin).
Lucien [September]: Thank you for this information, which I must take into account to correct my analysis of the facts. According to the Parliamentary Gazette article you link to, Ingushetia seems to have escaped the QR codes too.
[NOTE FROM EDWARD (SEPTEMBER): No. Wrong. It doesn’t say that. It says that Ingushetia was the last holdout before all regions adopted some form of compulsory vaccination. You can read news reports about Ingushetia adopting QR codes. You can even read the QR code decree on the Ingushetia Republic’s government website.]
Lucien [continued]: The sanitary dictatorship descended on Russia in 2020, but the so-called “sanitary measures” were not always applied seriously in that country, for a variety of reasons: rebellion by the population, passive resistance by local elected representatives, willful laxity on the part of the forces of law and order, and so on. I haven't archived them, but I should have, in anticipation of this discussion. I take into account the facts that you report, but I would like to add some nuances and that I am not drawing any global or definitive geopolitical conclusions, apart from the indisputable fact that Russia has been trapped and held hostage by the WHO and Big Pharma between 2020 and 2022, like dozens of other countries.
But on other issues, such as morality and the family, the Russian government retains a certain amount of common sense, and is in head-on opposition to the collective West, which is supposedly progressive, LGBT and woke, but is in fact simply decadent. The Russian government’s recent decision to facilitate the ideological immigration of foreigners who share traditional values is a step in this direction.
Edward [March]: Russia experienced a mortality rate in 2021 that hadn’t been recorded since the end of the Great Patriotic War. The response to the fake Covid pandemic had a devastating affect on the health of Russians. The claim that things were somehow more humane or reasonable is not backed by data.
Lucien [September]: The article you link to is very interesting and shows that in Russia there is a contradictory debate between Russian demographers and statisticians on the real causes of this excess mortality. This debate does not even exist in France, because it is forbidden to think outside the official narrative, which attributes the excess mortality exclusively and directly to Covid-19 disease. Scientists who dare to challenge this official truth, such as statistician Pierre Chaillot, are immediately accused of “conspiracy theory”.
The article also shows that Russian scientists nevertheless agree that there will be an excess mortality rate of around 1 million people, from all causes, over the period 2020-2021. As a comment, I would add that mortality rates are quantifiable and measurable, but quality of life is not, or is much harder to measure, as we have to rely on personal and subjective testimonies. To compare just two countries, the assertion that life was harder in France than in Russia in the years 2020-2022 is supported by all the testimonies I have gathered from French, Russians and bi-nationals who lived and travelled between France and Russia during this period. At this stage of the reasoning, I admit that it’s difficult to quantify and objectify things, it’s word against word, and there’s no referee.
Edward [February]: Alt media (including yourself, Lucien) claimed that the introduction of the digital ruble, unlike other CBDCs, was actually a good thing. In response, I pointed out that the digital ruble is indistinguishable from the central bank currencies being promoted in the West, and furthermore, I meticulously documented how patriotic/conservative media in Russia—including mainstream Russian outlets like Tsargrad—have been highly critical of the digital ruble.
Lucien [February]: I never said that the introduction of the digital ruble was a good thing, I said that Russia has no choice. In short, if you don't develop your own digital currency, you will be subject to the digital currency of others. The world is a highly competitive place, particularly from an economic point of view, but also from a technological point of view. History is not written with good feelings or pure ideas, but with ruthless material power relations, optimized by technology. Because technology enhances the human body and its capabilities. Technology makes us stronger, at least in the short term. It's a headlong rush, a crescendo, a climb to the extremes, and no one can escape it, except to withdraw from the competition, forfeit, and let the opponent win.
Edward [March]: But if the digital ruble is no different from other CBDCs (“bad”), how does that shield Russia from the negative effects of other CBDCs? Or I guess your point is that it doesn’t, but Russia has to do bad things anyway, to make sure that its the one doing the bad things, and not the West? Okay but that’s not particularly reassuring. Also: Russia already has a way to bypass SWIFT (its Financial Messaging System).
Lucien [September]: To understand geopolitics, we need to apply game theory, i.e. the universal theory of power relations, the scientific modelling of competitive and conflictual interactions. Several philosophers have paved the way. As Heraclitus said, we must recognize that combat is the father of all things, and as Nietzsche theorized, the only valid question in existence is how to prevail over my adversary, beyond good and evil? There are no right or wrong things, just economic power struggles that can only be won by fighting the enemy on equal terms, using the same technology or another more powerful technology that I invent and that will give me a competitive advantage over the enemy.
As it happens, information technology is always moving in the same direction, towards dematerialization, which creates a feeling of material comfort, and therefore pleasure, for example with contactless payment. The competitive advantage of dematerialization, or digitization, is the acceleration of information flows. We are already dependent on information technology, which makes it possible to disseminate information a thousand times faster than printing, and 10,000 times faster than handwriting. CBDCs are just the next logical step. Traceability and remote control, and therefore the end of privacy, are the consequences of this general competition optimized by digital technologies.
I'm not saying that this is a good thing, but I am saying that no one can escape it. Anyone who remains outside this system ends up marginalizing themselves and giving up their sovereignty. That’s why Russia developed the MIR electronic payment system, to remain competitive on the global economic stage after the first Western economic sanctions in 2015, which were paving the way for Russia’s total exclusion from the Western SWIFT payment system.
Edward [February]: Why am I guilty of creating “mistrust” in Putin and Russia (I’m not even sure what that means)? I didn’t know that citing what Russians inside Russia are saying about Russia was a crime against Russia. I appreciate that many of my blog posts directly contradict easily debunked baloney peddled by Western “independent” media, but I’m not sure why that constitutes “social engineering”?
Lucien [February]: The social bond is structured by three types of relationship: trust, mistrust and indifference. Social engineering consists of methodically taking control of the social bond by taking control of these relationships of trust, mistrust and indifference within a group or between different groups, in order to vary these three types of relationship at will, and thus build and deconstruct human groups by voluntarily modifying the form of the social bond. Everyone does it intuitively, or even unconsciously, but social engineering consists of doing it consciously, like management and team-building, to create alliances and new groups by building trust, or to set up triangulated conflicts, divide and rule, and break up a group or prevent it coming together by creating mistrust. There may be good reasons for creating distrust in an individual, a group or a country. That's what you mean when you try to break down the trust that certain Westerners, individuals or media, might have in Russia.
Edward [February]: Are you suggesting that the default position of alternative media should be to “trust” Putin and Russia (again, I’m not even sure what that would entail)? But doesn’t independent media exist to create a free exchange of ideas in order to help people make up their own minds about what the heck is going on in our crazy world? I would hope that alternative media is beholden to no one and isn’t answerable to any government? Whether or not Russian adopted WHO-endorsed “public health” measures may not be important to you, but let me assure you—it’s quite relevant if you live in Russia.
Lucien [February]: To begin with, the Russian vaccine Sputnik V has never been approved by the WHO. Perhaps because it’s not dangerous enough? Do you have any figures on the adverse effects of the Russian vaccine, to compare with those of Western vaccines? For my part, I have found figures on mortality (смертность) after injection of the various vaccines. A Russian study based on official figures released by 13 countries - India, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Austria, Italy, Norway, Denmark and Russia - showed in April 2021 that the mortality rate after injection of Pfizer's vaccine in these 13 countries was on average 39.4 deaths per million doses injected; Moderna: 20.2 deaths; AstraZeneca: 12.8 deaths; Johnson & Johnson: 7.5 deaths; Sputnik V: 2 deaths. The authors of the study acknowledge that a direct and linear cause-and-effect relationship has not been clearly established, but by April 2021 disturbing patterns and correlations were already being observed in terms of the level of danger posed by vaccines.
It is legitimate to object that this study, promoted by a Russian state investment fund, is not neutral and that it is designed to promote the Russian vaccine commercially. Perhaps it is. Conflicts of interest exist everywhere, especially in the medical sector, but they are not systematic either, and objectivity still exists in science. If you have any other figures, I'd be delighted to hear them.
On the other hand, treatment against Covid-19 with hydroxychloroquine has been authorized in Russia, unlike in France where it has been censored. At least for the masses, because the authorities have used it and even acknowledged it publicly (see Christian Estrosi, Mayor of Nice). Professor Didier Raoult defended this fairly conventional treatment, which works well but competes with vaccines. As a result, he was lynched by the media on the orders of the vaccine merchants. Fortunately for him, he was close to retirement, otherwise his career would have been ruined. In contrast, the health and medical authorities in Russia, not being subject to the vaccine producers, allowed this inexpensive treatment to compete with vaccines, including Sputnik V.
I am not suggesting that Putin and Russia should be trusted by default. I am wondering why some people are trying to create distrust of Putin and Russia. If you compare it to the collective West, that "empire of lies", there's nothing to be alarmed about in Russia. Nothing is perfect, nothing is ideal, but if you're looking for a real 'banana republic', where the mafia rules, then welcome to France.
Edward [March]: If Sputnik V is safe and effective, why is the Russian government withholding the clinical trial results of this drug? Meanwhile, numerous Russian doctors have reported that Sputnik V has been linked to severe adverse events.
I would encourage you to read a report filed in October 2021 by Katyusha.org about medical professionals in Russia who spoke out about post-vaccination complications and the lack of safety monitoring in the country.
Notably, official post-vaccination data collected by Argentina (which used Sputnik V and several Western shots) shows that Russia’s vaccine was comparable (and in some categories worse) to AstraZeneca’s safety record.
It would be great to have access to similar data in Russia, except it doesn’t exist.
Lucien [September]: I read your article, with Susan the cat, on the Sputnik V vaccine, which seems to confirm that the dangers of the Russian vaccine are similar to those of the AstraZeneca vaccine, because it's the same technology, and almost the same vaccine. Difficult to estimate, since the Russian government keeps pharmacovigilance figures secret. If it makes you feel any better, all the figures are wrong, in Russia as in the West, either because of intentional falsification or methodological falsification, or because of under-reporting of side-effects or over-reporting of side-effects, including death.
A direct and linear cause-and-effect relationship between a vaccination and a side effect is difficult to prove when it is delayed in time, and we are often limited to highlighting statistical correlations, i.e. strong presumptions, clusters of clues. One thing is certain: the WHO's health policies are increasing physical and mental illness. People are less healthy in 2024 than they were in 2019, but I think it’s multi-factorial.
To compare the covidist madness between Russia and the West, you have to take all the figures with a grain of salt, and I’m afraid we're limited to personal accounts, with all the subjective biases that implies. On the other hand, the hydroxychloroquine treatment for Covid-19 has been authorized in Russia, unlike in France, where it has been censored.
I’m not suggesting that Putin and Russia should be trusted by default. I'm wondering why some people are trying to create distrust in Putin and Russia. If you compare it to the collective West, that “empire of lies”, there’s nothing to be alarmed about in Russia. Nothing is perfect, nothing is ideal, but if you’re looking for a real ‘banana republic’, where the mafia rules, then welcome to France.
Edward [March]: Regarding your statements about Hydroxychloroquine. The drug received authorization for about 1 year in Russia, from April 2020 until May 2021, when it was removed from a list of Covid medications approved by the Health Ministry.
In autumn 2021, the Health Ministry “optimized” Covid treatment by adding remdesivir to its list of approved medications. Not very scientific, in my humble opinion.
Again, I don’t understand what creating “distrust in Putin and Russia” means, but since you agree that it shouldn’t be the default position of independent media to “trust” Putin and Russia, I guess it doesn’t matter that much.
Lucien [September]: I note that the opponents of hydroxychloroquine in Russia have won the battle in May 2021. On remdesivir: as is often the case in experimental science, results and conclusions change over time. For example, between 2020 and 2022, the WHO said one thing and its opposite—first it was against remdesivir, then for it—see the update published in April 2022, to correct a press release from November 2020.
Having said that, on the whole, I agree with you that the pharmaceutical industry is dangerous, in Russia as elsewhere. And I believe that, by default, we should be wary of and critical of the pharmaceutical industry, in Russia as elsewhere. To conclude on the causes of excess mortality: a recent Canadian study tends to show that it is above all the poor response of public health services that has led to an artificial increase in mortality in the period 2020-2023. Vaccines would have only a limited responsibility. In any case, I think you and I will agree that it is not the virus that has caused this excess mortality.
Edward [February]: Can you explain to me why the topics I cover on my blog are brought up on a daily basis in Russian information spaces by patriotic Russians (across the political spectrum)? Is it because they are engaged in “social engineering” against Putin and their own country? Maybe they just want a better future for the country they live in? Or are Russians who are critical of their government’s Unified Biometric Database engaged in NATO propaganda?
Lucien [February]: All industrialized countries have biometric databases. Russians who criticize their government’s databases should perhaps take a little more interest in the biometric databases that the USA and NATO are building on Russians. Have you heard about the biological weapons laboratories that NATO was developing in Ukraine? Criticizing Russian biometric databases on Russians without first, and foremost, criticizing NATO’s anti-Russian biometric databases on Russians does indeed sound like propaganda for NATO. Subtle propaganda by omission. Once again, Russia is not my subject, but I am obliged to react when people try to make me believe that things are worse than in the West.
Edward [March]: What do biometric databases have to do with Ukrainian biolabs and alleged bioweapons? Not sure if I follow your logic. But if we take the Ukrainian “bioweapon” claims at face value, one has to wonder why Russia’s Sanitary Shield, which is supposed to safeguard the country’s biosecurity, relies heavily on PCR tests (which are not fit for purpose) and genetic vaccines (not properly tested and unproven). That doesn’t seem like a very good way to protect against a real biothreat. But that’s just my opinion.
Lucien [September]: My logic is that of the weapons race (arms race). The starting point is this: using its biometric databases on Russians, NATO is developing biological weapons in laboratories located on Ukrainian territory to strike the Russian population. If the Russian government wants to support the balance of power, at least defensively, in the field of biological weapons, with an appropriate health shield, it must also rely on biometric databases concerning its own population, to produce the antidotes and cures for diseases created by genetic manipulation and gain of function in the Ukrainian NATO laboratories to hit the Russian population.
Russia’s biosecurity policy is subordinated to this requirement for the protection and survival of Russians. But Russian health policy is partially under Western and globalist ideological influence. As we have seen since 2020, the WHO and Big Pharma manage to subvert Russian biosecurity, which explains the excesses and submission to sorts of fads and new trends such as PCR tests.
Edward [February]: You claim: “technology is … a bus that never stops and that everyone wants to drive. It's like the weapons race, no one can escape it, except by disarming themselves and letting the other side win”. How does not developing experimental genetic “vaccines” allow “the other side to win”? As I asked in my response to an article you wrote in autumn 2023, what does Russia gain from mimicking the self-immolation of its purported enemies? The idea that Moscow would be somehow “left behind” if it didn’t adopt dangerous, invasive, and anti-human technologies doesn’t make sense to me.
There are plenty of technologies that are embraced by some countries but have been rejected by others for various reasons, including over safety or security concerns. Electronic [I meant to write online — Edward] voting (which is being rapidly adopted in Russia) is a perfect example. Can you please explain why you think that Russia would be at a disadvantage if it decided not to embrace technologies that seem to have no benefit for the Russian people?
Lucien [February]: If Russia hadn’t developed its own vaccine, Western vaccines would have invaded the Russian market and Pfizer’s vaccine would have been injected into the Russian people.
Russia’s health sovereignty demanded that it develop its own vaccine, capable of competing with Western vaccines. This example illustrates the constraints that weigh on national policies, reducing the margin of freedom of socio-political actors. You can’t do what you want, even if your name is Putin, because you constantly have to take account of other countries, to which you are forced to adapt your behavior. And when these other countries develop an invasive technology capable of invading me, I have to bring myself up to the same level of technological development in order to deploy a defensive technological response, to start with, and then possibly an offensive one, at a later stage, at least to dissuade my adversary. Obviously, Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine has been heavily criticized, notably by the European Union, as Russian health nationalism.
Some commentators, including yourself, approach these issues as if they were a matter of freedom of choice. There is no choice with technology, which advances in a systemic, enveloping, standardizing and non-selective a priori ethical and human way. Everything that can be done will be done, for better or for worse, and there's no going back, with a few exceptions. Everyone is obliged to comply and move forward, because renouncing the use of a technology will not prevent others from continuing to use it, and shaping the techno-scientific paradigm in which I also subsist, and which will end up encircling me anyway, even if I don't want to participate (cf. Ted Kaczynski).
This compulsory systemic commitment can be found at nation-state level. A country that renounces a given technology renounces its own ability to act in the world and its will to power. We must forget the illusions of metaphysics, which make you believe in free will, as if we were pure spirits detached from the world. Bioethics is a purely theoretical activity. In the beginning is not the Word, but the relationship. We are always already caught up in systems of social interaction, which take the form of power relations and calculations of interest, and which overdetermine our behavior.
The best way to understand what's going on is through game theory and the weapons race. Everyone is in competition with everyone else, trying to gain an advantage over everyone else, and it's technological innovation, and nothing else, that sustains these universal power relations. In other words, everyone imitates everyone else, but to try and outdo the competition. People are technophiles too. You're like that too: you use computers, and you'd be at a disadvantage if you didn't, because your readership would be divided by thousands. In other words, you have been augmented by computers, which give you a greater capacity to disseminate information than the average human in the pre-computer age. Gutenberg's invention of the printing press made the same leap forward possible in his own time.
When a new technology is not adopted or is rejected, it's because the material means to develop it don't exist, or because it's too dysfunctional. But as long as the cost-benefit ratio seems to be positive, we keep moving forward. For example, electronic voting poses a number of problems. In France, there has been a moratorium for years, but some MPs are calling for it to be lifted to make up for the lack of volunteers to help count ballot boxes at polling stations. So technology is going to replace the human, because the human is failing.
It's only a matter of time before we're all completely dependent on the new technologies of our time. Let's look at the history of science and technology. Transhumanist augmentation of the human body begins with the first weapons and tools. New technologies are always initially developed within a highly competitive military framework, because military issues are matters of life and death. If the enemy develops technologies more powerful than mine, I am potentially invaded, colonized and destroyed. Then, these new technologies find civilian applications by trickle-down effect or societal contamination, like fashions and new trends.
Laboratory researchers in every military-industrial complex on the planet spend their time spying on each other while they're still in the R&D phase, but once the technology has become commonplace, after 2 or 3 generations, it becomes normalized and infuses the whole of society. Nuclear power began with the bombing of Japan, then was harnessed in factories to produce electricity for the population. The Internet was first invented by the military under the name Arpanet, then came into civilian use 30 years later. Cybernetics and IT are generally objects of military technical innovation dating back to the 2nd World War, and today nobody can do without them. To criticize Russia's digital transformation, you yourself use the tools of digital transformation. And you can’t give them up.
To simply address these questions of philosophy of science, ask yourself: “Can I live today without a computer, without the Internet, without a smartphone?” Tell me frankly. If you answer "yes" in this article published on your computer blog, then you're contradicting yourself and lying to yourself.
On the other hand, your grandparents lived very well without these new computer technologies. Your grandparents lived very well without these technologies because they didn’t exist materially, not because they decided not to use them. If these computer technologies had existed at the time, they would have used them and become dependent on them, just as they used the technologies that existed during their lifetime—radio, television, the landline telephone - and were dependent on them too. And that's how history moves forward, through the manufacture of consent as technological thresholds are crossed.
Edward [March]: The claim that Sputnik V was created to counter Big Pharma doesn’t make sense to me, mostly because Sputnik V is virtually identical to AstraZeneca’s vaccine (which is not a coincidence). Cooperation between the Russian government and AstraZeneca began shortly after Moscow announced its intention to create a Covid vaccine. Almost a full month before Sputnik V was unveiled to the world, AstraZeneca transferred its “adenoviral vector” to Russian pharma firm R-Pharm as part of a deal to make Russia “one of the hubs for the production and supply of [AstraZeneca’s] vaccine to international markets.”
This partnership strengthened over the months, to the point where AstraZeneca and the Russian government signed a memorandum of cooperation, which included joint tests with AstraZeneca and Sputnik V. In a ceremony marking the deal in December 2020, Putin said Russia’s partnership with AstraZeneca would “protect the life, health and safety of millions of people on the planet as a whole.” Putin told the CEO of AstraZeneca: “I want to wish you success not only in the Russian market, but also in global markets, and express hope that the new year will be favorable both for your company and for solving the problems that we are talking about now.”
There are many other details about the Sputnik V-AstraZeneca partnership that you can read about here.
If you think that Sputnik V was designed to keep mRNA tech out of Russia (even if it may be the same genetic blood clot tech used by AstraZeneca), I’m afraid that also doesn’t seem to be the case.
The Gamaleya Center, which allegedly created Sputnik V, announced in September 2022 that it was developing its own mRNA shot. There have been several follow ups to this announcement, including the idea that mRNA technology can be used to create “canned food” for the rapid creation of new genetic vaccines.
In December, a Russian firm revealed that it had started producing components for mRNA vaccines.
More recently, at the end of February, Gamaleya Direct Alexander Gintsburg told TASS that he thought that mRNA technology could be harnessed to fight cancer. Personally, I’m not convinced that mRNA technology has shown itself to be safe, and I’m not sure why Russian mRNA should be trusted over Western mRNA. I don’t trust either.
I’m not sure how Russia’s close cooperation with AstraZeneca (including agreements to produce AstraZeneca’s vaccine for export) supports your theory that Sputnik V was a way to protect Russians from Big Pharma. And I’m also not sure why tens of millions of Russians were coerced into being injected with an unproven AstraZeneca clone—I’m not sure why that was necessary.
Lucien [September]: The purely economic law of commercial competition, coupled with Russia’s legitimate demand for health sovereignty, led Russia to develop its own vaccine, capable of competing with Western vaccines, and therefore applying similar technology to be taken seriously—which also led to a partnership with AstraZeneca. The experimental nature of the Sputnik V vaccine, and therefore its potential danger to Russian health, stems from the urgency with which it was developed, in order not to lose the scientific and commercial race. This example illustrates the constraints that weigh on national policies and reduce the freedom of socio-political actors. You can’t do what you want, even if your name is Putin, because you have to constantly take account of other countries and economic players, to whom we are forced to adapt our behavior, whether competitive or cooperative.
And when these other countries develop an invasive technology capable of invading me, I have to quickly bring myself up to the same level of technological development, in order to deploy a defensive technological response. The problem is that in this hurriedly competitive process, public health becomes an almost secondary objective, because the first priority is to have a product to present rather than nothing at all, even if the product is not perfect and has not yet passed all the safety tests. It’s the eternal problem of striking a balance between benefit and risk.
Edward [February]: You wrote in your opening statement: “Russia is developing a more conservative and cautious digital strategy than in the West”. Can you provide some examples? The Bank of Russia’s CBDC is months (perhaps years) ahead of its analogues in the West. Russia is also rapidly developing digital and biometric IDs. How is this possible if Moscow is taking a more “cautious and conservative” strategy?
Lucien [February]: I’m not convinced that Russia is so far ahead of the game when it comes to digital transformation. France has been developing digital identity since at least 2004, the date of publication of the “Blue Book” by Gixel, the French digital lobby.
Russia is obviously contaminated by technophilia. An article in the Russian press on the arrival of social credit in Russia stated: "It's worth noting that in 2020, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair called the introduction of a digital identity card 'inevitable' in a conversation with Mr. Gref, and the head of the World Economic Forum, said that, whether people like it or not, ‘sooner or later the world will arrive at a universal identity card for citizens and an entirely digital currency’.”
How can we fight digital transformation? The people who are asking this question, like you and me, i.e. the people who want to oppose digital transformation, are doing so using the tools of digital transformation. In a way, it's absurd: we're ranting against Bill Gates and his Great Reset, using the tools that Bill Gates has made available to us to communicate and that will bring about the Great Reset.
We write our texts against Bill Gates and his Great Reset on a word processor called Word, developed by Microsoft, owned by Bill Gates, a figure who horrifies us but who has given us the means to communicate amongst ourselves, including polemically, against digital transformation, using the internet, email and digital technologies, therefore without leaving our homes, therefore "without contact", therefore applying a central point of the Great Reset. In other words, you can't fight digital transformation, you can only mitigate it.
There are two factors committing the whole world to new technologies. The first is international competition of the weapons race type, which is the real driver of technological innovation, a universal phenomenon from which no one can escape. The second is ideological prometheism, a mixture of technophile candor and naïve progressivism, which can be rejected entirely, just as naively, by renouncing scientific research, and therefore renouncing our sovereignty, but which can also be mitigated and qualified by a prudent and conservative approach that does not renounce technical development. I have the impression that Russia is trying to take up the challenge of archaeo-futurism, in the sense of Guillaume Faye, i.e. not allowing itself to be overtaken by the technological innovation of other powers, supporting its own technological innovation - because technological sovereignty is the condition for political and geopolitical sovereignty - but without abandoning its traditional culture and deep-rooted identity, or falling into a sick transhumanism like that of the LGBT West.
Technology threatens human identity with innumerable abuses, but Putin’s speeches on Russia's digital sovereignty show that the Russian authorities are aware of these threats—as are Western conservatives like Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban and the Polish PIS, but they do not exercise power, or only with difficulty. Nevertheless, like everyone else, Russia is obliged to keep pace with competition in order to remain competitive on an international scale and protect its sovereignty.
History has a meaning, determined by technological innovation. All online digital activity is the basis of the fourth industrial revolution announced by Klaus Schwab, and we are all directly participating in it. Everyone who uses the internet is working to bring about the Great Reset. Digital transformation is therefore not a discriminating criterion, in the epistemological sense, for judging what is happening in Russia, because it is universal. It's metapolitical, and even metahistorical.
Now, if you want to take a serious stand against Agenda 2030, CBDCs and transhumanism, start by throwing your smartphone in the bin and disconnecting yourself from the internet, blogs and social networks. There’s no point in warning against Smart Cities, 5G, the end of cash, or chips implanted in the brain. You're already completely connected, chipped and tracked with the GPS in your smartphone, which also has a facial recognition camera, and you're yourself participating in the dematerialization of currencies and the digitization of existence.
Technology is creating voluntary servitude. We are its victims, but we consent to it. In fact, since the 1980s and the advent of computers for the general public, you have already voluntarily and freely passed through all the successive and irreversible stages of the fourth industrial revolution, and thus of your alienation in the virtual. I see a lot of people like you complaining on the Internet about the digital prison they are in the process of building themselves.
To rationalize this internal contradiction, this cognitive dissonance, they look for a scapegoat, Russia for example. Don’t get me wrong: we obviously need to denounce digital dictatorship, but why pick on Russia when we are all part of it? Perhaps we should put our own house in order before criticizing our neighbors.
Edward [March]: You didn’t really answer my question. Can you provide examples of Russia’s cautious and conservative approach to digitalization, and if this is how Moscow approaches digitalization, why is it months/years ahead of the West in many areas?
Lucien [September]: For example, the Russian government is working to develop artificial intelligence that respects Russian culture and identity. There are already differences between the Western AI ChatGPT, which is totally obedient to the Woke and LGBT ideology, and the Russian AI YandexGPT, which is also influenced by this ideology, but less so than its Western counterpart. For more details on these topics, I refer the reader to my article ‘Russia and the Great Reset’.
Edward [February]: In your essay “Russia and the Great Reset”, you claimed Moscow was in the process of withdrawing from the WHO. Can you updated us about this? The federal government has repeatedly stated since May 2022 that it has no intention of leaving the WHO. Just last week, Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said it would be “illogical and inappropriate” to leave the World Health Organization.
Lucien [September]: To be precise, I'm not saying that Moscow is in the process of withdrawing from the WHO, I'm quoting Piotr Tolstoy, Deputy Chairman of the State Duma, who spoke publicly in 2022 about withdrawing Russia from all the world organizations that claim to dictate policy to Russia, and he cited the WHO among others. In an article in 2023, you mocked this declaration by pointing out how many weeks had passed since this declaration without anything happening. But you're an adult, and you know that Russia has been in the WHO for several decades now, and that in these conditions of alienation, the administrative and bureaucratic time it will take to regain total health sovereignty will also take several years.
Everyone is aware that the Russian government may fail to leave the WHO, because the globalists are powerful in that country too. As far as I know, the other countries where there is a debate at the head of the state on the nuisance of the WHO are the USA, Brazil and several African countries. Russia may also decide to have one foot in and one foot out of the WHO, as it did in the days of the USSR. And it may also be that Russia and other countries manage to bend the WHO from within, without needing to leave or destroy it, so that it does not succeed in achieving its ultimate project, the end of the health sovereignty of nation states, i.e. the end of multipolarity in the health field.
The statements made by Rospotrebnadzor, the Russian federal consumer protection agency, on the base economic motivations of the WHO and its concept of “Disease X” presented at Davos 2024 show that Russia's health authorities are increasingly critical of the health dictatorship.
Russia has many good reasons for opposing the WHO. In November 2023, the Russian parliament passed a law banning LGBT propaganda, especially among children. However, the WHO is in favour of LGBT propaganda and promotes sex reassignment for children and sex education from birth. In France, and in several other European countries, paedophiles have seized power and are defining school curricula. Transvestites and transsexuals are allowed into schools for workshops on early masturbation.
The European Union and the Anglo-Americans are at the heart of this sick system that is in the process of collapsing. For its part, Russia still has the means to maintain a balance of power with the WHO on several issues, not only because the WHO has never recognised the Russian vaccine Sputnik V, but also because of the LGBT issue and the issue of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), on which the WHO is very lax. Over the years, the Russian parliament has taken a series of measures to drastically control GMOs on its territory, in order to limit or even ban their consumption, with an exception for basic research. While it is not possible to completely stop research into GMOs, as it is not possible to stop science, it is possible to ban their commercial production and thus limit their consumption.
Edward [March]: You wrote: “to be precise, I'm not saying that Moscow is in the process of withdrawing from the WHO...”
I am now quoting directly from the English translation of your article (“Russia and the Great Reset”): “Russia is planning to take the lead and recreate its own space of independence and alternative international relations by extricating itself completely from the system under Western control.” Then you excerpt Tolstoy’s statement.
What happened after Tolstoy made that statement? If you don’t know, I’ll tell you: Russia’s Health Ministry said it had no plans to leave the WHO. Russia’s Foreign Ministry said the same thing. You are taking a statement from a lawmaker that was repudiated by the federal government and claiming that it is representative of Russia’s position towards the WHO.
Here’s what I wrote in response to your article:
It’s been 488 days since Tolstoy made these comments. What has happened since May 18, 2022? Nothing. Worse than nothing, actually, because Russia’s Health Ministry immediately rebuked the State Duma, stating that “cooperation with the WHO is effective and mutually beneficial”. Then Sergei Lavrov got on the phone with Dr. Tedros and reaffirmed “Russia’s support for the central role of the WHO”.
Again, I’m asking: Since you wrote that Russia is planning on “extricating itself completely from the system under Western control”, and then cited Tolstoy’s comments about leaving the WHO and other organizations, what is the status of this “plan”?
And why exactly is Tolstoy’s comment relevant if the federal government has repeatedly stated over the past year that it has no intention of withdrawing from the WHO?
Lucien [September]: Piotr Tolstoy is the spokesman for one part of the Russian state bureaucracy, and the other leaders you mention are the spokesmen for another part of that same Russian state bureaucracy. All we can say is that there are internal contradictions within this Russian bureaucracy, with people who are against the WHO, others who are for it, and others who think they can 'live with it', on a case-by-case basis, without trying to change everything and turn the tables. In my previous answer, I gave the underlying reasons why the Russian government is opposed to the WHO on certain issues, but on other issues, the Russian government may be in agreement with the WHO.
Edward [February]: You warn about a “pro-Western liberal globalist fifth column working to integrate Russia into unipolar globalization”. What is your definition of “unipolar globalization”? Also, can you name some of these liberal fifth columnists in Russia?
Lucien [February]: We need to distinguish between two factors in globalization, i.e. the standardization of the world. The first is neither political nor intentional: it’s scientific discovery and its applied consequences. Technological innovation is a process of apolitical unification of the world. The laws of physics are universal. They are the same for everyone. When the human brain discovers and exploits them, it homogenizes its environment. This mechanism overdetermines political choices; it is stronger than willpower, and leaves little choice or room for maneuver, not least because of the competitive emulation that grips all players in research, and the rapid adoption of new products by consumers, inducing new uses and new sociological behaviors. So there's a fatalism about technological globalization, which translates into the deployment of ambient or ubiquitous computing, i.e. artificial intelligence fused into the environment, and which will regulate our lives and our relationships between connected objects and subjects. This is the 4th industrial revolution, in which we are all taking part as soon as we make use of computer technologies.
Secondly, and in parallel, there is a political project to unify the world and overcome geopolitical multipolarity. Its aim is the abolition of national sovereignties and the ever-increasing centralization of power. Its ideology is the open society supported by George Soros, or the liquid society described by Zygmunt Bauman. In short, it’s liberalism at its most individualistic. Its three pillars are those of the European Union: immigration, LGBT, and... Russophobia! Visceral, systematic, pathological. Russians refer to this essentially Western, Russophobic front as the "collective West". The fifth column in Russia is made up of all those individuals who admire this Western, anti-Russian model, and who would like to import it and apply it in Russia.
Most people are familiar with media agitators, such as the recently deceased Alexei Navalny, who died after suffering a fatal thrombosis as a side-effect of his multiple injections of Pfizer vaccine. This fifth column could also include all those who work to create an exaggeratedly negative image of Russia. There are certainly reasons to criticize Russia, but the absolute priority is to put an end to the political project of unipolar globalization supported by the collective West.
Edward [March]: I live in Russia and I write a blog about issues that matter to me and many others who live in Russia. I’m sorry that this is not a priority for you, but you are welcome to prioritize things that you think are more important. I’m 100% OK with that.
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Edward [February]: In your opinion, does BRICS offer a clear alternative to what is being proposed by global structures like the G20?
Lucien [February]: If there are politicians and peoples capable of putting an end to the chaos of the West, they will be found among the BRICS. We can also talk about the global South, which is beginning to awaken and become aware of its strength. In 2023, we witnessed a succession of putsches in sub-Saharan Africa to kick out the French and American colonial presence, and move closer to Russia and China. Why did this happen? Because France and the USA place “LGBT rights” at the heart of their international diplomacy. Third World countries can put up with having their natural resources plundered by Western invaders if, in return, these Western invaders build a few roads or railroads. But when the Western invader wants to hand over your children to drag-queens and pedophiles, the local populations and their armies still have the good sense to say "Stop!" and rise up. I have the impression that Black Africa can also be counted on to set limits for the WHO. Even China has rebelled against health globalism. In December 2022, China's health authorities decided to overturn the international norm and stop including comorbidities and asymptomatic cases in Covid-19 statistics, bringing the total number of deaths since the start of the epidemic to just 5,242. Some will say that the exact figure may be underestimated, but it's the revolution in the method of calculation that counts. Wang Guiqiang, Director of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Beijing University's First Hospital, said: “Deaths resulting primarily from pneumonia or respiratory failure caused by the new coronavirus will be counted as COVID-19 deaths, while patients who died from other pre-existing diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, will not be included.”
Edward [March]: Suggesting China offers a more humane approach to “public health” seems bold to me. But you are welcome to your opinion. The larger point here though is that BRICS openly promotes the same agenda as the G20, although it’s debatable which organization is more sustainable.
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Edward [February]: You write that the war in Ukraine “began with the Ukrainian putsch in 2014.” I don’t disagree (and I don’t think Iurie does, either). However, I worry that the SMO will not be able to accomplish its aims as stated by Putin in February 2022. For example, how will this war prevent the formation of a permanent anti-Russia in Ukraine? It seems to me that the war has actually cemented this transformation. If you think these concerns are unfounded and unreasonable, can you explain why?
Lucien [February]: The permanent anti-Russian movement had already been formed, cemented and in power in Ukraine since the 2014 putsch and NATO’s annexation of the country. The purpose of the Russian military operation is precisely to free Ukraine from this anti-Russian movement, by freeing it from NATO and the anti-Russian foreign NGOs that carried out the two color revolutions (2004 and 2014). This anti-Russian movement is expansionist: the Azov regiment’s slogan was “Today Ukraine. Tomorrow Russia and all of Europe” ("Сегодня Украина. Завтра Россия и вся Европа"), and it was preparing an ethnic cleansing of the Donbass in spring 2022.
After the Russian retaliation, the Ukrainian army was defeated in March 2022 and peace talks to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine had begun in Istanbul. But Boris Johnson said “Let's fight”, and the war resumed, under Western control, to the last Ukrainian. The Russian army is now obliged to liberate all Ukrainian territory. But how? We are witnessing an encirclement maneuver from within.
After liberating the eastern and south-eastern regions, the Russian government is going to organize new referendums on Russian integration in the Odessa and Transnistria regions. The Russian army will then move up along the western borders, and on to Belarus. To carry out this operation, the Russian army is saving its forces, because it knows that war is not a question of speed, but of endurance.
For its part, NATO no longer has the means to match its ambitions. Western capitalism has always been torn between its two contradictory aspects: consumerism and militarism. But it is consumerism, and therefore hedonism and individualism, that has won this internal battle. Militarism, with its values of individual sacrifice, has completely deserted the Western mindset. Troop morale is at an all-time low. No one will die for Zelensky. All that’s left for NATO is clandestine operations, carried out by terrorists, paramilitaries and fanatical mercenaries.
Edward [March]: Ukraine has never been more intertwined with NATO. That’s what I meant when I expressed concern that the SMO was actually exacerbating the problems that existed pre-February 2022. I would certainly hope that eventually the Russian military is able to push the UAF out of Donetsk and Lugansk. It seems premature to talk about Odessa, but who knows. I guess we’ll see.
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Sheesh, that was rather long. This guy has basically learned to love the Algorithm Ghetto. Which means there is really no point in being anti-EU or anti-NATO. He may as well just learn to love the EU and NATO also! Because, as he points out, East and West both de facto now have to develop and implement the Digital Gulag...in my mind, the primary directive of the EU/NATO (Global North) is to create a global Algorithm Ghetto! And apparently it is so for the Global South. So we end up at the same place anyway.
And he has been disingenuous regarding accusations...how difficult is it to understand that one can both be anti-EU and anti-NATO (ourselves as Westerners) and not pro-Moscow or pro-Beijing?
And I don't understand the Putin bromance (or any politician or state for that matter).
But he does have a good point about the digital system being global now, it being a universal paradigm, and everyone being possibly forced to participate, though I am not certain that needs to be the case. Ultimately, he sounds like an apologist for the 4IR transhuman Great Reset when he says the world accepts it and that we accept it. No, some of us do not, and some of us do not want to scan our eyeballs and be forced to own smart phones and are attempting to find ways to live without these new systems and go back to the old world.
“I'm looking for the ‘alternative’ or ‘provocative’ perspective in this [interview], but it sounds like French and NATO mass media”
-- What a lamer, he sets out looking for the specific narrative that would be emotionally satisfying to him, and when he finds that's not the reality, he blames the messenger, rather than the people who failed to live up to his expectations.