Elvira Nabiullina is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life
A reply to Simplicius' daring defense of the Bank of Russia's CBDC
There is a famous internet sage called Simplicius the Thinker, and recently he has been thinking tantalizing thoughts about Elvira Nabiullina and her centralized, programmable, traceable and completely wonderful digital tokens.
Simplicius “condemns” Central Bank Digital Currencies; he declares himself “about as anti-government/establishment/globalist as they come”. He expresses disdain for the central banking system, and agrees with the widely held belief that governments are duplicitous and undeserving of our trust.
But obviously the Bank of Russia’s CBDC is different from other CBDCs, and the Russian government is no ordinary government.
Simplicius “retain[s] a modest hope” that the Bank of Russia will use its centralized, programmable, traceable digital token to defeat the globalists. And we needn’t worry too much about the digital ruble being used as a tool of total control, because the Russian government “has a history of listening to its people’s demands quite a bit better than those in the West”.
That’s why the Bank of Russia, which is not part of the Russian government, is introducing a centralized, programmable, traceable digital token that an overwhelming 6% of Russians definitely want to use at some point in the future.
For more than a year now, your devoted correspondent has been pointing out that Russians inside Russia are not too keen on Elvira Nabiullina and her CBDC. The socialists, the monarchists, the neo-soviets, the conservatives, the military hardliners—with few exceptions, they all despise Elvira and her digital rubles.
In March, I anticipated Simplicius’ deep thoughts with an article that highlighted what Russian commentators were saying about the Bank of Russia’s CBDC:
"But the digital ruble is different"
Is the digital ruble the CBDC you’ve been waiting for your whole life? We hope so because it’s almost here. If everything goes according to plan, the legal framework for the Bank of Russia’s digital ruble (notice we didn’t type “Russia’s digital ruble”) will be
Also, why would the Bank of Russia need a centralized, programmable, traceable digital token to extricate Russia from the Western financial system, when it already has its own payment system (Mir)? I wrote about this at the end of July, and in the same article I suggested that perhaps it was a bad idea to shill the digital ruble, which is just like every other CBDC, i.e., terrible.
Some of you have been messaging me and asking for an assessment of Simplicius the Thinker’s deep thoughts about Elvira and her gross coin. I am happy to oblige. Let’s comb through his daring defense of the indefensible together.
Simplicius opens with a boilerplate red herring: Putin was not a WEF Young Global Leader. Ergo, there is nothing amiss about the digital ruble, and the Russian government is not involved in any technocratic hijinks:
Recently I’ve gotten a lot of requests to discuss Russia’s new digital Ruble, signed into law by Putin on July 24. It’s been oft-included in the blanket scary ‘CBDC’ category under the narrative that Putin is some sort of WEF stooge secretly helping to roll out the ‘Great Reset’ agenda.
As a quick digression to clear the plate—we all know by now that Putin’s previous designation by Klaus Schwab as a ‘Young Global Leader’ was in fact a lie. […]
I preface with this because much of the information related to Russia and central banking, CBDCs, Great Reset, etc., takes on a similar cast—Russia is unscrupulously corralled in with a lot of globalist machinations of which it actually has no part.
Cool, except two things: 1. Moscow is part of all kinds of globalist machinations, and openly boasts about this on a regular basis. For example, in May the Russian government pledged its undying devotion to globalist machinations at a global murder conference in Geneva. 2. Putin’s relationship with Schwab predates the creation of the Young Global Leaders program by one year.
Speaking at the Davos Agenda online forum on January 29, 2021, Russia’s president greeted the WEF chairman as “dear Klaus,” and recalled their decades-long relationship:
I have been to Davos many times, attending the events organized by Mr. Schwab, even back in the 1990s. Klaus [Schwab] just recalled that we met in 1992. Indeed, during my time in St. Petersburg, I visited this important forum many times.
The Kremlin proudly published the above statement on its website:
Simplicius then proceeds to lie by omission—because why not?
Putin has met with Schwab in St. Petersburg in 2019, but I believe as a leader Putin’s job is to meet and act cordial—at least on the surface—with everyone. But that doesn’t mean he sponsors what they’re doing or is in cahoots with them. Putin meets with everyone, including Kissinger many times in the past. You know what they say about keeping friends close and enemies closer—it’s the best way to understand and monitor them. Not to mention, this was pre-pandemic; afterwards, a lot of things changed.
Putin has been meeting with Schwab since 1992. That is relevant if you are trying to make the case that Putin has no meaningful ties to Schwab, no? Or am I mistaken?
The Kissinger bit is equally special.
Putin and Kissinger are “old friends”, and by 2012 had already met around 10 times. On one occasion they even shared a romantic dinner together at Kissinger’s private residence in New York. Source: Putin’s spokesman.
Right out of the gate, Simplicius misrepresents Putin’s relationship with two disgusting old slobs in an apparent attempt to prove that there’s nothing scary about the Bank of Russia’s CBDC. What’s going on, here? Is this how Thinkers think?
Simplicius then begins to make the case that the Bank of Russia is far less devious than the US Federal Reserve. He correctly observes that Moscow was disconnected from SWIFT and received a suspension from the Bank of International Settlements, the “central node of the entire Western global financial network.”
He then cites an article from RT.com that explains how the digital ruble will help Russia “fight sanctions”. RT also claims Sputnik V is safe and effective, and Russia’s newly minted Unified Biometric Database is very convenient and highly secure. English-language Russian state media is obviously the best source of information about Russian government policies, but maybe in the future Simplicius could try expanding his information diet?
Let’s see what Katyusha.org—a website curated by patriotic Christian conservatives who are not on the Kremlin’s payroll—had to say about the digital ruble on August 10:
The whole article is worth reading, but here are a few highlights:
The aspirations of the servants of the globalists will soon become mandatory, even if [the digital ruble] was introduced as completely voluntary. […]
Well, we can only say that if citizens actively use non-cash transactions, then they themselves will enter the electronic banking concentration camp, seemingly completely voluntarily. You can quickly forget about benefits in the form of cashbacks and interest on electronic bank accounts. We will closely monitor whether there will be directives to transfer state employees and civil servants to salaries paid in digital rubles—this would be a sad symptom of things to come.
And this brings us to one of the most extraordinary segments of Simplicius’ article: Some mean people have accused Elvira Nabiullina, the very elegant chief of Russia’s central bank, of being a “globalist plant”, but that’s completely unfair because Elvira and her cohorts have zero ties to nefarious Western institutions. Leave Elvira alone!
This is very amusing because Russians do not like this lady—and she actually does have creepy ties to the West. She was a Yale World Fellow, which means that she spent a semester at Yale “networking” with “rising global leaders”. New Haven is a very nice and anti-globalist place to network with rising global leaders.
Anyways, as I’ve already mentioned, Nabiullina does not have many Facebook friends in Russia.
For example, here is how the socialists from Nakanune.ru speak of her:
Let’s get a zoom-in on that graphic:
The conservatives at Katyusha.org are similarly complimentary of Elvira and her demon coin:
Just look at what these ungrateful patriots have been writing!
[The digital ruble] is the brainchild of the Central Bank, and the project itself is globalist, from the global financial oligarchy (IMF, World Bank, WEF). This Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is also being implemented in China, the USA, and the European Union; UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak actively advocates for it in Britain, etc. To put it quite simply, a new equivalent of programmable money has appeared, which is directly under the control of the Central Bank. […]
What the Central Bank (more precisely, its external owners) wants, it still gets ... We can only ask a rhetorical question: how can one trust “innovations” from an office that is not subordinate to the Government of the Russian Federation—an IMF branch and a reliable partner of the IMF, whose head was recognized as the banker of the year in 2015 by London-based magazine Euromoney, and received this award at the annual meeting of the World Bank and IMF Board of Governors.
Nabiullina also graduated from Yale University’s program for international leaders—the same one as convict Alexei Navalny. The activities of the Central Bank to stifle the Russian economy are regularly subjected to well-reasoned criticism from patriotic economists, in particular, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergei Glazyev.
Why should anyone trust the Bank of Russia’s “digital ruble”, which is not a central bank project at all, but a global project (which is not a secret to anyone)?
Let’s see what Tsargrad wrote when Nabiullina was nominated for another term as Central Bank Dominatrix in March 2022:
You get the idea.
When your humble correspondent read Simplicius’ Nabiullina fan fiction—purple prose that you cannot find anywhere in the Russian language—he was reminded of that time when Frank Sinatra was selected for the prestigious Communist MKULTRA fellowship program:
Let’s continue, I guess.
Getting back to CBDCs, a lot of people fear the digital currencies for good reason. I myself wrote an article condemning them on my other newsletter, and I’m about as anti-government/establishment/globalist as they come. But only the ignorant use blanket generalizations to paint every seemingly related contrivance with one brush; each should be examined at its own truth and essence.
The reason we fear CBDCs is because they’re being used by the globalist financial cartel in a plot to control us, as part of their wider 2030 totalitarian agenda. This would be done, hypothetically, in a variety of ways, allowing them to eventually ban cash and use only traceable CBDCs, as well as program the CBDCs to serve finance capital’s interests; e.g. increase the ‘money velocity’ of a banking system by putting timers on the currency, forcing you to spend it within a given deadline rather than hoarding it in your savings.
But recall what I just explained—the Russian central bank is not connected to Western financial institutions and the giant presumably-Rothschild banking system of the globe. Private capital and corporate banking institutions don’t own the Russian central bank, they have no stake or share in it whatsoever, unlike in the Western institutions. Hence, any CBDC created by Russia’s central bank in fact serves only the Russian state. Further, they’ve expressly stated that the digital Ruble will not replace cash—though admittedly, none of us take governments at their word when it comes to such things, so I don’t blame anyone for balking.
Good heavens.
Is Simplicius aware that senior officials from the Bank of Russia attended Cyber Polygon 2021—which was co-hosted that year by the World Economic Forum and Sberbank—and bragged about how cool and programmable the digital ruble would be?
He is aware of this, right?
And he knows that Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Moiseev acknowledged that the digital ruble was intended as a replacement for the “cash” ruble, right?
I don’t really understand what Mr. Simplicius is trying to convey. So he reassures his readers that the Bank of Russia “expressly stated” that the digital ruble would always be voluntary, while conceding that it would sort of be retarded to believe that? Okay.
What I find really odd though is that Simplicius’ entire argument is based around this idea that the only way the digital ruble could be bad is if Moscow were taking orders from the Collective West. Let’s assume there are no such orders (and there might not be). How does this change anything?
Is there a reason why someone might think that the Russian state (in this case the Bank of Russia, which is not even a governmental body) is too pure and noble to commit abuses of power? Is there a precedent they can point to? Maybe something from the last 500 years of Russian history?
I was thinking this morning of Gogol’s The Inspector-General. It is a very amusing play. Here is an excerpt, written during a time when Yale didn’t have a World Fellow program:
GOVERNOR: Well, I'm not afraid, but I just feel a little—you know—The merchants and townspeople bother me. I seem to be unpopular with them. But the Lord knows if I've taken from some I’ve done it without a trace of ill-feeling. I even suspect—[Takes him by the arm and walks aside with him.]—I even suspect that I may have been denounced. Or why would they send an Inspector to us? Look here, Ivan Kuzmich, don't you think you could—ahem!—just open a little every letter that passes through your office and read it—for the common benefit of us all, you know—to see if it contains any kind of information against me, or is only ordinary correspondence. If it is all right, you can seal it up again, or simply deliver the letter opened.
POSTMASTER: Oh, I know. You needn't teach me that. I do it not so much as a precaution as out of curiosity. I just itch to know what's doing in the world. And it's very interesting reading, I tell you. Some letters are fascinating—parts of them written grand—more edifying than the Moscow Gazette.
I am seriously and genuinely curious: Why would any sane person trust the Russian state (and not even the State, but a bank that answers to the IMF) with a centralized, programmable, traceable and completely deranged digital token?
Anyways, Professor Simplicius continues:
But the Russian government has a history of listening to its people’s demands quite a bit better than those in the West. For instance, the government initially joined the bandwagon of vaccination and attendant restrictions during the pandemic, but after outcries most of it was done away with. That’s how healthy governance should work. No one is suggesting governments should always be perfect and never introduce bad ideas, but what we as citizens demand is that if bad ideas are contrived, then after voicing our rejection of them, they should be summarily removed. The Russian government did that thus far—at least for the most part. There remain some bad apples within the structure who continue pushing certain nefarious agendas, whether it be vaccination or digital certificates, etc., but you’ll never get a completely amenable system unless you yourself institute total Orwellian control; there will always be bad actors.
My noodle. My poor little noodle.
Russia’s Health Ministry recently announced that in the event of another wave of Double-Secret Omegacron, the relevant authorities will have the right to coerce half the population into getting injected. This is not a policy that reflects the wishes of the Russian people. Please just trust me on this one.
But don’t worry. If it’s just a few “bad apples” promoting cattle tags and compulsory injections, Putin undoubtedly has everything under control:
Trust the plan.
Russia suffered the largest natural population decline in its recorded modern history in 2021, and not a single high-profile official was held responsible for the “public health” policies that destroyed businesses, families, and many, many lives.
The Maoist hypnotists did something very severe to to Herr Simplicius.
I suppose we will examine a few more excerpts, but I would like to press the Publish button and go for a walk:
With that said, Sberbank is headed by one of the few people at the top of the Russian food chain that we can unequivocally say is a full-blooded globalist, or mostly so: one Herman Gref, the ethnically German and seeming WEF stooge. He has served on the WEF board of trustees before, though he’s apparently not on it in the post-Covid era, and has been behind attempts to usher in a lot of WEF-initiated-and-designed societal ‘changes’ into Russia.
Hence, Russia isn’t perfect, and has some bad seeds actively working in its financial industry—but like I said, that’s the half-private Sberbank, not the Bank of Russia, which is Russia’s central bank. My point is not to exonerate those, but to simply point out the other major differences which makes Russia very unlike the West.
So the guy who is the head of Russia’s largest and most powerful bank—a guy who has been friends with Putin since the 90s, and meets semi-regularly with Russia’s president to talk about Sustainable Development Goals and AI—this guy, according to Simplicius, is a WEF stooge and “full-blooded globalist”? And what does it mean that Sberbank recently announced record profits? It means Russia’s monetary and financial system is fighting the globalists, right? Right.
By the way—half of Simplicius’ article is about how the Western financial system is bought and paid for by J.P Morgan Chase and other friendly banks, while Russia’s financial architecture is operated by patriotic civil servants. Guess who used to serve on J.P. Morgan’s International Council? Come on…guess.
Guys, what do you want me to type? You can believe Simplicius—who is clearly an assassin programmed by FSB psychologists to write embarrassing blog posts whenever he sees an Uno Draw 2 card—or you can believe what every Russian with more than one brain cell is saying? I think those are the choices, here.
Honestly, just go to the website, Telegram channel, or VK page of any Russian media outlet or activist group that isn’t citing RT articles, and you will see what I mean. It is an unavoidable reality.
I have cited this (ignored) petition in the past, but just have a gander at what the Public Commissioner for Family Protection published in January of this year:
On December 29, under the cover of a new year, a group of deputies and senators submitted to the State Duma a bill on the introduction of a digital ruble. In fact, this is a project of our Central Bank, which is not subordinate to the Government of the Russian Federation (Yale University graduate Nabiullina and her deputy, a graduate of the University of California, Skorobogatova).
In the bill’s explanatory note, the authors admit that during the preparation of the draft law, “foreign experience in creating and regulating the currencies of central banks was analyzed … projects of foreign countries aimed at the introduction of digital currencies of central banks (CBDC) were studied, in terms of issues related to their regulation. The general conceptual approaches developed by foreign policymakers were, to a certain extent, taken into account when creating the concept of the digital ruble.”
In other words, a globalist project to introduce standardized “digital money” worldwide has been initiated on Russian soil.
The project is managed by the central banks of all countries of the world —as part of the supranational structure of the Washington Consensus, in full accordance with the plans of the main shareholders of the Fed, as well as the controllers of the IMF and the World Bank (head offices are in the USA).
Yeah, but an anonymous guy on the internet told me that the Bank of Russia wasn’t that bad, and I am satisfied with this.
Please just stop.
The most troublesome aspect of Monsieur Simplicius’ blog post is how disingenuous and flip-floppy it is.
As Simplicius helpfully explains, you are a lunatic conspiracy theorist if you think the digital ruble is part of some globalist plot to make life insufferable for all people of the world. On the other hand, Simplicius tells us that governments shouldn’t be trusted, and his very long blog post defending the digital ruble and the Bank of Russia is in no way an endorsement of these two things!
What the heck is this?
It seems to me that Dr. Simplicius is trying to entice you with a deal—a proposition.
You can loathe CBDCs. You can spit on the New Normal. You can be self-righteous and Very Serious. And you can do all this while supporting the Russian government, which is doing exactly what every other unfortunate government is doing. Actually, Moscow is way ahead of the pack in some areas.
It’s a very nice proposition—very safe and effective and convenient.
But ask yourself this: Is it worth it? Are you sure you want to do this? Everyone knows that Simplicius is a famous and well-paid Thinker. But maybe you should Think for yourself?
I did not check this article for typos, and I am going for a walk.
A very pleasant evening to you all.
— Riley
You gotta have the patience of an angel, man. Me, I've just about had it with all these types and their phony "analyses". It's a particularly unctuous mixture of lies, half-lies and make-believe that corrodes almost all of the so called alternative media. Whatever they are up to, they're not helping the cause.
Re: Kissinger-Putin and their relationship, the very experienced American diplomat Harald Malmgren had this to say about it: From winter 2022, shortly before the not-war began:
"In 1999, Vladimir Putin suddenly sprang from bureaucratic obscurity to the office of Prime Minister. When, a few months later, Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned and Putin was voted in as President, governments around the world were taken by surprise yet again. How could this unknown figure have amassed national voter support with so little media attention?
I had first met Putin seven years before and was not surprised by his rapid domination of the new Russia. We were introduced by Yevgeny Primakov, widely known as “Russia’s Kissinger”, who I had met in Moscow multiple times during the Cold War years when I advised Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford. Primakov was a no-nonsense thinker and writer. He was also a special emissary for the Kremlin in conducting secret discussions with national leaders around the world.
When Yeltsin tasked his advisor Anatoly Sobchak with identifying and recruiting Russia’s best and brightest, Putin, then a local politician in his hometown of St Petersburg, was top of his list — so Primakov took Putin under his wing to tutor him in global power and security issues. Eventually, Primakov introduced Kissinger to Putin, and they became close. That both Primakov and Kissinger took time to coach Putin on geopolitics and geosecurity was a clear demonstration that they saw in him the characteristics of a powerful leader. It also showed Putin’s capacity for listening to lengthy lessons on geopolitics — as I was soon to learn.
In 1992, I received a call from a meeting organiser at the CSIS think tank inviting me to join a US-Russia St Petersburg Commission to be chaired by Kissinger and Sobchak. The purpose would be to help the new Russian leadership in opening channels of business and banking with the West. Most of the Western members would be CEOs of major US and European companies, as well as key officials of the new Russian government. I would attend as an expert. I was told that a “Mr Primakov” had personally asked if I could make time to participate. I could hardly refuse such a request, and I was intensely curious about the emerging Russian leadership, especially about Putin.
Arriving at the first meeting, I saw several people gathered around Kissinger and a man I was told was Putin. An official identified himself to me and said he had been asked by Primakov to introduce me to Putin. He interrupted the conversation with Kissinger to announce my arrival; Putin warmly responded that he was looking forward to chatting with me about how I see the world from inside Washington."
https://unherd.com/2022/01/what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-putin/
Simplicius sounds like so many ":alt" media analysts/commentators and their consumers, in the US and elsewhere in the West. They are *desperate* to have someone, some power figure, they can cling to, so as to attain or retain hope that some knight on shining armor is out there on the world's power play stage, fighting for them against the powers-that-shouldn't-be which they are directly dealing with.
What are they supposed to do, trust their fellow human beings, the rest of the 99.9%? (well, that's where change will come from, if it comes, the future's here, we are it, we're on our own, but they don't wanna hear THAT!). Thanks for continuing to shed light on this dark matter, Riley!