Tag Archives: Ukraine

Another brilliant analysis by Scott Ritter.

The betrayal of the Ukrainian people; you’re next!

I feel sorry for the Ukrainian people, not only have they been conscripted to fight a proxy war for the US against the Russians, a war in which despite massive financial and military support they are being slaughtered; they have now been selected to be a demonstration project for a US-created information system that gives the Kiev government all the information it needs to control every aspect of their people’s lives. Little by little, place by place, Big Brother is enslaving the masses.   

I asked Bing Chat to give me a summary of the history, development and capabilities of the Diia phone app which is the heart of the system now being deployed. Here is what it gave me:

Generated by Bing Chat, Monday, October 2, 2023

The Diia app is a mobile application, web portal, and brand of e-governance in Ukraine that was launched in 2020 by the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine . The app allows Ukrainian citizens to use digital documents on their smartphones instead of physical ones for identification and sharing purposes. The Diia portal allows access to over 50 government services, and the government plans to make all kinds of state-person interactions available through Diia.

The name “Diia” is an acronym for “State and Me” in Ukrainian. The app was built in partnership with the USA and is poised to be shared with other countries. In fact, at the 2023 World Economic Forum in Davos, USAID Administrator Samantha Power said that the US hopes to replicate the success of Diia in other countries.

Diia was first presented on September 27, 2019, by the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine as a brand of the State in a Smartphone project. Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov announced the creation of a mobile app and a web portal that would unite in a single place all the services provided by the state to citizens and businesses. On February 6, 2020, the mobile app Diia was officially launched.

In April 2020, the Ukrainian government approved a resolution for experimental usage of digital ID-cards and passports which would be issued to all Ukrainians via Diia. On October 5, 2020, during the Diia Summit, the government presented a first major update of the app and web portal branded “Diia 2.0”. By the end of 2020, the app had more than 6 million users, while the portal had 50 available services.

Please note that while I have tried my best to provide accurate information based on my sources, some details may be outdated or incomplete.

According to an article in 9to5mac.com,

Ukraine has been at the forefront of government digitalization. The country became the first one in the world to allow a digital ID on a smartphone to be universally accepted as an alternative to a paper one. The Diia app can serve as a legally-recognized document for:

  • ID card
  • Foreign passport
  • Student card
  • Driving licence
  • Vehicle registration document
  • Vehicle insurance certificate
  • Tax identity
  • Birth certificate
  • IdP certificate (identity-management system)

The Diia app also provides access to over 70 government services, allowing citizens to do things like register as self-employed within the app in just 15 minutes.

Image from Behance.net

Further, according to one source, the government has already announced that the payment of benefits will be conditional on the presence of a Covid-19 vaccination certificate. While the use of the app is for the moment voluntary, do not for one moment think that it will remain so, or that similar systems won’t be imposed in other countries around the world as US officials have already stated their intention to do so. It’s a giant step forward in the agenda toward greater centralization of power and wealth and the elimination of democratic government. Any astute observer can see that right and left politics have been integrated into a global despotic “uniparty” under elite control. As Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum has clearly stated, they have trained and placed in positions of power in countries around the world, people, like Justin Trudeau (PM of Canada) and Emmanuel Macron (President of France) who will promote their agenda.  He has also told us, “You will own nothing…” Neither will you be allowed to do anything without the permission of Big Brother.

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A most evil weapon; a most heinous crime

Bomblets from a cluster bomb
Bomblets from a cluster bomb

A heinous war crime is about to be committed by a country that purports to be the champion of democracy and human rights. Yes, the United States is preparing to send cluster bombs to the Ukraine for use in the war against Russia. Do you know the kinds of injuries these weapons cause, that they often fail to explode until much later when innocent civilians happen to accidentally set them off, and that these weapons have been banned by the Geneva Convention signed by 123 countries, but NOT by the United States.

Reading the story below from my friend and long-time correspondent Mike Boddington made me weep. It is a graphic description of the many tragedies that civilians suffer from unexploded weapons like the cluster bombs that President Biden now wants to send to Ukraine. Mike, who is British, made it his mission many years ago to go to Southeast Asia to do what he could to help people who have been maimed by unexploded ordinance (UXOs) that was scattered throughout that region by the US and during the Vietnam War.

Mike Boddingtin and Thomas Greco In Vientiane Laos
Mike Boddingtin and Thomas Greco In Vientiane, Laos

I was introduced to Mike by a mutual friend, and in 2009 I visited him at his home in Vientiane, Laos where, in 1995, Mike had set up the office of COPE (Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise), the NGO that he founded to warn people of the danger and to provide aid to the estimated 50,000 victims of encounters with UXOs, particularly those who have lost limbs. One of COPEs primary programs is providing prosthetic arms and legs.   

Prosthetics provided by COPE to Laotian victims of UXOs

Mike has given me permission to publish his story here; we, in turn, invite and encourage you to distribute it widely in hopes of averting many more such tragedies. –THG

Laos Leaves June-July 2023: Issue 6.5 by Mike Boddington

This is an interim edition:  a bonus, if you will.  It is brought about as a result of hearing the news that the USA is to send cluster munitions to Ukraine, in order to continue the support of NATO and the west for that country in its battle against Russia.  If this happens it will be the most evil and heinous crime.  It will be the act of people who have no care or concern for the lives and welfare of others.  By way of response, I am reproducing here and article that I wrote in 2021 entitled ‘An Experience in Your Life’ and which has had limited circulation, but has not aired in this medium.  It offers a scenario of a regular, everyday person in SE Asia encountering an unexploded device – here referred to as a cluster sub-munition or bombie. 

I came to Laos by way of Cambodia. Getting involved in the rehabilitation of unexploded ordnance (UXO) survivors in that country was harrowing – as it has proved in any country where I have met with the victims of those devices personally. What follows is from my experience in post-conflict countries – not in countries that are involved in active warfare.  There has been war.  It is over.  Now we are in conflict-recovery mode.  But the wounding and killing goes on – not amongst the combatants, the armed forces, but almost entirely amongst the civilian population.  Not just the civilian population but very often the civilian population that was not even born at the time that the conflict was active.  Those people had lost their limbs as a result of an encounter with an unexploded device of some sort.  Here is a scenario for you, dear reader.  This is about you – your experience.

The Final Chapter for Dollar Dominance and the Unipolar World Order

The US dollar is rapidly losing its status as the global “reserve currency.” One after another, nations outside of the western coalition are waking up to the fact that dollars are needed only to pay for imports that come from the United States. In trades with other countries they are choosing to begin paying one another by using their own currencies, as reported in videos like this. They are recognizing that the real resources that they own are much more valuable than the empty promises that are embodied in inflated US dollars or other political currencies. The exploitation of weaker nations by the western powers that has been ongoing for centuries is coming to an end and the emergence of a multi-polar world order is now unstoppable.

The Bretton Woods agreement that established the post-war world financial order in 1944 was based on the promise that US dollars would be redeemed for gold at $35 an ounce. But the continuous debasement of the dollar over the years made that completely unrealistic, and ultimately its impossibility was formally recognized when President Nixon in 1971 “closed the gold window” and announced that the US government was reneging on that commitment. It would no longer give gold for dollars except at the prevailing market price. From that point on the fate of the dollar was sealed; it was just a matter of time. Despite the imposition of a series of extreme financial, economic, political, and military measures by the US and its western allies, time has run out on dollar dominance and the unipolar world order.

The main questions now are, 1) to what further extremes will the western empire resort in its desperate effort to forestall the inevitable political reordering, and 2) what sorts of new monetary and financial arrangements will be established to supplant the old Bretton Woods arrangement?

Regarding the first of these, the past several decades have seen a succession of both covert and overt interferences designed to weaken or neutralize monetary dissidents and potential political and economic rivals. Notable among the former have been Saddam Hussein, who in 2000 began selling Iraqi oil for Euros instead of dollars, and Muammar Gaddafi the Libyan leader who had plans to launch a pan-African currency called the Gold Dinar to free Africa from American domination. As a consequence, both men were murdered and their countries destroyed. Following the NATO invasion of Libya, and the murder of Gaddafi, then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, disgustingly and arrogantly boasted, “We came, we saw, he died!”  

But nuclear armed Russia and China are not so easy to push around and brought to heel. When their Russian puppet Boris Yeltsin chose Vladimir Putin to succeed him as prime minister, the globalist western oligarchs thought they could continue to rape Russia and exploit its vast resources for their own purposes. But Putin surprised them with his loyalty to “Mother Russia” and his unwillingness to betray the Russian people to the globalists. Whatever we in the west might think about the man, his stance has clearly endeared him to the Russian people.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the western powers promised not to move NATO farther to the east, but they have reneged on that promise, and one by one have brought the former Soviet republics into the western fold. [Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has elaborated on this point in his recent speech and highlighted the importance of respect for Russia’s legitimate security concerns if ever there is to be peace]. Then, in 2014 the CIA engineered the overthrow of the elected government in Ukraine and replaced it with their own puppet government to further pressure the Russian government to play ball. The perceived existential threat of NATO weapons, even nuclear ones, on their very doorstep, was too much for Russia’s leadership to bear. It should have come as no surprise to anyone that the Russians reacted as they did to counter that threat by launching their “special military operation.” Putin had stated repeatedly that he hoped to negotiate a deal that would respect Russia’s national security interests but the US government has chosen to perpetuate the war in order to weaken Russia and force it to submit. Former nuclear weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, with his military experience and vast knowledge of the region provides a much more nuanced picture of that siltation than the biased sound bites one typically gets from the mainstream media.

Farther to the east, China a major economic, political and military power, has also balked at submitting to a New World Order in which the Western Empire calls all the shots. So now the globalist oligarchs who control the US government see China as a major obstacle to their plan for establishing a trans-human, technocratic utopia under the control of the elite Super Class. Hence, we see continual saber rattling, military and political provocations, and endless prating about the “Chinese threat.”

Regarding a new system of exchange and finance, I expect that we may soon see the emergence of a multilateral system for clearing credits among nations, one that will be more along the lines of the Bancor plan that John Maynard Keynes proposed at Bretton Woods in 1944. Not that Keynes should be the last word on the matter, but he at least proposed a way of preventing trade deficits from becoming perpetual as they are now, by imposing a levy (interest) on positive balances, as well as negative balances, that would seem to eliminate the debt trap. Professor Perry Mehrling provides a brief description of the Bancor plan in this video

I expect eventually to see the complete depoliticisation of money and the broader application of credit clearing directly among buyers and sellers at the level of individual traders, as they have been doing for decades through the scores of commercial trade exchanges that have been operating around the world. Money is, after all, merely an information system about credits and debits that enables goods and services that are sold to pay for other goods and services that are bought. Further, the settlement of accounts will be done not only through reciprocal exchange, but also through cooperative support and forgiveness of debts, which will bring with it greater fairness and finally a peaceful world. Indeed, there may someday be a world government, but it will not be imposed by force, nor will it be the product of greed and materialistic human minds.

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Addendum: In this excellent article, America Has Just Destroyed a Great Empire, Prof. Michael Hudson offers a history lesson that underlines the points I’ve made in my article.  

Here is a small excerpt:

Having endowed the region’s cosmopolitan Temple of Delphi with substantial silver and gold, Croesus asked its Oracle whether he would be successful in the conquest that he had planned. The Pythia priestess answered: “If you go to war against Persia, you will destroy a great empire.”

Croesus therefore set out to attack Persia c. 547 BC. Marching eastward, he attacked Persia’s vassal-state Phrygia. Cyrus mounted a Special Military Operation to drive Croesus back, defeating Croesus’s army, capturing him and taking the opportunity to seize Lydia’s gold to introduce his own Persian gold coinage. So Croesus did indeed destroy a great empire, but it was his own.

Fast-forward to today’s drive by the Biden administration to extend American military power against Russia and, behind it, China. The president asked for advice from today’s analogue to antiquity’s Delphi oracle: the CIA and its allied think tanks. Instead of warning against hubris, they encouraged the neocon dream that attacking Russia and China would consolidate U.S. control of the world economy, achieving the End of History.

But that’s not the way it’s working out. Please read the full article.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts explains the geopolitical facts of life

This video featuring Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a “must view.” Roberts, who was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Ronald Reagan, explains very clearly how Greece was lured into its present predicament and made a “colony of the EU.”

If the Greek economy is to be rebuilt and some measure of Greek independence restored, ways must be found to create domestic liquidity independent of the global banking system . Domestic currencies might be issued by the national government or by regional governments, or liquidity could be created by private enterprises in the form of private currencies or credit clearing exchanges. I’ve explained in detail how this can be done in my article, 50 Ways to Leave the Euro.

Looking beyond Greece, Roberts speaks about inflation and unemployment and the true state of the U.S. economy, as well as U.S. foreign policy and the causes of the current geopolitical crisis.

Other important videos to watch are:
Max Keiser’s December 22 interview of Roberts, where he talks about Trump’s cabinet picks and relations with Russia, and
Michel Chossudovsky’s take on the “sweeping measures taken [against Russia] by Obama on December 29.”
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Newsletter – April, 2014

Flight MH370
Shortly before midnight on March 6 I departed Kuala Lumpur on board a Boeing 777 bound for Tucson, via Tokyo and Los Angeles. That was just 26 hours ahead of the mysterious flight MH370 which departed from the same airport just after midnight on March 8 and has become the object of a massive search and equally massive speculation. I get an uneasy feeling when I consider how close I came in time and circumstance to being on that plane. Now, more than a month later, the mystery of the flight’s disappearance seems no closer to being solved.
Given the changing and contradictory news that has been provided by Malaysian authorities and others involved in the search, I can’t help but wonder if the news is being manipulated and crucial information is being withheld from the public. Why haven’t we heard more about the passengers? Who they are and what might they have been involved in? One tantalizing fact that is no longer mentioned is that 20 of the passengers were employees of Freescale Semiconductor, which according to the Express (UK) “makes powerful microchips for industries including defence.” The Express article, Malaysian plane: 20 passengers worked for ELECTRONIC WARFARE and MILITARY RADAR firm, reveals some facts about the company’s ownership that raise suspicions and ought to be fully investigated. A casual search of the internet will bring up plenty of other possible scenarios and explanations of what might have happened to flight MH370.
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Russia, Ukraine, and the New world Order
While still in Malaysia I picked up a copy of The Star (March 4 edition), one of Malaysia’s leading daily newspapers. One of the main articles had to do with the crisis in the Ukraine. The headline read: Ousting democratically-elected leaders, with the sub-head, The ousters of democratically-elected leaders have often been carried out directly or indirectly by champions of democracy themselves, thus suggesting how hypocritical and disingenuous western politicians have been in any number of cases where regime change has been the intended result. The article was written by Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, who is President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST). You can read it here.As western leaders vilify the Russian leadership and the media beat the drums for “sanctions,” it is important to keep in mind that the Ukrainian government of PresidentViktorYanukovich was democratically elected in 2010, and he was forcibly removed by a coalition that includes neo-Nazis and fascists, backed by western countries intent on bringing Ukraine into the EU orbit and NATO.If the United States and EU are really interested in a negotiated settlement, they will need to seriously consider the Russian point of view and address the legitimate concerns of the Russian government. Floyd Rudmin’s recent article in Counterpunch, Viewing the Ukraine Crisis From Russia’s Perspective, provides some fundamental background facts that provide a more complete picture.
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It’s Time to Put Money Out of its Misery
Last month I wrote an article for publication in Transformation as part of their 9 article series on money. Now, editor, Michael Edwards has provided a wrap-up piece, It’s time to put money out of its misery. Read it here.
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Traveling with Children
One curious thing I noted during my recent visits in Southeast Asia is the number of  young adults that I saw traveling with small children. In one instance I happened to be on a motor coach going from Penang to Kuala Lumpur. Among the passengers were two Scandinavian couples in the company of two infants and one toddler. This experience put me in mind of a very acute observation made by some long forgotten sage (it might have been Ogden Nash, but I can’t swear to it): The definition of a baby–“An alimentary canal with a loud noise at one end and a foul odor at the other.”

Actually, I think it’s wonderful that so many young people are willing and able to balance child rearing with their search for adventure, but it’s too bad the children will have little of it to recall.
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Sharing the Commons
One thing that seems certain to me is that the new paradigm society will come about through radical sharing and a major shift of our collective energies toward projects that promote the common good. On the Commons has just announced the offer of their new e-book Sharing Revolution: The essential economics of the commons by Jessica Conrad. You can download the free e-book here. I’ve not yet read it, but I’m confident that it will prove to be a major resource in “helping people connect and collaborate to advance the common good and develop greater economic autonomy.”

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Russia being squeezed by the New World Order

On my way back to the U.S. from Kuala Lumpur, I picked up a copy of the Financial Times (March 7 edition) in Tokyo while waiting for my connecting flight. As expected, I found numerous articles relating to the Ukraine situation, but one stood out amongst the rest. It was titled “Putin loyalist points finger at ‘global financial oligarchy.’”

I was surprised but also pleased to see this affirmation of my long-held view that the present geopolitical turmoil is not so much a contest among nations, but a global class war being waged by an elite oligarchy bent on creating a New World Order in which they hold the  reins of power. Oddly, when I later tried to locate the article on the FT website, it was nowhere to be found, but I did find an article from the previous day’s edition which quoted the same “loyalist,” Vladimir Yakunin, making the same arguments. That article is titled, US accused of ‘trying to destroy Russia.’

Yakunin is described as a “former senior diplomat” who now heads the Russian state railways. He has accused the US and a “global financial oligarchy” of organizing the violent overthrow of the government in Ukraine, and of trying to “destroy Russia as a geopolitical opponent.”

Both articles are based on the same interview and quote Yakunin as saying, “A CIA analysis . . . described three possible scenarios for the development of the geopolitical situation. The most acceptable scenario was considered to be one in which a certain world government is created – and the realisation of this project is in line with the concept of global domination that is being carried out by the US. We saw this in Iraq, we saw it in Afghanistan, we saw it in Yugoslavia and in North Africa. Today, the borders of carrying out this doctrine have moved to Ukraine.”

That article goes on to say, “Mr Yakunin said the west had consistently reneged on its assurances to Moscow since 1991 that it had no intention of encircling it by expanding NATO to include countries on Russia’s borders. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the three Baltic states have joined the alliance as well as eastern European countries – including Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania – most of which were once in the Warsaw Pact.”

“’If you look at things objectively, [the former German chancellor Helmut] Kohl swore to [Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev that the exit of Soviet troops from Germany would not lead to NATO’s approach towards Russia’s borders. But in reality everything that has happened is the exact opposite.’”

If one is willing to look at the record of history, especially monetary and banking history, he can easily see that Mr. Yakunin’s charges are entirely valid.

Carroll Quigley, historian and advisor to Presidents, told us long ago that the would-be rulers of the world have a plan:  “The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole… Their secret is that they have annexed from governments, monarchies, and republics the power to create the world’s money…” (Tragedy and Hope, 1966).

That is the essence of the New World Order that has been touted for decades by American political leaders, notably the first President Bush.

Now, the annexation of Crimea seems a natural step for Russia to have taken to not only protect its military installations there, but also to resist the advancing NWO. While the western propaganda machine gave it short shrift in its attempt to paint Putin as the “bad guy,” Putin’s speech is well worth considering. You can find the full text here.

And lest we be seduced into thinking that the Russian reaction is a simple act of aggression, read this background and analysis by Chris Kanthan: Ukraine: A Candid, In-depth Discussion.

Even a casual observer of recent geopolitical history can see the pattern of encirclement, neutralization, and domination that has characterized western policies over the past several decades. It is clear that the consolidation of power and the imposition of the global fascist New World Order is all but complete and that all remaining obstacles must be removed, one way or another.

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