Podcast | What's 'Folklore' about Disinfolklore?

I forged the word Disinfolklore out of disinformation and folklore in February 2023.

**The Origins of the Folklore Folder**

I established a folder on my computer in February 2020 called Folklore. And that folder, that’s where I was putting all these texts that I was reading to try and understand what trolls and trolling was about. And then that, out of that initial attempt to look at how those terms were being used in the media and had been used, tracing them back, going back to the, that led me on this massive journey, which I’m still on, into the origins of Indo-European languages, but also particularly through this data set from which I got from Factiva of tens of thousands of references to trolls and trolling.

So I had that folder on my computer called Folklore. And then disinformation, obviously, was one of the words. It could be misinformation or disinformation. And in February 2023, I was trying to think of a way of how can I archetype everything I have learned since being on the bridge. Obviously that was February 2023, which is a year into the war as well, where I realized I, because of my experience on this bridge from February 2015 onwards, and seeing and looking at patterns and data that I had a particular way of perceiving the daily diet of information that we were receiving through X and through Telegram.

At the time I was on Telegram and looking at for the full scale invasion. And I spent the first month of the full-scale invasion collecting information for the OSCE’s Moscow Mechanism mission, which then in April 2022 produced the first, it was charged by 44 countries, nation states, to inquire into Russia’s conduct of the war in Ukraine for the first month. And that report, which was then cited in the definitive, historical, comprehensive 600-page judgment delivered by the European Court on Human Rights about three months ago on Russia’s violations of the European Convention on Human Rights.

So I was collecting this data initially to help these four jurists who were producing this report. But I found that I had a particular perspective on it that was worth sharing. But I was looking for a means of naming it, naming what I was doing. And I consciously sat down one day to say, okay, so I wrote down disinformation and then folklore. And obviously Disinfolklore then was pretty obvious then because of the F in Disinfolklore. So that’s where the moniker, the branding was born.

**Why Folklore?**

But instead of including the word folklore, I could have chosen song or folk song, propaganda, stories, narratives, or a heap of other words to describe the new phenomenon that I’ve identified. And folklore, however, captures best the way of seeing. So it’s a way of seeing in the sense of that brilliant book by Berger on ways of seeing, ways of looking at art. I think it’s from the early 70s. And that really, that title, that idea from Nietzsche as well, all knowledge is perspective. But this idea of ways of seeing, which is as valid today to see described as Disinfolklore, as folklore was in Jacob Grimm or Herder’s times.

I mentioned Herder’s call last week in 1777 where he said, you know, it is time we’re under occupation by the French and we need to unite the 10 Germanic tribes. In order to do this, we need our Shakespeare. Where is our Shakespeare? We have no Shakespeare. And that he launched the folklore collection movement in Germany, which recruited the Grimm brothers later and Goethe. And they, riffing off this kind of, I mean, it’s quite, it’s amusing in a very nerdy way that the first, basically, if you’re looking at folklore studies, and since I did a course as a continuing education at Oxford last year just to go through the origins of folklore, which I found very useful and very helpful.

But basically the folklore movement, one of the origin stories is in Macpherson’s Ossian Tales, which turned out to be faked. But they, from the 17th century, they brought into the consciousness of the whole of European, Europe basically was convulsed by these stories of peasant wisdom and the found, which is a trope actually across Indo-European culture, including in Tibetan Buddhism, of these documents, which are just suddenly found somewhere under a rock and, and MacPherson is the archetypal Disinfolklorist because he did communicate something very authentic. I mean, they’re mainly based on Irish folklore, but he did it in a deceptive manner but who can blame him because it was that work which then inspired Herder for instance to realise okay we can create a sense of national self-identity by collecting stories and finding the archetypal stories of the German people and for three years I had been researching Indo-European mythology and folklore this is the three years before 2023 and before a year, so a year into the full-scale invasion.

For three years, I had been researching Indo-European mythology and folklore as a means of seeing how Russia and MAGA were using stories to create community. And I was looking for that moniker. And then Disinfolklore just suddenly came to me. A bit like that famous, you know, all those famous Eureka moments.

**The Folkloric Dimensions of the Bridge**

However, when I arrived, the reason I had this folder called Folklore on my computer was, yes, I was trying to look at trolling and trolls. But the, from the very, almost the very first moment I arrived at the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska, which is on the Donets River, it’s in a biosphere reserve area, beautiful forestry, either side of the river, weeping willows, whose leaves are falling into the river and whose bows are bowed towards the river. And there was a bridge across it. And on either side of the bridge were the Russian occupiers on one side and the Ukrainian defenders on the other side, separated by a kilometre and a half.

And then there was all these old houses, beautiful old wooden houses. Typically, the architecture around there, that part of Ukraine, is brick built, first story. And then they have wooden tops of the houses. And this didn’t fit my archetype of of Russia or of the Soviet Union, where I thought everyone lived in these horrible apartment blocks. And that’s from the perspective of a bourgeois Westerner, where these horrible apartment blocks generally aren’t, are kind of the equivalent that Americans see, you know, like projects. But of course, now having traveled a lot around Central and Eastern Europe, I realize that that archetypal meaning of these places is not consistent with the data where you have lovely, well-looked-after apartment blocks to the untrained eye. They just look like like a council estate in South London or something like that. But actually, when you’re getting close to them, you see, okay, there’s a whole community of people looking after them. And you have people from all type parts of society living in them.

But at the time, it was quite surprising to me that people in the former Soviet Union would live in, I thought, because I’d learned about collectivization and getting rid of the kulaks and all that. But eastern Ukraine, as we’ve probably all seen in these images, it is a beautiful, just an amazingly beautiful place. But there’s something folklore about it and I saw that the moment I arrived there because I guess my only reference point when I arrived there was folklore and stories which I had read in Lady Bird books or Hansel and Gretel or from Disney films and a lot of the scenes which I saw there that my only, the archetype in my consciousness was folklore.

So I had that intuition. I’m not going to say the first time I went to the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska. You know, we gradually moved there, closer there. The first day I arrived in Severodonetsk in this hotel called the Mir Hotel, which is now no longer with us like so many buildings that I know in Ukraine have been destroyed and looted. And I was only there for seven years. And I often reflect on this, that if so many places dear to me, including hotels I stayed in and my own house in Severodonetsk, which was destroyed and my next door neighbor was torn to pieces by Russian artillery. And then his friend went to rescue him and he was then torn to pieces.

And if I have had this experience, even though I only lived there for seven years in this hotel, then what it must be like for Ukrainians to have these whole cities and whole towns disappear from them, it often gives me an idea of the scale of the of the destruction, but sitting in the Mir Hotel in Severodonetsk, where I lived for a year, my first year there, we gradually moved closer to Stanytsia Luhanska from Severodonetsk. It’s about 180 kilometers, and there were terrible roads. And we would drive there each day, there and back each day. But about a month after I arrived there, we finally got to the bridge the first time.

But pretty early on, I intuited there was something folklore about the situation. And I had an intuition that folklore was connected to it. So there’s this idea of a bridge and there’s often these kind of, in folkloric tales, something mediating between worlds and other worlds. And a bridge was both a metaphor and an actual fact.

**The Wagner Mythology**

And also on the Russian side of the bridge, the Russian-occupied side of the bridge, they were Wagner Army or Wanger Army unit soldiers guarding the bridge. So these were the, not only had they, by that time, this was before the mythology of the wanger had really entered the mainstream. And it’s probably a bit hard for us to remember this, but the wanger really didn’t, like most normal people, didn’t really know anything about Wagner Private Military Company until about 2022, 2023. Now, people paying attention to Russia and to Syria would have known about it, would have known about them. But in 2015, this was very close to their beginnings.

But from my earliest times there, I was coming across these stories like mythical stories about these guys, these amazing mercenaries. But what I was seeing in actuality was scrawny, scruffy mercenaries in really bad, unkempt uniforms. But I was aware that something cynical was going on to create out of them this mythology about elite forces.

And then, and while I was there from around, as all of us know, the initial resistance and the hint that Ukraine would defeat Russia was already visible in the period from April 2014 to September 2014, because it was a ragtaggle group of mainly of a couple groups, Azov and Pravi Sector, composed out of football supporters clubs, mainly based in Kyiv, who became magnets for resistance to the Russians. And with the help of some oligarch cash from, in the case of the Dnepro I and Dnepro II battalions, which were paid for by Kolomorski and Dnipro’s Jewish community who armed them and got them up.

The storied Second Army in the world was already on the back foot by September 2014 by this ragtaggle group of people who became soldiers and now obviously are part of the Ukrainian military. And a kind of a mirroring process went on in Russia-occupied Luhansk, where you had a lot of community groups of people just protecting their local community from either they had believed the Disinfolklore about the Ukrainians coming to kill them, or they saw the rapacious mafia run Russia, run militias, and they wanted to protect their neighborhoods. And the Wanger were given the job of eliminating the these groups of armed resistors and people who just wanted to protect their neighborhood in Russia occupied Luhansk. And I was there while that was going on.

But then as I realized, the wanger, so they took their mythology from this guy who was supposedly killed in the airplane that supposedly killed the chef. Again, another moniker from kind of folklore, another archetypal moniker, Purgosian, the chef. He’s just Putin’s chef. He’s a restaurateur. He’s in catering. And yet he financed the operation which got Donald elected and got Brexit done.

So they took this ideology of Wagner which, Wagner, as in the German composer, was part of Herder’s project. He was a lot later and Herder was well dead by then. But he continued, he was responding to Herder’s 1777 plea like, where is our Shakespeare? We have to create songs. They weren’t even talking about stories like the Grimm brothers were collecting. He heard it was talking about songs and Wagner helped create that sense of German identity with his songs and his operas and his shows which were based on mythology that really only existed because the Roman historian Tacitus had collected these stories and published them in Latin in whatever, I think, 80 years into the Common Era.

And a lot of what we know about the origins of the Germanic people and that Manus had three sons and a lot of stuff which I deal with in my Power of Mana, my founding Manuland project comes from this Roman historian recorded in recorded in Latin. And Wanger, the composer, went back to this and created this sense of pride and unity in the German people. But the guy, Utkin, who supposedly formed, created out of the, out of the wanger, he was fond of the aesthetics of the Nazis. Again, that’s the Russian account from 2016, which I preserved on, you know, who are the Wagner militaries? And it’s like, he’s not really a Nazi. He just likes the aesthetics of the Nazi.

But of course, the aesthetics of the Nazi, the uniforms and stuff were very much a part of how they brainwashed people and created their sense of identity. So you can’t separate the aesthetics of the Nazi from what they do. But they deliberately take this German composer, high art composer, which again trolls people into pronouncing it Wagner you’ll notice I haven’t pronounced it Wagner because I don’t want to give it any positive connotations and I don’t want to try and communicate that I’m that I appreciate or appreciate Wagner’s operas. And of course, you know, Wagner is a great composer. He can’t be blamed for Hitler. You know, none of that stuff. I’m not interested in that.

What I am interested in is how, from the very early beginnings, the Russians were using this mythology, this mythology about the Wagner, this elite force, whose name came from someone whose purposeful, whose entire intellectual project was to weave of mythology, archetypal Germanic mythology, a sense of collective identity, and that these operatives became characters inside Russia-occupied Ukraine and executed, well, they executed, you know, zillions of people. And then in February 2022, they were given the job. It was the Wagner Group Group.

And I think it was Nile once who persuaded us on Volyathat we should be subverting this and calling them Wanger. And I’m happy to hear Mockers has stuck with that. And I’ve stuck with it as well. And every now and again, someone points out, no, it’s not Wanger, it’s Wagner. But they create this mythology about private military company. And so there’s something folklore, obviously, about that.

**Bridges Between Worlds**

There’s something folkloric about the whole structure of the position, the bridge, as I mentioned, dividing other worlds. So one world from another, Russia occupied Ukraine from government controlled Ukraine, paradise from hell and in daily life on that bridge and listening, speaking to the everyday, most days I would speak to dozens of people on the bridge and I would hear dozens of stories about, I’d ask them so through interpreter or through my amazing translators, you know, tell me about your journey today. How was it?

And, you know, they would have these kind of Luhansk cities about 14 kilometers away, but it might take them seven hours to travel that 14 kilometers because of just, you know, Russia specializes in creating these border zones. And it’s one of their unique skills is just to create hell on earth. So the bridge was dividing other symbolic other worlds in folklore and in folktales but also in actuality and the tales people spoke of that they would travel from Russia-occupied Ukraine into there.

And that particular spot has been a boundary zone for millennia. So the Donets, the Don River, is the dividing line, according to Isidore of Seville, who was kind of the Wikipedia of the 6th century in the Common Era. Your monastery was nothing if you didn’t have a copy, or it was everything if you had a copy, of Isidore of Seville’s etymologies.

And the Don River, Isidore of Seville has the Don River as the dividing line with Asia. So everywhere east of the Don is Asia and the Tanay, as Isidore calls it. And so the Donets River itself, as the little Don River, has been a boundary zone for millennia. And here it was a boundary zone again in 2015 onwards.

And in the Second World War, this always really blew my mind, the Second World War. It was also a boundary zone. The Nazis and the Soviets fought right there. And in the forestry all around it, there was the shrapnel from a rusty old shrapnel from that time. And here it was again. It was paradise between 1945 and and 2014 and no one in 2013 would have predicted that this was going to become a boundary zone again. And then there was the events like I talked about last time like the luxury sausage troll saga that almost lead to war so these are folklore like events.

**Gobekli Tepe and Ancient Symbolism**

Recently I visited this amazing place in Turkey, Gobekli Tepe, which is often described as the first monumental set of basically three stone circles with lots of orthostats and designs from 12,000 years ago. And it was discovered a decade or two ago, and I visited there. And on these orthostats, on these stones, there are carved animals, like the thing which affected me most is seeing birds, vultures, with their wings spread. So this same motif, which was in Babylon, the Hittites, and now many countries, including Russia, has the double-headed, the double-headed bird, I’ve already seen that in Hittite from about 1400 BCE on orthostats.

But Poland and loads of countries, America have the eagle. Loads of countries have birds. And to see this was important enough in human culture 12,000 years ago. Just totally, totally blew my mind. But also they had these boars, wild boars, boars carved on the stones. And this amazing wild boar, which clearly had significant religious experience, significance to these people living 12,000 years ago. And this really intricately designed Boar’s Head, with still the red paint on it that was buried in this place, which was discovered maybe a bit by chance.

That also added to my understanding of the luxury sausage troll saga, because you have this connection with pigs and boars going right back through folklore. Three little piggies going to market. We heard Putler describing Western politicians as piggies, basically lambs to the slaughter, using folkloric tropes. Going to them so the luxury sausage troll saga it itself had folkloric resonances even though at the time I didn’t know about Gobekli Tepe I was aware of the significance of pigs in Three Little Piggies and in folklore so that struck me at the time and then obviously the weaving of this event all of these Disinfolklore archetypal Disinfolklore in Russian occupying media which was used to brainwash Ukrainians in Russia occupied Ukraine into thinking that I as a member of, as a representative, as a diplomat from the international community sent there by 57 member states of the OSCE to help establish the facts in relation to particular incidents and to try and de-escalate the conflict that they created of my presence there folklore.

So that was another element than the everyday heroism of ordinary people managing an extraordinary situation.

**Everyday Heroism**

So it was mainly women and older people. Women, children, and older people of pension age who cross this bridge every day. 10,000 civilians going at the height, going each way. And at various stages over my three years there, we went through lots of different stages. Sometimes people would have to wait for seven or eight hours or overnight on one side of the bridge to go. And the main motivating factor for people from the Ukrainian side or from the Russia-occupied Luhansk side was they came over the bridge to collect their pensions from the Ukrainian state in Stanytsia Luhanska and then they would return over to the other side.

And obviously in April 2014 about a million and a half people saw the writing on the wall and left Russia occupied Ukraine and left Crimea immediately and I met and got to know many of the people who made those that choice they just left their apartments and never went back because they understood what was going to happen. But a lot of people didn’t leave because they may have had older parents or they didn’t have the foresight. Maybe culturally, they were closer to Moscow than to Kyiv. They might have just had a comfortable life there. Or maybe they were just a bit stubborn, obstinate, and who could have foreseen what was going to happen? So they decided to stay.

Pensioners then had access to the pensions in Ukraine still. So they crossed the bridge to physically collect them and then go back. And I, in my naivety at the time, thought, well, well, they’ll come over to the other side of the bridge and they’ll see that Ukrainians aren’t devils. And therefore, they will, the Disinfolklore which they’re being subjected to, the brainwashing Disinfolklore which they’re being subjected to, won’t brainwash them as deeply in Russia-occupied Ukraine because they’re coming over to Ukraine, they see that they’re normal people and that they can collect their pension.

**The Power of Disinfolklore**

But now I realize the power of Disinfolklore is, and we see this with MAGA as well, it’s so powerful that it becomes the filter through which you perceive the entire world. And people are willing to sacrifice their children or their family or their longest relatives, or we see with anti-vax stuff, they’re willing to subject themselves to death because they believe RFK Jr.’s idea that, you know, eating raw meat is, and, you know, having a raw deer every day, and, you know, eating dogs with brain worms inside them is actually going to make you a lot stronger.

So people, ideas are, and this is the power of Disinfolklore, are so strong. I mean, I don’t really need to, it’s easier, like, it’s a more common idea today, I think, for me to say that is less controversial than it would have been before COVID or 10 years ago, because I would have always thought, had this romantic notion that, oh, you know, the will to survive will overcome ideas. But now I think we’ve seen enough of how people can be brainwashed to not need to be convinced that this folklore can ruin lives, ruin families, and ruin Russia and Ukraine as well.

But the everyday heroism of the ordinary people managing an extraordinary situation, mothers bringing children across the hellscape. And that really struck me. And speaking to people about their experiences there every day and collecting those stories, which I reprinted faithfully in my in my reports, which not that many people read, even in my own organization. But I did the best I could, the best job I could, to record their stories. And maybe one day I’ll publish them all.

But it was just very ordinary people. But just doing, you know, the heroism of the mother, the young mother pretending to the child that this was completely normal about what they have to do and trying to goad the child across this one and a half kilometre stretch of land with the detritus of bullets and old artillery shells and just really grim stuff.

I’m going to post actually now in the purple pill, just some photos that I had to be careful about which photos I took there. But one Christmas, the Christmas of 2016, I systematically, I just took, I recorded the entire situation and and I’ve just shared now in the, I think it’s gone into the space thing. So you’ll see the kind of scene, the apocalyptic scene that I was dealing with and some of the heroic scenes.

Mothers with their children there’s this picture I’ve just posted there, a man looking at me very suspiciously as I took the photograph of him and he’s pushing his mother on on a wheelchair across this you know this terrible space and you see the stone mina be careful for the mines. And this is common again to folklore, where you just have ordinary people, archetypal, normal people, but in extraordinary situations.

And I never, I never, never ceased to amaze me, especially because you didn’t have men of military age, generally speaking, didn’t want to be in that space. You had a lot of smuggling going on. So you had kind of porters carrying things who were often young, young guys. There’s a whole sub economies there, but it was mainly civil, much older people who couldn’t be press ganged or tortured or captured, doing it. And so I, I always have that, that I always used to think of my mother as well. Like imagine if she had to, to go across there.

**Trolling and Emotion**

Then there was this the idea of trolling of emotion moving my emotion moving and over the course of being being there for three years you you you become a bit, just like I felt I owned the place in many respects because no one had witnessed no one else was witnessing it in the same that I was in my, my team was, and when I left, it was time to leave, basically, because I would get emotional. And then the Russian occupiers were also looking at our internet profiles. So they would be looking. By that time, I had deleted my internet profiles. I didn’t appear then on the internet again until really until I established a Medium account in the autumn and the fall of 2019 and then I started using Twitter in June 2021 after I had created Decoding Trolls and I had an idea of this set of the positive trolling the code of positive trolls so that I wasn’t just randomly tweeting stuff, that it all adhered to this communications technique.

But the Russian occupiers would, we had to cross and speak in multiple checkpoints. And they were always trolling us. And, you know, playing hardball or being mean or trying to spinning wheeling tails. But they were also looking at our internet and some of my colleagues were really, you know, they weren’t, I was told delete your Facebook and everything when I started that job and I dutifully did that. But most of my other colleagues didn’t seem to do it. And in some respects, they paid a price for it because it helped the Russians run operations against individuals.

And then the link with artillery barrages as well, where I realized, okay, they’re just about trolling people’s emotions. So now this whole discussion of the Oreshnik in Lviv the other day, I’m quite happy that now those people who’ve paid attention to it on, say, the Times broadcast or the Telegraph podcast are looking at in the sense that this is an information attack. It’s not about a military strategy. And I’m really happy about that level of awareness because that was one of my main foundational intuitions in eastern Ukraine was sometimes these days of thousands of ceasefire violations by the Russians that they had exactly the same emotional impact on me as did trolling by the Russian occupiers or online, where someone attacks you online and you just feel this sense of, oh, someone’s attacking me, I’m in danger.

And that’s quite a sophisticated idea for people. And we shouldn’t forget that, this idea that Russia only said that the purpose of this Reshnik is to add weight to the mythical attack on, mythological attack, Disinfolklore attack on Putler’s residence. Note the posh term which they use, and that in response to that, we fire the Oreshnik, and then we’re supposed to go, oh, that adds credibility to the Disinfolklore.

But I’m quite satisfied now that this idea that Russia’s attacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine are mainly, should be understood on the level of Disinfolklore. And this is, again, going back to why I’m careful about sharing stuff, because if that is their intention, they want to create horror and somehow out of that horror and ISIS you know we we saw ISIS doing doing this as well somehow that that horror attracts people like my Turkish colleague or my Kazakh colleague into watching these horrible things and they’re kind of doing the you’re keeping the troll trolls our energy as far as I conceive of them now and they die if no one keeps them alive. And I try to be careful about perpetuating them.

**Mythical Happenings**

And then there was the other aspect of folklore, mythical happenings that only existed in Russian Disinfolklore. So the Russian occupying media would be talking about these attacks which the Ukrainians had carried out. And often I was there when these mythological attacks that would appear in their media and they’d talk about them for weeks afterwards. And I get a call from Kyiv or from our operations team saying, oh, yeah, so tell me about this attack. And they’re like, it didn’t happen. Because I was there. And I know, or my colleague was there, and we know it didn’t happen.

And so I realized that these things can be real, even if they’re just in the information space. And again, that’s the folkloric element, that something feels so real and so vivid that you’re not quite sure whether it happened or not. Like a child getting really scared by a story, so scared that they can’t sleep. And then them beginning to think, well, even though they saw it in a film or in a Disney film or in a horror film or on TikTok, that you can’t really remember, is that real or not? Did it happen? And it kind of melds into our consciousness.

And Russia riffs off this, you know, implanting memories, artificial memories of what the USSR was like. And noticing that you can create prosthetic memories in people’s minds. We’ve talked about that before.

**Locus Amoenus: The Pleasant Spot**

The other aspect, folkloric aspect, was this in art, especially in classical stories, there’s this idea of what’s called in a quite posh Latin, locus amoenus. And the definition of a locus amoenus is a pleasant spot. And that’s a phrase used by modern scholars to refer to a set description of an idyllic landscape, typically containing trees and shade, a grassy meadow, running water, songbirds and cool breezes. The tradition goes back to Homer’s descriptions of the Grotto of Calypso and the Garden of Alcinus.

And this folkloric element aspect of even though it was hell on earth, a lot of the time there, I never lost sight of the beauty of that place. And I longed to return there after the deoccupation because it was a pleasant spot. It had the birds, the grassy meadows, the running water. There was always birds. It was cool breezes, trees, shade. And so I had that intimation the first time I was being there.

**Archetypal Characters**

Another dimension of that situation was the people who themselves were archetypes. So the leader of the Russian occupiers, until he went missing, someone said, oh, he’s probably gone on leave. And it’s like, no, you don’t go on leave, you get eliminated and he used to spin these tales and that he was like every morning I would go down there and say so what happened last night and he’d always have a story for me knowing that I would then put that word for word in my report. And he described himself as a simpler forester. So that’s a classic archetype from folklore.

Soldiers, knights, nurses, villagers, knaves, damsels in distress, invaders, trolls, villains, mercenaries, defenders, and animals of all kinds being led across the bridge. You know, it was like a living folktale. It’s like Mockers’ front room when she’s doing her show and the cats are all these adventures which are going on. These great stories are being created all the time. So there was these archetypes there. And that’s a narrow meaning of archetype by comparison to how I now use the idea of archetyping where Russia uses archetypes of national identity. For instance, it knows a certain proportion and then the population will be anti-Semitic. So it will stir them up and then get everyone fighting. **Archetypal Characters** (continued)

That’s the wider view of archetyping, which I use. And then there was very story like switches always there every day, interzone tripping. Russian occupiers describing themselves as defenders, Ukrainians represented as usurpers, as occupiers. So we see that all the time in these telegram stories. The Russians are still at it. They’re trying to re-archetype reality. They’re saying they’re trying to liberate Kupiansk from the occupiers. But international law is the standard against which we decide what is liberating and not.

But these fairy story-like switches of reversals, which are quite confusing for many of us until we get our eye into them. And even the idea of peace and mir, we’re just looking for peace and mir, but actually peace means war.

**Mists and Portals**

Mists often rising above the river, especially in the morning, which is in Welsh mythology, in particular in Irish mythology, mists are a portal into another world. And then the passage to other worlds, and I’ll finish here, is the afterlife is across bridges and rivers. The Styx River, the Acheron in Greek mythology. Odysseus passes into the underworld in the Kerch Strait, believe it or not, interestingly enough.

**Zoroastrian Mythology and the House of Lies**

And in early Iranian history, which hopefully we’ll have a moment. If they can get rid of the mullahs, we’ll get a bit of Zoroastrianism back into it. Daena, again, D-N, same as in Don, river, meaning river, Daena. Daena controls passage across Chinvat Bridge. To the saved, Daena appears as a beautiful woman. And there is often great beauty in this terrible place. And if Daena appears as a beautiful woman, you’re going to pass into the house of song. But to the damned, Daena appears as a witch and you will pass into the house of lies.

So again, this goes back into Luhansk. Russia occupied Luhansk was a house of lies. And archetyping it as a house of lies is substantiated by the Disinfolklore apparatus and how they used Disinfolklore to brainwash people. But this goes right back to the common heritage in, whether it’s Donald using truth social and trying to re-archetype lies as truth going back again to the federal and Jan 6th indictment, where it is the usurper Donald telling lies about the election being stolen to generate a rationale for Trump, for the Jan 6th insurrection.

**The Inscriptions of Behistun**

And that goes right back, all the way back to the inscriptions of Behistun, which I will be the first to visit if Iran is liberated from the mullahs, where we have Darius the Great who founded the Achaemenid Empire, which ruled most of the world or most of Anatolia and Mesopotamia and all the way to Greece for a brief 400 years until Alexander the Great came on the scene. But the inscriptions of Behistun where he talks about all the usurpers he has overcome who promoted the lie. They promoted the lie that they were the rightful monarchs of their areas.

And in these inscriptions, which are in three languages and enabled the decryption of cuneiform, basically the key to cuneiform. But going back to what I promised I would get to and the point we’re moving towards, is this idea of truth and the lies. But going right back to the Zoroastrian religion, and if Zarathustra or Zoroaster either works, lived, they lived around 1400 BCE. And so as far back as then, this idea of a house of lies is hell, basically. And that was the other side of the bridge where the Disinfolklore apparatus was going on. And the House of Song was the Ukraine part of the bridge.

**Conclusion: The Folkloric Dimensions**

And so those are all the different dimensions, folkloric dimensions, if you like, of that scene. And then so next week, we’ll move along, move away from the bridge. But I wanted to give you that deep dive, both parts, the one like the Sausage Troll saga, but also this aspect, because I know folklore is quite hard for us perhaps to relate to outside of the nursery and outside of our experience of the nursery, either as parents or as children ourselves. But this was me exploring my intuition that just occurred to me that there was something folklore about the situation. And then today I’ve described all the actual dimensions of the folkloric aspects of it, which led me to Disinfolklore.

**Learning and Evolution**

I realise now the work which I did do on looking at the impact of trolls and trolling as the keywords in the Dow Jones Factiva database and getting these 45,000 responses and then going through them. And from the early 70s onwards, and then just suddenly this eruption in 2007, 2008 on social media, obviously you have, you have a lot of stuff, early computer culture and alternate stuff from the 80s onward in Oakland and in other places. And that comes through a little bit through this data set.

But there is just this step change that happens with Facebook and Twitter. And for most of us, it feels quite recent because, you know, I remember when Facebook, when we all discovered Facebook or when my generation, you know, whenever it was, probably 2007 or something, and, you know, within two weeks, everyone you knew was on it. And it has this big change. And we see now this battle that’s in the national security strategy of the United States of America, which is basically we don’t want to deal with European governments and with the European Union. In fact, we’ll go to war with Europe over our provincial recent idea of free speech, which, oh, by the way, benefits us because I own truth social or untruth social or I own X.

And we use these mechanisms to brainwash and create, using Disinfolklore, our adherents, our cult followers. And then we get them, we mobilize them so that we can get more power and abolish and abolish democracy. But thankfully, because of the Macron judgment and these new rules in Australia and the European Union’s work on the Digital Services Act, there is a, it’s still a contested space and the battle is not over yet. And I try to never lose sight of that.

**The Stakes and Social Media**

But what you’re talking about there, Wendy, is, yeah, exactly that. The stakes and how children have, we were all taught to do things or not to do things through storytelling. And, you know, being afraid to go to the forest and being afraid to go into town because of the child snatcher and all of this kind of, all of these kinds of stuff. And now, as you say, folklore, or yeah, social media is the modern form of it.

And modern folklore theory, as I learned in that course that I did, does encompass social media although there is a kind of a conservative bias towards what we might easily recognize as folklore like Hansel and Gretel type stuff but also towards things in songs working working men’s songs and the Appalachians you know that kind of that kind of stuff as well but definitely for me war lore and what we’re what we’re subjected to on by these so-called mill bloggers who are really high-cultured, highly trained, brilliant, academically trained, in the most part, people like Zarina Zabriskie, who, as part of her linguistics degree in St. Petersburg, she was taught a module on combat propaganda.

And so all of these people are really, they’re not just some guy with a phone, which you kind of imagine it’s quite disarming to be called the mill bloggers or whatever. They’re actually very clever, for the most part, propagandists who are merely voicing very complex manipulative ideas that take advantage of folklore and how it works on our brains. So yeah, the fight is on.

Continued from:

First in series:

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