Podcast | Intimidating Russia through Archetypal Imaging (and very ancient symbolism)

[Lieutenant-General Budanov, chief of Ukraine’s main military intelligence directorate - HUR - nicknamed “The Owls”]

Elmo Robin and Druidey Don Batman dressed up in Marvel Universe costumes (through AI and In Real Life). Posting them them on their own Disinfolklore propagation network X. And compelling other oligarchs to do likewise of theirs. Were embedded in Disinfolklore - stories that purposefully affect our Moods/Intentions/Attitudes/ Motivations in ways that repurpose us to serve the Disinfolklorists memes/means to transform our world.

Druidey Don’s wife wore a meme chic costume for his inauguration. A Ukrainian fashion designer in Los Angeles noticed a market for real world clothes that mimic and riff off a Marvel or Disney World aesthetic.

She chose to model Druidey Don’s vision of Disinfolklore universe in which we are battered daily by a million hitherto unsayable and hitherto undoable things. So the abnormal becomes the normal. We have no anchor, except the Mememaster in Chief’s next whim to latch on to.

The power to Archetype at will belongs to all of us. 

BUT, if you own the memes of distribution of memes (the main means through which Archetyping outside our minds occurs) then you can archetype at scale.

Ukraine uses such archetypal symbolism to intimidate its enemies, provide an organising focus for its forces and to cast spells.

Magyar’s Birds is the moniker for Ukraine’s 414th Separate Unmanned Strike Aviation System Brigade. The cutting edge of Ukraine’s drone warfare. It takes the call-sign of its ethnic Hungarian chief Robert Brovdi - Magyar - and adds the bird symbolism. Today, Brovdi is the overall commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces (which has taken out around 25% of Russia’s oil refinery/fossil fuel transport capacity since early August). But his own unit lives on, enmeshed in bird symbolism.

“The vulture or owl goddess, a maleficent twin of the birth-giving goddess, appears as Death in the guise of a vulture, owl, or other predatory bird or carrion eater, yet has qualities of regeneration. A vulva, umbilical cord, or labyrinth is painted or engraved on her images. Hooks and axes symbols of energy and life stimulation-are engraved on western European stone stelae and on passage-grave slabs representing the owl goddess. In one of the Çatal Hüyük shrines of central Anatolia (seventh millennium BCE), the beaks of griffins emerge from the open nipples of female breasts. The owl goddess’s breasts, depicted in relief on slabs of megalithic gallery graves in Brittany, also suggest that regeneration is in her power.

The snowy owl appears in a number of engravings on the Upper Paleolithic (Magdalenian) cave walls of France, probably already as an epiphany of Death. There is rich evidence of the owl goddess throughout the Neolithic, Copper, and Early Bronze ages. During the last period, the owl form became the usual shape of urns…” [Encyclopaedia of Religion]

“…sacrifices to this goddess are known from the Paleolithic (Ksar Akil, Lebanon, mid-Paleolithic; Malta, c. 15,000 BCE), earliest Neolithic (Zawi Chemi Shanidar, northern Iraq, more than 10,000 years before our time), the Neolithic, and the Bronze Age (Isbister, Scotland). It is clear that large wings had enormous symbolic importance for millennia…”

[Hittite double-headed bird (~1,400 BCE) at ALACA HÖYÜK, Anatolia - photographed by Decoding Trolls].

Zoroastrian fire altar, & Iranian “Shahed” drone which sacrifices Ukrainians for Putin’s health (Zoroaster/Zarathustra, if he was an actual human being, as distinct from a mere mythological concept, lived around 1,400 BCE in ancient Iran,

Iran, like all Indo-European cultures, adopted language & religion first forged by ancient Ukrainians.

1st Aryans were Sintashta & Andronovo descendants of ancient 🇺🇦 migrants into Kazakhstan.

Yes, the bat. We all remember those pictures of Druidy Don.

I called him Druidy Don because he’s kind of truthy, Druidy, as in the class of intellectuals in Celtic, ancient Celtic society called Donn. Donn is the Lord of Death in ancient Celtic culture, who according to Irish mythology (which was first written down around 1100 AD in the Common Era, but through the language dates from earlier and is about the Indo-European invasions of Ireland, the island of Ireland) is Ireland’s pre-Christian Lord of Death. And obviously you have the Don Hyper (Dnipro) River, you have the Don River, you’ve Dnipro River, which is the Dnepro, the Upper Don. And they’ve Dniester, Don Istres, I think it’s Lower Don from the perspective, if you’re looking at them from Crimea. Then you’ve got the Danube, so you’ve got these DN, you’ve got these DN sands associated with rivers, which were the embodiments of uh deities and uh Druidey Donald you’ve got Donald and Druidey Don.

So you see Druidey Don and Batman and Robin basically archetyping themselves as Batman and Robin Elmo in the White House dressed in black, so using comic again comic book haute couture darkness.

Once you get your eye into what they’re doing and how they are archetyping, it seems quite clumsy sometimes.

It works quite well at the subconscious level, as of course Jung knew. They clearly know what they’re doing because it’s not an accident that Melania was dressed by DressX, two Ukrainian fashion designers from L.A. who tapped into this market.

It’s not an accident that Donald was talking about Alphonse Capone just the other day again. But he did it every one of his campaign at his campaign. So they very much know what they’re what they’re doing. They know it works in the moment and and they’re tapping into these into these archetypes.

Yes, the owls. I’m always impressed with General, I can’t remember his exact title, but Lieutenant-General Budanov, the owl behind him. And I link that to Sumerian imagery archetyping, where the owl Lilith, I think. And we have many images across the pre-Indo-European civilization of owls. So they’re extremely adept at generating archetypes and at working on that plane.

Long before I worked out and came up with a portmanteau Disinfolklore, when I look back at my writing since the war, and even before the war, but my public writing about Ukraine has only been since the full-scale invasion because I worked as a diplomat and I couldn’t write about Ukraine when I was working there.

But President Zelensky, obviously, as I wrote this piece at the end of March 2022, Let’s Compare Trolls, where I set... 20th century, who I call Duncey Putin now.

He’s Duncey because he’s like a folklore idiot. He’s the idiot. He’s the town fool. He’s like Raskalnikov in Crime and Punishment, who kills two women to see if he can get away with it. It’s just the stupidest thing ever. He’s been tortured by it. And this is Duncey Putin, the master strategist, who just wakes up each day. We see this archetypal character, Istanbul Peace Talks. They’re really pushing this. They’ve been pushing this.

I spotted its emergence in mid-March 2022, Istanbul Peace Talks in an article in the Financial Times.

And for people who are really tuned in to what had been going on in Ukraine (as I was since 2014) even what was reported then in mid-March 2022 in the Financial Times - that Ukraine would capitulate - was just… It was so not only even (apart from the fact that Russia, most of us or meant some of us could already see that Russia’s invasion was a disaster within the first week of it. I’m on record as saying on the 1st of March 2022.

Russia has done a reverse Napoleon because I saw what the communication logistics difficulties it was having with that massive convoy and the Russian units were complaining that they couldn’t connect with each other. So I likened it to doing the opposite of what Napoleon had done. Napoleon obviously invaded Russia, and here was Russia invading Ukraine. But it’s a reverse Napoleon in the sense that it shared the problem of having the logistics and all Ukraine had to do, which is what it’s doing on the long duration.

All it just has to do is keep drawing them in and letting them waste to their logistics, waste to their resources, which is exactly what the mythology, um, embedded in war and peace, um, tells us, um, field Marshal Kutuzov, the famous Russian general who, who resisted all attempts to, to, um, to make battle against Napoleon, kept on withdrawing, and everyone, the Tsar, and everyone said, come on, you must face him, and basically tried his best to avoid, and then the winter came).

And so President Zelensky is a master archetyper. I actually found footage of him archetyping himself as Napoleon when he, in one of his programs before Napoleon, long before the war, which is wonderful.

He’s just got this massive hat on. And so I juxtapose that with that great meme some of us will remember when President Macron finally came to sense.

You know, it was President Macron’s idea of Ukraine as this little brother of Russia. Germany’s idea of Ukraine as, well, actually, our debt, we owe our debt to Russia, not to Ukraine for killing - What was it, 8 million Ukrainians? But when I saw President Macron make that speech, and he first did it in an interview in mid-February 2024, where he basically went all in, and then he made that amazing speech, and then the Macronian memes came out with a Napoleon hat.

Um, so, uh, president, so you asked the question, what do I think about the owls and the Batman and, um, the bats in FSB? Yeah. Ukraine is working on that plane and it is blessed to have, uh, president Zelensky who operates, uh, it was his job. Uh, he didn’t just, it’s like second nature to him. He operates on this symbolic plane, uh, in such a successful way that he had the, he and his, um, his writer, his wife, who’s a writer, and his friends from Kryvyi Rih, which is a city I know really well. So I kind of understand deeply what he comes from. I actually used to visit the apartment block he grew up in quite a lot because there was a CSO, a civil society organization I did a lot of work with in Kryvyi Rih.

And so I really understand this in a deep sense where he came from. And when you hear us say MAGA people talk about Zelenskyy or if I’m in England and, uh, in the shires and people are saying to me, what do you think about Zelenskyy?

I know that they’re talking about a character they read about in the newspaper who has been relentlessly archetyped as somehow unconnected to the, what was it, 64% of the people who elected him directly, more bigger mandate than probably any democratically elected leader in a free and fair election in world history (like it’s literally at that scale!). Now thankfully we see him he’s up to what 72% or whatever in those so um so there is this war and this is um this is actually where where I and I’m operating on this level and all of us are unknowingly but this is where the war will be won and lost.

Lieutenant-General Budenov and President Zelenskyy get this. We have from the very beginning - it is a war of symbols. If Ukraine can archetype itself as a winner, it will get the means it needs to succeed.

If Russia manages to archetype Ukraine as part of Russia, as a loser, then no one will help Ukraine. That is the level that the war, so we have these two battlefronts, we have the kinetic battle space where Ukraine is doing extremely well. And then we have this war of symbols.

And you ask, what can we do about it? So what Volya Radio (Volya4UA on Twitter or on Spotify) does, what Mockers does, and Jenni and Ioana , I see you all there, what you do every day and Absurdistan Will Thiel’s “Absurdistan.”

What you’re both doing is Archetyping of Russia as this great culture which many of us were embedded in. And I know I’ve had this conversation a lot with Ming as well. He, like me, has read a lot of great Russian literature. And we’ve fallen for that troll. We’ve imbibed it. We’ve been drunk on its beauty and the amazingness of it. But then when you pull the stage, when you realize that actually it’s just a stage play, and then the Potemkin metaphor. It’s just so beautiful, so wonderful, because what you’re doing is de-archetyping Russia as this great culture, as Natalia’s (@NatalkaKyiv on Twitter) work does really well. So that’s really important work. We need to continue doing this and getting it into people’s minds. I mean whenever I obviously can’t really talk about many of the things I hear from say mockers or from Chris Owiki or whatever in normal polite society. People literally won’t believe it. Yet all of us have this kind of uh understanding of the absurdist and the lack of toilets. There’s just the mad stuff they come up with for to get people to sign a contract which doesn’t mean anything. Because you can’t coerce someone into signing a contract. It’s like what you do, again, goes back to Duncey Putin. It’s one of the first things you learn in contract law. You know, if there’s coercion. Yet every day we’re reading about these crazy folktale-like tricks of getting people to sign the contract torturing them. Then suddenly they sign the contract and they can be magically sent uh on a uh back you know to the front line where they’re killed within 24 hours. It’s absolutely insane stuff. It’s no way to run an empire covering one-sixth of the world surface. It’s comical. Absurd. It’s extraordinary stuff. The more people - they used to have this program in England called Eurotrash, where they basically seem to be based on, you know, bizarre things that happened in Japan in the 1980s- We need to continue doing that about Russia. This is the great work, say, that we see people trying to explain to Donald that Russia, you know, its economy is tiny. You know, it’s the size of Chile. This is not, this is, you know, if you’re going to sacrifice America to something, don’t sacrifice it to Russia.

Russia is just rubbish on every level. Obviously all of our countries can be archetyped as rubbish. But we’re not committing genocide or, and doing these horrific crimes. So that’s, that’s what we can do. But the war of symbols, Lieutenant-General Budanov and, President Zelensky and many of the people around them are operating on that level.

It’s beautiful to watch. It’s part of the evidence that I parsed to work out what’s going on and what I can.

I do have I have these 12 tools which I use and which I’m proselytizing that we should be able to use in our ordinary conversations and ordinary daily lives to help us see through this. The lenses of what I call the lenses of Disinfolklore. Archetypes are really important in my work. Once you identified them and verbalized them for me I understood immediately I see them immanent they are immanence’s in almost infinity of instances of Disinfolklore and memes and units of information we see everywhere. Especially that one - Russia has the right to decide on the destinies of its neighbours.

Tool One – Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy​

Tool Two – Incoming / Outgoing Troll Radars​

Tool Three – Look for the Mana in the Meme!​

Tool Four - Inner / Outer Realm immanences​

Tool Five - Trigger, Experience, Reaction​

Tool Six - The Code of Positive Trolls​

Tool Seven: Generosity ~ Is the Meaning in the Meme Generosity?​

Tool Eight: Right ~ Is the Meme’s Mana Ethical Discipline?​

Tool Nine: Mana ~ What are the Meme’s Implicit Archetypes?​

Tool Ten: Is the Meme’s Mana Promoting Patience?​

Tool Eleven: Mindfulness – Should I Potentially Allow this Meme into my Mind?​

Tool Twelve: Insight/Wisdom

That archetype of Russia has this kind of power. It’s in every international relations paper you come across. It’s, and you know, people, Putin understanders, And yet, of course, none of our countries, not even America, you know, which would have, which until Donald anyway, would have the right to say we are an amazing culture, which is the best in so many different areas of human endeavour would do that. Yeah, it was really helpful for me because it’s a way of cutting through.

Derrida talks about “knowledge is for cutting.” Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy really cuts through data. Wherever you pick it up - whether it’s some Telegram post or something that we pick up on tweets, those three archetypes - Russia’s indispensable. Russia’s undefeatable, Russia’s obsession with fairy tales and folk tales and Baba Yaga. And just James, while I think about, yeah, the other way we can, you know, it was the Russians, I believe themselves, who called the Baba Yaga drone, the Baba Yaga drone.

So we can use this power of magic against them. They use it against themselves. They scare themselves as well. And Ukraine and Lieutenant-General Budanov and its communications policy is really good at doing this.

President Zelensky plays it straight, but the apparatus around... And this is why we are very privileged, as all of the people here participating in the space right now, we’re all equally embedded in this... information space on this plane on this this plane the information space plane. What we are witnessing, I think, is, I mean, it’s obviously unprecedented. The patterns we pick up on are so important in every domain. In every - what I call - Disinfolklore Galaxy whether it is MAGA or CCP or or what is to come or anti-vax or any of these other areas.

We’re just seeing this epic battle of the titans between Duncey Putin through Idioting on one side and the Comedian Zelenskyy.

So this D-N- sound. I have them in all. Duncey, Druidey Don, The Comedian. The Comedian Zelensky. I think most of us understand who’s going to win this Titanic mythologically, in the mythological sense, battle.

Watching it in real time is obviously, a bit of an edge of the seats situation. It’s horrific and horrendous. It’s also extremely… it’s where most of us can make a contribution. It’s also very interesting. Yeah.

I think it’s, um, going back to Karl Jung. It’s President Zelensky’s Aura drives Donald nuts. Because he, he, he, President Zelensky does play it straight in those interactions. I thought the most interesting thing about that tweet, which wasn’t picked up by that much, was how, and for me, this is the first time I’d seen this, that Donald’s awareness that Russia will collapse if it continues, well, anyway, in Ukraine, that was very interesting to me.

Someone is getting to Donald. Someone is gradually adding a grain of sand at a time and upsetting that archetype of Russia as undefeatable in Donald’s mind. Obviously, he may change his mind. But to put that in that very compact tweet, I found that very interesting. It echoes something former Ukrainian President Kravchuk said in 2020 in the interview, which I often repost because it’s so wonderful, where he talks about how, of course, Russia could go, as they say, on the offensive again. But if she does, she will fall to pieces.

That, of course, wasn’t the conventional view that many of us were exposed to. I remember reading that in the interview at the time in 2020 and thinking, God, that’s interesting. Clearly that message is getting through somehow to Donald. Someone’s drawing the pictures in his daily briefings.

Once he senses in that animal way, Russia is the loser. And that archetype is upset and destroyed, which is obviously being chipped away by a lot of people he’s speaking to, whether it’s President Zelensky or the President of Finland or Merz or Prime Minister Starmer from England and Meloni and all of them are all, and his pastor (if he ever speaks to him), they’re all chipping away at these archetypal identities in Donald mind and I do get some hope from that.

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