Decoding Trolls returns for a deep dive into what he calls the “disinfolklore universe”—a constructed reality where propaganda, myth, archetypes, and emotional manipulation replace facts and reason.

Building on his Munich Security Conference intervention and years of lived experience in eastern Ukraine, Decoding unpacks how modern information warfare operates not just through lies, but through stories that feel true, emotionally charged archetypes, and psychological paradoxes designed to exhaust, demoralize, and ultimately re-engineer public consciousness.

The discussion explores how concepts like peace, security guarantees, and ceasefires are deliberately inverted—how capitulation is sold as peace, aggression as liberation, and coercion as care. From MAGA rhetoric and Russian disinformation ecosystems to Wagner mythology, Valhalla symbolism, and the weaponization of disgust (“migrants eating dogs”), this episode traces how ancient mythic structures are repurposed for modern mind-war.

Drawing on anthropology, cultural psychology, and firsthand ceasefire-monitoring experience, Decoding explains why demilitarized zones and ceasefire monitoring fail when there is no political will to enforce them—and why Russia’s long-term strategy has always relied on constant provocation, plausible deniability, and psychological erosion, not compliance…

US Presidents could always archætype at scale. Now, they have the capacity to re-encode our minds into their Disinfolklore Universe.

If the media repeats your trolls then people truly believe migrants are eating your pet dawg. If you own X and Facebook then you can convince at scale that we are NOT living in a Disinfolklore universe now.

We are though. The signs are everywhere, once you get your eye in. And that is my job: to get your eye in, so you can see what is being done.

By understanding the Disinfolklore Universe we can engage in conscious memetic warfare. Conscious Counter Disinfolklore.

So, two weeks ago, I ended at the point where I was talking about what I was most concerned with in my Munich speech in February 2025: that we would be wrapped up inside what I call a Disinfolklore, or a universe made up of different discrete galaxies all coalescing.

And sadly, the attempt to re-engineer humanity through this is ongoing. We see it every day throughout this so-called peace process. And so, how it manifests in our minds and in our timelines is exactly what we’re experiencing at the moment, which is a constant battering of our senses and emotions. Our emotions—most importantly—are battered with hope and with feelings that maybe, for instance, in the case of one of the main characters at the moment, the war in Ukraine, peace is going to arrive in a month or two, or that it is imminent.

I think all of us... I’m not going to go through why I don’t think this is true. I could go through each of the peace agreement’s elements and demonstrate it’s not true. But I probably actually will get to that point later, in a few weeks, when I get to the point about my experience in eastern Ukraine.

US presidents could always archetype at scale. And by archetyping, I mean something bigger than branding. It’s not a mere imprinting of ideas in our consciousness. It’s something akin to attaching something in the quotidian, in our timelines, to very deep structures within our cognitive frameworks on an individual, but also on a micro and a macro level.

So, when President Trump was talking about immigrants eating our dogs, that can be understood on the literal level: “Immigrants are eating our dogs.” And many of us would have spent time fact-checking this. And lo and behold, we discover immigrants aren’t eating our dogs. But when I heard that, it reminded me of one of my great supervisors, Anna Lo, who was a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Sadly, she died about a year ago. But she was the first ethnic Chinese member of a legislature in Europe. And I worked for her in Northern Ireland when I was General Secretary of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, an anti-sectarian political party.

There is a tradition among those supposedly loyal to the British crown of lighting bonfires in July. Some of us might remember seeing lots of bonfires. And “Anna Lo ate my dog”—I remember seeing that once on a sign on one of these bonfires and wondering, what are they talking about?

And I thought of that immediately when Donald was talking about migrants eating our dogs. So there is this element also of an archetypal relationship between dogs and migrants—being eaten and eating our pets—somehow “others.” And that’s quite conventional, clearly, in far-right circles. I happened to come across it once by accident in Northern Ireland, and then it popped up in Donald Trump’s speech that time, and suddenly everyone is going [crazy].

So that’s also an archetypal structure. But it also sounds so bizarre to us as normal human beings who support Ukraine, that it’s like a hidden code, an unhidden code. And somehow it connects with the deep psychological fears of people in their inner minds and motivates them to hate migrants. It motivated enough of a set of people that it was worth Donald airing this in his campaign; that it was worth these so-called loyalists attaching a poster of Anna Lo to their bonfire and then burning the effigy, and burning the sign “Anna Lo ate my dogs.”

So this is the kind of thing I’m talking about: archetypal Disinfolklore literacy. We don’t have to learn all of these tropes, because honestly, I think we could end up being brainwashed. But when we hear, when we see the Wagner (or the “Wanger”) propagandist who was killed by one of the first HIMARS strikes in Popasna in July 2022... some of us will remember that incident where he was visiting the front line as a tourist. And it was in Popasna, which is a city I know well, or knew well when I lived in eastern Ukraine. He photographed his arrival there and it was put up online. But there was a label on the building behind him, and HIMARS came to visit, and he was killed.

And the person who took over the Grey Zone Telegram channel wrote: “So-and-so has gone to Odin.” Again, this is a very deep archetype in Indo-European history. And in Germanic, ancient Germanic thought—surfaced by Tacitus, recorded first in the first century of the Common Era, and then used by Wagner, the composer, as part of this project to create a German national consciousness movement. This was a response to the call by Herder in 1778 to unify the ten German tribes that Tacitus had recorded existed. Odin became prominent, and as part of that, Wagner the composer played his role—as did Goethe and many other great artists and writers—to form this culture. This is akin to what MAGA and Russia are trying to do using all of these different means.

When they use archetypes, like in this case, Odin (”He’s gone to Odin”), these are very deep structures. They attach not just into our culture, but into, for instance, Wednesday. Every time you say Wednesday, you’re unknowingly, perhaps, making a dedication to Odin. Wodanas is the Germanic way of calling Woden the god, but Odin is another name for it. And for the Wagner military guys, it was part of their lore, part of their inner lore, and it is still part of their lore. So when you pick up these things, they’re not mere tropes. They’re not mere accidental. There’s something more about them. So that’s what I mean about archetypes. It’s bigger than branding. It’s more than representation. It’s something much deeper. And that’s what I’m most concerned about.

This week, we saw, for instance—well, two weeks ago, and we talked a bit about it last week—we saw the new National Security Strategy. And so when we see... oh, it’s obvious, and this is from my previous work which I’ve talked about before, how “Putler” archetypes Ukraine as a woman. A woman from the perspective of the masculinist. From the perspective of Hegseth, or the head of the FBI, who incidentally, when he talks about Valhalla, is tapping into that white supremacist Germanic lore archetype. So it’s not just the Wagner military.

But what I noticed they’re also trying to do in the National Security Strategy is archetype Europe in the same way that they’re archetyping Ukraine. So it’s kind of turning the concept of Europe away from its power, its economic power and all of that, and turning it into—as I talk about characters in Disinfolklore literacy—a character that has the characteristics of a woman, a weak woman. And a “weak woman” is an archetype from the perspective of masculinists like Putler, like Hegseth, like Donald, like all of these paleo-male, paleo-conservatives.

They’re trying to create a sense of disgust about it. One friend of mine wrote to me from the United States, and she was like, “Well, how is Europe these days? I mean, it sounds... it’s all very sick to me, everything that’s going on there. You’re just ailing.” And this is the mood which has been spread.

I talk about how Disinfolklore works on our manner, on our energy, from which all our motivations come. Our attitudes, our moods emanate. So this is the secret sauce, as it were. We’re looking at the meme, we’re looking at the peace talks—the so-called peace talks—and our mood is being affected. And the mood is a much longer-term mechanism to brainwash us and to turn us, to demotivate us (”What’s the point in voting? Because they’re all the same”). That kind of way that they’re using memes to do this can be effected by archetypes.

And so when we’ve had previous, for instance, US presidents who have seen value in trying to inspire us for good or for ill, this is not what we have at the moment. So there are similarities, is basically what I’m saying; for instance, US presidents could always archetype at scale. But that doesn’t mean what we’re experiencing today in our minds, and in the mind war, is a facsimile version of the past. Because now they have the capacity to re-encode our minds into their Disinfolklore universe. If the media repeats your trolls, then people truly will believe migrants are eating your pet dog. If you own X or Facebook, then you can convince at scale that we are not living in a Disinfolklore universe. But we are.

The signs are everywhere once you get your eye in. And that is my job: to try and help us get our eyes in, and for me to remind myself of the real purpose of all of this peace talk—Disinfolklore—quite apart from the daily quotidian ebb and flow of “will they, won’t they.” I think most of us—I can be pretty confident and say most of us who are listening to this right now—that’s one particular Disinfolklore galaxy which isn’t wrapping us up inside. But I see it in even the Kyiv Independent. They’re going, “Oh, as we move closer to a peace process...” and then you see other journalists, and you see European leaders talking about how we’re as close as we were forever to a peace process. But I think most of us are pretty clear we’re not.

So then what is the purpose? What is the intention? What is the effect of all of this trolling with Witkoff and Kushner and all of this? Well, it’s to wrap us up inside my premonition of a Disinfolklore universe. And of course, it’s only one of thousands of different Disinfolklore galaxies or sub-galaxies which are going on at the moment. We’ve got the Epstein thing, we’ve got the Susie Wiles thing. In each of our individual countries, we have any number of stories which are going on. Maybe one I note today: that a conservative television channel in Poland is reported as wanting to establish a MAGA TV station there. So there’s one subset in many of our countries, perhaps a movement probably based around Palestine, animus towards Israel, or it could be about migrants, or both, or it could be about Ukraine or about any number of issues.

And this is what I kind of talked about a few weeks ago: this great insight from this amazing article by the Ukrainian historian Tetiana Boryak in InformNapalm, where she talks about the mental war which the Russians have declared against us. And how Surkov himself—Vladislav Surkov, the former Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, and who was in charge of Ukraine from, I think, 2012 to February 2020... I kind of laugh because I remember his nemesis. Surkov’s nemesis was the moment in December 2019 when President Zelensky refused to surrender Donetsk and Luhansk to Putler, despite Macron and Putin and the then-German Chancellor Merkel and Surkov promising that this newly minted president would give Russia control, enable them to hold elections. It was reported that Yermak almost came to blows with Surkov at that Paris meeting. And then Surkov left there.

But the really insightful thing from this piece in InformNapalm from Tetiana Boryak, which helped me a lot, was this statement from Surkov in his writings, where he talks about how Russia uses the archetypes of national consciousness as fig leaves to disguise their mental imperialism. And in the context of Russia and Russkiy Mir—which Russkiy Mir as an idea has been around for centuries probably—he realized that he could use this as a fig leaf to disguise Russia’s naked imperial ambition and to brainwash so many of the people we know. Many of us might have experienced this, brainwashing people into thinking, “Oh, there’s a problem with Russian language speakers in Ukraine. It’s just Russian language speaking places,” and all of these mad excuses which are trotted out as convenient fictions.

And so Surkov himself talks about archetypes in a different way than I do. In one sense, he’s talking about it in quite a narrow sense, but in another sense, it helps us understand how in Britain during Brexit, they were able to attach this political campaign to this archetype of “England alone” and “Ireland alone,” independence, a very deep sense of where we’re different from Europe. And over the course of six months, kind of brainwash people.

But I do note—and this could be amazing, we’ll see what happens—that the British Prime Minister and the ruling party have announced an immediate inquiry into foreign interference in elections on the island of Britain. And this was finally... many of us may have signed, would have seen that we signed a petition calling for this. We’ve been calling for this since basically the results of Brexit came out. And it just seemed a bit... the whole thing seemed a bit mad, a bit weird. And then when we learned about Cambridge Analytica and various other things... So now it’s possible that some of this will come out.

The motivation to make a military intervention in Ukraine is perhaps growing. We saw this in the case of Kosovo in 1999, when France, Germany, and... sorry, France, the United States, and Britain had decided they would go to war; then they made sure the information space created a motivation for that. So hopefully... I’ve been calling for this since about April 2022, trying to get the troops in there.

So that’s what I mean by the use of archetypes. And once you get your eye in, you can find them all over the place. And you kind of know then that this is what, for instance, MAGA is trying to do with Europe. It’s trying to make Europe seem weak. And by understanding what I call the Disinfolklore universe, we can engage ourselves in conscious mimetic warfare. We can consciously counter Disinfolklore. We won’t necessarily get caught so much on the facts of matters, but will understand what they’re doing, what’s the effect of what they’re doing.

Because they themselves may not... I’m not saying that the people in MAGA are the people who wrote the national security strategy—Vance and the people around him—sat around and used the word “archetypes.” “We’re going to archetype Ukraine as a woman, and we are going to talk about how all of this equality in Europe and its laws against discrimination, its laws against brainwashing because of the Holocaust... that because of all of that, we’re going to archetype Europe as weak. And then we’ll promote this trope inside Europe. And this will divide people in Europe so that they’re weak and they’ll submit to America.”

Well, actually, that probably is kind of what they’re doing. But it’s the same trick Putler did with Ukraine and still does. The Russians do it with Ukraine. But it certainly has its limits, as we see. I’m certainly pretty confident—99.9% confident—Ukraine is not going to lay down arms for a large number of reasons, most of which we in this community understand.

And so the Disinfolklore universe is a place where “up” has been archetyped as “down.” So it’s a place where peace means war. It’s a place where the person, for instance, Donald Trump, whose entire career is characterized by creating conflict and benefiting from the chaos, is apparently looking for a Nobel Peace Prize. Where an urge to force Ukraine to capitulate is archetyped as peace, a “peace process.” And most of us, when we hear this on the news, or perhaps most of our friends—people who don’t spend all day every day thinking about Ukraine and thinking, how can we help and how can we see what’s going on and interpret what’s going on and do our own little assistance in the information war?—normal people just say (I’m sure you’ve had it, I’ve had it in my life): “So, do you think there’s going to be peace soon?”

And I always have to judge: okay, do you have 10 hours? Because I’ll tell you. But the bottom line is no, because America doesn’t have the leverage. Russia doesn’t occupy the territory it thinks it occupies. The ceasefire is not... there were thousands of ceasefire violations in, say, the summer of 2016 when I was monitoring it—which I certified. Minsk, which was signed by my boss and then gathered dust presumably there somewhere, or maybe someone shredded them at some point. So the ceasefire was violated every day, thousands of times by the Russians, and no one did anything. So what’s going to trigger the forces?

We see today this stuff, this mad stuff about security guarantees. And actually, I just saw it now where they’re talking about America is now offering—or the Trump administration, sorry, I don’t mean to come down on America, it’s this crazy Trump administration. They’re offering Ukraine Article 4 or Article 5, whatever it is, like security guarantees, cast iron... but Ukraine has to agree to them in the next few days. So you’re like, well, how cast iron are they? I’m not buying a t-shirt in a shop. You want me to surrender my territory and my people in return for cast iron security guarantees, which presumably are supposed to last 100 years? And yet, if I don’t agree to them in the next two weeks, they’re not cast iron? I mean, it’s just... it’s absolutely insane stuff.

So for all these reasons, this so-called peace process isn’t a peace process. The substance of it isn’t. But once we realize that, say, the word “peace” is being used to archetype something in our minds, to connect with something in our minds... The Russians use this word “peace” all the time. It’s in Mir—Russkiy Mir—which interestingly, in Ukrainian, mir translates into “measure.” But the hotel I lived in in Severodonetsk was called the Mir Hotel; the rockets called the Mir. Mir is everywhere, all over Russia. Meanwhile, they were always threatening us with nuclear annihilation. And so then once you see that that’s what they did, then it’s pretty easy to see when every time you hear Donald talk about peace, or any of the people around him, the apparatchiks around him, you see: ah, this is the same mind game the Soviets used. And it’s trying to archetype the opposite as peace.

So what I saw in eastern Ukraine was: it took Russian Disinfolklore seven years to change the identities, through brainwashing, of the population of Russia-occupied Ukraine, using Disinfolklore—thousands of stories every day with this energy of confusion, archetyping, inner-outer realm switching, and with a conscious and purposeful objective of turning the populations of Ukrainians into thinking that they are Russians and to prepare them to participate in what we now know to be called meat assaults.

The process began around the same time in America, around 2015, turning normal right-wing Americans into MAGA cult members—a subset of them. And what I feared, and what I spoke of in February 2025 in the Pirate Party security event which was held at the same time as the Munich Security Conference, is that this process, which was unleashed inside a province—three provinces of Ukraine: Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk—would be unleashed on us. And at the same time, it was unleashed on people with certain personality inventory characteristics: low conscientiousness, high paranoia on the scale, for instance. On various psychological aspects of the OCEAN model: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. And these were the two dimensions of personality which Cambridge Analytica used to identify their recruits, which they then indoctrinated into MAGA using the same techniques that every cult has ever used.

Unleashing all of this on us is what I feared most. Now, when I was writing this and setting this all out from November to February 2024-25, and actually as I was delivering this talk at the Pirate Party Security Conference... Vance, the couch guy, was at the time giving us the first draft of the National Security Strategy. He was in a German city criticizing Germany for its post-World War II legal mechanisms to ensure “never again” means never again in Germany.

And then we had that White House visit happen about a week later. And when that White House visit happened, I remember when I was reading it—or most of us will probably all remember the moment we saw it—and the feeling of the mood, the disappointment. It wasn’t clear which way European leaders would go at that point. Would they follow blindly the United States foreign policy and approach to Ukraine as they had done basically during the Biden presidency? Or would they strike a pose and reject it and support President Zelensky? And I think what we saw was, happily, they all, one by one, that very day, supported President Zelensky.

And now we’ve seen this again and again and again. It’s a very consistent debate. And why wouldn’t it be, when Ukraine is the most powerful army on the continent and upon whose good offices all of our security now depends? So after seven years in Russia-occupied Ukraine, the Ukrainians were not only convinced their fellow Ukrainians across the river were outer-realm dehumanized bogeymen—they were like Europeans are to MAGA; they were just weak, they were “other,” they were like the migrants who eat dogs. Ukrainians were convinced through the Disinfolklore that their fellow Ukrainians in government-controlled Ukraine were these outer-realm dehumanized bogeymen. And Russian Disinfolklore brainwashed them to such an extent...

And this I didn’t see at the time—why they were doing it, why the Russians were doing it. But after the full-scale invasion, I saw, well... the practical outcome of this is that they will participate in meat assaults against their fellow Ukrainians. And some of us will have seen some of these attacks last week—those two attacks on Pokrovsk, where Ukraine turns everyone into ghosts in the vaunted VDV. And then there was another one today where the Russian—or well, it was a report, I think it was yesterday—where you see all of these Russian soldiers, they just suddenly stop, because they think they’re in Russia-occupied territory, but they’re not. Because the lies, the maps they’re given are lies, and then they just stop, and then they’re all annihilated.

And this kind of brainwashing of people is what I saw happening in eastern Ukraine. But I didn’t really know... I didn’t understand it was brainwashing at the time and I didn’t know what the objective was. And that’s why when we hear these warnings from Chancellor Merz and Pistorius, and in Britain from the head of MI6 and the head of, I think, the Admiralty, about war and that we are very close to a war... this process of brainwashing many of our compadres into thinking, “Oh, peace is really close; if Ukraine would just surrender the territory...” (Everyone thinks, friends of mine think, “Oh, if Ukraine would just stand down, then we’ll be close to peace.”) And you’re like: No, it’s the exact opposite, the exact opposite. Because they will then turn those Ukrainians into warriors, into meat, and they will invade Poland. It’s just... the whole thing is so predictable and indeed was predictable and forecast by many of us from almost the first moment that Crimea was occupied in 2014.

So today, Russia uses Telegram to create communities characterized by division, anti-immigrant far-right and far-left militancy that spill onto our streets and politics to wreak havoc. And now we see these new techniques where children... when we listen to Zdenka and JTS’s great SBU—the successor for Tracy’s SBU “Snooping and Pooping” once a week—where they’re describing the Ukrainian internal security services’ latest unmasking of various Russian attempts to recruit agents inside Ukraine to sow chaos. And The Insider did that great piece last year in Lithuania where they’re doing likewise. And I suspect at least some of the Palestine Action-related events and spectacles are, for me, they have a family resemblance to the kinds of things I saw in Ukraine. We know as a matter of fact that Surkov himself—because we have his email inbox, which was gotten by InformNapalm and published in 2017—that we know for a fact that these are the kinds of events that are organized to cause problems and cause division. So now they’ve got Telegram to do this, with X and various other instruments which weren’t even available at that time.

That’s Episode 2.

Now, I want to talk about a couple of things which I had written this week.

Probably the most important thing I wrote this week was... I talked a bit before when I was talking about cultural psychology and this law of opposites, which are these mental laws that anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss and mythologists like Marcel Mauss and great thinkers had discerned. They thought these were universals in humans, but as I previously mentioned, I don’t think we have to say they’re universals, but they may be necessary in particular Indo-European thought systems. But the law of association and the law of similarity and laws of opposites, which are part of these mental laws which in the late 19th century anthropologists got very excited by, and then many people have written about in the 20th century.

And I had this intuition that there was something... there’s something going on with... we have these opposites. So I’ve talked about how Donald is the opposite of peace. He has always been the opposite of peace. I was going to say there’s no shame in it—there’s a lot of shame in it—but he’d be the first to admit when he was lucid that he loves to cause a bit of chaos, a bit of conflict. And for him to then go for the exact opposite, which is a Peace Prize... there’s a pattern there.

Between, for instance, the way the Russians will, in Russia-occupied Ukraine, talk about “liberating” territories. And this is something that was all over the data set that I collected from 2015 onwards as well. And my eyes would roll. I couldn’t get through any article from Russia-occupied Ukraine without my eyes rolling about three million times. Every single article, a lot of eye-rolling. More eye-rolling than mockers, managers of a morning. And because they—and this is also what I mean by re-archetyping, rebranding reality, but doing it in a way that connects it to, for instance, the Second World War—so when we talk about them “liberating” Prokrosk, we are rolling our eyes and we’re using air quotes and it’s a bit of a joke because we know it. But the Russians use it—and this is why I try to be careful in using terms like that—they use it to describe annihilation.

Where the standard against which liberation or occupation in terms of the Geneva Conventions is international law, is the post-World War II legal and socio-legal order in this sense, which we know Donald and Putler are committed to overcoming and destroying. They want no constraint on their power. As we talked a few weeks ago, Wendy, at the end of the show (I think it was on the 27th), and I remember you were asking, “What do they hope to achieve by getting rid of international law?”

But these opposites: hybrid war/conventional war, inner/outer realm switching... So I had this intuition about opposites. So, you know, “it’s the vaccine which causes the harm, not the virus.” And it’s this idea of holographic, that they’re basically selling paradoxes. And the Russians basically take paradoxes like, “You know, Western politicians, they’re all hypocrites. And therefore, it doesn’t matter if Putler is also corrupt.” These accusations of hypocrisy, I believe, are a gateway drug to Russia’s fake paradox, brainwashing trolls, so that “liberation is an occupation.” So your mind begins to get used to these paradoxes. And then when you come across entirely false paradoxes—that actually the destruction of a Ukrainian city is a liberation—you can fall for these trolls, or certain personalities can fall for them in particular areas.

That hybrid war isn’t conventional war, for instance; it’s something less than it is. And yet, psychological warfare has always been part of war. We just have taken on this phrase—I think we talked about it about six episodes ago. And these Russian information warfare memes familiarize their consumers with paradoxical structures. And these, I believe, are one of the mechanisms used to brainwash people and brainwash us in particular areas of our lives. And it’s an element in coercive control, which is one of the key energies in Russian and MAGA Disinfolklore.

And coercive control, which is illegal now in English law, is exerting power over someone. I mean, the classic archetypal situation is where a man is controlling their spouse or girlfriend (or indeed, empirically speaking, it is usually a man doing it to a woman) through checking her phone messages the whole time, through not letting her have any friends. There’s a whole list which I’ve written about, which I’ve taken from the English law. So again, it’s this sense of controlling someone through brainwashing. “I love you, I hate you,” which Donald actually does. Midas Touch have pointed out a few times that his funding applicant, or the request for money which comes every day... and this guy, Ben Meiselas (or something like that), who’s a journalist for Midas Touch, he often reads these out so that we don’t have to receive them. And they are telling his people he loves them, his supporters. So it’s this kind of coercive control thing. “I love you. I hate you. I’m only hitting you because I love you.” That kind of thing.

Just like Putler says, “You know, we love Ukraine. This is why we’re doing it. Surrender and you’ll get peace.” But we know they’ll get slaughtered. “Elect a billionaire to make things affordable.” You know, it’s nuts. It makes no sense. And yet so many people have fallen for it. “Brexit will make England’s economy stronger by erecting obstacles between 8% and 55% of its export-import market.” Lo and behold, it hasn’t happened that way.

It’s in homeopathic medicine. So it’s this idea that a tiniest smidgen, an essence, can have the same impact that a proper dose can have. And that that’s better than going to the doctor; that “the vaccine, not the virus, causes the harm.” And so if we see this structure in memes, it also takes advantage of this element—the element of surprise—which is one of the key motivators that gets people’s interest in plots, whether it’s in plots in art or movies, but also in what I call Disinfolklore.

And so when we see these paradoxes in memes, then that’s an interesting data set. Someone may be trying to manipulate us from it. And when we see accusations of hypocrisy, especially from Russians... Simonyan, for instance, is always doing that. This is a pattern you see all the time. “Oh, Europeans say that they believe in justice, but now they’re going to take our 200 billion dollars. They’re such hypocrites.” And this pattern is very common. And I think it is what I call a gateway drug to getting used to paradoxes. And these paradoxes... that Russia may be invading Ukraine and killing all these people, but it doesn’t mean us any harm; it’s just going to do it to the Ukrainians. So this is just a powerful pattern which I’m getting closer and closer to setting out.

We’ve seen this week a bit more stuff, the campaign against Ukraine’s chief negotiator. And we saw the podcasters in charge of the FBI, Kash Patel, who won Donald’s heart by co-producing the Jan 6th anthem with convicted seditionists and insurrectionists that Donald played instead of the national anthem at his rallies. So it was a brainwashing thing. The Pizzagate Troll, which basically managed to connect in the brains of very many people the idea of the connection between Hillary Clinton and disgust and child exploitation. And that it was attached to a pizza because these cultural psychologists believe the strong emotion of disgust was originally generated through food as a means of obviously stopping us from poisoning ourselves.

Then when we see these campaigns—I believe there’s one going on against Ursula von der Leyen. There’s one certainly in Britain against Keir Starmer, which is quite successful. I don’t know how much traction the one against Ursula von der Leyen is taking; certainly not that much, I don’t think. But the whole Pizzagate conspiracy, that guy, Dan Bongino... whatever his name is, he’s deputy director of the FBI. And they were both shaking down Rustem Umerov and let it be known to the Washington Post. So many people saw this as a straight article that the Washington Post... rather than as I interpreted it: these two podcast guys in charge of the FBI are using the leverage that the FBI has over Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies because of the cooperation between them in the Biden presidency to put the squeeze on Rustem Umerov. Which is just disgusting. That disgusts me.

Then this bizarre idea, which we’ve seen a bit of reporting about: apparently, Ukraine is willing to give up Enerhodar Nuclear Power Plant. Which I just think... no, it’s not. And people who don’t know anything about Ukraine or the fact that this is a nuclear fort... and the US wants to gift it to Russia. So this is a space on the planet in Europe—Europe’s largest nuclear power plant—from which Russia has fired thousands of missiles and drones, mostly at Nikopol across the water, a city I know well, and I know Enerhodar well. And it has killed thousands of people using this as an impregnable fort, which Ukraine has had a couple of operations against it, but nothing massively significant. And according to the draft peace agreement, America is proposing, and Russia is proposing, that Ukraine would give it away.

So when we see that, I just think... that will never happen in this universe. It may happen in a Disinfolklore universe. And that’s exactly where it is happening, which is in these articles that we’re reading of people who don’t know anything about it. And Will Thiel was brilliant on this week. He was like, “You know, so what? They’re going to... Wyckoff and Kushner are going to get the nuclear power plant, then have some data centers...” And why don’t they build the data centers now? They can do that in Ukraine. They got loads of funding to do it. So they don’t need this elaborate, this crazy plan that could only have been generated in Moscow.

So we always think a ceasefire is black and white. Someone shoots the gun and that will... then the F-35s are just going to come in and carpet bomb them for doing that. But the lived reality of people like me, and thankfully people like Macron, because he went through all of this—and all of us understand, it’s just a matter of military strategy—is that Russia will constantly provoke reactions from the other side. And then you have to decide: okay, is this going to tip us over the edge?

So to the normal person listening to the news, it seems completely doable to have a ceasefire, and that if the ceasefire is breached, then we will do X, Y, and Z. But if you’re not that motivated to do X, Y, and Z anyway, then you’ll find excuses not to react to the ceasefire breach. And these excuses are... and so when Donald... so the original 28-point peace plan, it was up to him to decide to certify the breach of the ceasefire. Much like under the justification for the second war in Iraq, the British government (so the Prime Minister) reserved the right to determine whether the 1991 ceasefire was... the UN Security Council resolution which ended the first Gulf War, the first Iraq War. The Prime Minister himself took it on himself that he could certify it as violated, and then that justified—legally speaking, from their perspective—the war. Many international lawyers didn’t think that legal advice was right.

And so it’s a highly complicated process, but where Russia is occupying these territories, a ceasefire violation may involve violence against a member of the population. And is it a bullet going off here? Was it an accident? And then while I was there, you ask, “So how many...” If you don’t have the will to enforce the ceasefire absolutely, then the other side—and particularly Russia, as a matter of fact—will always breach it. So every night there were ceasefire violations where I was, in Stanytsia Luhanska, in eastern Ukraine. And some nights there were tens of thousands. There were at least up to 10,000—I better put it that way—ceasefire violations. And you would assess: was that the Russians? Was that the Ukrainians reacting to it? Were they trying to hit each other? Or were they just marking territory that we were there? And absolutely nothing happened.

Well, we had a formal procedure where I would certify them. I’d have to stay up all night and count them and try and decide: is that artillery? Are those bullets? Is it small arms? What is it? Which direction is coming from? Is it the Russians? Is it the Ukrainians?

And some days... so for instance, I would go to these places, and I have the photographs (which I’ve published a bit) here where the Ukrainian positions would be built. And then I’d come back the next morning, and they would just be like Aero—like that chocolate with holes in it. Because all night long, the Russians were firing heavy machine guns into it to pepper it. Days when I would go down to this area, me and my colleagues each morning, and I would speak to the Ukrainian army defenders and they would tell me their stories from the night before. And then I would cross the river and speak to the occupiers and they would tell their stories.

And both sides would always talk about what they call provocations. And this is the origin of my understanding of what I call “provocation logic,” where every act has a pretext. For Putler, it’s NATO expansion; it’s “Ukraine was wearing a short skirt”; Ukraine said this, the West said that. And there’s always this pretext and “Oh, they’re just trying to provoke us.” So each morning each side would talk about the provocation, and many days it was impossible for me to discern who had started it. But I never lost sight of the fact that Russians were occupying sovereign Ukrainian territory. But not everyone was able to keep that focus that they shouldn’t be there.

And so when they’re talking about this demilitarized zone inside Ukraine... if I thought it was going to happen, if I thought there was a remote chance this was going to happen, I would be getting very annoyed whenever they talk about it. Because this is Ukrainian sovereign territory, and the Russians should just leave Ukraine. So if we’re talking about a demilitarized zone 15 miles or 100 miles over the Russian border and 100 miles on the Ukrainian border, then that’s a parity of esteem, that’s dignity. But if you’re talking about a so-called demilitarized zone inside Ukraine, then this is exactly what we went through.

And it didn’t work because as a matter of military strategy and mental warfare, Russia will constantly breach any ceasefire in myriad ways—whether it is imprisoning someone inside the occupation, hitting them, beating them, firing off a heavy weapon, heavy machine gun. And then you have to decide: oh, okay, we’re not going to react like Obama in Syria to this chemical weapon use. So this is the reality of so-called ceasefires. And so Ukraine often would have responded to gunfire and to artillery strikes. But very often it didn’t because they had very strict orders not to rise to the provocations in that sense. But Russia was mostly responsible for most of them.

And these were reported in the OSCE’s public reports, which were published every day. But it was never allocated to one side or the other. So it would say something like “three kilometers northeast of Stanytsia Luhanska, a gun was heard firing,” or actually southwest where the Russians were occupying. So you had to know where the line of contact was, and you had to know where the various forces were. And very few people apart from people like me who were down there on the ground knew this. And so I had spoken to NATO people in Vienna who used to read our daily reports, and they just found them gobbledygook. And at my level, I could attribute—I could say who it was—but that would be cleaned out of it later on. And it was all part of this idea of the Minsk thing, which was just: “We just kind of... let’s keep it on tense. Ukraine should just pipe down and everything will be fine. The Russians won’t invade.”

And so when they talk about “No Minsk 3”—and President Zelensky said it about 94 times over the last four years—Ukrainians who understand Minsk understand when they say it. This whole thing that we’re going through at the moment, and even the Europeans’ response to it, is exactly what we went through in Minsk. Now, I happen to believe, without any secret knowledge, that the Europeans like Macron and co. understand this, and they’re just playing along because they know the Russians will refuse it anyway. So I’m 99.9% confident, so I don’t get exercised by it.

But this was before the era of drones. We did... there were drones in our area, but my job would be impossible now because of this area, these areas of these 50 square kilometers on the contact line. And when I hear the Americans saying they’re going to give geospatial or remote sensing, “We’re going to do this remote”... We went through this from 2014 onwards. And at the end of the day, if there’s no political will to exit the Russians from Ukraine, then they’re not going to do anything if there’s a particular ceasefire violation.

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#107 - Stephen Balogh - The State Of Democracy: Why Voters In Britain & Western Europe Are So Unhappy With Politics