Disinfolklore

I am keeping a grip on where we are. This is episode three of a series I started four weeks ago. As some of us might remember, there were technical issues in the second week. So, this is episode three, where I am going through the paper I delivered at the Pirate Party Security Conference at the time of the Munich Conference last February.The words from the United States Vice President at that conference are continuing to resonate, with new policies being released all the time. Most recently, the attempt to sanction the European Union—specifically several former senior European Union officials—for so-called free speech crimes.So, this is the Disinfolklore universe that I had an intimation we were moving towards. It is provoked into being by such actions as we have seen today. I am also aware of my promise to Iona about six weeks ago that we would deal with truth, and I am moving towards that as well. It will be a few more episodes where I move towards that point.Last week, we saw the continued reference to the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Some of us might remember in the prehistoric past—which, when I looked back on my writing over the past few months, was actually only a month ago, believe it or not—that five weeks ago I got the first intimation that this new round of so-called capitulation, or peace talks, was beginning and the pressure was on.My first intimation of it—some of us will remember picking this data point up on our timelines—was when the United States had attempted to take the term “territorial integrity” out of the annual United Nations resolution in support of Ukraine’s war of independence and against Russia’s aggression. At the time, that stood out to me like a sore thumb.The reference to sovereignty without the reference to territorial integrity is significant. The sound “right” or “writ” is in both those terms: territorial and integrity. It is also in sovereignty, but it is disguised as the “reign” element—reine in French—originating from this idea of straightness, truth, and the rod. For instance, President Zelenskyy held a rod in his right hand when he was inaugurated as president in the Verkhovna Rada. The current English King, who is sovereign—there is only one sovereign on the island of Britain, and that is the King—also held a straight rod in his right hand when he was inaugurated as monarch.These are very, very old Indo-European rites, and they are integrated into our language and the way we, as Indo-European communities, govern ourselves. This goes right back to Mykhailivka village in Zaporizhzhia, where the Yamnaya community lived between four thousand one hundred BCE and three thousand five hundred BCE. They spread Indo-European languages, religions, and forms of governance into the area between Ireland and India.When I see today the President of the European Commission, the President of France, and Indo-European civilization’s greatest leaders—particularly in Europe—referencing the term sovereignty and digital sovereignty in almost identical terms, it pleases me enormously. We are moving towards the relationship between these concepts and trying to define what is rightful and what is truthful, which is what we try to do every day in real-time on our timelines.I am a great admirer of postmodern philosophy—I studied as a postgraduate at Georgetown—but I am also a little old-fashioned insofar as I do believe there is truth. Truth is not merely a mobile army of metaphors; it can be, but it is not merely that. There is truth: when we sit on a chair, we are sitting on the chair. As we previously discussed with Wendy regarding the idea of emptiness, ultimately nothing does matter. However, in conventional reality, we have elaborated and established certain rules, certain regulations, and certain rights.In that conventional reality that we are living in, for me, the preeminent rights are those established after World War Two and the international legal order for which eight million Ukrainians died, including one million Ukrainian Jews. Eight million European Jews died, and tens of millions of others died. We established this set of rules and regulations after World War Two, and for me, that is the truth—the standard against which we measure any speech trying to incite hatred or division.Sadly, we see the lack of respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty which China, for instance, practiced when it invaded and occupied Tibet, and which Russia has denigrated a billion times. Sadly, we are seeing now the threats—the serious military threats against Greenland, part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and also against the European Union’s digital sovereignty.These concepts and ideas are more important than ever. I see all of this as part of the Disinfolklore universe, which the MAGA administration, as well as Russia and the Chinese Communist Party, are attempting to wrap us up inside. Thankfully, for the time being—and I see no clouds on the horizon on this front—the European Union is holding up what is right, as indeed are Australia and Japan.One of the main means we can use to determine who is upholding what is right—meaning the post-World War Two legal and social order in today’s world—is how they are supporting Ukraine. Some of us might well have friends who do not necessarily support Ukraine or who have had their minds contaminated by Russian Disinfolklore, so that they think they can challenge for the sake of debate or argument, arguing Russian information warfare tropes either knowingly or unknowingly.It is not enough to defend sovereignty alone because the three archetypes which are central to Indo-European communities since the time of the Yamnaya are: Sovereignty, Security, and Prosperity (or Fertility).These three elements are represented today, for instance, in our memory of the Hindi caste system, where you have priests, soldiers, and farmers. The priests are one aspect of sovereignty, the soldiers are an aspect of security, and the farmers are an aspect of prosperity. Again, the “writ” sound is in security, fertility, prosperity, and sovereignty. We have these archetypes very deeply embedded into our language, into the way we think, and into how we govern ourselves. It tickles me to have come across the literature of the French philosopher Georges Dumézil, who discovered these three archetypes imminent in all Indo-European traditions in the nineteen thirties.For many of you, you will know I spent the time from twenty-fifteen to twenty-eighteen in a particular part of eastern Ukraine, in Stanytsia Luhanska. This is the only official crossing point from Russia-occupied Ukraine into government-controlled Ukraine. I worked for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). It was founded after the Berlin Wall fell, but it stems from the Helsinki Final Act of nineteen seventy-six.I had cause to read the Helsinki Final Act this week, and territorial integrity is in every clause. Russia signed up to it and has violated sovereignty and territorial integrity. When you think about it, you can be a sovereign individual yourself, but you need an “area.” The word “area” eventually finds its way into “Aryan” or “Iranian.” You need an area in which to exercise your sovereignty. Unless this area is secure and defined, your sovereignty is compromised.While I was in eastern Ukraine, in Stanytsia Luhanska, I encountered what I call the first Disinfolklore universe. For those who were not there, it is akin to what you saw with MAGA affecting people you knew. It goes from being a joke to actually being an identity-forming element. I engineered the term Disinfolklore from my experience as a diplomat on this bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska.The scene itself was a biosphere reserve, forested, with the Donets River running through it. The Donets is part of a series of “DN” sounded rivers. In my work, there are three sounds which are really important: the “MN” sound, the “RT” or “RIT” sound (associated with truth, Arta in ancient Iranian or Rita in Vedic), and the “DN” sound.We have the Don River, which marked the border between the area protected by the Goddess Europa and Asia. We have a map from Isidore of Seville from about the sixth century defining this. Isidore was basically the Wikipedia of the pre-Middle Age world. Isidore of Seville defines the area protected by the Goddess Europa as being west of the Tanais—the Don River. East of the Don River is Asia.Then you have the Donets River, which is the Little Don. Then you have the Dnipro, the “Don Upper” river. Then you have the Dniester, the “Don Lower” river. And then you have the Danube. You have these great rivers of Europe, all with the “DN” sound in their moniker.I was on the Don. I did not know any of this while I was there, thankfully, or I would have bored my fellow diplomats to tears. But the setting made an impact on me: beautiful forests, willows hanging over the river, and this iron bridge. On one side, about a kilometer north, was the Ukrainian Armed Forces position. On the south side was the Russian occupier position.I arrived there in February twenty-fifteen, just after the bridge itself had been blown up. You could still cross the river, but it was a difficult passage, like in a computer game. It was about fifteen kilometers to Luhansk City, which was and is under occupation by the Ruscists.In this whole scene, it was a beautiful, halcyon, bucolic location with birdsong and trees, yet wild animals would often set off landmines in the forestry. Before twenty-fourteen, it was sleepy. Then, while I was there, each night there were massive amounts of artillery strikes from one side to the other.Each morning I would go down to the bridge, speak to the Ukrainian commanding officer, and write down their stories. Then I would pass thousands of civilians waiting in queues on this borderline. A lot of folktales are about borders—between this world and another, a liminal world between truth and fiction.Then I would cross the bridge and speak to the occupiers. Often, the stories they told me would be the mirror opposite of what the Ukrainian soldiers were telling me. At the same time, I was doing an MBA at Oxford, studying Silicon Valley and trolling in computer culture. I made the conceptual link between internet trolling and what the forces on either side of the bridge were doing to me. They were trolling my emotions with these stories.This Disinfolklore universe, which I saw being created inside Russia-occupied Ukraine, is my training set. Just as you use masses of data to train an artificial intelligence neural network to identify cats, my training data set is these three years of hearing stories on the bridge and watching how they interacted with the information space.One day, a Russian colleague and I went to the bridge, and several tons of sausages in white bags had been dumped exactly at the halfway point. The Ukrainian forces said they knew nothing about it. The Russian occupiers said they initially thought it was a weapon and trained their guns on it, but realized it was sausages—Kharkiv sausages, which have a mythological significance of luxury in the Soviet mindset.We inspected the sausages while drones filmed us. For the next three weeks, my Russian colleague and I appeared in Disinfolklore stories in the Russian occupation media. The stories evolved from us smuggling sausages to us trying to poison the population. This was the “Luxury Sausage Troll Saga.” It was an archetypal experience where I personally featured in a system of trolls on one theme.I had other instances where there would be an explosion. I would ask a Ukrainian soldier polishing his grenade launcher if he heard it, and he would deny it. Then I would go five hundred meters to the Russian occupiers, and a senior officer would take me on a whirlwind tour of damage, claiming Ukrainian diversionary groups had fired at them. They showed me blood on the ground, but it was blackberry season, and tons of blackberries were being transported across the bridge, so I was not sure if it was real blood.Then stories would emerge saying the injured people were “crisis actors.” This was my training set. When I read about MAGA accusations of crisis actors or Pizzagate, or the bizarre stuff on Twitter since the full-scale invasion, I recognize the origins. That is where I came up with the idea of Disinfolklore. It is a narrative form akin to folklore, triggering the same emotional impacts, but with real-world consequences on how you perceive reality.I associated the area with folklore immediately because of the forests. I have spoken before about the “Mother and the Maiden” tale, which was another archetypal moment. We perceive reality through folklore much more than we are consciously aware.Victoria Amelina wrote about the “Executed Renaissance” of the nineteen twenties in Ukraine. The Russians initially pretended to support Ukrainian culture, leading to a flowering of culture, and then executed thousands of writers. Putin constantly talks about correcting “Lenin’s mistake,” by which he means this Ukrainization. Victoria Amelina was collecting stories about violence for war crimes tribunals before she was murdered. One of her short stories was titled “A Shell Hole in a Fairy Tale.”The Wagner Group, whom I encountered in Stanytsia Luhanska in twenty-fifteen, fired a shell into the “Fairy Tale” kindergarten there on the twenty-fourth of February, twenty twenty-two. I have a photo of it. When I saw that, and when I saw them bombing the Shchastya power plant, I knew the whole war was imminent.The kindergarten is a vital institution. Ukrainians had invested huge efforts after twenty-fourteen to bring their kindergartens up to European standards, using money from USAID and the EU. The desecration of these symbols of Ukraine’s emergence from the Soviet cloud was significant.Everywhere I look, there are these folkloric references. You have this fusion of reality with fiction—Disinfolklore—which has a strong emotional connection. It is a method of changing how we perceive reality, brainwashing people whether they are in MAGA or Russia-occupied Ukraine.Maybe now we are seeing the high point of MAGA. I hope the relentlessness of the Epstein documents, which explode the main foundation myth in MAGA, will have the power to wake everyone up from their spell. But we cannot be complacent. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

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. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

It’s exactly a year since I detected the system-wide effects of the aggregatation of MAGA and Russian Disinfolklore artifacts invading our minds, information space and reality. In February in Munich at the Pirate Party security conference I declared what by then I had archætyped as a “Disinfolklore Universe” to be operating inside all of our minds and cultures. Today I want to begin a series of the five parts of the “Battling Archetypes” paper I conceived for the first time exactly a year ago and which I spoke about in embryonic form at the Munich meeting in February.So I wanted to go through the four, I won’t go through the four parts today, or five parts rather, over the next week or two to remind us of the system so that we can, for instance, apply it to this idea of a peace process of which Ukraine isn’t part of. It’s not a voluntary part of it.It’s obviously sticking in there as long as it can to maintain intelligence support for as long as it can. But as I understand it, Ukraine last year spent 5 billion euros on drones and 80 or 70 or 80% of Russian casualties were caused by those drones. So that’s 5 billion.So the amounts of money and the technical needs of Ukraine, they have everything they need, basically, at a minimum. It would be very nice if they can maintain intelligence, support, and other particular munitions. But even the patriots, we see these things, the, what are they called, SMTs or the SPTs, The anti-aircraft thing that the Italians make,I think, is it with the English or the French or some of the Germans, seem to be doing very well with that. So the United States is no longer the indispensable ally. But, you know, I totally admire the patience of the Ukrainian side. They want to keep America on board, mainly because the deep state,if there is one, and the people who will succeed Donald... God willing, they kind of will expect Ukraine to maintain its politeness. And it’s an investment in Ukraine’s future, but I don’t see it as an existential need for them. So then what are the Americans and the Russians doing? They are altering our culture.changing our approach to international law, trying to return us to the social conditions of the 1930s. And this has always been the plan, the people behind MAGA and Donald, which is basically municipal law should be, should trump international law. That for me, if you were to say to me, what is Russia’s game? What is the project?by invading and occupying Crimea. That’s what I would say. I’d say it’s to replace the international law which constrains individual sovereigns from certain activities. It prescribes a certain set of activities, the contravening human rights, contravening various laws, laws of the sea, laws of armed conflict, genocide convention. These are all constraints on the sovereign.And both MAGA and Russia and many oligarchs around the world don’t want any constraint on sovereigns. And so when we hear them trying to talk about recognising sovereignty, Crimea recognizing the taking of a territory. On the one hand, it will be America doing what Russia did when it brought Zaporozhye into its constitution.It just ruins the entire constitutions of America. as it would do with Russia. It will have no effect on other countries like the European Union, other powerful countries, or Japan in terms of recognition. They’re not going to fall. They’re not going to suddenly recognize them. But Taiwan and everyone will accelerate their nuclear weapons programs and it willhave real-world... effects on that on all of those but apart from all of that what I see happening and it happens in almost imperceptibly is it changes our realities and normalizes what was previously impossible and so this is what I talk about distant folkloreuniverse and this is why Wendy when I see articles particularly like this one about recognizing Crimea it just kind of jumps out as, oh my God, they are going to do this and this is what the implications are going to be. And in my own small way, I’ll just try to set that, lay those out.But I hope people who have power are trying to... lay this out. And I hope there’s a plan. Maybe the plan involves leaks. Maybe that’s why Whitcoff looked so terrible in Miami, because he was spending nights going through all his conversations for the last six months, which someone has, perhaps, and that they’re all going to leak them.I don’t know. But anyway, So I declared our distant folklore universe in February in Munich. And I thought it was appropriate to be talking about that at a pirate party security conference event. Because those who founded the pirate party get what I’m about to speak to you about now. There’s a flow between, on the one hand, culture,art, films, literature about pirates and geopolitical security. This is especially apt as we see these attacks on Russia-connected cargo vessels at the moment. Those whom we entrust with securing our conditions of civilized life don’t seem to understand this flow between, on the one hand, culture, art, films and literature. and geopolitical security.Donald, of course, does, because he talked incessantly about Alphonse Capone. He talked about Hannibal Lecter. He brought in these archetypal characters from art. He archetypes himself as the Joker or as a magus or seer or... And so he gets it, but many of our leaders don’t. But President Zelensky certainly gets it, and that’s part of my argument.And this is partly why there’s such easy marks for Russian and MAGA distant folklore. So this is, I’m talking about the straight-laced geopolitical actors and commentators who don’t really get this flow between art, culture, and films. And for them, they can’t really understand Donald as a as an artist, as an archetyper, as someone who archetypes at scale.And the same, obviously, with Duncy Putler. They get wrapped up so easily in Russian or MAGA trolls, like flies in a spider’s web. It’s very hard for them even to understand that they’re trapped inside old thinking. And I’m not saying I don’t get trapped. I get wrapped up in these trolls all the time.I’m just trying to develop tools that help me escape the spider’s web and go to when I find myself in a state of confusion. For instance, when... I saw this last Friday night about America recognizing Crimea. And I don’t go into despair or put out tweets going, oh, this is terrible.I just try and think it through and think, what will happen if this happens? What are they up to? Is it likely to happen? So, and today I’m going to offer you a perspective on what I call our distant folklore universe, which is, and I’m also going to offer a means to escape the troll memes,wrap us up inside when we fall for MAGA or Russian distant folklore. None of this is easy. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have all the answers. And whenever you hear anyone talk about disinformation or disinfolklore as if it happens to other people, as if only stupid people fall for trolls, whenever you hear chatter like that,be certain these people are easy marks for trolls, for MAGA and Russian disinfolklore. You’ll have heard me say that this a lot, most recently with President Biden and his, we’re not going to go for World War III. over Ukraine. We talked about that three weeks ago. So today we live in a true distant folklore universe.The fabric of every dimension of our lives, our work, personal relationships, life choices, fates are fused with aspects of Druid-y-Don and Duncy-Putin’s memetic onslaught. That is as true today as as it was in February when I first spoke about this in Munich. And then you’ll all of course remember the White House visit happened a few daysafter my Munich speech, which affects all our moods, motivations, intentions and attitudes. So it’s moods. Increasingly, I’m focusing on moods. Because it’s kind of the moods which are affected by this news about peace plans, about Ukraine being forced into capitulation. Oh, can they do that? Is it going to be due? And we’re just depressed by it.And the aggregate of us all being depressed is, oh, Ukraine can’t win. And this is really what they’re attacking on a civilizational scale, on a country scale, this fear. this malaise, they’re trying to create this sense of malaise and these are being formed by what I call distant folklore directly through the media memes we consume or indirectlythrough our own minds working through these memes and those of others influencing us from archetypes created and evolving from distant folklore. So we had all of the archetyping of Elmo and Druidy Don in the White House that day, those days in January. and the totality of our infospace was occupied by memes like the Department of Government Efficiency,named after a meme coin, but also after the class of oligarchs who ran, I think it was Venice, into the ground, and the baseless meme coins. But it’s had real-world impacts. Some studies have talked about millions of people dying as a result of the cancelling of USAID, And it’s kind of hard to see these institutions being restored.And so there is a permanent, this is what I mean by the permanent change in our culture, the permanent change in the architecture of our lives and millions of lives by these people. So even though we might win certain battles and the Supreme Court might rule that or this, The real world impacts are in many cases permanent.We never return to the world the way it was before. And obviously all of us hope something, some deus ex machina will come on the stage and we’ll just go back to how things were. But obviously that’s never going to happen, how things were in 2014. So we just have to try and...keep control of our perceptions of how things are developing and evolving in my humble opinion. And the totality of our conception of America now is occupied by actors playing leaders in superhero costumes. This character, Jared Kushner, who is he? Is he? Did he get Epstein’s business and Epstein got Maxwell’s business?I don’t know, but it’s a whole character set. They just kind of bring on stage and we just gaze at them and think, oh, that’s kind of a bit weird, especially as you were going on about Hunter Biden, who was never really on stage. for so many years. And now you’re completely Zen with this guy.He’s married to a mall, to a gangster, a gangster mall, gangster’s mall or a gangster. He is a gangster. He’s a gangster’s mall or he’s the son-in-law of a gangster. He happens to be president. His father was in prison, was a gangster, but now he’s US ambassador to France.So just kind of odd archetyping of different characters who are part of our lives with these weird powers over us in the information space. uh we we did have elmo robin and druidy don batman they were dressed up in marvel cinematic universe costumes all that black the black coat that elmo was wearingthey use ai and in real life costumes uh they’re memeing a distant folklore universe using marvelous marvel universe inspired memes is a means of creating a distant folklore universe in our minds and in real life and i focus on this because there we can see it i can draw attentionto it a lot more easily than when when they’re when you see talking heads on tv talking about a peace process and talking about oh here’s jared kushner walking across red square with with this guy, Witkoff, and they’re going to talk to Putler about peace.And it’s hard to see how abnormal that is because it’s portrayed as normal. So I focus, I try to get our eye in by when you see Elmo dressed in a costume or Donald dressed in his costume with his red hat or his bizarre golf clothes. They’re using... So their controlled dis-folklore propagation network X or Telegram,America buying TikTok from China and compelling other oligarchs to do likewise with theirs so they own the memes of production. and the means of reproduction of the memes of production of this distant folklore universe were being embedded in it just as Russia embeds Ukrainians inside the occupation in distant folklore.By distant folklore I mean briefly stories that purposefully affect our moods, intentions, attitudes and motivations. in ways that repurpose us to serve the distant folklorists’ memes and means to transform our world. And of all the crimes that Donald and his crew are committing,one of the worst is the way they can bring the moods of Ukrainians in the worst moment of their lives, 42 million Ukrainians, in the very worst moment of their lives, If they do tune in to this mad news, they just become deflated or, I mean, on the one hand defiant, but on the other hand,they just think, oh, is everyone going to abandon us again? Happened. It happened in 1918. It happened during the Holodomor. It happened after, during the Second World War. Is it going to happen again? And they’re playing on that. The Russians are playing on that. And I, for me, that is one of the worst things they do.So we saw Melania wearing her meme chic costume. designed by a Ukrainian fashion label, Dress X. So we remember her dressed as the gangster’s mall with her big hat at standing behind Don, who was archetyping as Alphonse Capone. But really, it’s not the Italian mafia, it’s the Russian mafia.Two Ukrainian fashion designers founded Dress X in Los Angeles. They, like the pirate party and me with distant folklore, noticed the porousness between in real life and memes in our cultural space. Dress X identified a market for real world clothes that mimic and riff off a Marvel or Disney World aesthetic. So archetyping through haute couture.So it’s not archetyping just through news. It’s done through clothes. Elmo dressed as a superhero wearing Dress X. Melania doing the same thing. And so by clothing, Druidy Don, Disney Folklore’s wife, actual memester-in-chief’s first lady, that’s the Ukrainians, what the Ukrainians are doing.So good luck to them, for they’ve seen what I see and what the pirate party sees. We’re living in a distant folklore universe made up of memes. And the first lady chose Dress X to model Druidy Don’s vision of a distant folklore universe, Alphonse Capone, the gangster’s mall, 1930s,the social conditions that preceded and provoked World War II. That’s what they’re modeling, that’s what they’re archetyping, in which we’re battered daily by a million hitherto unsayable and hitherto undoable things. So the abnormal becomes the normal. America recognizes armed aggression, the taking of another state’s territory. Even though the United States didn’t recognize Latvia,Lithuania or Estonia as part of the Soviet Union for 50 or for the entire 45 years, then suddenly now it’s going to recognize part of Ukraine. So the abnormal becomes the normal. We have no anchor except the memester-in-chief’s next whim to latch on to. And the power to archetype at will belongs to all of us.But if you own the memes of cultural production, exchange and distribution of memes, the main means through which archetyping outside our minds occurs, then you can archetype at scale. And we on Twitter and in Volia and every day in the Volia shows, Mockers and Will and Yonah and others, And of course,James and Wendy and everyone and Zdena and Genesis Man are all archetyping and disrupting archetypes and using the power we have, such as it is. to change the reality and to transform each other’s minds and to pass around information. So I don’t in any way minimize what we’re doing and what NAFO does. These are really powerful.And of course, all the people with the big accounts as well are doing. But if you own the memes of cultural production exchange and distribution of memes, then you can archetype at a scale and intensity which others can’t and which affects people, especially low information people. By archetyping in this context, I’m speaking about an aspect of cognition.We model the world, our context, our mental ideals help us navigate. We create stereotypes. aggregates of phenomena being archetyped as this or that, then new data is bounced off these archetypes like peace. So does it look like peace when Russia is bombing? No, absolutely it doesn’t. You just think about it for a millisecond.And yet every newsreader in the world is archetyping Russia’s peace efforts or this bizarre spectacle. Oh, does Putla really want peace? And And then Druidy Don himself, who is the most non-peaceful person. And I’m on record as saying, I don’t really believe this Nobel Prize troll. I think that’s an alibi. So he’s trying to archetype as peace,but we know everything he’s ever done is about conflict and creating conflict and chaos. So again, we know that because we’ve seen his history. And now suddenly we believe he is archetyping himself as peace because he wants a Nobel Peace Prize. And none of it sustains more than five seconds thought, even by the people promoting these trolls.But these aggregates of phenomenon become archetyped as him looking for peace or that. Then new data is bounced off these archetypes. The missile comes in. Russia sends a missile into Dnipro at rush hour. People lost their eyes. They lost their hands. They were killed. And these archetypes, which in some cases are fluid and dynamic,But sometimes we form what I call data-resistant archetypes. And this is one of the main goals, I think, of this information attack, the so-called peace process, which is to archetype Russia as strong at a time when we know it’s at its weakest, and to archetype Ukraine as weak, as a supplicant.It needs big daddy America to come in and save it or a mummy to come in and save it. Although all of us who are tuned in very closely, I’m not seeing any signs of Ukraine genuinely wanting to engage in this travesty of a peace process. I just see lots of pressure on, incredible pressure on Ukraine.So by declaring our distant folklore universe, I’m archetyping the current moment in civilization and our values, reputations, modeling, mental architectures, characters, personalities, interpretations, algorithms, stereotyping. These are all forms, all dimensions of archetyping, as I’m using the term archetyping. Today, values, reputations, modelling, mental architectures, characters, personalities, interpretations, algorithms, stereotyping.They’re all forms of archetyping, all dimensions as I’m using the term today. Defining something is also a form of archetyping as I’m using it. using the term and I’ll come back to this next week but I’ll leave it at that for now because I’m sure others maybe have other things to talk about and I know Jamesand Wendy you’ve stuffed the nest and there’s lots of interesting news to talk about out yeah you might well ask that question as the English might say so I think it goes back to this idea of might is right Can you hear me now? You might well ask that, Wendy, as the English might say.Yeah, I think it goes down to Mitre’s Reich. So they think they’re going to win. So Trenin, who was the doyen of the Russia experts, I think he ran Carnegie, Moscow, and was in Valdei. He wrote recently that Russia has now re-established the supremacy of national legislation over international treaties.And those who followed the Brexit debate will remember how it was all about getting this one clause in, it was called the Single European Act, which said that European law has supremacy over national law in areas of competency, reserved competency by the European Union. And that was used as the excuse to say, oh, we’re not sovereign.And so they... They think they can get a... Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, it’s the same thing with the COVID. I think, you know, somehow they think they’re immune to viruses, but it will get them in the end. But it’s mad. It is kind of crazy. But I think they think with Mitre’s Reich...We can just overcome the law. And it’s the law just in the same way that the mafia runs, has laws and conventions. So perhaps that’s it. And now you have all these New York Russian mafia adjacent Brighton Beach people trying to hoist Ukraine to try and take a whole state and...And they think they can get away with it because everyone understands the laws. You just watch a few episodes of The Godfather. But I don’t wonder too much at what they think they’re going to get away with on it because it is just nuts. And we can become non-moving, paralysed. I wonder, you just think it’s so mad.Like even, you know, Pukla’s thing about taking Ukraine. It’s just, it’s so insane. You know, what’s he after? Who cares? We just need to stop him and them. But it’s also a psychological thing, I think, because for certain kinds of personality, people with certain personality inventories, as talked about before, especially writ-wing authoritarian followers and social followers, dominators,which have scientific means of determining where you chart on those particular psychological inventory scales. The idea of being a sovereign individual, even though you’re using language to think your mummy and daddy helped you and And all of this stuff and all the poor people, you know, make your amazing house. You depend on so many people.The idea of being a sovereign individual really appeals. So it has a good campaigning effect for these people. And then they project that onto... the international legal sphere. And ultimately, the constraints on people like Pete Hegseth are the Geneva Conventions, as we’ve seen. And, you know, he’s such an idiot.How many people has Donald got convicted of crimes? I mean, however many, on Jan 6th, I can’t remember the number, but it’s a very significant number of people actually have I do have the number. I did a tweet on how many people who’ve gone to jail for Donald. And now Pete Hegseth and the rest of them,unless they manage to completely upend and transform reality, which I’m not rooting out, they’re all going to go to prison. They’re all going to die in prison, Witkoff and go, the rest of them. And they must be... looking at that. But so the international law is the constraint, because that provides the standard against which they’re judged,they can mess around with the US Supreme Court all they want, and indeed, the International Criminal Court. But ultimately, the standard has been set by 100, whatever it is, 184 States in the UN Charter, you cannot be a state and not recognize the territorial integrity and Ukraine’s right to self-defense and all of those things.So, but yeah, I agree with the tone of your question, Wendy. It’s absolutely insane. Like, it’s just insane. Yeah. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

Disinfolklore is Russia using First Person View Drones on human prey to train its drone pilots. Then the Russian state publishes the footage of these murders, from the perspective of the First Person view drone pilots as they close in on their human prey. This is archetypal Disinfolklore: create the event (in this case murder), then publicise it using different memes and means of storytelling. Russia’s only in Ukraine to create social media content, which it uses to troll its own population and America’s leaders into perpetuating Ukraine’s annihilation. Disinfolklore always has a purpose. Infolklore (such as this podcast), by contrast, has an opposite purpose.After detailed investigations into 200 of the 2,800 murders of civilians by Russia using First Person View drones in Kherson, the UN Commission of Inquiry has determined these are Crimes Against Humanity.The UN Commission of Inquiry based in Vienna has issued a report on the human safaris in Kherson that all of us are aware of, which have been going on since July 2024, and it has established that these are crimes against humanity. And part of the the indictment of Russia and those participating in the prosecution of these crimes against humanity, interesting to use the word prosecution there, is that Russia, the Russian state is sharing these videos of their human safaris of the 140 people they’ve murdered using first-person view drones. The commission of inquiry determines that because they are first-person view drones, the operators of these drones are hunting individuals, chasing them,and watching as they murder them, and then sharing these on what I call the distant folklore apparatus, which is Telegram, X, Facebook, Instagram, and now, sadly, the White House press room. These videos themselves are a perfect example of dissent folklore. They breach all ethical guidelines, which is the second.I have six criteria to determine whether or not the story constitutes dissent folklore, second of which is right or ethical discipline. Obviously, it’s morally wrong to engage in human safaris. There’s no law. anywhere which allows this, moral or otherwise. But now we have a determination by a UN commission specifically established by 184UN member states to inquire into Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine. And it determines that these are crimes against humanity and there’s no a greater crime in the human family than crimes against humanity. And so therefore, the breach of the second element in the Code of Positive Trolls, which I use to determine what is distant folklore,how to distinguish between a unit of distant folklore and a unit of folklore, or any other kind of story or narrative form, But now we have this determination. So that’s a perfect example of distant folklore. Much of what is on Telegram, and of course Telegram is in Russian combat propaganda, in Russian military strategy,you have this concept of information confrontation in which the informational units and the environment are engaged in a confrontation. And here we have Telegram specifically established by the Russian state in order to communicate distant folklore into the inner minds of humanity and very successfully doing it, is acting in concert with its military apparatus in Kherson.So it’s not just killing these people, it is spreading the stories, spreading the images of these people being murdered as part of its plan to to dominate the inner minds of humanity and create terror, not just in the minds of the people of Hearson, and this is not me, this is the inquiry,but inside the minds of humanity as people gradually become aware that this is what’s going on. So that’s a good example of what dysin folklore is in actual. What helped me see this pattern, this is what I really do, I hunt for patterns and data. And I assimilate, as many of us do, who participate in X,because X, as we now know from the third report on foreign information manipulation and interference by the European Union, which was released. I highly recommend to anyone. to read along with the first two reports, which was published a couple of weeks ago. X is where on a data set,I think it was over 40,000 FIMI instances of FIMI that were collected by the European Union. X was involved in 86% of them. So this is where we all are. And I know many of us have ethical dilemmas about should we be here, should we not?And most of us are also part of Blue Sky and other places. But the fight is here. The examples are here of whether it’s I saw Maid Marian Simonian tweeting again in her folksy, her folksy distant folklore way where she does this a lot, where she tells these stories as indeed does Donald.they tell these stories of frankly horrifying things. This is going to your question, James, uh, really horrifying things. Uh, like for instance, Don, the way Donald communicated, and I think it was March, 2024, that if, uh, that if the head of a major NATO country said to him, um, We can’t pay for our NATO membership.Would you protect us? And he said, I’d say, you know, to do whatever the hell they want with you. And then this this unit of information was then reported by CNN as as a fact that Donald had. had told this head of state that America wouldn’t protect him.But we’re not clear whether this ever, ever happened, but it was reported as a fact by CNN. And so you see these folksy stories get taken up. Simone, tonight, she’s talking about how people in the offices, and these terms really interest me, and they made me, I’ve seen them for years now. And if it’s a pattern,which is what, along with the horror of what they’re saying, if it’s a pattern that made me suspicious something, something methodical was going on here, which is what I’ve used this folklore to explain and to interpret. She says, oh, people in the offices in Moscow are saying that if Germany gives their weapons to Ukraine, that they will,Ukraine won’t be able to do anything with them without Germany’s help. Therefore, Germany is complicit. And so we’ll have to strike Berlin. And so this is a classic piece of distant folklore. There’s a distancing piece. uh in the narrative form it’s presented as a folksy story people in the offices ofmoscow as if she’s she’s just been uh and the image in our head is she’s she’s just heard this gossip uh and she said this before when she’s spoken the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in June 2022, many of us will remember this here,where she said people in Moscow are saying that all our hope is in the famine. And then she interprets what these folksy people are supposedly saying. And she’s sitting beside the head of state. She’s sitting beside John C. Putin himself. on the days at St. Petersburg Economic Forum, dressed in green,which is why I call her made Marion Simonian like a reverse Robin Hood. And this is an aspect of the distant folklore analytical method that we can use these folklore archetypes to interpret those who are themselves using these folksy archetypes to combat them.And she said, all our hope, the people in Moscow are saying all our hope is in the famine. And what they mean by that is, this is her saying that she understands what the folk, what the ordinary folk in Moscow are saying. They are saying that there will be famine in Africa and the migrants will come toEurope and then the European Union will release the sanctions because it’s impossible for us not to be friends. So this is the folksy banter of the schoolyard. This is you speaking, your seven-year-old child speaking to their seven-year-old friend, best friend, and they’ve had an argument. It’s impossible not to be friends.But this isn’t a micro chat in a schoolyard. It’s a conversation sitting beside the head of state of a country at war, which is planning to famine millions of people in Africa, in Africa, a madcap attempt, which would really only, you’d only see it in literature in Don Quixote or in some folktale.So the madcap plan to win in Ukraine is to starve millions of Africans. That will provoke the Europeans into lifting the sanctions. And then Russia will become friends with Europe and Ukraine will be abandoned. So the way she tells the story, it’s very solid Russian strategy, but it’s told in a folksy way.And it’s absolutely horrifying when you analyze what it’s saying. but it passes most people by. It enters their inner minds as indeed does this stuff archetyping the former president of Russia as drunk. So many of us will have seen many sensible people tweeting today the content of theformer president of Russia’s tweet once again threatening WW3 if something happens. I think it’s related to the Germans. And so these are kind of folktale archetypes, folks and stories which communicate really horrifying things when you parse the data. And it’s a pattern that they use. And it’s really effective because people like us share these because they provokesomething in us, in our emotions. And even if we think we’re harming the former president by characterizing them, by archetyping them as drunk, we’re still repeating the meme. And this horrifyingness is slyly communicated and the energy is continued and it’s pinging around the world. Thankfully, now, today, as many of us will know, because we’re tuned into this,we see great advance in our political leadership over what we have experienced since February 2022. But this method of communication has had the impact on President Biden’s policy, don’t poke the bear, is the distant folklore meme, probably the most successful one ever, that actually impacts on foreign policy. It stopped America properly helping Ukraine.And international relations itself, the entire discourse is full of these... metaphors and distant folklore, don’t poke the bear being one, but distant folklore means that are represented as being a means of communicating foreign policy and strategy affecting the lives and deaths of millions of people. Whereas in fact,These strategies are only communicated by means of these means and through these means. And so what I have spotted, which as far as I’m aware, no one else’s or no other writers have really noticed is this continuity across multiple narrative forms, discourses. It’s obvious in anthropology or in folklore studies or in psychology, in Jungian psychology,when they’re referencing myths and archetypes and storytelling. But the same dynamic is at place inside international relations discourse inside the speeches up until recently of many of our leading politicians. And obviously everything Donald says, he speaks this in folklore fluently. It’s these folksy stories from the Jan 6th anthem of the Jan 6th insurrectionistsorganized by the current head of the FBI. the songs which were used in his rallies, which many of us, the talk, the folksy way of speaking about Alphonse Capone, the archetyping of Melania as Al Capone’s wife, using, wearing this, the clothes, haute couture clothes made by Ukrainian fashion designers in LA, DressX, who supply haute couture clothesinterpretations of comic book, chic comic book aesthetics for people like Elon Musk and Melania Trump who want to archetype themselves as characters in our info space by referencing through their clothes superheroes or characters from folklore, from folktale, from our contemporary folktale. So that’s kind of a sample of thethe scale of what I believe I’ve identified with distant folklore in this narrative form. But to answer your question, it’s basic. So I took the idea of archetypes from, I’m a Buddhist, from Tibetan Buddhism, where the entire practice is about embedding archetypes in our minds and very scary images of the Lord of Death, Yama.And what I noticed in Jung’s work, which he takes it, he says he took the idea of archetypes from St. Augustine. So again, it’s the similar idea of trying to embed these tropes. I use the term, so for me, the fundamental metaphor is troll, fundamental unit of information. That’s another term I use units of information or me.So those three for me are synonymous and I use them interchangeably. Uh, so, uh, I’m very happy to use the word meme, visual, audible. It’s an informational unit of any size. It could be a whole book or it could be just a flash of a color in my conception. And archetypal identities can be attached in my mind.I suppose, philosophical anthropology for want of a grand term, but we’re among anthropologists here. In my philosophical anthropology, the archetypes can be identified with these means. And so for Jung, he he didn’t have access to the same, for instance, archaeology or linguistics and ancient DNA that we had. So when Jung was writing about Tibetan Buddhism,he wrote the introduction to the second edition of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was found by Evans Vence, who wrote his PhD thesis at Oxford on fairy tales in WBH’s work, and who was a follower of Madame Lavatsky, who’s from Dnipro in eastern Ukraine. And Madame Lavatsky created the religion of theosophy.which fused ancient Egypt and ancient Tibetan and made up a lot of stuff. But she would have picked up a lot of the stuff there from Ukraine. But what we know, but that Carl Jung couldn’t know, is that what he considered to be universal and part of the collective unconscious of humanity in this way,which has received a lot of criticism, actually... All the examples he gives are from Indo-European languages and religions. He did not know this then. He didn’t really understand, and many people still don’t understand, Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, because it was transmitted from the Vedic into the Sanskrit into the Tibetan,and now it’s coming back preserved in Tibetan and non-Indo-European language. But basically, its content is in Indo-European. So in all of my work, I am only ever talking about archetypes that work on Indo-European structured minds, the minds of those whose language one, whose native tongue is an Indo-European language. So that’s the only claim I’m making.I’m not talking about collective unconsciousness of humanity. But what I can say from my own experience of watching and observing and experiencing propaganda from the first moments on that archetypal bridge in eastern Ukraine, where I spent three years in a forest, is that I perceive the world through archetypes and that when I read information,that contains what I call archetypal identities, characters, so Ukraine can be archetyped as a weak woman. Putin does this. He did this when he spoke four days before the invasion, and he said, the full-scale invasion, he said, like it or not, take it my beauty.So what he was saying to Ukraine as international lawyers, notice I’m also a lawyer by training, They interpreted this as they didn’t use the word archetyping, but they intuitively understood it as archetyping. They said what Putin was there was doing was he was representing Ukraine as a corpse.And Putin got this particular phrase, which means a lot to Russians. because it featured, it’s a song lyric. So songs are very much part of the beginning of folklore, which led to the foundation of nation states, the German, first unified German state, first Irish, modern Irish state, the first Greek state, modern Greek state.These are all the products of purposeful campaigns based around mythology and folklore to establish a unified identity that helped create community that resisted occupation. When the Herder in 1777 launched the German folklore, folk song movement and inspired Goethe And the brothers Grimm, who all of us will remember as children,to collect folktales and inspired Wagner then and led to the first German, unified German state 90 years later. They set out purposefully to collect common culture in the form of stories. The same in Ireland. The Irish Cultural Revival, the first president of Ireland, was a folklore collector. And he, among others, created this sense. which was true,empirically true, but we didn’t, Irish people didn’t understand it until this 30-year campaign revived Celtic culture as a distinct culture from the Germanic-English occupier. So Germany under occupation in 1777 by the French, French generals actually living in Goethe’s house in Frankfurt, which I visited, very different kind of occupation to the one we’re all aware of.Same thing in Greece against the Ottoman Empire. What they did was they collected these stories to to create a sense of community. And this is what I realized the Russians were doing and what MAGA is doing. So it’s creating these arch in-jokes. If you’ve listened, and I’m sure you have, James and Wendy,you’ve listened to any of Donald’s campaign speeches where he’s talking about Hannibal Lecter, again, a fictional character, using an archetypal character in our modern culture that people of a certain age will understand. So people who are today between probably the ages of 50 and 70 will remember Hannibal Lecter as a film character.And so what Donald is doing is he’s not linking into any archetypes that that are embedded in all of humanity, in my humble opinion. He is ripping off the archetypes of which the cognition of a certain subset of Indo-Europeans at a certain moment in a certain culture are aware of. Hannibal Lecter in that case,Alphonse Capone for obvious reasons, the man who was found guilty of 34 felony counts, and and of acts tantamount to, I won’t mention a horrible word, on EJ and Carol. So Donald is counter-archetyping, which is what I try to do as well when I call him Duncy Putin or Druity Don.But what I believe they’re trying to do and successfully doing is, and this ties in to my understanding of deep Indo-European religion, the Lord of Death is one of the primary, primal, primordial archetypes inside Indo-European’s cognition, whether it’s Jesus Christ, whether it’s represented as Jesus Christ or Yama in Hindu religion and Vedic before it and in Buddhism,Odin, Woden’s Day, Wednesday, Odin, Lord of Death. These are all self-sacrificing first monarchs. Basically, I think what they’re doing effectively is saying, and this resurrection of Stalin is saying, I control your death. This is what Donald is doing with whether it’s vaccines or anti-vaccines or all of these terrible policies that lead to people’s deaths.The same thing with Putin and Stalin. They’re saying, we control the time of your death. This is a a very old, ancient, tried and tested formula for exertion, psychological control over people. And I guess this is partly connected also to the drone safaris.What the Harrison, this is obviously, we see this as a harbinger of what is to come. And they can do this through various means. There’s almost infinite stories that can be used to communicate these fears into people’s inner minds. And that’s what I believe they’re at.Watch this great documentary by Zarina Zabrisky:https://khersonhumansafari.com/#card-6ewvucrvz5dt2uy Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

Rearchetype “acts of war” as “hybrid warfare” or “Active Measures.” Then, get the most knowing people in your chosen enemies’ chains-of-command to take on that Archetyping.While they earnestly, sincerely, confused and proudly model their knowingness (by explaining to others the intricacies of Russia’s own re-Archetyping of actual “War” with euphemisms) Russia continues its war by all means. The delicious irony is that by subverting the signifier (War) that properly describes Russia’s attacks on our countries and implementing a new meaning (Hybrid War), Russia is proving that it is at war against us. Concealing its war against us from Russia’s chosen enemies’ perception IS an instrument of contemporary warfare. It’s the very definition of Mental War which that now is 3/4s of War. We all think we’d recognise a genocide or war, yet our mental models of war that’s forged through films about Napoleon or this or that kinetic battle in World War Two have not caught up with how war today manifests.Here we see the full power of Russia’s Archeytypal Disinfolklore. It contaminates the very concepts we need to communicate war and threats and invasion. That is, it substitutes “hybrid warfare” for war. Then we see events on the ground we would otherwise characterise as “armed attacks” as “not war.” Note too how cleverest most strategic thinkers in our security architecture earnestly fall for this troll. Archetypal Disinfolklore literacy can help us perceive the Mana/energy inside such euphemisms and instruments of war.So today I wanted to talk, go back. This is our 26th episode! For those who are counting, even for those who aren’t counting, it’s still our 26th episode. I wanted to go right back to where we were at the beginning. So Disinfolklore is an analytical method with 12 tools.The second six tools are basically the Code of Positive Trolls, which I’ve talked about. The very first tool, some might remember, is called Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy. I haven’t talked about that for a little while. I wanted to go back to basics and talk about Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy.To understand what I mean by archetypes, understanding what the North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO) does is a perfect example of what I call counter-archetyping. So firstly, individuals archetype themselves with a nom-de-guerre or in the form of a visual meme as a dog. The endless creativity and self-expression that is involved in choosing an avatar, a NAFO avatar is is in itself really charming. It’s beautiful. It’s lovely. It’s agreeable. It’s kind. It’s not egotistical. It’s humbly joyous. I remember many people’s, the way they’ve archetyped themselves as the avatar.What NAFO does itself is an act of counter-archetyping in the sense of it is, does its utmost, the 100,000 or maybe more people who spontaneously self-identified from May 2022 onwards into this amazing decentralized organization of pro-Ukraine supporters. It de-archetypes, if you like, what the Russians tried to do.So the foundational meme from the late Ukraine Memes for NATO Teens (@LivFaustDieJung), very sad that he died before the liberation of Crimea. However, @LivFaustDieJung’s engagement with the archetyping and indeed archetypal nasty Russian ambassador based in Vienna, where he summed up what the Russian’s casus belli was along the lines of, from memory: So, basically, a few Russian language speakers in Ukraine were being discriminated against, and you decided to go in and kill everyone. As we all remember, the ambassador, the actual ambassador, archetypal villain, responds very negatively towards this summation of the truth of how Russia is reacting to entirely mythical discrimination: You pronounce this nonsense not me.That is the foundational meme in NAFO and what it does is it undermines the normal the normal play of things. You have an actual ambassador… A country’s ambassador. This is probably one of the lows in any Russian ambassador’s time in Vienna. He engages with a cartoon dog. With a guy in America. He loses the engagement.As an act of counter archetyping, that’s quite typical. Now there’s been millions, probably hundreds of millions of NAFO attempts to counter archetype. We see it all over our timelines. Anytime a Russian diplomat or figure attempts to re-archetype reality to favor Russia... then oodles of NAFO members go in. In a very humorous way, they undermine what the Russians are trying to do. So that, in general terms, is what I mean by archetyping. Archetyping can be conscious or unconscious. It’s actually an aspect of our cognition. So in my understanding of archetyping, we... archetype the world when we resolve the big the booming sensation the booming buzzing sensation that is external reality into units. We navigate the world and we archetype this as that or that as this. We take a risk when we get on to this aggregation of atoms and quarks we aggregate into an aeroplane. We sit down and we travel to a countrywhich itself is an archetype. An archetypal entity. It doesn’t exist in any way apart from in our head. This is Spain. This is America. These are archetypal identities of highly highly complex systems of trillions and trillions of sentient beings and different memories and history. So that’s really what I mean by archetyping. It can be purposeful or accidental. In the case of Ukraine Memes for NATO Teens and that engagement, which is the foundational moment in NAFO, that was completely accidental. LivFastDieJung didn’t expect to found a movement. I don’t think Kama, I think the other founder or the person who created the organization around it, thought he was going to create this decentralized entity. NAFO has been sustainable. So that was accidental.What Russia does is purposeful archetyping. I talked about it in the fourth episode. I talked about where I when I discovered the mother and the maiden and this mission that I was sent on in eastern Ukraine. As a result of a report from Russia’s security service in Russia-occupied Ukraine that a mother and her underage daughter, the maiden, were about to be chopped into tiny pieces by another character in Russia’s archetypal disenfolklore arsenal, which is the mythical Ukrainian Nazi. That was when I discovered that Russia was archetyping on purpose. It was using those forms of archetypes, or what Jung calls ‘primordial archetypes.’ What I now understand as archetyping is really, we have mobile armies of archetypes. Some of which are primordial archetypes, which are invested with new meanings and they’re attached to particular policy choices that Russia or China or MAGA or other movements which wish to manipulate our minds invest them in. Others are, well, we’ll talk about some of the mobile army. So in the context of what’s happened this week, this term called ‘hybrid war.’ So we see today in Italy’s defence minister describing “Russia’s targeting of infrastructure, elections, public opinion and supply chains as a hybrid war. He says Western inaction is absurd.” This is Italy’s defence minister! Polish Prime Minister Tusk slams explosion “on Warsaw and Lublin line as unprecedented, sabotaged by a foreign state. Russia’s fingerprints all over it. Hybrid war is here.” So here we have... two leading NATO members senior politicians are recognizing that Russia is behind these acts of war. Both of them are archetyping what are acts of war as a hybrid war. At the Berlin Security Conference, NATO’s Ingo Gerhards “warned that the West is not at war but no longer at peace due to Russia’s threat. He then noted Russia exploits Europe’s bureaucracy slow weapons production and divisions to weaken the west.What we have here are senior leaders recognizing attacks… Recognizing that Russia is behind them (which is a huge advance so we don’t have any uh shilly-shallying about this) however they’re quite comfortable with archetyping these attacks these acts of war as a hybrid war.We saw this week (this pains me obviously not as much as Romanians because it’s their country affected. It’s just absolutely bizarre. I’ve been right in this part of Ukraine on the the Danube looking across to Romania where the Turkish/owned a NATO-owned, flagged LNG tanker was hit by a Russian anti-ship missile. Had the attack worked to explode, as distinct from merely set on fire, a kilo tonne-scale explosion would have entirely wiped out Ukraine’s Ismail port. Romanian officials evacuated two villages, approximately 250 people, and as the owner pointed out during the week, all of their animals. So these are not hybrid war attacks. These are acts of war.Many of us will remember how we reacted when I think it was the German, part of the German consulate in Kyiv was hit in, maybe it was October 2022. Remember how we thought, right, this is Article 5 stuff. Now, none of us have any expectation that article 5 will be raised.I want to try and explain what I believe is going on through the prism of the Disinfolklore Analytical Method. To help us - at least the people who listen to this - understand what is going on. The sense of indignation I feel (and all of us feel on this space) that these acts of war are being archetyped as hybrid war. They’re recognized as such by senior leading politicians. The culprit is identified. Yet Article 5 is not being triggered. Nor is, as far as we are aware, yet, a Kosovo-esque or NATO or non-NATO intervention force to go into Ukraine to help Ukraine. Ukraine still fights alone even though Russia’s army is bolstered again with a new batch of North Korean soldiers reportedly being killed in their droves by Ukraine in Pokrovsk.I cannot listen to any non-Ukrainian speak about the problems and the scandal around Mindich without asking first, well, “Are you calling out America for all of its scandals and all of the scandals in our country? Why are you archetyping Ukraine in this condescending way?!” As if the aid you are giving is some sort of a gift. As if it gives you the right to determine what Ukraine should be doing, when the amount of corruption in the United States and in the current president with the Epstein debacle is just absolutely extraordinary.So I have no time to listen to any of them lecture Ukraine.The Special Military Operation (SMO) moniker that Russia uses to conceal the largest land war in Europe since 1945. A 1,800km long front-line! That’s another form of archetyping. Archetyping acts of war as hybrid warfare or active measures is an aspect of the way Russia wages its mental war. I remember when I first encountered the phrase hybrid warfare. It was pretty hard to get my head around it. Even though I was involved in eastern Ukraine on this bridge in Stanitsia-Luhanska between 2015 and 2018. A gray zone. We called it the gray zone. Because this was an area of a kilometer-and-a-half initially between the russian occupiers positions south of the Donets river and the Ukrainian defenders’ positions north of the river. About 10,000 civilians passed through this grey zone each day. I and my colleagues provided what’s known in human rights work as protection-by-presence. We got embroiled in all of these stories and evolved into Disinfolklore.The use of gray zone as a metaphor has a very real meaning to me. It is an actual physical space where acts of war happened. Explosions. People are being killed. People are being injured. All the time. People are being threatened. At night, artillery duels are going on in this very space. In the morning, I would go there to catalogue the ordinance. To determine from which direction it was fired. That being characterized in London or Berlin at the time or in Washington as a hybrid war always seemed a bit ridiculous to me. Because it was an act of war. Now here we are, several hundred thousand dead Ukrainians later. A million-and-a-half dead Russians later. Hundreds-of-billions-of-euros actually spent. Trillions of euros owed by Russia to Ukrainians. We are still hearing, after Russia has attacked, blown up a train line and tried to do even worse damage, the Prime Minister talking about hybrid warfare. So to get the most knowing people in Russia’s chosen enemies chains of command to take on its own archetyping of how it conducts war. To persuade someone with the knowledge and experience of Prime Minister Tusk to describe the blowing up by Russia of its railway line, as hybrid war is the height of the success of Russia’s campaign of archetyping. We have these knowledgeable people who, while recognizing apparently the seriousness of the actual kinetic attacks against Europe, targeting infrastructure, killing people, hacking the health system in Ireland and in other countries, the most the biggest crime of all adulterating elections adulterating the information space in ways that have never been done before that have seemed to be have been normalized in people’s minds with the use of this “oh, it’s just hybrid warfare” or even if their tone is “oh Russia is conducting hybrid war” what are we are not doing against them is an aspect of Russia’s success.While earnestly and proudly we model our knowingness by explaining to others the intricacies of re-archetyping of actual war with euphemisms like “hybrid warfare” is just a euphemism for war, for kinetic war, for armed attacks against our people. Our culture. The persistence of our democracies. Our right to free and fair elections upon which all our other rights depend and flow from. Russia continues its war by all means. While we’re engaged in indulging ourselves by talking about this kinetic war, by using Russia’s archetypes, its invented archetypes, all going back to Gerasimov’s 2013 paper on hybrid warfare.That paper itself is an example of how Russia conducts its war! It creates these concepts which then flow into the minds of the people who are supposed to protect us. Those concepts in their minds act to prevent them responding to kinetic acts of war which have been going on on the European continent and in America at least since 2014. ‘Hybrid war’ itself substantively is an act of successful archetyping by Russia. The term ‘hybrid warfare’ communicates that archetyping to us in a manner that persuades us with these seductive archetypal monikers (‘Hybrid Warfare’ sounds sexy! New! Attractive! In-groupy) to parse and see reality in a way that doesn’t correspond to the actual archetype’s substance (warfare, which is messy, bloody, disgusting) of what is going on which is a kinetic war. So Russia managed to conceal itself from its enemies perception. Here we have this remarkable point where Italy’s defense minister and Poland’s prime minister - I’m not picking on them. Any number of people this week and all of our timelines are full of people and very experienced people characterizing these acts of war as mere ‘active measures’ or hybrid warfare. I’m just using them as an example.) Here they’re actually recognizing that Russia is doing it, and they’re still not identifying it as warfare. These are extreme examples of how concepts are introduced into language. We take them on. It’s the height of irony because hybrid warfare is a term that was invented to conceal war and it’s successfully doing so. Hiding in plain sight! So I go back to my “I mean we all think we’d recognize a genocide or a war” origin story in Disinfolklore: Stealth Genocide.I was monitoring very closely the information space in Russia-occupied Luhansk over the course of those three years. I encountered all these oodles of stories, some of which featured me and my colleagues, but others which didn’t. All full of archetypes, whether it’s “Polish mercenaries” or “Ukrainian punishers” (a lot of archetypes from the Second World War). This archetypal Disinfolklore, in the form of thousands, millions of stories, memes, fed through the minds of the million-and-a-half people in temporarily occupied Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea, as well at the time. As I’ve spoken about: I didn’t know what they were doing. I just knew this was odd. It became most obviously odd when I saw the Mother and the Maidan in the operation I was trolled, ordered to lead by my supervisor. I was brought to participate in this enactment of a piece of Disinfolklore. Then my participation in this operation that had been set and my chain of command had been trolled into tasking me and my colleagues to go on. To this cottage in the forest to check on the Mother and the Maiden who are about to be chopped into tiny pieces by this mythical Ukrainian Nazi archetypal character that Russia had spent decades establishing as a credible presence in our information space. Then the act of us being sent there. Going there became further fuel in Disinfolklore stories promoted inside Russia-occupied Ukraine. This had the effect, when aggregated, with millions of other similar stories, over the course of years, of brainwashing the people there into thinking that the West was ridiculous. That people like me were ridiculous. That we shouldn’t have even been there. And anyway everyone across the Donetsk river was a Nazi and deserved to die.And obviously, at the time, I didn’t know what was going on. I wasn’t even thinking (even though I was trained as an international lawyer), I wasn’t even thinking in terms of the very definite, legally established archetype for Russia-occupied Ukraine, which is that it is, that it was occupied. It was under occupation, as defined by the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Arising from that designation or that archetype arose a whole number of requirements that Russia as the occupant of the territory needed to observe. However Russia managed not only to conceal its occupation and by archetyping the occupation, Russia had managed to re-archetype what is a bog-standard traditional occupation of territory, which is definable in international law, and which, for instance, Israel has always talked about occupying territory. Russia had managed to re-archetype that as a whole confusing mess of ‘civil war,’ and what have you. Managed to troll leaders in Europe and the leaders in my organisation, the OSCE, and the part of the member states, the 57 member states, to participate in the troll. As a diplomat in Ukraine in an organisation (OSCE) which had been pressed by its political masters and mistresses into integrating the fiction that Russia was not an occupying force in Ukraine, I had to work closely with Russian diplomats also employed by the OSCE. For a year, as the OSCE’s political focal point for Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Kirivohrad I had to go to meetings along with a Russian government official posing as a diplomat. At almost every one of these meetings, I had to intervene to explain when that Russian official, my colleague, tried to present the opinion that Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine was actually a ‘civil war’ between Ukrainians that Russia was mediating disinterestedly. I would have to interject each time my colleague surfaced this troll. I would explain that my colleague’s view did not represent mine or the official position of the OSCE. Each time I would hope that he would refrain from this re-Archetyping of reality, so as to avoid the inevitable tension that would then arise between us on our frequently very long drives back to our base in Dnipro after the meeting with local Ukrainian officials or civil society representatives. However, each time, like a Russian infantry soldier today in eastern Ukraine my colleague would launch himself forward in a meat assault against reality. My favourite moments were when a Ukrainian official in the room would give my Russian colleague a lecture on how this was not Bosnia, as my colleague would attempt to troll us into perceiving Russia’s genocidal occupation of Ukraine. This was an invasion by Russia. Then all I would have to say is: I fully agree. And my embarrassed chastened Russian colleague yet again suffer defeat in his attempt to re-archetype “Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine” as an “Intra-Ukrainian civil war.” Yet at the next meeting he would air his “just like Bosnia” troll again.It was just this confusing mess of an issue that Russia managed to put into our minds. It was only really when I was doing this work for the Moscow Mechanism Mission in March 2022, helping to catalogue the minutiae of the occupation of Zaporizhzhia and the parts where Russia and up near Kyiv, that I understood that I, despite having an education in genocide studies and international law, I hadn’t even noticed that it was a genocide. What I call now a ‘stealth genocide’, going on from the time of 2014 onwards because they were preparing them to participate in a genocide. So again, I’m not picking on Prime Minister Tusk or Italy’s defence minister because I was part of all of this. I didn’t see it because I was subject to the same archetypes and archetyping by the Russians and the institutions I worked for. So this is the full power really of Russia’s archetypal Disinfolklore. It contaminates the very concepts we need to interpret reality correctly.Russian combat propaganda substitutes the meaning of what is with what it wishes to re-archetype what is as. Or, it injects new monikers like ‘hybrid war’ and subverts meanings inside our inner minds. Our Mana / the energy from which all our decisions flow becomes contaminated.The meaning of war is an armed attack. This is what has been going on. People are dead, because of Russia’s hack of Ireland’s healthcare system computer architecture. The meaning of war is subversion of other people’s rightful government, in how they determine who is in government. In their elections. So that meaning has changed now too. By calling such unlawful and until 2014 almost unheard of interference in other countries democratic systems (which is a prima facie breach of International Law and the Helsinki Declaration upon which the OSCE was founded, Inter Alia) mere hybrid warfare or ‘it’s just the Russians’ we conceal these imperialist assertions of Russian power /Mana over our lives. It substitutes ‘hybrid warfare’ for ‘war.’ That becomes a contagion in our minds. It has the effect of leaving us more open to war. We see events on the ground like election interference by other states or what we would otherwise characterise as ‘armed attacks’ as ‘not war.’ Even the cleverest people, most strategic thinkers in our security architecture earnestly fall for this troll. As spoken about last week with President Biden, who fell for the troll, of ‘not starting World War Three to defend Ukraine.’ When when i talk about archetyping, it’s empirical. I’ve talked about my own lived experience there. We all have the lived experience this week of watching our timelines. The blowing up of the railway tracks in Poland by the Russian state. and all of these um all of these attacks uh and this is where i come from these mobile armies of archetypes there’s heaps of different concepts there’s archetypes of national identity which areinvested with new meanings which i mentioned the other week are the main that is the main strategy which russia uses to influence our countries in ways that which bamboozle and confuse us into inaction. So in the case of MAGA, they will go to archetypes of national identity like slavery, like discrimination against...black or brown people, or they will subvert the meaning of the flag. And then Donald and his crew also used the same strategies with, for instance, the Jan 6th anthem, which was co-produced by Kash Patel and replaced the national anthem in the in Donald’s election rallies it’s the case in all of our countries and when you getyour eye into this and whenever you come across these aspects of national self-identity which are being used for instance the Georgescu’s campaign in Romania sticking to this nostalgic idea of the past and using nationalist tropes to hack people’s minds. Now we can look at this archetyping as suspicious. Of course, there is positive nationalism.We see it in Ukraine. We’ve seen it in Ukraine since 2014. where archetypes of national self-identity have not been subverted. But obviously, the idea of corruption or Nazis, Russia is just constantly throwing these archetyping linguistic weapons. Someone this week sent me this, I don’t know,maybe some of you have seen these graphic representations of the history of the world. The Histo map is one of the most famous ones, which still actually stood the test of time from the 1930s. And it shows sort of the last 3,000 years and in various ways, in various colors,different civilizations and when they rose and abided and when they fell. And someone who I don’t think they’d seen the histo map before sent me this one. And it’s relatively little is happening before 1000 BC. We’ve just got Babylon, Indus Valley. And then suddenly Persia, Greece arise.But there’s nothing about Ukraine, ancient Ukraine, and the beginnings of Indo-European culture. So this graphic representation is, again, it’s an archetyping of our civilization with Greece, ancient Greece, and Persia as the most ancient. They kind of come out of nowhere at a certain time, which we know is not true from a...um from uh an empirical so i don’t mean to say that archetyping is um is wrong or as an as an act but the russians uh use it um in subversive ways and what i talked about two weeks ago when i talked about the how um vladoslav sorkov the former deputy prime minister of russia haduh written written about this where he was looking uh when he was designing putin’s um presidency um after the disaster of the the the transition of power from medvedev back to putler and there was those big protests and he was under enormous pressure um Sorkov himself, because he had been, he’d founded this fascist movement, NASHI, of youth,Hitler youth, basically, and they were supposed to protect against from protests. And yet there were protests all over Russia against the transition of power. And Surkov was Ruski Mir as an idea, as a concept, had been around for a long time, 100 or 100 or so years.But what Surkov described was when he realized he was looking for an a fig leaf to disguise what they were really doing uh the imperialism the planning to take to occupy crimea planning to execute more wars and to um brainwash and and transform the mental um the mentality of russians which has happened since 2010 andso he decided to choose ruski mir as a fig leaf but in all our countries the russians will use different fig leaves whether it’s different ideas in ireland neutrality so they take by their very essence they take what you as a as a as a nation but also you as an individual and this is where themicro goes to the macro what i saw in russia occupied ukraine was individuals identities were transformed from being ukrainian to being Russian. And most of us have an idea that, oh, this could never happen to us. And yet we’ve seen it happen to people in MAGA or anti-vax people or people we know.So whose actions are so unusual that they actually transform their self-identity. And this is usually as a result of interaction with social media. had our identities transformed since the 24th of February 2022. But what we are, how we differ is what we’re trying to promote is completely consistent with the post-World War II legal order and international law,which is Russia out of 100%. percent of Ukraine and if you are promoting a position that is inconsistent with that then according to my code of positive trials that would be a breach of the right or the ethical discipline part of it. So archetypal archetypes, we’ve got the Jungian primordial archetypes like the mother and the maiden,and meanings can be disconnected from archetypal characters of this kind who appear in items of distant folklore and memes. And someone wrote to me recently, a NAFO member wrote to me recently, to remind me that Joseph Campbell in the 1980s spoke of Star Wars and how the use of myths,as she put it to me when she was writing, bi-directional, not uni-directional, The current bidirectional mythology and history deserve the same treatment. So we’re talking about updating these archetypes. So obviously most people today don’t understand anything about Greek myth and the significance of these gods, but they do about Star Wars.and then we have the like the Joseph Campbell archetypes the hero’s journey which a lot of script writers are interested in and Greek myths or Campbell based a lot of the stuff these are archetypal structures But they’re not the totality or even they’re only a tiny bit of what I mean by archetypes. They’re useful, but they’re not.They don’t help explain what Russia is doing with memes and say it’s hybrid warfare framing or labeling. And we can’t really see these archetypes without the story characters without the memes necessarily. So that’s why I told you the little story about the the Italian defense minister and Tusk and the quotes there.But the archetypes are in there, this hybrid war fair bit. And then a very important aspect of the disinfolklore analytical method and some of the tools for seeing disinfolklore and for parsing it and for countering it are different archetypal structures like The inner outer realm switching,which I use the example of what was happening in Mariupol when Russia murdered the 600 people sheltering in the drama theater. Or most of them, if not all of them, apart from the babies, of course, were native refugees. Ukrainian native Russian language speakers. However, as soon as the bombs dropped, they were cast from the inner realm,from the perspective of Moscow, into the outer realm. They became Nazis, dead Nazis, who deserved to be dead. They actually metamorphosized in Russian information space from mothers and maidens and into dead Ukrainian Nazis. And so we have this inner outer realm switching and transformations of people through storytelling, through the distant folklore.Even my concept of mana energy is a form of archetyping, defining things. And then, of course, those three great archetypes, which Joanna so clearly helped me see Russia’s invincible, Russia is indispensable and Russia has the right to interfere in its neighboring countries’ destinies. And in fact, in all our countries’ destinies,because we talk about normalizing election interference or we complain about it as that Italian defense minister is complaining about. But somehow it’s being executed without us reacting appropriately to it, apart from Romania and Moldova. But I’m not seeing too many other countries really understanding what the significance of those two examples are in protecting the foundational structure ofour communities by taking it in hand and looking at the interference as, for instance, the Moldovan countries, government did and the Moldovan intelligence services did by releasing and the Romanians did the same thing but the Moldovan one stick to mind because they really just they went through all the different dimensions of Russia’s interference fromthe training of of of of people’s so they could cause riots in in bosnia bringing them to bosnia under the the care of the church the priests and their cards and all these very different dimensions of affecting the information space the information environment all witha view to uh of affecting the uh the elections and this is uh this is a form of imperialism this is an execution of right by russia in our countries and while people in our communities are arguing over is this hybrid war is it not or russia wouldn’t attack us the actual attack ishappening or many people would argue that russia isn’t an empire and yet It’s executing imperium inside and right inside our communities as it did in America in 2016 and in all the elections and in all the elections until we get rid of this, this thing,which is what I’m trying slightly what I’m trying to do with my work. So I’ve talked before about how characters in stories help these archetypal disinfolklore take hold of our minds. Ukraine can be a character. For us it’s the plucky David against Goliath and we’ve watched its archetypal identity and people’s minds change, transform.The last 10 days have been a nightmare from that perspective. but we press on and we have to trust that President Zelensky will find the way through this to the extent that this affects him. So these characters, they appear as solid concepts with fixed meanings, like Russia is invincible, Russia is indispensable,and yet those of us who listen to Mockers and Genesis Man and Will and Iona and others each day understand Russia is on its last legs and may only have a month or two left of existence and we must never forget this and it’s a source of great joy in all of our lives.even when we, well, despite when we see these attacks in Chernobyl and stuff. And good luck to the Russians with election interference and stuff when millions of Russians over the following, over the next few months without internet access, even the fixed line internet access is gone from many parts of Russia apart. They can only access government websites.Good luck to them as they starve and freeze with continuing these attacks or thinking they’re getting anything from these attacks. The absurdity of Russia’s persistence in trying to take Myrna Grad or Pokrovsk when it’s falling apart at the seams is, well, I suppose Jung would have something to say about it.what Russia does is it legislates its archetypes through historical memory I did a podcast this week with Betty Heidi Cuba and Betty Dangerous and the author of this brilliant Ukrainian academic who wrote the mental war piece which I talked about before and which I’ll I’ll talk about again where she highlights what Russia has really done to legislatefor historical memory inside Russia. And this is a form of archetyping that is key to its success in brainwashing its own population. And indeed, the people we know who are caught up in this idea of Ruski Mir or the, you know, the great Russian culture.A really insidious form of archetyping, which I’ve really only got my head around recently. is this use of the word opposition. So now most of us, or probably all of us listening to this, understand whenever we see the Russian opposition, so-called opposition, that’s how we should call it, talk, you know,it’s eyes raised and there’s something about Navalny saying, Today, and this is what the Russians do, and they did it in Ukraine in February 2014. Paul Manafort was given the praise for renaming Trump’s advisor, Paul Manafort, who had advised Yanukovych, and whose work there had been paid for by Ford.uh oligarchs um akhmatov who’s now seemed he seems to have seen the light um adara pasca who hasn’t seen the light as far as we can see fertash who’s still hiding from american justice in vienna uh and and one other whose name escapes me paid for his work and But Paul Manafort reborn or renamed, re-monikered,re-archetyped the party of the regions as Opposition Bloc, which was this party which even in 2019 had about 30% of the vote and had the whole TV stations run by Medvedchuk. which were very successful in brainwashing. Even people I knew, even people who worked with me,who were married to Ukrainians and watched this nonsense all the time until it was banned. The entire brainwashing apparatus was banned. but opposition block this is the idea of archetyping a part of of the people who are against the government as the whole of the government and then they can becontrolled and this is an old trick the russians use and many of us fall for it because we we we think they’re They must be the opposition. So other archetypes like Banderites, neutrality, Moldovan language. One thing I learned this week from this great historian who’s now at Vilnius University...that Russia consciously used the word Soviet to conceal the domination of the USSR by Russia. So they were looking for a fig leaf. So again, this is the same thing, the same form of archetyping that... that Surkov invented in 2009, 2010 with the Ruski Mir. They did it before consciously the documents demonstrate that Soviet is a cynicalimposition, imprinting over Russia to conceal Russia and convince people that they weren’t being dominated by these white supremacists, Nordic and Slavic Russians from Moscow, an imperial entity. um but this is uh another form of archetyping the punishers which is from world warii that was in every newspaper article all the time every day that i saw in russia occupied ukraine it meant nothing to me but it but it triggered memories and in the minds and very complex memories and systems of thought in the minds of the people read it and acted to brainwash people.Fake news is, of course, Donald’s way of archetyping the truth as a fake. And then people who don’t understand this then refer to items of propaganda as being fake news. But these are kind of smear tactic archetyping piece another form and so that really is all I had to sayabout this archetyping but that’s how I see the hybrid warfare fitting into it and our own identities are made up of endlessly dynamic mobile matrices of interlocking archetypes And almost the first barrier and research on distant folklore is to overcome, as I often say, is to convince people that their identities are up for grabs.Once you accept that your identity is itself the product of mobile armies of metaphors, of truth, of archetypes, then we can begin to look more critically at how our minds and our identities can be affected by distant folklore and by manipulative people, whether it’s so-called pickup artists negging you to try and provoke you into pleasing them,or it’s Russians trying to convince you as they attack us, as they try to break the very sinews of our culture and our countries that they’re not engaged in war so that we’re not aware of what they’re doing. So wealth, intelligence, access to information is no barrier to Russia’s use of weaponized archetypes. Russia and all con men,con persons have this same tactics, tropes and procedures and strategies for the whole spectrum of cognitive frames. And that’s why David Brookfield’s work on scams was really, really helpful, really useful, because again, this is the micro, but what we see is exactly the same strategies used by Putin and Donald toto change our realities and to change our minds i’ll leave on this like russia has declared the war it’s there it’s in the documents uh um we have them uh from signed by putin himself um inform napan has exposed them not only surkov’s email box but this document from november 30 2023 umwhich Vladimir Putin himself has signed. Accordingly, to solve the problem of social entropy in such a system of social relationships, the most obvious solution is to continue the policy of exporting chaos abroad, that is, diffusing internal tensions through external expansion. Russia has declared war. For me, it’s simple. We are at war.And any obfuscation of that through the use of the term hybrid warfare is to fall for the troll, basically. And so it’s... It is a declared war, so even talking in euphemisms. And we can see its substance with the attacks against Romania, against Poland, against Ireland, against Britain. Hundreds and hundreds of kinetic attacks and murders and assassinations.Yes, you can. It’s part of a system of thousands, 150,000 war crimes in Europe on the European continent. It’s war. And this is probably what we have to get used to in our minds. But the concept of hybrid war and all of these euphemisms are... are very helpful for us.And that’s our vulnerability because we don’t want to face it. Not us necessarily because we spend all of our days in this. But Tusk doesn’t want to face it. He doesn’t want to get the tanks or put everyone on alert or call people. to the thing, nor does the Italian guy.So they talk about it as if it’s something that’s happening elsewhere and something that isn’t happening. And it’s that vulnerability, which the Russians are very good at exploiting. But I will leave on the positive note, which is I still don’t see what Russia gets out of any of this. I mean,we clearly don’t get anything out of it and Ukrainians aren’t getting anything out of it. but the russians aren’t getting anything out of it and um and that is a source of great joy to me in fact while they’re engaged in this exporting of chaos throughthese kinetic activities um their own um place is absolutely falling apart and um And I really look forward to Fridays this week in Absurdistan and Mokers’ accounts because not everyone, very few people really understand what is going on in Russia at the moment. They’re still captured by these archetypes. So that’s the positive note.I’ll leave everyone on, but I’ve got to go. But thank you so much. Bye.Recent podcast: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

I’m 100% comfortable with using the term ‘meme.’ I use the term ‘meme’ interchangeably with the term ‘informational unit’ and also with the term ‘troll,‘ where troll is describing the item of Disinfolklore or the item of information. So ‘meme,’ for me, is more than simply the visual image that we have come to think about it as being. Obviously, when the term ‘meme’ was coined in whatever was 1976 by by that English philosopher Dawkins, it described ‘informational unit.’ What I call informational units (which are communicated in cultures in the same way that genes, or the genome are communicated biologically). I discovered Disinfolklore as a narrative form in eastern Ukraine, where I gradually realized—while working in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018—that what I was observing were particular items of Disinfolklore, usually recurrent memes or “units of information.” The quotidian, daily ebb and flow of news and “newsey” content made me wonder: was there a system behind it?As I looked more deeply, I realized that Russian military strategy includes the concept of Information Confrontation. According to Russia’s military doctrine, Information Confrontation comprises two elements:1. The means (instances of information such as memes, trolls, and informational units).2. The Information Environment.This led me to what I now call a Disinfolklore galaxy—a system Russia created inside occupied Ukraine. Every thought, every movement, every aspect of reality—from where you work to how you commute, to the people you talk to, whether family or colleagues—is injected with what I call Disinfolklore. Ideas meld with the texture of life itself.Unless you profess certain memes, beliefs, or informational units, you risk consequences. If you get it wrong, you might lose your job—like the ABC News journalist who called Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, “full of hate.” That journalist lost his job. This is a perfect example of how the Information Environment impacts every aspect of life: you say something, and you lose your job.That was eastern Ukraine, where I discovered what I now call the Disinfolklore galaxy. Today, I conceptualize the Disinfolklore universe as being made up of many different galaxies. The MAGA Disinfolklore galaxy shares many continuities and similarities with what I saw in Russia-occupied Ukraine.In early November 2024, just after the U.S. presidential election—which Donald Trump reportedly won—I had a vision. What happened to MAGA, to those who are part of MAGA, was going to happen to all of humanity, starting with America. This vision became the basis of my talk at the Pirate Party Conference in Munich during the Munich Security Conference: Welcome to Our Disinfolklore Universe. Today, we see the same melding of reality in America’s relationship with Ukraine, which is why we’re here. We want Ukraine to win, but most of us understand America will never tip the scales in Ukraine’s favor. Now we just hope it doesn’t tip them against Ukraine. Ukraine has been central to U.S. politics since 2016.The Republican National Convention in August 2016 marked a turning point. Paul Manafort, whose work contributed directly to this war in Ukraine, was later imprisoned for operating as an unregistered agent for Ukraine’s former president. Manafort had the commitment to deliver military support for Ukraine removed from the Republican platform. I have posted before about the exact moment when MAGA shifted to a pro-Russia stance. Recently, Reuters reported evidence that the United States may not fund Ukraine militarily next year. This path—from secretive policy changes to mainstream acceptance—illustrates how thousands of memes invade our information space, forming what I call the Disinfolklore galaxy.My main teaching, for lack of a better term, is that when we tune into individual memes and informational units daily, we fail to see the larger structure: a Disinfolklore galaxy as powerful as the one that surrounds those who embraced MAGA. This phenomenon is not about intelligence or education; it is a deliberate attempt to hack minds and surround people with an information environment designed to influence behavior.Paul Manafort remains a dark force behind much of Ukraine’s division between 2004 and 2014. The irony is stark: those he worked for—and MAGA—claim the Maidan uprising was engineered by the U.S., even though Manafort supported Yanukovych, who, according to leaked texts from his daughters, arranged the massacre on the Maidan in February 2014. At that time, European leaders were in Kyiv urging demonstrators to accept a deal with Yanukovych, but he fled. Manafort later worked for Donald Trump. Though not prominent publicly, he appeared at the national convention, and his influence persists.Today, figures like Tulsi Gabbard amplify narratives reminiscent of Russian disinformation playbooks. Her recent video about nuclear war exemplifies Disinfolklore: carefully crafted aesthetics, deliberate archetyping, and messaging designed to evoke fear. The imagery—dark tones, ashes, and even her gray hair—suggests archetypes of witches and doom. This is not accidental; it is psychological warfare.Applying my Disinfolklore analytical method, I interpret her message as a statement of power: surrender to us, and we will protect you from elites who allegedly seek nuclear war. For those who resist, the underlying message is intimidation—“You are powerless.” This aligns with decades of narratives portraying cities as lawless and elites as corrupt, themes deeply embedded in American discourse.The method I use draws on cognitive models like Paul Ekman’s Atlas of Emotions: trigger, experience, reaction. Every day, we undergo countless emotional journeys triggered by stimuli—tweets, images, videos. Separating experience from reaction helps us resist manipulation. Gabbard’s video triggered curiosity in me; my reaction was analysis, not amplification.Ultimately, Disinfolklore thrives on fear, negativity, and archetypes. Whether through memes, videos, or orchestrated spectacles like Russia’s missile strikes or human safari footage shared on Telegram, the goal is the same: to create a distorted reality. This is what I observed in eastern Ukraine, and it is what we see now globally. Unless more of us wake up to these tactics, their influence will deepen.Elon Musk dresses up in superhero costumes, the Pirate Party began as a party of protest, and pirates from literature, from art became their part of their their moniker, their folk the folk heroes of pirates. They were going to be the pirates. So it was appropriate, but I made the speech there, and then, since then, I’ve worked carefully on detailing the whole idea, this whole aspect of the Disinfolklore narrative method / narrative form and Disinfolklore, analytical methods. So it’s many different things, which concerns the Disinfolklore universe.When I saw Tulsi Gabbard’s “Nuclear Ashes” speech in the run-up to America’s bombing of Iran, I decided to apply the method—a 12 tool algorithm designed to help us interpret any Informational Unit. Any meme, whether it’s a photograph or an image circulating in the English information space. We’re likely seeing similar patterns in Northern Ireland right now, where riots have erupted following allegations that two immigrants allegedly attempted r***. This turmoil reflects a perennial theme in Disinfolklore—and in Indo-European thought—where outsiders enter the inner realm and threaten its fertility, sovereignty, or security. These three archetypes recur across Indo-European societies, as noted by leading theorists of language, linguistics, and religion.Since recognizing this pattern, I’ve used it as a tool for analysis—whether examining riots in Ballymena or other unrest. I wouldn’t be surprised if Telegram is involved in amplifying hatred. Applying these methods helps us understand what leaders and influencers are trying to do—whether in Ukraine, Russia, or elsewhere. Russia demonstrates the endgame: a nightmare reality, mirrored by the CCP, North Korea, and Iran—societies deeply embedded in Disinfolklore, using stories to hack minds.Tulsi Gabbard’s video is archetypal Disinfolklore. The aesthetics immediately reminded me of a strange artifact a Ukrainian friend sent me during the war: a man in 1970s-style visuals discussing hypermodern issues like global warming and environmental catastrophe. Gabbard’s video evokes a similar mood—dark, foreboding, like being lost in a forest. It is cynically and carefully produced, down to details like her gray hair strand, reminiscent of a character from The Munsters. This deliberate archetyping casts her as a witch, placing viewers in a negative psychological space.The imagery—dark backgrounds, ashes—reinforces this mood. For someone like me, who filters what enters my mind, the video felt abrupt and unsettling. Was it responding to something in the news cycle, or was it simply injected into our space as a deliberate artifact? Either way, it signals intent. Combined with events like the activation of the National Guard and military parades in D.C., it suggests escalation—a coup in motion since the disputed 2020 election, now accelerating.Applying the Disinfolklore literacy tools, I see deliberate archetyping: Gabbard as a witch-like figure, invoking nuclear war, ashes, and elites. The message is layered but clear: fear. This negative mood bypasses rational filters, embedding itself in our minds and triggering routines and traumas. Coming from someone tied to U.S. intelligence circles, the irony is striking—she positions herself as anti-elite while claiming elites want nuclear war because they have shelters. This is nonsense, of course, but effective as psychological manipulation.The third tool—finding the Mana in the meme—asks: what energy does this convey? So Mana, for me is an energy, and the energy in the meme. So you just look for what it what is the energy? The different levels. Layers. Is it negative? Positive? What’s it saying? What’s it doing? What’s the intention? Mens rea. For me, the intention there is to say, we are going to protect you. If you surrender to us, we’ll protect you from this nuclear war which the elites, which the outer realm people, want to spark. For those of us who don’t fall for that, the message is: we’re so powerful that there’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing you can do anymore. You’re powerless. We will arrest you. The army will shoot you. For me, the ultimate energy is a statement: “We will protect you if you surrender.” For those who resist, the message is intimidation: “You are powerless.” The fourth tool—inner/outer realm immanences—reveals another layer. Every Disinfolklore artifact plays on this tension: Insiders versus Outsiders. Fertility versus Threat’s to your community’s children. It’s women. Guarantors of any community’s persistence over time. Migration tropes in English info-space often depict outsiders as corrupting the Inner Realm’s purity. Gabbard’s message embeds this archetype: elites as the Outer Realm, stirring chaos. Yet, she’s as elite as it gets: Director of National Intelligence. And she’s archetype herself as One of Us. If you didn’t have the dark forest end of the world aesthetic provoking your emotions about the end of the world, you might just laugh off the attempt to hack our emotions. Yet, I repeat, this actor is actual director of National Intelligence.She could have blamed Russia or China, but she didn’t. Leaving interpretation open aligns with decades of narratives portraying cities as lawless and elites as corrupt—deeply ingrained in American discourse. that she and the people she’s working for are all working together, whether it’s her boss, the Chinese, the Russians, Iranians, the North Koreans, all of these nuclear all of these nuclear powers. So she could have said that they were the ones who were threatening us, you know, Ronald Reagan type thing, where these are our enemies, or even Axis of Evil type thing. But she didn’t use this. She left it to the interpretation, to the Maga interpretation. And this has been very deeply built on decades of this idea, especially in America, of the cities being lawless lands, where the Maga Maga base living in safe communities, generally speaking, in nice or certainly, the people I know, or my relatives who’ve gone Maga are quite wealthy and quite safe. But even from a young age, they’ve been banging on about how unsafe the cities are. And now I see what’s happening in in LA, or in the information space about LA is built on this decades-long idea that have those in the cities are Outer Realm there and then. The Inner-Outer Realm switching is dizzying. Yet characteristic of Disinfolklore.The fifth tool—adapted from Paul Ekman and the Dalai Lama’s Atlas of Emotions—maps emotional journeys: Trigger, Experience, Reaction. Social media bombards us with triggers, and our reactions often amplify Disinfolklore. My reaction was analysis, not amplification—a conscious choice.So then the fifth tool is this idea, which I got from the Dalai Lama and the great psychologist Paul Ekman, who did this amazing work, which is available online, called Atlas of emotions. And in it, they have this, this system, which I adapt into the Disinfolklore analytical method called trigger experience reaction.So any of the emotional journeys that we go on each day… We go on 1000s of emotional journeys, millions, perhaps each day, whether it’s as we’re going down our timeline is an obvious way of illustrating this. We see pictures. I mean, all of us who are experts at filtering and responding to information in a way that perhaps we don’t understand how, how amazing we are at this. Now, by just being on simply being on Twitter, we have so many different algorithms to filter out things in our mind and not to let them into our Inner Mind, where they might contaminate our own Mana. but Ultimately, we’re being brought on oodles of emotional journeys. Obviously this also goes In Real Life as well. In work. With our spouses or children. Even with our pets or just walking down the street as different stimuli bounce off us. It’s this timeline of emotions that the Ekman Dalai Lama cognitive model of Trigger Experience Reaction. So there’s a Trigger - a meme. We Experience a feeling of Anger, Fear, Disgust, Sadness, and/or Enjoyment. Then we React to them. Obviously the Disinfolklore Analytical Method’s message is that you can separate the Experience, the Sadness, from the Reaction. You can avoid actively falling from the trolls. Or, you know, sharing that Disinfolklore. Sharing that image. As we talked about last time of someone who’s trying to, you know, at the moment, there’s a lot of stuff about Elon Musk’s father. This conference in Moscow. Where these famous people have gone to. A lot of us have shared the pictures of them, for instance, which is, from my perspective, part of the purpose of the conference. By sharing that nonsense we’re contributing to Russia’s motivation to stage such events as a means of continuing to wrap us up inside a Disinfolklore Universe. So we choose to react to this experience by sharing it. So with the Tulsi Gabbard thing, for me, the experience I had was curiosity. My reaction to it is this conversation here today that I’m having with you. Not really a conversation that’s the monologue. Hopefully, maybe we might have questions or reactions to what I’ve triggered. For me, it was when I as soon as I saw it, I was like, Okay, let me apply the Disinfolklore analytical method to it. Then the other six tools, which I won’t go through now, the Code of Positive Trolls. The most important element of the Code of Positive Trolls really in for me is Generosity. There was nothing generous in what she was she was saying. There was nothing positive about it. It wasn’t even a cynical attempt to please us. It was a, was a, it was a cynical attempt to put us at dis-ease. For that reason, it’s a perfect example of Disinfolklore. And what I mean by Disinfolklore. As indeed is what we see when Russia sends missiles into Ukraine and then it shows its own murders and destruction. Russia showing its human Safari training of drone pilots in Kherson on hunan prey, including small children. Russia has killed 1,800 civilians in Kherson then published the First Person View footage of these Crimes Against Hunanity on Russia’s own state controlled social media platform/Disinfolklore propagation apparatus Telegram. Boasting about, creating Disinfolklore. I saw this process in its primitive form in Russia-occupied Ukraine. I’ve spoken about how Russia filmed me and my colleagues then spun bizarre takes for months on end about mythical events. So this is the same thing which I saw in eastern Ukraine, where reality becomes the pictures of burning cars in the tiny area of Los Angeles where MAGA is trying to conjure into being a civil war. Being used and repeated, repetitively, repeatedly or by the mainstream media, and used as pretext to create what I call the Disinfolklore Galaxy.Ultimately, Gabbard’s video exemplifies Disinfolklore: fear-driven, archetype-laden, and manipulative. Similar tactics appear in Russia’s missile strikes and Telegram’s “human safari” videos—spectacles designed to distort reality. This is what I observed in eastern Ukraine, and it is spreading globally. Unless we wake up to these methods, their influence will deepen. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

Dive into the intriguing world of peppercorn rent and contract law, where the host uncovers the deeper meanings behind legal terms. Explore Marcel Mauss's ideas on reciprocal obligations linked to personal pledges. Discover how communal feasts symbolize energy transfer and the concept of mana. The discussion takes a fascinating turn, comparing memes to ancient deities, showcasing how cultural notions of life energy persist. Finally, the host connects linguistic patterns to age-old beliefs, revealing the intertwining of magic and social organization.

**Audio updated on 9 November due to editing error after 50mins in the original version**I wanted to talk about the continuation of what we had spoken about before. Part One:This basically involves a few different ingredients into the analytical theory that I invented, which is called Disinfolklore. Disinfolklore is both an analytical theory. Part Two:It’s also a way of seeing. It’s a description of a new form of narrative. It also is a way of cutting through Russian disinformation and in particular in the context of the Ukraine war.Part Three:However, it is an aspect of our culture which can be used in different contexts. The tools the modern discipline of Cultural Psychology and particularly the jurisprudence of Sympathetic Magic (including the Laws of Contagion and of Similarity (which includes the law of Difference) can be applied in the context of Disinfolklore. I am the first writer do this.But first, I thought I would just quickly go through some of the things I wrote this week. I wrote earlier on in the week, which is quite apt today because I see a couple were arrested and charged by the Polish police for one of whom, or both of them, I think… Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

So my first interest in magic stemmed from reading this paper on the war magic, which was used by the fifth Dalai Lama who lived around 1560, around that time, and was a great esoteric practitioner and basically once and for all beat this other Tibetan Buddhist sect with the help of Mongols and after that ruled Tibet until now. The idea of war magic, I mentioned it last week…Great question. Yes. So my first interest in magic stemmed from reading this paper on the war magic, which was used by the fifth Dalai Lama who lived around 1560, around that time, and was a great esoteric practitioner and basically once and for all beat this other Tibetan Buddhist sect with the help of Mongols andafter that ruled Tibet until now. And the idea of war magic, I mentioned it last week, it wasn’t so much the esoteric practices and spells which the fifth Dalai Lama, who was a great realized practitioner, but also a good military leader. It wasn’t the actual spells or the claim wasn’t that it’s not the spells,but it was that the word got out. that he was doing this. And this really disturbed the Karmapas, who was the other, we still have a Karmapa, but it was these battles which were won. It was the words that got out. And that really fascinated me. as war magic, as propaganda.And there the magic was in the sense of these esoteric practices, which I suspect go back, or many of them anyway, go back to the early Indo-European culture. And they’re just preserved in Tibetan Buddhism via India, where they were converted. And so And this was in... I read that in 2016.So this is while I was working in Russia-occupied Ukraine and going across the bridge all the time and trying to work out what are they doing? What are they talking about? What is all this nonsense in their information space that’s brainwashing people? Ah, it’s war magic. This is what they’re kind of doing.So I would archetype exactly what you’ve just... talked about in that way as a way of once you categorize it in that way then you look at it more like like an artifact in a museum you can walk around it and look up at it and down atit and as you in fact are obviously are doing you know rather than you know rather than you so you see it as an objet dar rather than something to be worried about or something that’s going to trigger your negative emotions which is obviously how therussians want to do it and i mentioned a bit earlier i’m not sure it was when you’re joined but one of the really important things I’ve tried to do and it’s helped me in distant folklore and looking at mythology is especially when you’re looking say at someone like DuganIf you have a deep hinterland or a deeper or a deep understanding, or at least a conscious understanding, you actually look it up to look at what does this symbolism mean? Then it enables us to look at what Dugan is doing and what, as you’re describing, the Russians are doing as their gobbledygook. It’s a pastiche.It’s a troll, but it’s a muddle of lots of different things. You get this sense in the Russian Orthodox Church, everything happens behind the veil, a bit like The Wizard of Oz. I don’t know whether or not Putin believes... I don’t know and it’s not necessary to know whether they’re utterly cynical. I suspectthat they don’t have an understanding, say, of... Wendy got this immediately when we talked about in the second week of emptiness, which from the Buddhist perspective is this idea that everything is empty of manna, of essence. And therefore, you can either go to one end of the extreme and despair, And that’s nihilism, the extreme of nihilism.Or you can go to the other end of the extreme and make up loads of s**t and come up with lots of nice stories to make yourself feel better about things. And that’s from the standpoint of ultimate reality. But in conventional reality, you have to accept that this chair, if I sit down on it,it’s going to work. The airplane is going to fly. And what the Russians are trying to do with that kind of stuff is probably from a standpoint of their own confusion, is muddle all of these different discourses, ultimate reality where nothing matters, because they are ultimately nihilistic, to breaking the laws of physics,which is the conventional view of what magic is, to using stories to scare people, And what we can do is develop an immunity, I think, to what they’re doing by understanding its absolute, well, Okay, so it doesn’t always help that it’s absolute nonsense because it’s not absolute nonsense because they’re mixing loads of things in.And I started this evening at eight o’clock by quoting from Soliev talking about Ukrainians being demons. And one of the, this early, there was a bit of a controversy over whether early archaic Roman religion was called Numenism. with the MN in numinism or whether it was called demonism. And again, the MN is also in demon.So this idea of manna is quite a helpful way of looking through all these things. But Solyov this week, yes, saying Ukrainians are demons. We heard this before about them being Satan worshippers. And if you don’t have any grounding in religious discourse, or if one doesn’t, as many of us don’t,I taught myself this stuff because I wanted to know what they were talking about, then you can miss the significance of what they’re trying to do. You can be a bit... Because a lot of people don’t have grounding in religion, for instance, they will just try and ignore it. Like I’m just thinking of normal military people,for instance, or many of our politicians in London or in Washington or something like that. though in Washington they might have some grounding in religion, but that demon chatter will work with them. So I feel, yeah, it’s a pastiche. So that’s, I think, what they’re doing. It is of no more significance than it is a pastiche.But one of my early intuitions, and by pastiche I mean... They are taking, as you point out, the hazelnuts in Irish mythology, which fall into the river up in the Moran Mountains and then the salmon eats the walnut and then the fisherman eats the salmon and becomes the king. And this is... As we know now,this is one manifestation of an essential story of what happens in the afterlife in Indo-European societies and in Indo-European religion. I once heard Putin talk about how he had been told there was massive freshwater reserves under the Azov Sea. And again, this is from an ancient Iran idea.And I thought, okay, he’s been trolled by someone who’s been studying ancient Persian. And then a year later, I saw the story that they had drilled and they didn’t find anything. I was like, I could have told you that. So this is why I get the idea that they’re not coming from a standpoint ofwe really understand this stuff and we’re just playing with it. We’re digging up these symbols and the symbolism, we’re putting them together and we’re toying with people like deities. I see it more that they are doing a pick and mix of different tropes and elements. Dugan, for instance,he is clearly very bright and has a real grasp on symbolism, which is probably why he’s so successful because there’s not that many people around who do understand it. But as the Russians did with Wagner, which is really clever what they did with Wagner.And I’m not even sure that they understand what they did by linking in with the foundation of the Germanic people. I think they just tuned into the Nazi aesthetic. But they really went, they ended up bringing in the foundations of Germanic culture and Manus and the sons of Manus whofounded Germanic culture and the Wagner operas and how the Germanic nation became a modern nation state and what they were doing with their distant folklore, creating a sense of identity, hacking, destroying existing senses of identity and creating a new sense of identity through using forcemonikered as the Wagner by Purgosian who wrote a book of fairy tales himself. So I’m not ruling out. They are extremely... They know exactly what they’re doing. I’m not sure I’ll ever have that conversation. But my feeling from reading people like Surkov and Dugan very closely is it’s...they don’t really understand what they’re doing, but they are brilliant at it. And they’re using symbols and tools which are politicians and are army people or are specialists in disinformation, for instance, they’re not at the races, they don’t get it at all. They’re not even valuing it.Some of you might remember when I first brought up mythology in the context of the predecessor to Volia from the ancien regime, You know, they try and shut me up. And yet we were talking about Wagner. So it’s that attitude of, oh, I’m a bit intimidated by that. I don’t know anything about it.So I’m just going to ignore that part. They’re probably just talking s**t. So, yeah. So it’s good. It’s important. But we shouldn’t let it intimidate us because it’s just classic war magic. I’ll leave it at that. A great question. I have to. Thank you so much decoding. That was amazing. Thank you. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

Our mantra: “Look for the Mana in the Meme!”1. Scan for the ‘Mana in the Meme.’ 2. Identify, unlayer it. 3. Characterise the Mana’s Dimensions. 4. Evaluate them. 5. Make the Call: Positive, Negative or Neutral. 6. Intervene, Act appropriately.I felt bad all week. I left you on a bit of a downer in this Podcast:That the mental war that Russia has launched against all of us in all of our countries, wherever we’re from, will continue after Ukraine’s victory.I wanted to situate that description of how I see that reality- that the Russians’ war against us will continue after victory. Even if, as I do in this piece below, I can foresee the gentle eradication of what Putler referred to as ‘the Russian Ethnos’ which has, as we see in Ukraine, a remarkable propensity to commit war crimes - 300,000 or so registered war crimes in Ukraine since Feb 24 2022.The German and Japanese Ethnos’s survived after World War Two because they repented, acknowledged their crimes, surrendered their war criminals and got on with credibly rebuilding their cultures, communities and countries with the help of benign occupation forces of Canada, England and the United States.Russians themselves say that they are going to continue to prosecute their mental war after the end of the kinetic phase. Russia’s mental war is hidden inside Disinfolklore (qua the narrative form which I am the first writer to identify and name and the analytical theory which I invented and which I’m elaborating upon here for parsing all forms of disinformation). See here how Galina Rymbo, a poet, translator, feminist and anarchist of Moldovan-Romanian and Ukrainian origin who was born and raised in Western Siberia and now has found sanctuary in Ukraine wrote about what I call the Disinfolklore Universe:I am proposing a solution which many of us can integrate into our own mental algorithms. To vaccinate ourselves against the contagion of Russia’s mental war against us.Disinfolklore, the analytical theory, is supposed to help us in real time.The challenge I had set myself was to come up with a method that we can all use on-the-fly in our daily lives to parse data/informational units/memes.I use those words or those terms interchangeably.The visual memes that we have come to associate with the moniker Meme. I go back all the way back to, I think it was 1976. Richard Dawkins coined the term or the moniker ‘Meme’ to describe cultural ideas that pass around through the ether, as it were. Through human culture.It’s always fascinated me that that word ‘Meme’ didn’t need to be created until that book.Actually, when I think about it, the concept of Mana, which I use a lot in my work. The concepts of contagion or medium - something which is passed between us - actually serves the same purpose as Meme does in the English language.By meme, I mean any visual, audible phenomenon. Anything that affects our energy, our Mana. Anything which comes inside into your Inner Minds through, through or even actually inside our own minds.Part of this idea of Contagion, in Cultural Psychology and Anthropology (which I mentioned three weeks ago) that once something is lodged in your mind,that it has its own energy and it works away by itself into provoking our own emotions.we’ve all had sleepless nights over ideas or woken up thinking of something and can’t get back to sleep about it. And in many ways, the purpose of Russian disinformation is to plant these memes in our minds, these informational units, which burrow away and affect our attitudes, our intentions, our moods and our motivations, those four ideas.That’s how I look at, that’s the kind of the cognitive model which I use in Disin folklore as an analytical method for parsing Russian and any form of disinformation, but also any form of data really coming in from the outside that it affects the cognitive model that I’ve established or elaborated on, which has been pretty stable now for about two years. aspect I added was moods during a trip to Turkey last on the Turkish Riviera last, not last summer, the summer before last. And I’m very interested to see that moods are often used in the analysis of howfairy tales and various things affect people’s minds. So the cognitive model is that we have an energy, we have a manna, we are human. MN is in human. This is our energy. This is what shines through us. It’s in our mind. And external things come in and they impact this manna.Mana is the source from which all our moods, attitudes, motivations and intentions flow. This is what I believe Russian disinformation attempts to hack. It attempts to hack our Mana, our energy. Then this has an impact on our attitudes, on our moods and or on our motivations or on our our intentions. Any of those four elements. So in that sense, the tool which is most useful on-the-fly to deal with misinformation from my perspective. This mental war which is being prosecuted against all of us. Which, as I argued last week, will persist after the kinetic war has ended. After victory. After Ukraine has these 150 to 200 fourth generation fighter jets. Zillions of different drones and all of that matériel. This mental war will continue in our communities. I take note of what was being discussed today by Genesis Man and Midwest Fella and some of the callers in about how hopefully Orban will lose. That this will hopefully turn the tide on this epidemic of far-right and far-left madness which has which I associate with Telegram as a mechanism, and I associate with Russia, whether in the sense that they’re either creating the division where none existed before, or they’re finding, identifying very early on these divisions in our community wherever we are. They’re exasperating the divisions and making them bigger. Take this idea of ‘look for the Mana in the Meme.’ Disinfolklore’s (as an analytical method) main Mantra. Look beyond what is immediately given in the particular meme. The Disinfolklore analytical method should be useful independent of the source of the data or the source of the meme. Because you can’t always discern the source. The most conventional methods, I spoke about it, I think it was in the fourth episode, when I set out the European Union’s External Action Service or Diplomatic services Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) framework. Now that Donald has closed down all of the disinformation unit in the State Department looking at FIMI (which is kind of the the grown-up word or an alternative word for what I call Disinfolklore (qua narrative phenomenon sneaking trolls into our Inner Minds millions of times a day these days). Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference is quite a mouthful!Helpful people sometimes wrote to me to say ‘Disinfolklore is a bountiful. It’s hard to say. Can’t you vile up with a better moniker!’ ‘Try saying FIMI is my usual response!’ FIMI defines itself as ‘foreign’ interference in our information space. Manipulation of our information spaces is okay, according to this model, if it is not foreign. So the same Meme would be okay if uttered by a domestic source. Obviously Russia then just persuades, hypnotised, trolls, manipulates EU nationals to promote its Disinfolklore. That weakness is immanent in the FIMI framework. In the context of the European Union ‘foreign’ means our enemies China and Russia (and to some extent Iran and North Korea) when it comes to FIMI. Therefore, if you can trace any particular Meme back to those sources, then you know it’s foreign interference, and it’s prima facie wrong. Obviously, one of the intrinsic features of Russian disinformation (as Galina Rymbo notes above) is that Russia plants its trolls in the voices of people in our own community. So it’s harder to see it. So this English MP who we’ll all have seen this week, Zarah Sultana whose ‘Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class’ absurdity this week went viral. She naturally name checks that “of course, Putin is a dictator and has done war crimes.” Then she goes on to say: “but President Zelensky is no friend of the working class.” So when you’re looking at a Meme like that… Let’s take that as an informational unit from an English MP. She’s saying, ‘of course, Putin is a dictator and has done war crimes,but President Zelensky is no friend of the working class.’ All of us can see through that immediately because we’ve spent so much time in the Ukrainian information space. We’ve seen, I’m not going to say we’ve seen it all, but we have seen a lot of it. Someone like me, for instance, who was a great fan, actually, of Jeremy Corbyn up until that Panorama documentary. It basically... revealed that this group set up by the Labour Party to investigate allegations of anti-Semitism was stopped at every possible turn. Those committed Labour Party members hired specifically to deal with the wave of antisemitism claims against the party, then blew the whistle. All these very committed young Labour Party officials who reminded me of myself when I worked for the Irish Labour Party, the Irish Green Party, the antisectarian Alliance Party of Northern Ireland and the English Labour Party as well. Just committed to the cause and trying to help it. I lost faith then in leftist, formal leftist, self-declared leftist politics at that point. I had no idea of this whole tanky thing. I’d never come across the term tanky until relatively far into the war. It might have been when those American legislators, AOC and co, wrote that draft letter. I think it was in September 2022. Basically... Donald’s position up until now is their position, which was ‘Blame the Victim’ Ukraine should make peace. Everyone at the time went nuts. That was way back in the historical era of 2022, before Donald had hypnotised humanity with Russian Disinfolklore tropes like ‘Ukraine is an obstacle to peace.’So I discovered the term tanky. Now I recognize the energy / Mana of tankydom in many memes. The Mana of tankydom. When I hear the stock qualifier of an anti-Ukraine positioning attempting to conceal itself -“of course, Putin is a dictator and has done war crimes….” This is exactly the kind of thing we hear when we hear the Russian opposition.When then they go on to say, “…but President Zelensky is no friend of the working class.”There’s been some fantastic... take towns of Sultana on this.I’m quite optimistic that this whole episode certainly has served to help educate some people anyway into the contradictions of tankydom.I wondered how I would use the Code of Positive Trolls. There are these 12 analytical tools which are part of the Disinfolklore analytical method, which I’ve spoken about before. Half of those tools are archetyped into what I call the Code of Positive Trolls. That’s code in the legal sense. It’s also code in the sense of moral code. That if you want to proof outgoing informational units, outgoing memes. The Disinfolklore analytical method is not just to help me interpret Disinfolklore in incoming trolls.I’ve got my Incoming Troll Radar, which is scanning for the Mana/energy in incoming informational units. To determine whether they’re positive, negative, or neutral. It’s also about outgoing.I don’t want to be like Sultana. I presume she’s well-meaning. She went to this conference in Paris and is a full-on tanky. We certainly have no evidence that she (and nothing I’ve seen about her. I don’t know that much about her. Hardly heard of her before. I did look her up on Wikipedia. Nothing makes me as suspicious of her as I am of say, Farage or Jeffrey Sachs or people who are actually paid to be tankies and have taken money, whether it’s from RT or from other Russia-connected sources. In order to promote particular trolls. Or particular memes).So she goes to this conference and I read a brilliant critique of some of the people in that conference in Paris which Sultana referenced and particularly of “Ukrainian” people there who are basically Russian patsies.I’m going to say that. The person who’s analyzed this is Galina Rymbo poet, translator, feminist and anarchist of Moldovan-Romanian and Ukrainian origin who says she was born and raised in Western Siberia, in the working village of Chkalovsky in the city of Omsk and who’s currently living in L’viv. She was critiquing Sultana and critiquing some of the people who were at this conference in Paris. There is in particular these Ukrainian leftists who are against the war. They want peace. They remind me of these bloggers Russia used in Ukraine to divide Ukrainian society who transformed from blogging about. Edit/eastern spirituality to becoming anti-bad-Let Covid Rip demonstrators outside provincial government administration buildings across Ukraine while I was working there. To, suddenly, archetyping themselves as “anti-war” Ukrainian “nationalists.”[see https://www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2021/01/19/7280367/]These Manosphere adjacent so-called Ukrainian leftists gave speeches at the Paris conference where English MP Sultana learned that “Zelenskyy is no friend of the Working Class.” Some of us might have watched those excerpts online. These are a species of people that I encountered as a diplomat in Eastern Ukraine. It took me a little while to discern who was a Russian asset or agent and who was well-meaning and acting in good faith. Who was sane and which activist was a fantasist either knowingly or unknowingly being controlled by his Russian curators.One person in particular whom I met at a court hearing related to protecting Ukrainian servicemen’s rights - a perfect cover that trolled me into believing this guy was a Ukrainian patriot. As a diplomat building a network, I spent about a year meeting him a few times. To collect information. To take the temperature, as it were, in eastern Ukraine. It took me a year to work out that actually, beyond all reasonable doubt, and certainly beyond my need to take a risk, that he was basically a Russian (knowing or unknowing) Useful Idiot. Once you know that there are people who profess these views “Putin of course is a dictator and has done war crimes, yet…” And who at the same time may well be pushing informational memes that are contrary to Ukraine’s best interests. Once you know that’s possible. Then it’s easier to understand that if you’re at this conference of socialists or leftists in Paris and you hear someone criticizing Ukraine. Then their words are repeated by a self-declared Leftist English member of parliament as if these people are the true voice of Ukraine. These anti-patriots are not Ukrainian patriots. Yet trying to represent themselves as patriots. They are being representedly archaetyped as Ukrainian. As an example of how not all Ukrainians are in support of President Zelenskyy or his Servant of the People political party. Or of a country which is at war.The Mana or energy of their memes directly and indirectly being transmitted by Sultana is 100% Russian, not Ukrainian.Like Jeffrey Sachs, mysteriously they get platformed constantly. Their memes influence influential people like Sultana. Most of us don’t have the time. Well, actually most of us do have the time here because we spend our days, whatever, even in between our jobs and everything like that, we’re just on this constantly.Yet most normal people don’t have the time to go through what I’ve just gone through. I did only very cursory research on all of this. So I went to the Code of Positive Trolls. The fourth criterion is Mana/Energy. We look for the ‘Mana in the Meme.’ That little mantra that we learn and that come into our mind, we ‘go, okay. What’s the Mana in all that Manosphere meaning from this ‘Dublin Group’? It’s Russia. 100% Russia. I have a feeling something’s off about “of course, Putin is a dictator and he has done war crimes, but Z is no friend of the working class.”You immediately have a reaction to this. You think, “It’s quite a clever non-sequitur.” A Both Sidesing.Then to go on about how to mention that President Zelensky is a dictator or so. I mean, it just so happens I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the apartment building in Kryvyi Rih where President Zelensky grew up. And because I used to visit, as a defendant,I used to visit a civil society organization which was based in that building. And I went there before he was president, when I didn’t even know who he was. And then after he was president, when the police would be there protecting him. And Krivi Rhee, as most of us know, is like,Aside from the purely Marxian/theoretical aspects of the formal definition of the working class, if Sultana wants to get into a pissing contest (excuse me, pardon my French) about who’s working class or not. I don’t know anything about where Sultana grew up or her background. Just because President Zelensky’s parents happened to be academics, everyone who grew up, most people who grew up in the Soviet Union grew up in the same kind of apartment buildings. The same kind of apartments as President Zelensky did. His apartment building is what people in London, what people, say, from West London might look at in Elephant and Castle or in East London as being, or in America as “projects.”They have that vibe about them. Kryvyi Rhih, Dnipropetrovsk’s second city where President Zelenskyy grew up is a very serious industrial town.In fact, the first time I went there (I have visited Kryvyi Rih for work many dozens of times) was to investigate some far-right guys who had attacked an LGBTIQ campaigner. A really brilliant campaigner in Kryvyi Rih who, like President Zelensky, tried his best to operate in this environment because he’s a really courageous person like President Zelensky. Some of us will have come across the story about when they built this underpass in the center of Kryvyi Rih. Under this roundabout. It was a big thing. It happened I think when President Zelenskyy was maybe 15 or something. This was a story one of his best friends told after he became president. President Zelenskyy went out with his guitar to busk in the new underpass. They took bets. His friends took bets about how many songs he’d get to sing before he got beaten up. Well, he got to sing one or two songs and then he got beaten up,and his guitar broken.So, you know, it’s a really tough, tough place: Kryvyi Rih. This is why it’s completely consistent with the real 3e!, as it were, the real President Zelenskyy, that he wouldn’t run away. Take a ride. Run away. Because he’s a tough, he’s a tough cookie. He grew up in a tough neighborhood. Really tough neighborhood. Really tough town. Steel making town. Whatever environment Sultana grew up in, I would say his would give her a run for her money. However, the beauty of the Disinfolklore Analytical Method is that you don’t have to know all of that to intuit that there’s something wrong or something off about what Suktana said. Let me show you how the Code of Positive Trolls can help us discern the Mana in the Meme: “I’m archetyping myself as more Working Class than President Zelenskyy.”The first element of the Code of Positive Trolls is ‘Generosity.’This is something I’ve come to realise recently. If you want to archaetype yourself as a leftist, you just profess care about the working class. That’s your Virtue Signal.Want to archaetype herself as right-wing? Archaetype your concern about migration or how everyone should be able to be as rich as humanly possible without boring taxes. Its rhetoric. The Mana is: “I’m archaetyping as Right. Or left. Follow me!” When Sultana talks about President Zelenskyy (or as she says dismissively ‘Zelenskyy’) as being no friend of the working class, this is a self-archetyping. She’s situating herself as a friend of the working class. Using President Zelenskyy. While she was at, I think it was, Birmingham University. It is now a top university in England. While she was there, her Wikipedia page says, she worked in Primark and various kinds of Fast Fashion-type stores. She would consider herself working class. Actually, however as a former student or scholar in Marxist, Marxian philosophy, I understand that formally a proletarian is someone who creates value for the capitalist. Their essence. Their being. Their Mana. Their energy is alienated from them. Invested into the product of their labour. Then the capitalist for whom they’re making this widget then takes it from them. It’s that sense of psychological alienation arising from the physical alienation of what you’ve spent four or five hours of your life creating. Out of that comes the need for revolution. The alienation that capitalism provokes in our minds, in our sentiments. While in the late 19th century, the mid 19th century, there were many people who weren’t proletarians. Today, most people fit into this formal definition of proletarian: creating objects of value which are alienated from them and which contain their Mana / energy. Sultana is not a proletarian. Because she’s actually a member of the English parliament. Today even people who work in the City of London or on Wall Street or in Facebook. These guys who’ve been recently hired by Facebook for 100 million a year to make AI algorithms, improve them. They are all formally proletarians and in the working class. So Sultana’s idea of working class is completely anachronistic. Aside from that, the idea of manifesting support for the working class and for the proletarians and for those who are exploited or those who feel alienated from themselves by the system is very generous.Therefore, the generosity criterion in the Code of Positive Trolls can’t disassociate really generous people from those who are just archetyping as generous. So then the second element is Right / ethical discipline. If you don’t have any information about Sultana, you think, well, she’s in good faith. She’s accepted Putin as a dictator and that he’s done War Crimes (though after 300,000 documented War Crimes by Russia, so far in Ukraine, for which Putin has Commamd Responsibility it’s hardly a huge stretch for Suktana to concede that. Not being a friend of the working class, allegedly, however would seem according to her values equal to 300,000 War Crimes! That’s some exchange rate!). Like, who knows if it’s true or not that President Zelenskyy is a friend of the working class if you don’t know anything about President Zelensky. If you don’t know anything about Sultana, you think, well, maybe she’s “Right.” Maybe that’s Ethically Disciplined. Though that’s me being very generous. As she has equated 300,000 War Crimes with being a friend of the Working Class, which seems pretty off. But I’m trying to be generous here, even if it is not Right to so equate President Zelenskyy who won 64% of the vote and every single district in Ukraine (apart from one up near L’viv), whereas Putin is too scared ever to have gone for election in a free and fair vote without, for example, murdering 1m Chechens so he could archætype as a ‘Hero’ before ballots are cast.So we go to the fourth criterion, which is Mana / Energy. What’s the energy / Mana in what she’s saying? If you don’t have a concept of looking for the “Mana in the meme,” then you might bother to do that. Most of us listening here, we have a sense of what sounds Right / Ethically Disciplined.We can smell tankydom because we’ve had so much practice. Our training set is millions of memes that have passed us on the timeline since the 24th of February 2022. So that training set has enabled us to scent in date what smells of tankydom in ways normal civilians who don’t spend every spare moment of every day on helping Ukraine defeat Russia in the information war. What I’m trying to do with Disinfolklore as an analytical method is to drill down into how am I sensing these matters that we now intuitively can without almost a second thought? What is the smell of tankydom? What is the smell of pro-Russian-ness? Because they disguise it all the time. Fig leafs.Obviously, if it’s coming from RT today, you can... you know it’s Russian theme or Russian Disinfolklore. When it’s coming from Sultana or from some pro-Palestine activists or from the most unexpected people - from your mother or your child or your best friend.M’ockers (Volya Radio presenter on X Spaces) has often described the interactions she has with her best friend who comes around to moan about migrants. Immanent in that, if you’ve got these words that I’m trying to communicate like Mana, is the energy of the Disinfolklore bearing stories of migrants colonising M’ockers friend’s mind. Sadly, the BBC is always repeating it. Everyone’s always repeating it. But underlying all of that are different layers of whether it’s the money that funds GB News (which came from these guys who made their money in Russia in the early noughties from oil via Malta). Or whether it’s Farage getting money from RT or Nathan Gill, the Reform leader in Wales who was convicted and is about to be sentenced for exchanging money from Russia for speaking in the European Parliament.There you can see these genetic, these causal connections with Russia, and that’s great. Many of us suspected it when we would hear how say Nathan Gill or Farage or others are talking Russian Talking Points. The Mana of what they’re saying is so eerily similar to Russia’s main Mana immanent in its information warfare memes that it can’t be a coincidence or these people, like M’ockers friend is, are not innocently being brainwashed unknowingly by Disinfolklore disguised Russian information warfare memes. It does indeed really help every now and again if someone is outed as actually taking Putler’s shilling, as it were. Then it’s much easier to explain to low-information people like most people in our lives who aren’t following this stuff in such granular detail or my friend’s who it’s hard to explain these things to. With Mana though, we’re looking for... When we don’t know that there’s a conviction for taking Russian cash to oppose Ukraine in the European Parliament. When we don’t know there’s an actual physical genetic connection between Russia and the speaker. When we don’t know the source of the meme. All we have to go on is the meme itself. This is what I’m trying to teach and inculcate myself and disaggregate the quick... instinctual, intuitional intuition that many of us have now for when we hear certain memes and certain tanky-esque words. So for me it’s a six-step process.I scan for the Mana. I try to find and isolate what is the energy / Mana inside this. Next, I’m identifying its layers here. So Sultana archetyping as Working Class by othering President Zelenskyy, by saying President Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class. Slightly cynically putting in that, of course, Putin is a dictator and has done more crimes. Then somehow equating that with President Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class. As mentioned, this is not Right. So she’s not merely archætyping herself as a friend of the Working Class. She’s not merely modelling generous, earthy virtue. She’s deceptively equating a dictator who outside the Rule of Law has murdered over a million people, with President Zelenskyy who was democratically elected and who commands an army which, sure, has eliminated over 1m Russians. Yet, he has done so within the law. States have an inherent right to defend themselves. It’s Article 42 of the UN Charter. By contrast, Russia signed up to respect Ukraine and other states’ sovereignty, security (including their territorial integrity). So Sultana is not only Wrongly equating President Zelenskyy with Putin, she is equating the values of the unlawful mass murderer Putin with her own. That is simply not Right or Ethically Disciplined.The standard which the Code of Positive Trolls uses to distinguish ethical / truthful or rightful behaviour from its opposite is the post World War Two legal and social order. President Zelenskyy is defending that. Sultana, apparently, equates the fact that Putin is a War Criminal with the (false) opinion she picked up at a Paris conference that, truly, President Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class. That’s simply not Right.The Mana of Sultana’s troll is akin to a species of meme which basically is justifying genocide in Ukraine by some alleged or perceived failure in virtue of President Zelensky or Ukrainians, which of course is the most famous one was that “Ukrainians are Nazis, therefore just kill them all.”So many people fell for that troll. So you scan for the Mana. You’re looking for the Mana. You’re looking for it in any meme. You’re identifying the layers immanent in the Meme, as I’ve just done with Sultana’s troll. There’s lots of different layers to even this very simple “Putin is a dictator and has done war crimes. But 3e! is no friend of the working class” meme/troll.Layers there are on the one hand that’s great, she sees that he’s a dictator and he’s done war crimes, but does she know about Lisa? Does she know about that poor babushka and her goats? Does she know about the toddler, the human safari? And all of these, does she know anything about Izium?Does she remember what went on and all these things? So this isn’t just War Crimes. This is 250,000+ of them. Crimes Against Humanity too. Does she know this, as she tritely dismisses President Zelenskyy? There’s lots of layers to what she’s saying, even when she says something as simple as “Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class.”When I hear, there can be a certain tone in which they say that, and it’s not very respectful. Usually, even when I’m writing. I did go through a stage of saying 3e! (pronounced Z), because that was how he... His party had the sound Z from his name.Now usually I say “President Zelensky” mainly because I would hear reflected from the right in America and from people like Sultana who know nothing about President Zelensky and have no sympathy for him or for Ukraine disrespect and dismissiveness that is contagious in merely referring to President Zelenskyy as merely “Zelenskyy.” There’s a certain sense of contempt. That’s it. So there’s layers. There’s lots of different layers in it.Then next to characterize the Mana. So what is it on balance? Is it Positive, Negative or Neutral? In this case, supporting Ukraine is the metric. You make a call. So scan for the Mana. Identify its layers.Characterise it. Make a call.This is what we do intuitively, a million times a day as we’re scanning our timelines. Deciding whether or not to read on or share dome visual, audible or textual meme. We make a call. When I talk about Contagion and this aspect of the Law of Sympathetic Magic…So the formal definition of the laws of Sympathetic Magic are:“Descriptions of a consistent pattern of beliefs, thoughts and practices observed across a wide range of traditional cultures. Their widespread occurrence suggests that they may constitute laws of human thought.”So that’s the view from anthropology. From philosophy. Of what these Laws of Sympathetic Magic consist?They are “laws of human thought.”As I’ve said before, I can’t go that far. What I can say is: I spend my time looking for mental laws affecting native Indo-European-language speaking people like me whose minds, whose native language is an Indo-European language. There’s certain commonalities between all of us who have our minds formed inside Indo-European structures of thought. It’s these commonalities which Russian disinformation can hack and take advantage of. So while 19th and early 20th century philosophers can talk about the Laws of Sympathetic Magic because they were looking in the colonies for them. They were looking at what they considered to be primitive peoples. They were trying to discern how they think and how they think differently from so-called “civilized” people.When I encountered this body of work (19/20c literature on Polynesian use of the term Mana), I realized, ah, this is very similar to what we have in disinformation sphere, where you have these very strange ideas repeating, being amplified, which are different, yet the same. They have what Wittgenstein called a quality of Family Resemblance. When you first encounter them, you are disgusted by them. They seem very strange. Then you go away to a metaphorical desert island (you take a break from the Internet) for six months. Return, now everyone believes them. Like Brexit. It’s a perfect one. Donald’s takeover of the US Republican Party. There’s lots of others.We have all of these different journeys, mental journeys, which we have gone on ourselves from disgust to casually accepting something.When Russian disinformationists or Disinfolklorists or MAGA or Brexit or England’s latest far right corporate lobbying group masquerading as a political party “Reform” or in any of our countries take us on these journeys, they purposefully and manipulate our Mana. They ‘-pulate’ our Mana. Shake it up. That process of changing our attitudes, our intentions, our moods, and our motivations, sometimes it happens naturally.Yet, that’s not really what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about people who are deliberately manipulated, like Sultana, by these people. These Russia-adjacent leftists in Paris at this conference. I’m not making any judgment that she is trying to manipulate others. She may well just be an archetypal Useful Idiot. We see these processes going on. The three Laws of Sympathetic Magic are Contagion, Similarity, and Opposites. There’s really only two which are Contagion and Similarity. Law of Opposites is usually classified as being a part of the Law of Similarity. Contagion, which is the medium. So you have a source of Contagion.You have RT today, which is pumping out a meme. That meme itself, once it leaves the Source, manifests the Contagion (Mana). There’s something in it, a Mana, an energy, which then... gets assimilated into a Target. Source, Contagion (Mana), Target.If we’re talking humans, it’s going into their brain, it’s going into our brains. Contagion is really what I mean by Mana. By energy. Mana is something that passes between us. So the meme itself obviously is going between us. I am posting it. I am the source. You are receiving the meme. You are the target. It’s actually something in the meme which is the contagion. It’s that word mana which I use for contagion and which I worked out is essential to have a grasp of in Disinfolklore and in Disinformation interpretation before I encountered the academic discipline of Cultural Psychology. The discipline which looks most closely today at the Laws of Sympathetic Magic.The law of similarity really helped me understand this strange phenomenon that, so for instance, that somehow the fact that President Zelenskyy is a native Russian language speaking Ukrainian, who is part of the Ukrainian Jewish community, somehow with enough amplification, this demonstrates to certain minds that of course he’s a Nazi.Again, it’s so absurd. There is this strange effect in our brains that we will believe opposites if there’s some sort of similarity in it. I had been trying to understand the pattern that I had already noticed in data: that the more opposite the truth is, the more likely certain minds will believe something. How the Russians achieve this! Donald and MAGA do it as well. Where the completely anti-intuitive thing like it’s the vaccines cause the harm, not the virus take hold of our minds. Even when we know rationally that the virus is the contaminant inside the contagion. We know rationally. We know scientifically. 400,000 scientific papers show the different aspects of the harm of the virus that caused Covid. Billions of people have taken the vaccine. Only a minuscule number of them have been harmed by the vaccine. Whereas billions of people have been harmed by imbibing this horrible virus.Somehow people, certain minds can be convinced because virus vaccine are similar, are associated that they can be... that they are associated. Cause and effect become reversed, through association and similarity. So the laws and this exploration as part of cultural psychology, which is the discipline it’s become a part of now, were very interesting to me. This idea of magical thinking, which was always seen as negative. I first encountered Magical Thinking in the context of Brexit. Brexiteers, and particularly this group of n’er do wells in the English parliament called the European Research Group, who actually never did any research was the joke. They were no joke. They were on our airwaves the whole time for ages.They were magical thinkers par excellence. Manipulators. ‘We’ll leave the European Union. Our biggest market. We’ll become richer.” That’s Magical Thinking. When you look into the literature… When I started to look at it, I saw that, oh, this is often a stage in children’s development before they get cause and effect right. Whereas now, as mentioned in a previous episode, magical thinking isn’t seen as so negative now. It’s a means of innovation, really, basically. You innovate, because you think magically. Because you think you can put this together. The drone warfare kit that Another Alex Ferguson, are working on, there’s probably a lot of magical thinking there. It’s working, which is... which is good. So this word magic I think is worth just looking into. It appears a lot. We’ve recently seen that movie the “Magus in the Kremlin. The Magus. This “G” sound was associated in the Greeks in early 5th century BC with singing a wailing song of grief. So the tales of woe which M’ockers is so brilliant at recounting. They are really… They are magic. They are the original meaning of magic. As far back we’ve written records.This is the first time this verb which is the element in magic appears. So to sing a wailing song of Greek a Greek playwright then uses the words in the Persians to describe songs here I’m quoting “that call upon the souls of the dead to appear to the living.” So that’s what Russia does. We used to always have May 9th - “Victory Day, Russians call it. I attended a few of them in Ukraine, as part of my job. Everyone holds up placards showing photographs of their relatives who supposedly fought in the Second World War. The Immortal Regiment. The whole institution was revitalised after the 2009 demonstrations against Putin stealing the Russian election. It’s a Soviet-era institution. The Immortal Regiment troll in modern Russia is about calling the souls of the dead.When Putler is talking about the great patriotic war, that’s what he’s doing. Then you have in this other play, one of the very early uses of this word Gōes, which goes into magic, is in this play. This guy called -I don’t know anything about him- but he’s called Hippolytus. He’s called a Gōes by his father when he attempts to control his father through clever speech.Where I first became interested in what I learned was called War Magic, which is propaganda, which was used by the fifth Dalai Lama in Tibet.Basically it became known by their enemies that the fifth Dalai Lama was doing all of these esoteric spells on the enemy. It wasn’t so much the effect of the esoteric spells themselves which caused their enemy to be defeated. They panicked when they heard that he was doing it. So it’s this use of War Magic as propaganda when Russia tells us what it’s going to do. People get really scared of the nuclear stuff. That is prima facie war magic in exactly the way that I learned about the concept and got particularly interested in it.So I just mentioned that to say that that’s why I was particularly tuned into thinking about looking at what magic is rather than um this uh like I suppose every country has them. There’s this guy Paul Daniels who was very famous in England in in the 1970s and 1980s as a magician. Or all of those illusionists. Essentially if we take the Disinfolklore perspective and look at what Donald does, what Putler does, but also what President Zelensky does as examples of magic. Then again we need a way of distinguishing between Pootler and Donald and President Zelensky.I’ll finish up today on this piece which I wrote a year before I... I came up with the word Disinfolklore in March 2022. And actually ghost originates from this ghost as well, from magic, same route, because he attempts to control them through his clever speech. And that is what Russia does through its propaganda and its disinformation. But it is also what President Zelenskyy does. But the second element in the Code of Roswell Trails, which is right and ethical discipline.And I was posed this question by scouts recently, which was, well, how do you determine whether something is proper sort of in war? And for me, the ethical discipline, what’s right is defined by international law, by the Geneva Conventions. And none of us, I think,or most of us wouldn’t approve of any willful flouting of the Geneva Conventions, which are There were some preceding 1949, but the great body of them came in after the war with the Nazis. And so that’s what sets the ethical discipline. And that’s why President Zelensky, quite apart from the fact that he’s a better troll than Pukler,because we see again and again, the same old stories got the stuff coming out this week from I mean, their lines, that was all he could come up with in America, that stuff, which we’ve heard a million times before. Whereas President Zelensky, I think he’s been on TV every night. He’s done that.He does his thing from his iPhone every night. Every night the presentation is different. Sometimes he does these really inspiring things which help all of us, keep all of us motivated. So that kind of innovation, that’s the kind of innovation you need if you’re going to build the USSR’s most successful independent TV production company and be one of the most successful actors and a household name in Russia even, before 2013. When he, I think in December 2013, he pulled out of Moscow and left. This kind of look at how you can affect people’s emotions is precisely what we’re doing when we’re looking at disinformation and propaganda. I’ll leave it there for now. Just quickly end up with the the idea that which I saw it somewhere else, but I’m quite interested by it, which is just this idea that the left, that Sultana can somehow bring about peace in Ukraine by disarming Ukraine.This is a perfect example of how the law of similarity and the law of opposites operates. It’s such a bonkers idea. It makes no sense. You just have to think about it for three seconds. Ukraine gives up its arms and then peace will come. But the emotion, the calmness that comes over us when we hear, oh, peace, this is a recipe for peace. We’ll just stop arming them. And I hear it from friends as well, who are properly equally well-educated and intelligent as Zoltana. They’ve fallen for the troll. It’s very hard to break them out of it. But that is our challenge. I’ll leave it at that for now.Podcast available wherever you get your podcasts or on this page. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe