Today, the fabric of every aspect of our lives – our values, our work, our health, whether we believe vaccines work, that Global Warming is happening or that it can be mitigated, even the bond market- is permeated with story-borne artefacts (Disinfolklore) of an attempt to support authoritarian cultures. What I call ‘Disinfolklore’ is being pumped constantly into our inner minds through the Make America Great Again (MAGA), Russian State and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatus that includes X, Telegram, Fox News, TikTok and even, now, the White House press team. Once Disinfolklore has infected our minds with expertly designed and targeted emotionally resonant communicable trolls, we also act as perpetuators of Disinfolklore. We repeat these trolls to others. Often unknowingly, we become Servant Disinfolklorists of the Russian State, MAGA and CCP cultural revolutions. If we are to confront and solve the problems that Disinfolklore and its diabolical siblings - disinformation, misinformation and other forms of propaganda - are causing inside our communities, we must first acknowledge that we are part of the problem…
DECODING TROLLS
Great to finally meet you, Wendy. I work on the intersection of anthropology, archaeology, psychology, and various different other disciplines, and all of it informs my work. And yes, I worked in Ukraine between 2015 and 2022, and for three years of that time I worked on a bridge in Stanislaw Luhansk which divided Russia-occupied
Luhansk from government-controlled Ukraine and it was there I basically experienced what would become what I now understand as being a distant folklore universe, a distant folklore galaxy that Russia created inside Russia-occupied Ukraine. And now I fear and I see the signs, the indications that what Russia did there and inside Russia itself is now
spreading across the entire world and it's It's linking into the MAGA distant folklore galaxy, and to a lesser extent for the time being, the Chinese Communist Party distant folklore galaxy. And so I see us being enmeshed in this entire system of basically trolling and trolls of untruth, of distant folklore, communicated through stories coming from the White House,
coming from all of these voices we see. And that is what motivates my work is to try and help us see this distant folklore universe, these distant folklore galaxies that we are being enmeshed in. And Ukraine is central, absolutely central to it, as everyone in this space understands.
Ukraine has been on the avant-garde of this war since 2015. And thankfully, uh, now most people, uh, who have power understand this and, and it's a crucial, a crucial battle space, the information space around Ukraine. And that's, it's great for your radios is doing a fantastic job every day, trying to bring the stories,
bring to light the stories often containing distant folklore. Um, Very happy to be here. I do have a beginning, so I'm happy to say something if that will inspire questions then.
WENDY
Go ahead, Wendy. I did have a quick question. If, Decoding, you could explain what your interpretation of this in folklore is. It's kind of a new term to me and to probably many people. You get the idea it's connected to disinformation and misinformation. But could you please explain the term as you see it?
DECODING TROLLS
So this afternoon, the UN Commission of Enquiry based in Vienna has issued a report on the human safaris in Hyrsen 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 the 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. And so 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 184 UN member states to inquire into Russia's war crimes in Russia. Ukraine, and it determines that these are crimes against humanity, and there's no 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 telegrams 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 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 dysphochlore is in actuality.
JAMES
Let's talk. That's a great example of something really rotten. And you'd think that they wouldn't be sharing this information, perhaps. The idea that somebody advertises their war crimes, which I think Russia sort of does, doesn't seem to make sense on the surface of it. But I think you have a way of explaining what
why they may send out such a negative message, and I wondered if you could address that.
DECODING TROLLS
Yeah, part of what helped me see this pattern, this is what I really do, I hunt for patterns in data, and I assimilate, as many of us do, who participate in X, and X, as we now know from from the third report on foreign information manipulation and interference by the European Union, which was released.
I highly recommend 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. And But the fight is here and 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, the way Donald communicated in, 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 to do whatever the hell they want with you. And then this unit of information was then reported by CNN as a fact that Donald
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. Simonian 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 methodical was going on here, which is what I do use 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 in the narrative form.
It's presented as a folksy story. People in the offices of Moscow as if she's just been, and the image in our head is she's just heard this gossip, and she's 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 Maid Marian 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, 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 to Europe.
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, 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 a madcap attempt, which would really only, you'd only see it in literature in Dom Gioti or in some folktale. So the mad cap 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 would have seen Many sensible people tweeting today the content of the former 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, folksy 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 provoke something 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 a 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 insurrectionists. organized 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, Dress X, who, who supply haute couture interpretations 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 the scale of what I believe I've identified with distant folklore in this narrative form. But to answer your question, it's at basic, it's a narrative form,
which as far as I know, I'm the first person to spot it.
JAMES
Well, it is an interesting idea. I think there are many different ways to look at the information that's coming out and try to analyze it. I believe each one of us has to do that intuitively as best we can for our own defense. If we're interested in solving a problem, we're going to do this.
I appreciate your take on this, and I'm glad that you brought up Jung's work. I think it's a really good place to start. For one thing, he is a person who recognizes that the unconscious, or recognized, I should say, He unfortunately has passed away a while ago.
But he recognized there's a large part of our psyche that is, in fact, unconscious. And, you know, his Man and His Symbols book, I don't know if you've read that decoding. Probably you have. Excellent book. And just to tell you a little story about that.
Someone approached Carl Jung late in his life and said, your theories are great. I think everybody should understand this better. Would you consider writing a book about this? And he listened to this guy's two-hour spiel about his arguments about why this would be a good idea.
And he thought about it and he said, no, I think, you know, I've captured this. I don't know that it has a place. And then he slept on it. He went to bed and he had a dream. And as a result of the dream, he called the guy back and said, yes,
I am way into this idea about the book. And I thought that was a good example of how the unconscious worked for the man himself. And I don't know about you, but perhaps you've had some dreams like I had some in my youth that kind of steered my life a little bit.
You know, my reactions to the dream, it made me recognize something I needed to do. And, uh, so this is where this idea of archetypes come from, that there are common symbols that people recognize whether or not they mean to, uh, they recognize things, uh, coming in fours as a sort of an important theme or, uh,
some other things that stand out as symbols, uh, triangles, um, various things, but they don't necessarily mean the same thing to everybody. Um, And these archetypes, is what he's calling them, are these things that come up in common across various people's dreams, even if they have differing meanings.
And I think that's such an important idea that he was in psychology work, working with people enough. to know that this was happening independent of each other. This wasn't like a group discussion about memes and things like that that led them to have common dreams. This was independent people coming up with the same symbols.
I really appreciate that you mentioned this because I think this is a good intro into things about our own nature. Now, what strikes me about this, and I particularly like your, you know, discussing even the clothing, the haute couture, as you called it, and sort of alluding to gangster days. I appreciate that. Now,
I didn't pick up on that, the gangster part, but I'm glad you did. I think that's a fascinating take on it. I do think that it's also very interesting that, of course, people do not take the same information in and have the same response. That's very clear. And those particular things, I do believe you're right.
There is kind of that outlaw culture that exists and to some extent justified in the sense that why shouldn't we drink liquor? And now that's a thought from the 1930s when it was illegal in the United States in the 20s. But, you know, Beyond that, why would it be popular to be in the criminal culture?
That's a really good question, except the fact that we do love gangster movies and we watch them and they're enjoyable. And for some reason, we have some affinity to these mobsters, whether it's some of the classic movies or some of the classic TV shows. So how is it?
Or how are we missing the boat when we do not recognize that this meme that I'm going to call it a meme, you may call it an archetype, but how is it that This meme that is so attractive, perhaps, to MAGA is pretty damned revolting.
Now, for me, I don't care about fashion, so I just glazed right over what Melania was wearing. I did not associate it with what you were talking about. But now I can kind of see that. And I don't think it's beyond Russia's scope to, you know, I think they would catch on to this.
So why is it that we're missing some of the messages? And again, I guess to hark back to the original question, um, that, that idea that the terror that they expose themselves, Russians do, um, it still works for them. And is that because it appeals to the MAGA folk or is it because it works to, uh,
drive us away from confronting Russia? Oh, decoding Mike, maybe.
DECODING TROLLS
I'm here. Uh, 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 tro, fundamental unit of information. That's another term I use, units of information or mean. So those three for me are synonymous. And I use them interchangeably.
So 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 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's 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 an Indo-European religion. 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, full-scale invasion, he said, like it or not, take it my beauty.
So what he was saying to Ukraine as international lawyers, 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 its song lyrics. So songs are very much part of the beginning of folklore, which led to the foundation of nation states, the German, the first unified German state, the 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, folksong 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. And 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 are embedded in all of humanity, in my humble opinion. he, 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, uh, are aware of, uh, Hannibal Lecter in that case, uh,
Alphonse Capone for obvious reasons, uh, the man who was found guilty of 34 felony counts, um, and, um, and, uh, of acts tantamount to, um, to, well, I won't mention a horrible word, on E.J. 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 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. And these are all self-sacrificing first monarchs. And 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 vaccines. all of these terrible policies that lead to people's deaths.
And the same thing with Putin and Stalin. They're saying, we control the time of your death. And this is a very old, ancient, tried and tested formula for exerting psychological control over people. And I guess this is partly connected also to the drone safaris. 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.
JAMES
Thank you for that. Go ahead, Wendy.
WENDY
Well, that's really fascinating. Those are really fascinating connections to very different kinds of strands. I wanted to go back a little bit in that you've mentioned more than once Indo-Europeans. I did a little bit of looking at some of those origins in your work and in others.
and they seem to trace back to the Yamnaya people in the Bronze Age, who they feel that the Indo-European languages originated from, and those Yamnaya people were in Ukraine, that area of Ukraine in the steppes and other nearby areas. There were, of course, not the current political borders.
I wondered if you could give a little bit of background on that so that people have a better understanding of how it all connects to Indo-European archetypes and
DECODING TROLLS
My favorite subject, and it all begins in Hearson, whether it's the UN Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes in Ukraine or the YAMNA community, who relatively small number of individuals created the language, the linguistic structures, the words we use almost in every sentence. the religions, the solid imminence in many Indo-European religions,
including I would characterize Christianity as an Indo-European religion, and Buddhism created by this community, which just in itself is an amazing, just amazing, absolutely amazing, because most of us grow up, we have a mental model of Greece, Rome, maybe ancient Egypt before Greece and, and then our cultures. Um, and that turns out this is not true.
And that, um, Greek, Greece and Rome, Greek, uh, well, uh, Italic culture, um, Italic and Celtic languages, as far as we know, formed in, inside a mixture of the Yamna community from this area in, um, Hirson, Mikhailov, Oblast, you know, right around the river where Russia and Ukraine, you know, this has been an intersection point,
an interaction point for millennia. Out of an interaction between migrating Yamnaf from there after 2500 BCE westwards near Odessa, just east of Odessa, and this community of people there. Linguists and archaeologists have suspected, many of them have suspected this for decades, for a few decades.
And Jung refers to the reason why Jung explains why he believes that these archetypes are part of the collective unconscious of humanity is He just can't understand how else they could have come from, where else they could have come from. And he talks, Jung talks about the wildest migration theories, which now we know since 2015,
ancient DNA revolution, as it's known in the literature, is scientific facts. So the scientific fact of the genetic content of people from India to Ireland, whose genetic ancestry comes from what they call the steppe, what I call ancient Ukrainian. And so for me, a lot of my work is about re-archetyping Ukraine inside the mental models of humanity,
because I realized, as many of us did, There was some problem that people had, whether it was the former German policy or the policy of many of our governments. They all were perceiving, and perhaps many of us did this as well before we became aware about Ukraine and its importance, not only in our current day,
in our current moment, but its importance over time, that that there was something they basically, Russia was managing by, uh, by controlling, uh, the, by monopolizing the myth of Russia's superiority of Ukraine archetyping. Ukraine is not a real country. Um, By every time Donson Putin speaks, he's re-archetyping Russia as this great power.
And many of us and many of our friends perhaps still will perceive Russia's culture as somehow justifying its genocide in Ukraine and activities in Ukraine or Dostoevsky or ballet. And I'm a great fan of those writers because I think they're very insightful and very helpful. to us.
So I realized that basically from the very beginning of the war, of the full-scale invasion, without really understanding it as being archetyping at the time, but I realized that what I had to do, my mission was to try and at least campaign for parity of esteem between
Ukraine and other modern nation states which have won the monopoly by fair means of vow. Certain communities of people after World War II who had managed to become UN members, including Ukraine, which was the founding member of the United Nations, signed the UN Charter in 1945. So, um, so even,
but then as I dug into it more deeply and followed these, um, this path from when I was in Eastern Ukraine, working in Eastern Ukraine, I accidentally discovered the Yamnia when some property developers were destroying, um, this extraordinary structure in a posh suburb of Dnipro.
And it made the front page of the New York Times and all of the local people were protesting. And so I went to, in my capacity as a monitor, to monitor the security situation, I went there to try and discover what was going on. And what I discovered was these property dwellers had destroyed a Yamna burial
mound in which was buried the local the local monarch and various other people throughout throughout the millennia including the last person to be buried in there was the head of the collective farm uh believe it or not in like 1932 so delusions of grandeur there and continuity and
underneath this mound when they destroyed it was found the stone circle uh which was created by by the one of the major ingredient cultures in in the yamna and And through that, I began to, from a position of extreme skepticism, that we could trace the linguistic, the journey of certain people carrying not just a language,
not just the words, the vocabulary, the sounds and meanings which we use today. There's about a thousand sounds and meanings in what we call Proto-Indo-European. or I call ancient Ukrainian, which is the language spoken by the Yamna between 4100 BCE and 2500 BCE. And I recognize I'm throwing out these dates.
For me, it's really chartered territory for most people. Most of us, our history kind of begins maybe around 1000 BCE with the first King David in the Bible or whatever. But again, what I'm trying to do, and part of my mission is to re-archetype our mental models, our idea of not just Ukraine, humanity,
our human history and our European history and Ukrainians' position in it, but to create these new structures and these frameworks, because that's how what I call disinfolklore and disinformation does. It creates frameworks, untruthful frameworks in our minds, So, you know, people inside MAGA, in the MAGA disenfoked or galaxy, you know, they have all these in jokes.
They know all about these different things which you and I wouldn't know about. And this is how it works, as I understand. This is how Russian disinformation is, why it's so successful. Because it's not a question of people's intelligence or their education. or anything like that. It's about how people's minds are changed.
So I'm quite upfront about this when I outline these histories and all of this stuff, which is, you know, the ancient DNA studies is published in Nature and Science, the preeminent scientific journals that stay away from anything that's in any way unkosher or not backed up.
Feel free to follow up on anything to do with the Indo-European thing, because it's key to my mission to re-archetype the idea of Ukraine in people's minds, but also it's the key to understanding how archetyping works, I believe, in our minds, in Indo-European's minds.
JAMES
Wow, thank you. That gives me a lot to think about. Well, Carl Jung's work, as well as this idea of archetyping. I think if you can seize the symbols, if you will, of a country and do something with it, then you sort of are winning in a certain respect. And I certainly see that. Yesterday, for example,
Vatnik Soup, my co-host at the time, mentioned the fact that the FSB, Russia's Foreign Services Bureau, the spies and journalists, bad actors there in Russia who go abroad, that their symbol is a bat. And so part of SBU chose owls because owls eat bats.
And I thought of that as perhaps a crude or simple way of kind of controlling that, but I wondered what you thought about that as an example of the kind of things you're talking about, and have you ideas about how we seize the initiative from Russia in, if you will, re-archetyping things?
I think that's an interesting term, by the way. I have some thoughts about it myself, but I think everybody wants to hear your thoughts.
DECODING TROLLS
Yes, the bat, we all remember those pictures of Druidy Don, I called him Druidy Don, because he's kind of truthy, Druidy, as in the class of intellectuals in ancient Celtic society. So I called Don is the Lord of Death in ancient Celtic culture, who according to
Irish mythology, which was first written down around 1100 AD in the Common Era. But through the language, it dates from earlier and is about the Indo-European invasions of Ireland, the island of Ireland. And Ireland's pre-Christian Lord of Death was Don. And obviously you have the Donnieper River, you have the Don River.
You've done Ypres River, which is the Dnipro, the Upper Don. And they've done Istres, I think it's Lower Don from the perspective, if you're looking at them from Crimea. And then you've got the Danube. So you've got these DN, you've got these DN sands associated with rivers, which were the embodiments of, of,
deities and uh druidy donald you've got donald and druidy don so you see druidy don and batman and robin basically archetyping themselves as batman and robin elmo in the white house dressed in black so using comic again comic book haute couture darkness uh these are very um
like once you get your eye into what they're doing and how they are archetyping, it's very, it seems quite clumsy sometimes, but it works quite well at the subconscious level as of course Jung knew. And they clearly know what they're doing because it's not an accident that Melania was dressed by DressX,
two Ukrainian fashion designers from LA who tapped into this market. It's not an accident that Donald was talking about Alphonse Capone just the other day again. But he did it every one of his campaign at his campaign. So they very much know what they're what they're doing. They know it works in the moment.
And and they're tapping into these into these archetypes. Yes, the owls. I'm always impressed with General, I can't remember his exact title, but General Boudinov's, the owl behind him. And I link that to Sumerian imagery archetyping, where the owl lilith, I think. And we have many images across the pre-Indo-European civilization of owls,
So they're extremely adept at generating archetypes and at working on that plane. And long before I worked out my, and came up with a portmanteau, just in folklore, I was, when I look back at my writing since the war and even before the war, but my public writing has only,
like Ukraine has only been since the full-scale invasion. because I worked as a diplomat and I couldn't write about Ukraine when I was working there. But the President Zelensky, obviously, as I wrote this piece at the end of March 2022, Let's Compare Trolls, where I set 20th century ideas who I call Duncy Putin now.
And he's Duncy because he's like a folklore idiot. He's the idiot. He's the town fool. He's like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, kills two women to see if he can get away with it. And then it's just the stupidest thing ever. He's been tortured by it.
And this is Dancy Putin, the master strategist, who just wakes up each day. We see this archetypal character, Istanbul Peace Talks. They're really pushing this. They've been pushing this. I spotted its emergence in mid-March 2022, Istanbul Peace Talks. in an article in the Financial Times.
And for people who are really tuned in to what had been going on in Ukraine as I was since 2014, even what was reported then in mid-March 2022 in the Financial Times that Ukraine would capitulate was just, it was so, not only even apart from the fact that Russia, most of us,
or some of us could already see that Russia's invasion was a disaster within the first week of it. I'm on record as saying on the 1st of March 2022, Russia has done a reverse Napoleon because I saw what the communication logistics difficulties it was having with that massive convoy and the Russian units were complaining.
that they couldn't connect with each other. So I likened it to doing the opposite of what Napoleon had done. Napoleon obviously invaded Russia, and here was Russia invading Ukraine. But it's a reverse Napoleon in the sense that it shared the problem of having the logistics and all Ukraine had to do,
which is what it's doing on the long durée. All it just has to do is keep drawing them in and letting them Waste to their logistics, waste to their resources, which is exactly what the mythology embedded in war and peace tells us of the Marshal Kutuzov, the famous Russian general who resisted all attempts to make battle against
Napoleon, kept on withdrawing and everyone, the Tsar, and everyone said, come on, you must face them. and basically tried his best to avoid, and then the winter came. And so President Zelensky is a master archetyper. I actually found footage of him archetyping himself as Napoleon in one of his programs long before the war, which is wonderful.
He's just got this massive hat on. And so I juxtapose that with that great meme some of us will remember, when President Macron finally came to sense. It was President Macron's idea of Ukraine as this little brother of Russia, Germany's idea of Ukraine as, well, actually, our debt, we owe our debt to Russia,
not to Ukraine for killing, what was it, 8 million Ukrainians. But But when I saw President Macron make that speech, well, he first did it in an interview in mid-February 2024, where he basically went all in. And then he made that amazing speech. And then the Macronian means came out with a Napoleon hat. So, President,
so you asked the question, what do I think about the owls and the Batman and the bats in FSB? Yeah, Ukraine is working on that plane and it is blessed to have President Zelensky who operates. It was his job. He didn't just, it's like second nature to him.
He operates on this symbolic plane in such a successful way that he had the, he and his, his writer, his wife, who's a writer, and his friends from Krivi Rhee, which is a city I know really well. So I kind of understand deeply what he comes from.
I actually used to visit the apartment block he grew up in quite a lot because there was a CSO, a civil society organization I did a lot of work with in Krivi Rhee. And so I really understand this in a deep sense where he And when you hear us say MAGA people talk about Zelensky,
or if I'm in England and in the shires and people are saying to me, what do you think about Zelensky? I know that they're talking about a character they read about in the newspaper who has been relentlessly archetyped. as somehow unconnected to the, what was it, 64% of the people who elected him directly, more,
a bigger mandate than probably any democratically elected leader in a free and fair election in world history. Like, it's literally at that scale. And now, thankfully, we see him, he's up to, what, 72% or whatever in those. So, um, So there is this war, and this is actually where I, and I'm operating on this level,
and all of us are, unknowingly. But this is where the war will be won and lost. And General Budenov and President Zelensky get this and have from the very beginning. It is a war of symbols. If Ukraine can archetype itself as a winner, it will get the means it needs to succeed.
If Russia manages to archetype Ukraine as part of Russia, as a loser, then no one will help Ukraine. And that is the level that the war, so we have these two battlefronts. We have the kinetic battle space where Ukraine is doing extremely well. And then we have this war of symbols.
And you ask, what can we do about it? So what Volia Arabia does, what Mockers does, and Yeni and Joanna, I see you all there, what you do every day at Surdistan, Wills at Surdistan, and what you're both doing is, especially the Wills at Surdistan and these stories that Mockers tells from Chris Awicki and these people,
Because the archetype of Russia is this great culture, which many of us were embedded in. And I know I've had this conversation a lot with Ming as well. He, like me, has read a lot of Russian, great Russian literature. And we've fallen for that trail. We've imbibed it.
And we've been drunk on its beauty and the amazingness of it. But then when you pull the... when the stage, when you, when you realize that actually it's just a stage play and then you, you know, the Potomacan metaphor is just so beautiful. Uh, so wonderful. Um,
because what you're doing is de-archetyping Russia as this great culture as, as, as, um, and Natalia Ukraine's work does really well. So that, so that's really important work and we need to continue doing this and, getting it into people's minds. I mean, whenever, I obviously can't really talk about many of the things I hear from, say,
mockers or from Chris Owicki or whatever in normal, polite society, because people literally won't believe it. And yet, all of us have this kind of understanding of the absurdism, the lack of toilets, just the mad stuff they come up with to get people to sign a contract, which doesn't mean anything, because
You can't coerce someone into signing a contract. It's like what you do. Again, it goes back to Dancy Putin. It's one of the first things you learn in contract law. You know, if there's coercion, and yet every day we're reading about these crazy folktale-like tricks of getting people to sign the contract, torturing them.
And then suddenly they sign the contract and they can be magically sent, uh, on a, uh, back, you know, to the front line where they're killed within 24 hours. And it's absolutely insane stuff. It's no way to run an empire covering one sixth of the world surface. It's comical. It's absurd.
it's um it's extraordinary stuff but uh the more people they used to have this program in england called euro trash where they basically seem to be based on you know bizarre things that happened in japan in the 1980s uh we need to continue doing that about russia uh because and this is the great work say that um
We see people trying to explain to Donald that Russia, you know, its economy is tiny. You know, it's the size of Chile. This is not, this is, you know, if you're going to sacrifice America to something, don't sacrifice it to Russia. This is just rubbish on every level.
And obviously all of our countries can be archetyped as rubbish, but we're not committing genocide and doing these horrific crimes. So that's, That's what we can do. But the War of Symbols, General Boudinov and President Zelensky and many of the people around them are operating on that level. And it's beautiful to watch.
And it's part of the evidence that I parsed to work out what's going on. And what I can and then I do have I have these 12 tools which I use and which I'm proselytizing that we should be able to use in our ordinary conversations and ordinary daily lives to help us see through this and, um,
and get, get, get the lenses of what I call the lenses of Disney profile.
For the full range of Volya Radio’s excellent work rearchetyping Ukraine and Russia, you can listen on Spotify to its daily shows:
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