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.
Archetypal Disinfolklore
I first noticed the Disinfolklore Universe now spreading through our neural networks, like triffids rewilding the garden of Eden, when it was in a more primitive form. In 2016, I was a diplomat posted to eastern Ukraine. Russia’s army, cosplaying as Little Green Men, Polite Fo…
The second six tools are basically the Code of Positive Trolls, which I’ve talked about.
Disinfolklore: Twelve Tools to Deploy, Detect, Decrypt, and Defeat the Disinfolklore Universe Before it Destroys Civilization
Greetings! In November 2024 I was commissioned to speak at the Pirate Party Security Conference in Munich. I worked up an original piece - Disinfolklore Universe for that speech:
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 country
which 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 are
invested 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 get
your 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 had
uh 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 and
so 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 the
micro 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 of
our 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 from
the 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 with
a 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 is
happening 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 legislate
for 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 be
controlled 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 cynical
imposition, 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 war
ii 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 say
about 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 to
to 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 um
which 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 through
these 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.
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