Some of you may remember last week I talked about Donald archetyping himself as mad, and my archetyping of my experience on the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska as something folkloric—that leading to an accidental insight which in turn led to my discovery of disinfolklore.
Today I wanted to keep on going.
## Inside Russia-Occupied Ukraine
Inside Russia-occupied Ukraine, in occupied Luhansk, where I crossed into every day from government-controlled Ukraine, I would take a journey from now-occupied Severodonetsk—about 150 kilometers on terrible roads, but really beautiful landscape—all the way there from my hotel, the Hotel Mir (Peace), which had been bombed in 2014.
The last time I saw photographs of it, Severodonetsk, like many places I stayed in Ukraine, is now in ruins. I lived in the Hotel Mir for a year, then moved into a beautiful house with a swimming pool and underfloor heating in Severodonetsk. That house isn’t quite a ruin, but it has been damaged. The family I lived with sent me photographs recently, and I can now determine when places have been looted repeated times—walls are missing.
At the time, Severodonetsk was a bit of a haven. Gradually, as I was there from February 2015 onwards, as I got my eye into what for me was the first former Soviet city—and it was a real Soviet city, the largest producer of ammonium in the former Soviet Union—it looked very like Soviet cities. But gradually, as I was there, it became more colorful. People became richer. Avocados appeared in the supermarket, as did hummus. Those supermarkets are now in ruins.
At the time, I was going from this haven. Severodonetsk’s best days may have been in the Soviet era, depending on one’s viewpoint, or I would claim that its best days were during the years I was there, up until 2022, as it experienced being the de facto capital of Luhansk.
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## Crossing Into the Matrix
Each day, going to Stanytsia Luhanska was like passing into another world through this long journey along very rough roads, which we got to know extremely well because I did it five days a week for three years. Crossing into that bridge was a bit like crossing into a matrix.
Here I’m using the matrix from the movie as a metaphor. Russia’s archetyping system inside Russia-occupied Ukraine consisted of hundreds of media outlets intermeshed with coercive force, coercive control, and so-called institutions which did not actually mediate reality. All of these means—the media outlets, the coercive force, the coercive control, and these fake institutions which only existed on paper in the media outlets—I mentioned this last week. For the first few months, I was reading stories about how the Russian occupiers were establishing a central bank and courts and a parliament and all of these normal institutions of foundational democracies. They were fake. They only existed on paper. It took me a few months to realize that.
None of these means really mediated reality. They forged reality. I use the word “forged” there as a double entendre—in the sense that they forged it like you might forge a horse’s shoe in a forge, hammering it away, putting it in the fire, taking it out, hammering it away—and then forged it in the sense of forgeries, art forgeries or fake reality, which is the essence of the disinfolklore metaphor.
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## Understanding Russian Objectives
I didn’t then understand what the Russians were doing. I didn’t understand what their objective was. At the time, March 2015, the Council of the European Union—the supreme government’s part of the European Union, as distinct from the European Commission (civil servants) and the European Parliament (directly elected parliamentarians)—at the end of March mentioned disinformation for the first time. There wasn’t really a vibe of disinformation. Of course, I had the memory of Russian propaganda from my school textbooks and a bit at university, but I didn’t realize that what I was being embedded in was something completely new, which required new language and new terms to describe, and which had—and this is key to the battling archetypes aspect of disinfolklore—system-wide effects.
We’re not just looking at individual memes or stories, days, tweets. We’re looking at the system-wide effects of thousands or millions of those. I got that insight from seeing how this matrix-like enmeshing of the humans living inside Russia-occupied Ukraine worked.
Here I’m using matrix in the geometric sense, where you have this enmeshing of different media outlets. Those of us who listen to Chuck Farah and Alan regularly—they have a good new show this week I listened to a couple of days ago—one of Chuck Farah’s many aphorisms is “one is none,” which I’ve taken quite to heart. In the past, I would try to only have one item, one charger for instance, that could do everything. Now I’m going for redundancy—having loads of different chargers. It’s quite liberating actually.
This “one is none” ideology is practiced by the Russians. They have constant redundancy, whether in their operations overseas. They’ll flicker between using church groups, diplomats, propaganda outlets. There’s this kind of enmeshing. This principle of enmeshing of a matrix in the geometric sense is something that we may not notice when we’re looking at particular memes.
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## System-Wide Effects
What I’m trying to articulate always with the battling archetypes aspect of the disinfolklore analytical method is the system-wide effect of Donald saying certain things. It’s not just about Venezuela or Greenland or Ukraine or the Epstein files—it’s a whole system that has persistent effects on us.
At the time in 2015, I didn’t see that this was what they were doing in Russia-occupied Ukraine, but I was gathering data points which I then spent years parsing for patterns. They were weaving reality in there. I didn’t know why they were doing it. They were changing the identities of the consumers of disinfolklore. This is what MAGA does, what Donald does, and what the Russians are still doing.
Coming up to the anniversary, I think Volia is doing a 24-hour thing, which is great. Hopefully I’ll be able to participate in that. One of the things I’ve been reflecting on is how the war has changed me. I started out with a set of beliefs or thoughts—that the West would intervene, that NATO was useful. Those external perceptions have then moved right into the depths of my mind, how things have changed in my own mind. My identity in many senses has been changed, and perhaps many of our identities have been changed, where our identities are a function of what we think and do day after day.
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## Algorithmic Identity
I was interested to read recently about the X algorithm because I noticed this. Up until the 27th of February 2022, I never tweeted about Ukraine because I was still working there and didn’t want to be talking about what I was working in. I was very engaged in trying to raise awareness about COVID, so my timeline was full of doctors and medics. Then that changed really quite quickly—I was put into the Ukraine category.
I was interested to read recently that my lived experience backs up that this is true: your categorization by the Twitter algorithm can change quite quickly according to what you like and what you post on. In some ways that’s a metaphor or example of how our online identity can change quite quickly. We’re not stuck in boxes.
After he who shall not be named bought Twitter, there was a thing about how Ukraine people in the pro-Ukraine group were being discriminated against when the algorithm was released. Maybe when you got into the pro-Ukraine group, it became more of a fixed identity. This is again how quickly our externally perceived identities can be seen to change.
I saw the same thing happen—many of us have—with MAGA people, and in Russia-occupied Ukraine through this enmeshing matrix of hundreds of different media outlets, the interaction between them and reality, and of course brutal violence and coercive control, and the reestablishment in people’s minds of patterns that had been very common prior to the end of the Soviet Union.
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## The Insight from Luhansk
That kind of insight is what I bring to you today from Russia-occupied Luhansk. At the time, my thought was always, “Oh God, this would never happen at home.” This was before Brexit and before Donald Trump. What a strange place, that this can happen to Ukrainians by the Russians. I came from another type of place where this could never happen.
Now, over the course of those nine years, what I saw there in this small province, which felt like it was the edge of the world, the edge of Europe—and has been for millennia—that has seeped into every person, not just in Europe and America, but across the world, through the means of, for instance, the economic impact of the war in Ukraine. Everyone everywhere is paying more for everything. Through memes, through Donald becoming elected by the help of the Russians, and now through Donald’s zigzagging through our brains and minds fifty million times a day.
There’s this great phrase: “The future’s out there, it’s just not evenly distributed.” That idea, which actually animates Silicon Valley, suggests that on the edges you have existences and manifestations of reality which will take over the world and take over humanity and take over the mind—whether it’s Facebook or TikTok. It also applies to what happened in Ukraine after February 2014. It will continue to happen because Ukraine is the center of our civilization.
My other project, Finding Manuland, investigates why this is the case and finds the empirical evidence for it. We can see it in our lived experience—this may have been the case when Indo-European languages and mythology and religions first evolved from 6,000 years ago in Zaporizhia. It’s also the case since 2014.
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## The Puzzle of Russian Strategy
At the time, I just couldn’t work out what they were doing. I remember thinking, “Well, surely if you’re trying to attract the rest of Ukraine into supporting these rebel troll kingdoms, you would try and make them into utopia and paradise.” It’s a constant source of mystery why the Russians, if they really wanted to do what they said they wanted to do, wouldn’t do this. As we know, everything they touch turns to shit.
This completely out-of-syncness between the reality the Russians create—this hell on earth, wherever they go—is so out of sync with their stated intentions. Many of the people we know who live in the normal world, who don’t spend all their time on Ukraine or on learning about Russia and understanding the grammar and the syntax of its disinfolklore and propaganda, but also of its behavior—learning the patterns, the repeated patterns—Ukrainians and Central Europeans in general can be really helpful, and Baltic people who lived under occupation from the Russians in various forms can be very helpful to teach people from Western Europe and America what these patterns are, these repeated patterns.
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## The Stealth Genocide Revelation
It was about a week into the full-scale invasion when I started—as I mentioned before, I was collecting data for the OSCE Moscow Mechanism mission that had been given the task directly after the full-scale invasion began on the 24th of February 2022 of collecting data about what Russia was doing and its violations of OSCE commitments.
About a week into the war, I was looking at the executions that the Russians were carrying out, the conduct of the war, when I had this flash of insight: the entire point of the system, the matrix of communications, of what I now call disinfolklore in Russia-occupied Ukraine, was to execute what I called and call a stealth genocide.
In that sense, I was learning about how the Russians were forcing Ukrainians who had lived under the occupation to participate in a war against their fellow citizens, their fellow Ukrainians across the Donets River. I realized that what Russia had been doing over the course of those seven years was to execute a genocide.
I, who had been there for three years, then looked back—and I continue to do this—at what I had seen and experienced: the disinfolklore apparatus, the direct and public incitement to genocide, the mass forcible transfers of people, the enslavement of people, the killing of people simply for being Ukrainian. All these things I was aware of while I was working there, but it never occurred to me for a second while I was there that this was a genocide.
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## Genocide and Selective Blindness
I know Mockers and Genesis Man had a brief conversation about this today on Volia Radio on their show, and Yeni contributed to it as well. It’s a source of enormous sadness that the refusal to put together all of these individual events—many of which we uniquely in this community outside of Ukraine see and experience each day as we follow the conduct of the war and have followed it since the 24th of February—it’s enormously sad for me that while genocide has become common parlance of people who engage with other conflicts or wars or occupations merely through social media like many of us, they refuse to attach that moniker to this war.
Despite it having every possible characteristic of genocide, which I as a lawyer saw from very early on and have read—particularly the two reports from New Lines Institute on applying the international legal definition of genocide to Russia’s actions.
The first I heard of what might be going on in Bucha was around mid-March 2022 when a friend of mine told me about sexual crimes which it was rumored were happening in the Kyiv area. I remember my reaction to seeing this and thinking, “I think that’s probably exaggerating it. I’ll need to see more than that.” The memory of that reaction helps me understand where my thinking was at that time, even though I was reading at that time of atrocities and recording them and collecting them for the Moscow Mechanism mission.
The scale of the barbarism then in Bucha—most of us will remember those days when we first started hearing about it around the 7th of April. It’s to the credit of the four jurists who were responsible for directly writing the Moscow Mechanism report, which was published, I think, on the 9th of April 2022 (it’s in my pinned tweet, the reference to it and my work on it)—they mention all the strands that we know today, even though the evidence wasn’t clear at the time for what exactly had happened at Bucha: the mass forcible transfer of children, the killing of civilians, the indiscriminate killing of civilians trying to escape, the bombings, the terrible crimes.
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## The Genocide Framework
Even before my friend had texted me about these sexual crimes in the Kyiv area and I thought, “No, not even the Russians would be doing that kind of stuff,” I had categorized what was going on as a genocide. I made the connection between what the Russians were doing in March 2022 and what they were preparing to do throughout my time there with the disinfolklore apparatus and the brainwashing, the identity-changing means for Ukrainians—changing them from being loyal, in many cases Ukrainians, to thinking that they were Russians.
Even with that weakened evidence base at that time—and I remember another data point is around the 10th of March 2022, when the Polish president, who also was a lawyer, first used the term genocide in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—he at the time wouldn’t have known about Bucha and what was going on there. President Zelensky first used the term, as far as I understand, around the 7th of April in that famous footage when he has his bulletproof vest on and Yermak is standing behind him, talking about what was going on in Bucha.
The fact that all three of us—the then president of Poland, me, and President Zelensky—studied international law and are lawyers and thought of it as a genocide then, it’s enormously sad that to this day, and it’s a testament to the success of Russia’s disinfolklore apparatus, as we are being enmeshed in it… Many of our sensitive friends and colleagues and community members have been enmeshed in this over the war, Israel and Israel’s war against Hamas.
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## Weaponizing the Term “Genocide”
I used to see the likening of any situation to genocide by demonstrators in Eastern Ukraine. Often there would be demonstrations against, say, heightened gas prices. I noticed a pattern of hysterical likening of such and such to a genocide. When I was working out of the Dnipro office between 2018 and 2022, after about a year of going to demonstrations—which was part of my job, trying to assess whether this is real, organic, or is this the Russians, an active measure—I had this shortcut: if they’re likening a relatively trivial event like the rising of gas prices or rents or some problem with communal services to a genocide, then chances are that’s a Russian operation.
What they’re trying to do is reduce the currency and meaning of genocide, which I believe is part of Russia’s communications strategy. This was rolled out from parts of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and other parts of Ukraine as they tried to stir tumult. They then rolled that out globally to fantastic success. We have a genocide concealed in Ukraine, concealed by these memes and by these monikers.
It is especially shameful to me that I did not—and I try to learn from it—that I didn’t notice this when I was in Ukraine between 2015 and 2018 in eastern Ukraine. I didn’t notice I was inside a genocide because I had read Primo Levi, I’d read *The Assassins of Memory*, I’d visited Auschwitz in 1991. I was very engaged in reading about the Second World War. As many of us used to do, we used to think, “Oh, so-and-so would become a Nazi in the war, so-and-so wouldn’t.” Then we realized, well, actually most people become inured to this violence and don’t react in the same way that all of us have to this particular war.
I’m a lawyer and I trained in it, so it’s especially embarrassing to me that I was caught up inside our kind of bureaucratic organization and I couldn’t work it out.
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## The Railway to Auschwitz Analogy
It occurred to me in March 2022 that if in 1942 the garden of your house had the railway going by, and that railway was going to Auschwitz or to other places, and the railway cars were going by, you might notice the humans in the railway cars, but of course you wouldn’t know that you were witnessing a genocide because you’re just seeing one moment in a very complex system.
That probably also applies to people who think they’re seeing a genocide when they’re not necessarily. It certainly applies to the conventional wisdom that won’t use that term for what the Russians are doing in Ukraine, despite those horrific numbers which were published today—about 600,000 Ukrainians killed. It’s reported as a “both sides” type thing—600,000 Ukrainians dead and whatever 1.2 million Russians, or 300,000, or 600,000 casualties. The scale of these numbers is off the charts. How many more Ukrainians need to die before you will archetype this properly as a genocide?
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## Defining Disinfolklore
The family resemblance between the disinfolklore universe that Russia was creating in the minds of Ukrainians living in Russia-occupied Ukraine and what is today happening on a global scale across America and across our civilization is one of the key insights I want to communicate. I know you’ve heard it a million times from me, but part of my mission is to repeat myself so that I’m trying to put ideas in people’s minds and to teach this way, this mode of seeing—not as *the* way, but as *a* way of seeing.
Let’s define disinfolklore as follows: **Disinfolklore is a specific form of disinformation. Disinfolklore is a medium for affecting our moods, intentions, motivations, and attitudes in ways which help the disinfolklorist.**
Our moods, intentions, motivations, and attitudes—I believe in my mental model—are the key to affecting our identities and changing people’s identities. Your mood will affect you in a kind of longue durée way. Intention is more short-term, but it can be long as well—your intention to donate right now, which may have changed because you’re reading disinfolklore and a bad article about Ukraine and you think, “Oh, I’m not going to donate now.” But also your intention about what you’re going to do in your life, your motivations. Again, long and short durée, and your attitudes—in ways which help the disinfolklorists.
These are all altered and can all be altered by storytelling and by stories and by what I call disinfolklore. For example, we intend to donate to help Ukraine develop its drone-based warfare capability. But the *New York Times* tells us a fable whose message, whose manner, is “Russia will win.” Instead, we donate our money to another cause—hopefully a worthwhile cause.
Disinfolklore is disinformation which can be usefully parsed into some of its folkloric elements, as I spoke about last week and the week before.
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## Folkloric Elements in News
It’s clear that legend, epic poetry, mythology, and wisdom sayings from ancient times all contain folkloric elements. It’s not so clear that news does. That, again, is a key insight I’m trying to communicate—trying to re-archetype what we consider to be news, objective, as the determination of what is necessarily important.
But the leaving out of, for instance, that horrific railway attack by Russia today in Kharkiv—we all saw it, people tuned into Ukraine saw it. I’m guessing it wasn’t on the BBC News tonight. Maybe it was. I don’t know. But I’m guessing it wasn’t, and it’s not on other people’s minds. Those editorial choices themselves are part of what I would consider disinfolklore. If they’re talking about other stories which are comparatively less grisly and less important, then they’re making choices to manipulate our minds and to leave these out.
Many of the people we know who exist in the normal world where they don’t spend all day long engaged in trying to combat Russian propaganda and trying to help Ukraine in whatever small ways we can—those people, as we hear often, say things like, “Oh, is that war still going on?” That kind of stuff.
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## Tools from Multiple Disciplines
In disinfolklore, we use tools from different disciplines—comparative mythology, literary theory, theology—to parse MAGA, Russian, and other forms of disinformation and disinfolklore into its folkloric components.
I’ve been listening every now and again to this podcast from a guy near the Russian border—I think it’s Latvia—called something like “East of the Border.” I quite like it. He focuses a lot on the theological components in Russian disinfolklore and in their ways of seeing. I’ve been doing that since very early on. When Putler is using the church, for instance, as part of their matrices of wrapping everyone up in a disinfolklore universe and fooling people and changing people’s minds and intentions, motivations and moods and attitudes—when he was pictured going into the church, this is all the use of theology. When they liken Ukraine to Satan and the war to Satan, it’s a key aspect of disinfolklore and the Russian approach.
We can use all these different disciplines to parse MAGA, Russian, and other forms of disinformation into its folkloric components.
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## Infolklore: The Counter-Narrative
There’s a reflexive relationship, meaning all these different aspects interact, sometimes in the same meme, in the same story—between legend, lore, mythology, epic, drama, and folklore.
I’ve introduced the new concept of **infolklore**, which depending on how a piece, an item of disinfolklore can be spoken about, can be transformed, transmogrified into what I would call infolklore. An archetypal infolklore is basically what Mockers would be talking about, or Will, or on *Accidental Ukrainian*—which I really enjoyed this week, a fantastic episode. These are stories which amuse, which are told from the perspective of helping Ukraine, but also of changing our attitude from a depressed mood into a happy mood. They’re informational, they’re true, they’re correct, but they’re not trying to change our attitudes in a negative way.
By negative, I use the standard which is the second element in what I call the Code of Positive Trolls: right ethical discipline as defined by the post-World War II legal order. If the meaning of the meme is to persuade us that the laws of war don’t matter or individual right to life doesn’t matter, then that is disinfolklore. If it’s doing the opposite, if it’s supporting Ukraine’s right to defend itself and its territorial integrity, then by definition it is what I would call infolklore.
These aren’t yet—maybe someday they will become—definitions that judges could use in courts to decide whether to allow speech that, for instance, denigrates or is preparing a people, changing their identities, preparing a people to be sacrificed in some sort of future genocide. For the time being, each of us can be a judge, and we’re just looking for a good enough method to deal with all of the data incoming each day. We don’t have to spend too long on a particular meme to decide: Is this disinfolklore or infolklore? Will I believe this? Will I communicate it onwards? Will I get upset by it? Will I spend three days being depressed by it?
We can just use these tools that I’m helping to articulate and communicate to parse these items of data—whether it’s a visual, a picture, a tweet, a meme, or a whole 8,000-word essay in *The New Yorker*—into its pieces, and then move on to the next one. We don’t have to defend our decision in a court of law. We’re just trying to find a way of parsing, in the sense of chopping—as the great French post-modern philosopher Derrida said, “Knowledge is for cutting”—and I always imagine, you know, like on a cutting board, chopping the onions. This is all I’m trying to do.
I do happen to think it’s useful and could in the future be used as models in court cases to determine: Are we going to sanction this individual? Well, yes, because they’ve been promoting trolls that denigrate the post-World War II legal order, which promote and publicly incite genocide. Here’s the evidence, these memes, and we can apply the disinfolklore analytical method to do it. That’s my ambition for the future. In the meantime, just in our daily journeys through our timeline and through our lives and listening to the news on the radio, hopefully these tools can help us.
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## The Common Law Analogy
If we look at memes in the same way we look at legends as lore—and by law in particular, for those of us who come from common law jurisdictions like England or Ireland or the United States or Australia or New Zealand, where some of the law is based on statute, but a good part of the law is based on stories, the common law, and principles which are immanent in these stories, in these cases. The corollary of that in international law is international customary law.
We have the equivalent of statutes in international law—we have the UN Charter, we have treaties—but we also have international custom accepted as law. These principles, for instance the laws of war, are articulated in several different Geneva Conventions, but they didn’t need to be in the Geneva Conventions to be part of international law. That is quite similar to common law, all based on stories.
Lore is the law of any community we’re part of, whether in our office or our family, our history. Indeed, we have lore in Volia Radio, and those of us who participated in Maria Report in any form are aware of the lore there.
Mythology is very important because so much work has been done developing tools. There is a conscious and accidental, perhaps, use of mythology in Wagner, in what the Russians are trying to do. Therefore we can delve into these areas for tools useful to parse this information. There aren’t that many other people apart from me doing this—I mean, there are some, but it’s not mainstreamed. I feel I have a contribution to make by emphasizing these aspects, not least because the entire casus belli itself from Putler, all of its historical nonsense, is mythology and based on mythology. If you can understand the status of this as mythology rather than fact or history, that I think helps to combat it.
I used to have this debate with some of the people on Mrija Report, some of the presenters, where they’d be like, “Oh, this is all irrelevant, no one cares about mythology.” Yet it was all too relevant.
Epic as well—we’re in the midst of an epic. Drama every day, in every tweet. Donald is the drama monarch. Folklore itself, as previously discussed. These forms of narrative, these art forms, are not really associated with news by many people—very few, in fact. I keep my eye out for it. That’s one of my unique contributions to the area of disinformation and information warfare management.
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## Transmission of Values
Such stories transmit values across the ages. It’s quite easy for people to grasp how legend, law, lore, the Old Testament, old treaties, old religions transmit values which we either agree with or disagree with across the ages. In one age, the heroic deeds of humans in the past become mythological activities of deities.
There’s a great example in early Indian history where you have this community of people called the Dānavas who are mentioned in the Rig Veda as devils, as demons. It’s argued that the Dānavas actually—this is the memory of the Indo-Europeans, the descendants of those who left Ukraine with the language—they enter India, they fight against the people who were living there, and then they’re remembered in mythology and religion and text as demons. In fact, they were real people.
This is the kind of pattern which happens in the news and what the Russians try to do with their scary stories. Ukraine’s best or ultimate strategic objective, as I think, is to communicate such a sense of fear into the minds of today’s Russians that no Russian will ever be born in the next hundred years without being told by their parents, “Never go west of the Don. Stay east of the Don because demons, monsters live there.” As a strategy, as an objective, I think that’s really what Ukraine is trying to do.
In another age, as previously talked about, these deities become trolls and nymphs, satyrs, asuras, witches, demons, titans. That’s how I archetype this titanic struggle between Donald, Volodymyr Zelensky the comedian, and Duncy Putler—this is really a battle of the titans.
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## The Magic of Disinfolklore
By magical communications, I mean how Russian disinfolklore somehow occupies people’s minds. It manages to archetype what is going on in Gaza as a genocide by Israel. But somehow we cannot, with all our collective help, archetype what is going on in Ukraine as a genocide—as the most serious crime resulting in more deaths than any other war almost, perhaps (I don’t know whether you can say that), or injuries, but certainly more damage to the world and to a country than any other war since the Second World War.
There is something magical about that. I don’t deny it. I spend most of my time, as many of us do, trying to work out what is magical about Russian disinfolklore. How do they get these memes repeated constantly by people?
But as I argue and will argue later in a further episode, for me, magic isn’t how we might think of it from childhood, watching a magic TV show. Magic is cause and effect. It’s these *magoi*, the strange things, countries with strange powers. The magi, the magistrates, the majesty of monarchs—these are the magico-religious element of sovereignty and the exercise of leadership. What we see in mind-manipulating memes is magical, but we can harness it.
If we understand it, then we create infolklore to also be magical, just as advertisers use, just as cult owners use, and just as parents try to inspire their children not to do dangerous things by telling them stories.
In another age, the echoes of heroic deeds may become localized staples of lore transmitted by and among the simple folk. “Simple folk” is a term I take from the 16th century, as opposed to the aristocracy—it’s not patronizing, but they tell stories. This is what we do with the news and exchanging news.
In all cases, particularly in pre-literate societies, lore, laws, legends, folklore can all be parsed for information in much the same way we can trace different archaeological cultures by digging deeper and deeper in the soil—but also in memes and what we see on our timeline. For me, it’s the same practices you use to look at the changes in communities over time in lore, laws, legends, folklore, as we should be looking in our quotidian daily communications, whether person to person or online.
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## Russian Bogeymen
An example of Russian disinfolklore that directly and indirectly undermines Ukraine’s sovereignty is its use of fictional bogeymen. Bogeymen are archetypes from folklore, but they’re very much part of our way of thinking, and we’re taught it as children. Scapegoating.
The entirely fictional bogeyman, the Ukrainian Nazi fighting Russia—last week I talked about the Polish mercenaries. We could talk about the entirely fictional bogeyman, the Ukrainian Nazi. I learned recently that all of the papers from the Second World War were carted off back to Moscow after the war or towards the end of the war. Ukraine, no one has access to this kind of everyone rushing around trying to survive, changing—a bit like Syria—changing loyalties. Russia takes away all the paperwork. Hopefully I dream about Ukraine getting all of that back, and then we can have proper discussion about the Second World War.
Russia takes away the evidence, then archetypes Ukrainians as Nazis and uses this bogeyman to infest the minds of people we know in the real world with an idea they’re not even aware of, which is basically, “Oh, if Ukrainians are Nazis, then let the Russians kill them.” This is just one of thousands of disinfolklore archetypes using bogeymen or bogeypersons to try and change the intentions and undermine the motivations of those who would otherwise support any people from resisting unlawful violence, unlawful killing, and unlawful genocide.
These kinds of fictional bogeymen—the Russians are great at creating them, and they promote the troll that Ukrainians deserve to be genocided. I mentioned that folklore course I did at Oxford last year as a continuing education person, when I was trying to explain disinfolklore to the teacher. This very point—he said, “But of course, there were Ukrainian Nazis during the Second World War.” It really made me sad that he just couldn’t understand how in today’s world, fictional bogeymen can be used to affect today’s intentions and motivations and perceptions of reality.
Quite apart from the fact that the entire historical archives of what was happening during the Second World War on Ukrainian territory are not available to historians to look at—quite apart from that, the point is not whether or not some Ukrainians fought with the Nazis. Of course, the real point is that the Russians signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty with the Nazis. How does Russia manage to anchor these ideas in the minds of people like my teacher, who’s a brilliant folklorist, but didn’t really understand the contemporary relevance of these folkloric tropes like bogeymen in distracting people? Scapegoats, scapegoating.
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## Trickster Tales
This is the key thing: disinfolklore inhabits us like ghosts. It is a bit of a ghost. It’s a way of seeing. It’s a mood itself, a kind of bad mood.
There is a literary genre of trickster tales where the trickster is preeminently a storyteller. These qualify as meta-narratives in that they’re stories about the role of stories. Now we’re living inside a trickster tale which has been woven by Druidy Don and Duncy Putin. They’re purveyors of these trickster tales, and treating them as otherwise is to fall for the trolls.
This idea this week—this anchorage agreement which the Russians are trying to embed in everyone’s minds—is just a mind trick, a trickster tale.
Disinfolklore is an analytical method for parsing disinformation. It can give us the power to analyze Druidy Don and Duncy Putin’s trickster tales as such. How many of us would dream of seeing the front page of the *New York Times* or the *Washington Post* or the *London Times* taking artifacts injected into the information space by Druidy Don, disinfolklore himself, Donald Trump, or Duncy Putin’s, as trickster tales? Not as news or as a policy or as a statement that Ukraine should give up land for mythical security guarantees on the anniversary of the signing of the Budapest memorandum.
Continued from:
First in series:
