This is episode six of going through the battling archetypes and essential tools in the Disinfolklore analytical method. 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, and that leading to an accidental insight which in turn led to my discovery of Disinfolklore.
Today I wanted to keep going. Inside Russia-occupied Ukraine, in occupied Luhansk, where I crossed into every day from government-controlled Ukraine, on a journey I would take from now-occupied Severodonetsk — about 150 kilometres on terrible roads, but really beautiful landscape all the way — from my hotel, the Hotel Mir, “Peace,” which had been bombed in 2014 in Severodonetsk. Last time I saw photographs of it, like many places I stayed in Ukraine, it’s now in ruins.
I lived in the Mir Hotel for a year, and then I moved into a beautiful house with a swimming pool and underfloor heating in Severodonetsk. Now that house itself — it’s not quite a ruin, but it has been looted. The family I lived with sent me photographs of the house recently, and I can now determine when places have been looted repeatedly. 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 — it was a real Soviet city, the largest producer of ammonium in the former Soviet Union, that was its speciality, and it looked very like Soviet cities — but gradually it became more colourful. People became richer. Avocados appeared in the supermarket, as did hummus. Now those supermarkets are in ruins.
Severodonetsk’s best days — depending on one’s viewpoint — may have been in the Soviet era, 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.
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 like crossing into a matrix. Inside Russia-occupied Ukraine was a matrix — and here I’m using the matrix from the movie as a metaphor rather than an actual place.
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, how 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 these normal foundational institutions. But they were fake. They only existed on paper. Took me a few months to realise 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 horseshoe in a forge, hammering it away, putting it in the fire, taking it out, hammering it away. And forged in the sense of forgeries, art forgeries, fake reality — which is the essence of the Disinfolklore metaphor, the Disinfolklore insight that I had.
I didn’t then understand what the Russians were doing. I didn’t understand their objective. At the time, March 2015, the Council of the European Union — the supreme governments’ part of the European Union, as distinct from the European Commission’s civil servants and the European Parliament’s directly elected parliamentarians — the Council of the European Union at the end of March mentioned disinformation for the first time. So at the 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 realise 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 or 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 — and here I’m not using matrix in the sense of the film, but in the geometric sense — this enmeshing of different media outlets.
Those of us who listen to Chuck Pfarrer and Alan regularly — they have a good new show this week I listened to a couple of days ago — one of Chuck Pfarrer’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” principle is practised by the Russians. They have constant redundancy, whether it’s in their operations overseas — they’ll flicker between using church groups, diplomats, propaganda outlets. There’s this enmeshing. This principle of enmeshing, a matrix in the geometric sense, is something we may not notice when we’re looking at particular memes.
What I’m trying to articulate with the battling archetypes aspect of the Disinfolklore analytical method is the system-wide effect. Donald saying certain things — it’s not just about Venezuela or Greenland or Ukraine or the Epstein files. It’s a whole system, and it 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 Volya is doing a 24-hour thing for the anniversary, 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 — that the West would intervene, that NATO was useful. Those external perceptions have then moved right into the depths of my mind. 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.
I was interested to read recently on X about the 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. But I was very engaged in trying to raise awareness about COVID. My timeline was full of doctors and medics. Then that changed really quickly — I was put into the Ukraine category. I was interested to read recently that my lived experience backs up that your categorisation by the Twitter algorithm can change quite quickly according to what you like and what you post.
In some ways, that’s a metaphor or example of how our online identity can change quite quickly. We’re not stuck in boxes. Now, after he who shall not be named bought Twitter, there was a thing about how, when the algorithm was released, people in the pro-Ukraine group were being discriminated against. So maybe when you got into the pro-Ukraine group, it became more of a fixed identity.
Again, how quickly our externally perceived identities can be seen to change. I saw the same thing happen — and many of us have — with MAGA people, and in Russia-occupied Ukraine through the means of this enmeshing matrix of hundreds of different media outlets and the interaction between them and reality, and of course brutal violence and coercive control, and the re-establishment in people’s minds of patterns that had been very common prior to the end of the Soviet Union.
That’s the kind of insight I bring to you today from Russia-occupied Luhansk. At the time, it was interesting as something — my thought was always: “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, but I come from another type of place where this could never happen.
Now, of course, over the course of those nine years, what I saw there in this small province — which felt like 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 economic impact of the war in Ukraine — everyone everywhere is paying more for everything. Through memes, through Donald becoming elected with the help of the Russians, and now through Donald’s zigzagging through our brains and minds 50 million times a day.
These patterns — there’s this great phrase: “The future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” That idea, which actually animates Silicon Valley, where on the edges you have existences and manifestations of reality which will take over the world and take over the mind, whether it’s Facebook or TikTok — it also applies to what happened in Ukraine after February 2014, directly as a result of Ukraine. It will continue to happen because Ukraine is the centre of our civilisation.
My other project, Finding Manuland, investigates why this is the case and finds the empirical evidence for it. But we can see it in our lived experience. This may have been the case when Indo-European languages, mythology, and religions were first evolved from 6,000 years ago in Zaporizhzhia. But it’s also the case since 2014.
At the time, I just couldn’t work out what they were doing. I remember thinking: surely, if you’re trying to attract the rest of Ukraine into supporting these rebel troll kingdoms, you would try to make them into utopia and paradise. We talked about this last week. 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. But as we know, everything they touch turns to shit.
This completely out-of-sync relationship 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 learning about Russia, understanding the grammar and syntax of not just its Disinfolklore and propaganda but also its behaviour, 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 in teaching people from Western Europe and America what these patterns are.
About a week into the full-scale invasion, I started — as I mentioned before — collecting data for the OSCE Moscow Mechanism mission that had been charged directly after the full-scale invasion began on the 24th of February 2022 with 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 realised that what Russia had been doing over the course of those seven years was to execute a genocide.
But I, who had been there for three years, then looked back — and I continued 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.
I know Mokrushyna and Genesis Man had a brief conversation about this today on Volya 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 since the 24th of February — it’s enormously sad for me that while genocide has become common parlance for 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.
I as a lawyer saw this 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 told me about sexual crimes which it was rumoured 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.
It’s the memory of that reaction which helps me understand where my thinking was at that time, even though I was reading of atrocities and recording them and collecting them for the Moscow Mechanism mission. But 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, published I think on the 9th of April 2022 — it’s in my pinned tweet, the reference to it and my work on it — that 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, all the themes — the killing of civilians, the indiscriminate killing of civilians trying to escape, the bombings, the terrible crimes.
I mention this because 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” — I had categorised 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. Forcing 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 another data point I have is around the 10th of March 2022, when the then Polish president, who was also a lawyer, first used the term genocide in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But he at the time wouldn’t have known about Bucha. 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 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, and 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.
I used to use this: the likening of any situation to genocide in eastern Ukraine by demonstrators. Often there would be demonstrations against, say, heightened gas prices. I noticed a pattern of hysterical likening of such-and-such to a genocide. After about a year of going to demonstrations, which was part of my job — when I was working out of the Dnipro office between 2018 and 2022 — trying to assess: is this real, is this organic, or is this the Russians, is this an active measure?
I had this shortcut: if they’re likening a relatively trivial event like the rising of gas prices, rents, or some problem with communal services to a genocide, then chances are that’s a Russian operation. Because what they’re trying to do is reduce the currency and the meaning of genocide. I believe this is part of Russia’s communications strategy, which 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.
And there we have a genocide concealed in Ukraine, concealed by these memes and monikers. It is especially shameful to me that I did not — and I tried 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’d play this mind game: “So-and-so would become a Nazi in the war, so-and-so wouldn’t.” Then we realised most people become Nazis — inured to this violence and don’t react the way all of us have to this particular war.
It’s especially embarrassing to me, as a lawyer trained in this, that I was caught up inside our bureaucratic organisation and couldn’t work it out.
It occurred to me in March 2022 that if in 1942, the railway went by the garden of your house, 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 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.
But 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 published today — the figure was about 600,000 Ukrainians killed. Again, it’s reported as a both-sides thing: 600,000 Ukrainians dead and whatever 1.2 million Russians, or 300,000, or 600,000 casualties — I don’t know. 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?
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 civilisation, 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 — I’m trying to put ideas in people’s minds and to teach this mode of seeing. Not as the way of seeing, 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 long-durée way. Intention is more short-term but can be long as well — it can be your intention to donate right now, which has changed because you’re reading Disinfolklore, a bad article about Ukraine, and you think “I’m not going to donate now.” Also your intention about what you’re going to do in your life, and your motivations — long and short — and your attitudes, in ways which help the Disinfolklorists.
All of these can be altered by storytelling and by stories, 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 mana, is “Russia will win.” So 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. It’s clear that legend, epic poetry, mythology, and wisdom sayings from ancient times all contain folkloric elements. But it’s not so clear that news does. And 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.
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. But 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. Because if they’re talking about other stories which are comparatively less grisly and less important, they’re making choices to manipulate our minds and leave these out.
Many of the people we know who exist in the normal world — who 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 say things like, “Oh, is that war still going on?”
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 this guy in Latvia, near the Russian border — it’s called East of the Border or something like that. I quite like it. He focuses a lot on the theological components in Russian Disinfolklore, in their ways of seeing. I quite like that because I’ve been doing that since very early on.
When Putler is using the church as part of their matrices of wrapping everyone up in a Disinfolklore universe, fooling people, changing their minds and intentions, motivations, moods, and attitudes — when he was pictured going into the church, that’s 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 to Disinfolklore.
We can use all these different disciplines to parse MAGA, Russian, and other forms of disinformation into its folkloric components. 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. Depending on how a piece, an item of Disinfolklore is reframed, it can be transformed, transmogrified into what I would call Infolklore. An archetypal Infolklore is what Mokrushyna 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 for negative — the second element in what I call the Code of Positive Trolls, which is 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. But 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. But for the time being, each of us can be a judge. We’re just looking for a good enough method to deal with all the incoming data 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 use these tools 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. 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 postmodern philosopher Derrida said, knowledge is for cutting. I always imagine, on a cutting board, chopping onions. That’s all I’m trying to do.
I do think it is 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 evaluate them. But that’s just my ambition for the future. In the meantime, in our daily journeys through our timelines and through our lives, listening to the news on the radio, hopefully these tools can help.
If we look at memes in the same way we look at legends as law — and by law, in particular, for those of us who come from common-law jurisdictions like England, Ireland, the United States, 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 and cases. The corollary of that in international law is international customary law.
We have the equivalent of statutes in international law — the UN Charter, treaties — but we also have international custom accepted as law. These principles — for instance, the laws of war are articulated in several 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 — which is the law of any community we’re a part of, whether it’s in our office or our family, our history. Indeed, we have lore in Volya Radio, and those of us who participated in Maria Report in any form are aware of the lore there.
Mythology is particularly important because so much work has been done developing tools. And as discussed previously, there is a conscious and perhaps accidental use of mythology in Wagner, in what the Russians are trying to do. Therefore we can delve into these areas for tools that are useful to parse this information.
There aren’t that many other people apart from me — there are some, but there aren’t that many. It’s not mainstreamed. I feel I have a contribution to make by emphasising these aspects, not least because the entire casus belli itself from Putler, all its historical nonsense, is mythology and based on mythology. If you can understand the status of this as mythology rather than fact or history, then that helps to combat it.
I used to have this debate with some of the presenters on Maria Report, where they’d say, “This is all irrelevant, no one cares about mythology.” And 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. And 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.
These stories transmit values across the ages. That’s quite easy for people to grasp — how legend, 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 become mythological activities of deities.
There’s this great example in India, in early Indian history, where you have this community of people called the Danavas who are mentioned in the Rig Veda as devils, as demons. It’s argued that the Danavas were actually the memory of the Indo-Europeans, the descendants of those who left Ukraine with the language. The Danavas enter India, they fight against the people who were living there, and then they’re remembered in mythology, in the religion and the texts, as demons. But 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, 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, 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. And other vehicles to explain supposedly supernatural or magical communications — and 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 effort, archetype what is going on in Ukraine as a genocide — as the most serious crime, resulting in more deaths than any other war, 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 will argue later, for me, magic isn’t how we might think of it from childhood, from watching a magic TV show. Magic is cause and effect. It’s the magoi, the strange 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 can create Infolklore to also be magical — just as advertisers use it, just as cult leaders use it, 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 localised staples of lore, transmitted by and among the simple folk — and “simple folk” is a term I take from about the 16th century, as opposed to the aristocracy. It’s not patronising, but they tell stories. This is what we do with the news and exchanging news.
In all cases, particularly in pre-literate societies, lore, legends, folklore — all can 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 timelines. For me, it’s the same practices you use to look at changes in communities over time, in lore, legends, folklore, as we should be using in our quotidian daily communications, whether person to person or online.
An example of Russian Disinfolklore that directly or indirectly undermines Ukraine’s sovereignty is its use of fictional bogeymen. Bogeymen are archetypes from folklore, very much part of how we think of things. We’re taught it as children — scapegoating. The entirely fictional bogeyman: the Ukrainian Nazi fighting Russia.
I learned recently that all the papers from the Second World War were carted off back to Moscow after the war or towards the end of the war. Ukraine has no access to this — everyone rushing around trying to survive, changing loyalties, a bit like Syria. Russia takes away all the paperwork. Hopefully I dream about Ukraine getting all of that back so we can have proper discussion about the Second World War. But 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. Basically: if Ukrainians are Nazis, then let the Russians kill them.
This is just one of thousands of Disinfolklore archetypes using bogeymen to try to change the intentions and undermine the motivations of those who would otherwise support any people resisting unlawful violence, unlawful killing, and unlawful genocide. These fictional bogeymen — the Russians are great at creating them — promote the troll that Ukrainians deserve to be genocided.
Those who communicate onwards this idea — in this folklore course I did at Oxford last year as a continuing education student, 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.” Which 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. Quite apart from that, the point is not whether some Ukrainians fought with the Nazis. Of course they did. The real point is that the Russians signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the Nazis. And that is again this magical — how does Russia manage to anchor these ideas in the minds of people like my teacher, a brilliant folklorist, who didn’t understand the contemporary relevance of these folkloric tropes like bogeymen in distracting people? Scapegoating.
The key thing is that Disinfolklore inhabits us like ghosts. 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 pre-eminently 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 Putler. 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. It’s a trickster tale. Disinfolklore is an analytical method for parsing disinformation. It can give us the power to analyse Druidy Don and Duncy Putler’s trickster tales as such.
How many of us would dream of seeing the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the London Times taking artefacts injected into the information space by Druidy Don — Disinfolklorist himself, Donald Trump — or Duncy Putler’s, as trickster tales? Not as news, or as 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.
I’ve spoken for an hour, so I’ll leave it at that for today.
**Wendy:** Very interesting. That was perfect. Really interesting. Gives us lots to think about. James, and then I see Yeni has her hand up.
**Yeni:** How do we get legacy media and the UN to get over the hurdle and actually name this a genocide? Because the Russians have already admitted it. I remember — this was months ago, maybe even a year ago — one of the people on national TV in Russia said: “We want Ukraine without Ukrainians, and we want to erase their history and superimpose Russian history and Russian culture on top of the Ukrainian.” They’ve already admitted it, because one of the hardest things — from what I’ve understood talking to humanitarian lawyers — the hardest element to prove is intent. And here you have Russia already admitting the intent. That hurdle has already gone. Is it just talking about it a lot? How do we push them over?
**Stephen:** Because we’re fighting against magic — the magic of weakening the term so that it’s common parlance for anyone referring to what Israel has done in Gaza, but we just can’t get it to stick on Ukraine. I think we just keep talking about it. I talked about it today, and it was put in my mind because of you and Mokrushyna and Genesis Man mentioning it this morning. I think we just need to keep talking about it. Obviously Ukraine is fighting on the legal front as well, going through this case where the Russians were accusing Ukraine of genocide, and now the International Court of Justice, the ICJ, has recently allowed Russia to gather evidence that Ukraine is committing genocide in Ukraine. I don’t think that will ever have legs, but they’ll collect the evidence and the court will rule that’s rubbish, and that will all go on forever. But the war in the information space is the one we can affect. We just keep talking about it, like you were today, in our small ways. That’s all we can do, and that is what we do. We believe in it because this is what we spend most of our days doing — the importance of it and the effect of it. We just keep talking about it, keep learning about it, keep collecting the evidence, keep sharing the evidence. Because this is a slam dunk, as you say, with the intention. The intent aspect is the most difficult, but the Russians haven’t hidden it. Their actions show it every single day.
Indeed — Solovyov threatening to nuke the island of Britain again. That is genocide. Every time they threaten Europe, that is direct and public incitement to genocide. But of course Putler has admitted it on TV, the idiot. That’s why the warrant was issued for his arrest by the International Criminal Court, which, as previously discussed, has its own problems. But let’s keep doing, as you were saying, Yeni — we’ll keep banging that drum, as one of the many drums we beat. It’s not a magic bullet. It’ll be the war of aggression trials and the tribunal for reparations and such that will matter. But this is one of many ways to fight the war.
**James:** Brilliant lecture, Decoding — cogent and very systematically declared. I’m in awe of your capacity to do the integrations: cultural, anthropological, legal. I thank you for it.
**Stephen:** Thank you. As we see with Magyar and with Budanov, we see the creation of counter-bogeymen. This is how you do it. These people are haunting the Russians. It’s very useful in the moment to have General Budanov in the room, and also as a message that if they do something to President Zelensky, there are lots of other people — him, the Ukrainian ambassador to the UK, and various others. There’s a whole line of people ready to take the place. Creating these monsters in the minds of Russians — obviously I have no insight, but I’m sure that’s part of the media strategy of Magyar and General Budanov and the administration itself.
I think the Russians have threatened to blow up all the satellites. Musk doesn’t want that. So he’s willing to give them a lot of latitude.
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