Counter Disinfolklore

Controlling War Magic

Part I - Disinfolklore: Bridge to the House of Lies

Image Credit: @exileoftza on X

Chapter One - Færytale Beginning

My intuition about Disinfolklore first manifested while I was a peacekeeping diplomat. Between 2015 and 2018, I was posted on a bridge spanning the eastern Ukrainian Donets River at Stanitsia Luhanska. That wooden and iron bridge was the only pedestrian crossing place between Russia-occupied Luhansk and the rest of Ukraine. Ten thousand civilians – mostly older women, children and those unlikely to be pressganged into military service by Russian occupiers – traversed it daily.

For several years my job was negotiating local ceasefires between the armed Russian bridge trolls unlawfully occupying the south bank of the river, and with the Ukrainian soldiers defending the northern shore. We whose fate it was to participate in the daily array of diabolical dramas staged there by Russian war lords became like stock characters in a long-running soap opera. The cast of players acting out roles in this tragicomedy included diplomats, mercenaries, traders, soldiers, Russian occupiers, spies, and ordinary folk just like you and me.

The folkloric resonances of the situation were glaring. Most famous troll tales in our culture derive from “Three Billy-Goats’ Gruff.” Three goats successively attempt to negotiate passage across a bridge guarded by a troll. That fable is itself a folkloric reflex of a much older legend in Indo-European culture.

In ancient Iranian religion, at the time of death, we approach Chinvat bridge. Chinvat is guarded by Daenā. If Daenā appears as a beautiful woman, she brings the soul of the righteous human over the cosmic mountain safely, and we will pass into the eternal heavenly House of Songs. The souls of those who have lived evil lives, though, will be attacked by the witch and will fall as demons into the dark, cold ravine, or “House of Lies” that is Hell (or Russia-occupied Ukraine). Yes, if the bridge narrows as we approach it to the width of a sword blade and Daenā is a witch, we shall spend eternity in the hellish House of Lies.

I was a living character in the daily re-enactment of one or other of these stories. Arriving there each morning, I could never be sure which version the Russians had scripted for the day. Amid the trolling artillery and mortar duels that could erupt any time in the one-and-a-half-mile stretch of roadway that ran through no-man’s land to and from the river, I was always on the lookout for Daenā. Some days the Russian army bridge trolls would manifest seductive charm.

At other times they epitomized demonic witches with their proud boasts about how they had, overnight, dispatched Ukrainian soldier giants to the House of Lies. Some days the fates assigned me a walk-on part as one of the two luckless Billy Goats who through deceptive means negotiate safe passage through the checkpoints of bridge-guarding Russian army trolls. Sometimes, I found myself in the role of Solomon, accidentally invoking the right formula of words to dissuade the Russian army bridge trolls from devouring Ukrainian civilians.

Nobody would voluntarily cross that infernal bridge. “Coercive control” describes Russia’s main governance technique perfectly^[1].

Like an ultraviolent spouse or the evilest monarch imaginable, Russia conjured up a state of desperation inside its victims’ minds, usually through physical, economic, psychological, or sexual violence (and often all four). Then, Russia would offer conditional access to a sub-standard escape route from the terror its own actions had wrought. As was the case for those unlucky enough to be forced into crossing the bridge, usually whichever “solution” Russia offered to the hateful predicaments it created for its victims itself involved running a gauntlet of one sort or another.

Russia would always look for credit for salving the pain it has caused. If any damsel Russia’s violent coercive control strategies had distressed had the temerity to refuse their persecutors’ proffered assistance, then Russia used that refusal as an excuse for further violence against its subjects. Russia, as a state, attempted coercively to control Ukraine, by holding to ransom its people living in Russia-occupied Ukraine, the parts of its land it occupied, and by perverting the way other states perceived Ukraine. Russia, by violently and militarily occupying Europe’s largest nuclear power plant and threatening again and again to blow it up attempted coercively to control the whole continent of Europe.

Disinfolklore infused with the subtle energy of Russia’s signature Coercive Control Mana was how Russia pulled off this feat of intimidating our entire civilisation into accepting its genocide of Ukrainians. Each Russian official from its unelected dictator Putin down to its lowliest torturer in one of dozens of torture chambers uncovered whenever Russia retreated from parts of Ukraine it had occupied practised coercive control tactics on individual Ukrainians. Immanent in all their activities, including linguistic and visual memes, was the Mana of Coercive Control.

If you do not recognise the word “Mana,” please do not worry. We will soon turn back to its meaning in greater detail.

Suffice it to say, for now, it is a founding assumption of Counter Disinfolklore that the Mana of folklore is discernible in Russian (and other forms of divisive) propaganda and disinformation! The Mana of folklore from the Indo-European cultural zone that stretches from Ireland to India is, briefly:

·      Stories that embed an Inner / Outer Realm division in our minds, with invaders from the Outer Realm said to be threatening the sovereignty, security, and sustainability of our Inner Realm.

Folklore is immanent in our information spheres much more frequently than we, perhaps, recognise. Let us apply the Lenses of the Disinfolklore analytical method to the long-running campaign by the foreign-owned anti-migrant media against England’s prince who married an American princess: English (half-blood?) prince Harry married outside the tribe. A self-made, black American princess threatened Inner Realm England’s sense of itself. English Rose and Inner Realm crown princess is portrayed as threatened by Outer Realm princess. Their house - Frogmore Cottage - in the grounds of the monarch’s castle is taken from them. The threat is neutered, using Disinfolklore that paints Harry and Meghan as villains. Half-Blood prince, along with black American princess and their half-blood child, are expelled to Outer Realm of Hollywood, California. It is very easy to see how categories we learn from folklore reappear in that tale - because real life characters occupy the same positions in an actual royal family. In Counter Disinfolklore we shall learn to see the folkloric structures immanent in propaganda masquerading as news of almost every kind, and in particular in Russian Disinfolklore.

The repeating pattern (or routine) of Coercive / Control Mana-laden communications is immanent in the Russian state’s rhetoric, its actions, and in the language and activities of individual actors operating on behalf of the Russian state. This coercive control routine shone through the antics of Russia as a permanent member of the United Nations security council in every security council session, and in the quotidian situations I found myself in on the bridge. The entire bridge tragedy in which I played a walk-on role for three years was an emanation of Russian coercive control strategy.

The only reason the Russian and Ukrainian armies faced off at that geographical point was because Russia had invaded Ukraine. Russia was holding the Ukrainian land it occupied (occupied in the sense of the Geneva Conventions, which govern the laws of war and how military occupations must operate) and the Ukrainians who lived there to ransom: Conform to our diktats which violate the Geneva Conventions, or Russia will exile, torture, detain, starve, or kill you. Now that Russia had invaded Ukraine, Russia could not simply let people pass over the bridge unmolested - that would be against its nature as a coercive control addict. Russia had to use the bridge as a means of coercively controlling, herding, tuning, and conditioning the behaviour of everyone involved in that demi-monde.

As in all matters in Counter Disinfolklore, there is an objective, agreed, and lawful standard against which to judge Russia’s actions at that bridge: the Geneva Conventions stipulate that occupiers must allow those living under occupation to leave the occupation unmolested. Every day I bore witness, on behalf of the international community, to Russia’s violations of multiple international legal obligations.

Russia, like any grievance-mining gaslighting wifebeater, also blamed its victim Ukraine for the consequences of Russia’s own law breaking. In promoting the troll that someone else was responsible for the choices Russia made to continue its unlawful and violent occupation of Ukraine’s land, Russia (and the individual army bridge trolls under its command) were executing one of its main objectives in Ukraine: the creation and entrenchment of physical and mental separation between previously united Ukrainians either side of the Donets. Then, in 2015, I had no idea why Russia was using its monopoly in the information space inside Russia occupied Ukraine to ignite in the minds of Ukrainians left in occupied Ukraine the idea that other Ukrainians belonged to an Outer Realm and that such Outer Realm Ukrainians wanted to kill those Ukrainians left inside the occupation. Later, we will understand how important the Disinfolklore content propagated through Russia’s propaganda apparatus is in concealing genocide.

Russia, like an evil monarch in a færy tale, had trapped over one million Ukrainians inside a ten-thousand-square-kilometre prison in the parts of Ukraine that it occupied after its February 2014 invasion. Enclosed in this giant concentration camp, with walls concealed by Disinfolklore, Russia exercised the full panoply of coercive control strategies which I now recognize as preparatory acts to genocide. A core enabling condition of Russia’s Ukrainian genocide was its Disinfolklore production and propagation apparatus inside occupied Ukraine, as well as Russia’s use of Disinfolklore inside the information space of countries which are duty bound, by law, to act to prevent genocide. Counter Disinfolklore will often reference the vast array of propaganda inside occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2023 which it was my job to collect and interpret.

At first, the content I had to collect, parse, and interpret each day was mesmerizingly confusing. It was non-sensical, in many cases. There were repeated stories about ten thousand “Polish mercenaries” assembling in localities near the bridge which I would be ordered to visit by my supervisors where I would only find a few mystified village elders. There was the “Luxury Sausage Troll Saga” which I will tell you about later. The “Cut Into Tiny Pieces”episode that I was sent by my bosses to investigate was so preposterous that it led directly to my detection of Disinfolklore which, again, we will look at later. I did not know then what experts in folklore wrote about the Lapplanders who use imaginative stories to inculcate their children with rules to keep them safe:

“When children are very small the Lapp parents give them rules to follow. These rules are often hidden in stories or tales. The stories are told by the elderly Lapps to the children. One story tells about the Big Sea Snake that lives in the deep and very cold fjeld-tarn. When the Big Sea Snake finds a child alone on the shore, she may come up from the depth and swallow that child. One story advises every small child to keep a little bell in their belt. When moving outside the village the bell must be jingling to keep the Mountain witch away.”

Russian Disinfolklore operates using the same methods to conceal its meanings long enough for them to become a part of the minds of those who uncritically read and share its engaging trolls. I possess a huge collection of the daily array of Disinfolklore emanating from Russia’s “media” outlets and troll farms inside Russia-occupied Ukraine. Content from this data set, with which I shall illustrate the Disinfolklore analytical method for parsing Russian Disinformation, successfully brainwashed Ukrainians in occupied Ukraine. Our leaders, too, and our people, outside Ukraine, were expertly targeted by individual and mass media borne Disinfolklore. This Russian Disinfolklore concealed itself in jokey memes or stories about jokey characters like the drunk former president Medvedyev. It communicated into our minds rules as effectively as those immanent in the stories Lapplander elders shared with their communities’ children. Russian Disinfolklore affected how we interpreted the reality of Russia’s genocide in Ukraine. And it was so effective our communities were bamboozled into tolerating Russia’s unlawful genocidal military occupation of Ukraine for far too long.

It is a noted phenomenon that Counter Disinfolklore will use for our benefit that we can switch between the macro (the Russian state) operating in coercive control governance mode to the micro (how Russian army bridge trolls controlling access and egress from the bridge). Regardless of which domain Russian Disinfolklore was operating against and inside, immanent in its strategic trolling were meanings that amounted to the same coercive control techniques for terrorising the people over whom they had power. This specific model of power exercise through Coercive Control permeates all Russian interrelationships at the micro- (within the family), meso- (within organizations), and macro- (in politics) levels. In the activities and rhetoric of the Nordic Russian troll king Putin himself the micro (Putin’s grievance-mining, ultimatum-legislating rhetoric often embodied the stance of the wounded wife-beater) and the macro (almost every time he spoke Putin accused some country or other of tricking Russia and of humiliating it as a justification for engaging in threats or violence against those states) often fused. In June of 2023 troll monarch Putin made a speech to a gathering of Russian journalists in which he listed at least twelve moments in recent Russian history when, according to Putin, he had been betrayed by another country: 2003, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.

There is a comic dimension to this: someone who Russian Disinfolklore represents as a monarch of Solomonesque wisdom being, according to their own account, fooled so repeatedly. There is also a sinister (“sinister” semantically translates as “left”) aspect to it. The Mana in such grievance mining nonsense, we should become aware, is very effective in connecting, emotionally, with certain kinds of personalities (who are high on the neurotic psychological spectrum) who themselves feel victimised by the world. Such obsessive grievance-mining is also, almost always, a pretext to threatening or executing harms upon those who are being accused of such invented betrayals.

For example, in February 2022, as international lawyers looking for evidence of the intention to genocide Ukraine have noted Putin likened Ukraine to a Dead Woman:

“‘Like it or not, take it, my beauty,’ a reference to a vulgar Russian rhyme about necrophiliac rape, implying an intention to inflict similar destruction on Ukraine and a view of Ukraine as a corpse.^[2]

The “vulgar Russian rhyme” Putin was referencing has obvious Disinfolklore connotations. It is a Soviet-era lyric from a Russian band:

“Sleeping beauty in a coffin, I crept up and f**ked her. Like it, or dislike it, sleep my beauty.”

One-and-a-half-million Ukrainians had permanently escaped Russia-occupied Ukraine from March 2014, often with just the clothes on their back. I worked with many of these internally displaced people. My favourite, most competent and trust-worthy translators were those who had left their lives (and in some cases their families) behind them in Russia-occupied Ukraine. They understood that remaining in Russia-occupied Ukraine would mean either compromising their values as modern Europeans or suffering torture, death, unjust detention, or worse. They understood, given Ukraine’s experience during its occupation by Russia during Soviet times, that there is no way to live freely when Russia is occupying your land. I could be, relatively speaking, confident that having lost everything because of Russia’s invasion, that such colleagues were not paid Russian agents trying to manipulate the contents of my reports into pro-Russia sentiment.

I also lived in Russia-occupied Luhansk city. While there I worked with many Ukrainians who had remained inside Russia-occupied Ukraine, because they had elderly parents who would not leave. Others expected the occupation would not last very long. Many did not have the foresight to imagine the horrors the occupation would bring. Still others, I suspected, were willing and ideologically aligned collaborators. Many who remained inside Russia-occupied Ukraine both before and after the full-scale invasion of February 2022 were coerced, passively or actively, to collaborate with the Russian occupiers. They, like all of us, were victims of Russian Disinfolklore. Yet, unlike us who lived outside Russia’s totalitarian-controlled information space, those living inside Russia-occupied land were subjected to unrelenting Disinfolklore that eventually brainwashed all but the most resilient minds into, eventually, surrendering to the Russian fist. The vastly confusing, effective, and psychologically sophisticated techniques that pro-Russia colleagues used to sabotage my work (and the work of teams I participated on) helped me discover Disinfolklore. I owe to these colleagues - traitors that they were to humanity and to their country - a lot. The ordeals they put me (and other colleagues through) were of immense value in, for example, helping me understand the continuities between the techniques used in online trolling and in interpersonal communications. For them, Kyiv, London, New York, Paris, or Berlin were not shining cities on the hill; Moscow was.

Those who surrender their minds to Russian Disinfolklore’s rules, diktats, and “logic” become compromised by the many and escalating pacts with the devil that living under Russia’s coercive control involved. What applied to those living in 1930s Nazi Germany as stated in Sebastian Haffner’s 1939 memoire published under the name “Defying Hitler” could be said of those who collaborate with and become compromised by Russian Disinfolklore:

“Just a little pact with the devil — and you were no longer one of the captured quarry. Instead, you were one of the victorious hunters. That was the simplest and crudest temptation. Many succumbed to it. Later they often found that the price to be paid was higher than they had thought and that they were no match for the real Nazis. There are many thousands of them today in Germany, Nazis with a bad conscience. People who wear their Nazi badges like Macbeth wore his royal robes, who, in for a penny, in for a pound, now find their consciences shouldering one burden after another, who search in vain for a way out, drink and take sleeping pills, no longer dare to think, and do not know whether they should rather pray for the end of the Nazi era — their own era! — or dread it.”

 In later chapters we will see how such brainwashing convinced those who remained behind that other Ukrainians hated them. And for many, over time, this sense of being threatened by the other reached such a crescendo that Russia was able to recruit them into its army to fight against the Ukrainian army. Russian Disinfolklore created an Inner Realm in the information space of occupied Ukraine that was defined by the idea that the sovereignty, security, and sustainability of occupied Ukraine was under mortal threat from an Outer Realm constituted of the rest of Ukraine. Then, this Inner Realm / Outer Realm division became a part of the consciousness of the population who were being stewed in this engaging nonsense. Their minds became afflicted with mythical threats that engage their anger, fear, disgust, and sadness.

I was studying Russian Disinfolklore each day as part of my job so that I could advise my supervisors on the threat environment that might affect our diplomatic teams on the bridge and elsewhere in and around Russia-occupied Luhansk. Much of this Inner / Outer Realm Disinfolklore also provoked enjoyment in the minds of those subjected to wave after wave after wave of it. I could never understand why the Russian controlled media outlets would paint endlessly gory images through their Disinfolklore of the deaths of Ukrainian soldier defenders, often in events I knew had never happened. I was at the bridge at the time when a Massive Attack that was reported in Russian Disinfolklore was supposed to have occurred. Yet I saw nothing. On the information plane, such mythical events though fed the primal emotions of those who were enveloped within their hypnotic grasp in the same way as a child who’s read a scary story before bedtime might see monsters everywhere for months afterwards. Layer upon layer of fake reports, propagated day after day, for years on end operated to teach their consumers to enjoy the deaths and agony of their fellow Ukrainians from non-Russia-occupied territory. Normal civilised and good people became changed by this Disinfolklore which had dehumanised their fellow Ukrainians living across the Donets River into creatures who only deserved punishment.

So this Inner / Outer Realm bordering entered minds from the Disinfolklore and then flowed outwards into dividing families. I remember the moment I first noticed this phenomenon. In March 2015 I and my colleagues were speaking to some villagers in an area close to the Donets River in Ukrainian government-controlled territory. One of the women I was speaking to told me that she had stopped communicating with her sister who lived in Russia. When her Russia resident sister had continued to repeat trolls she had picked up from Russian media about Nazis in Ukraine killing Russian language speaking Ukrainians, the villager I was chatting with would say: “Sister dear, these matters you speak of are not real. Why do you believe the television over your own sister?! I have never lied to you. We lived in peace here, until the Russians invaded.”

I also remember what I thought when I heard that tale. I was thinking: gosh, that is a strange phenomenon which could never happen in America, or England, Ireland, or any culture that I know well. This was 2015. Trump-Brexitism had not happened yet. Families and marriages would be torn asunder over arguments about subjects that very few people had cared about before being radicalised by media borne Disinfolklore. And when I began to pick up signals about this division in England and America that was being stoked by Disinfolklore from early 2016 onwards, gradually I began to understand that what that lady in the village near the Donets had told me had occurred between her and her sister to spoil their relationship was also happening at home: families were being torn asunder after they internalised different interpretations of Trump-Brexit Disinfolklore. If you watched with surprise at how England and America had been trolled into existential division by Trump-Brexitism from late 2015 onwards, then, you at least have an experience of how successful Disinfolklore works (and of how randomly constructed counter Disinfolkore is not enough to counter it).

Expertly targeted Disinfolklore can move our minds towards accepting crimes against our fundamental rights. Part of the issue is that cynics with authority (who are often high on the Social Dominance psychological scale) know that they can use Disinfolklore to mobilise followers who are high on the Writ Wing Authoritarian psychological scale. They understand that with the correct messaging sufficient numbers of people can be provoked into supporting perversions of Good Governance, such as Trump-Brexitism, to make those perversions seem right enough in the minds of enough people to make them happen.

This sense of being under siege is an essential component of the Russian strategy of purporting to be the rescuer of the damsel whom Russia itself had led into a state of distress. We will see in later chapters how Russian Disinfolklore managed to convince Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Ukraine that it was Ukrainians who were threatening them, not the Russian occupiers. In occupied Ukraine, as elsewhere, the Russian Big Bad Wolf managed to manipulate the minds of its victims into becoming blind to the real threat (the Russians). Russian Disinfolklore even convinced Ukrainians to fight against a mythical threat that Russian Disinfolklore had conjured into being.

In a May 2023 interview Russian occupier leader Pavel Gubarev, who was sanctioned by the United States and the United Kingdom in 2014 for participating in Russia’s occupation of Ukraine, stated:

“Now there is no such category at all as an adult male aged twenty-five to fifty-five years… That is, in fact, Donetsk is a deserted (of adult men) territory. Those who did not have time to leave were mobilized by Russians and among them were huge losses. And these people continue to be ‘mowed down’ in senseless frontal attacks, the so-called ‘meat assaults’.”

To be clear: this is the testimony of someone who supported and supports Russia’s occupation of Donetsk. Donetsk city hosted the European Cup football championships in 2012. It was a normal Central European city. Many of those who had eagerly queued for tickets to the match held there were destined to be brainwashed and die just a few years later as executioners of Russia’s genocide against their fellow Ukrainians. I mention this to highlight how, in the words of Ukrainian author Anatoly Kuznetsov in his first-hand account of the German Nazi occupation of Kyiv from 1941 and their murder of one million Ukrainian Jewish community members:

“I have not told about anything exceptional, but only about ordinary things that were part of a system; things that happened just yesterday, historically speaking, when people were exactly as they are today.”

If these things that happened on that bridge, in Luhansk, and in Donetsk while I was in Ukraine could be provoked into being by Disinfolklore, then, there is no reason on Lugh’s earth to believe, they will not happen in the peaceful village, town, city, county or living room in which you are reading my words today.

In February 2014 hundreds-of-thousands of Donetsk male residents participated in the Euro-Maidan protests urging the then pro-Russia president of Ukraine to be impeached. Today, eight-years later, that city and the part of its region the Russians occupy is completely denuded of males between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-five. I call this process that has been operating in Ukraine since February 2014 “Stealth Genocide.”

Russia’s creeping genocide in Ukraine was stealthy because not even I, a highly educated international lawyer, categorised what I witnessed as such. I who experienced a three-year-long fever dream on that bridge never, in my wildest nightmares, suspected that what I was seeing each day in Donetsk’s sister region of Luhansk was a preparation, through brainwashing Disinfolklore, for the genocide of Ukrainians by Ukrainians, at the behest of the Russians.

When I look back at what I was witnessing now with the benefit of hindsight I find myself in the position of someone in 1943 watching trains on the way to Auschwitz pass by their garden. We think of course we would recognise genocide when we saw it. Yet, genocides are made up of heaps of dual-use moments. If we do not witness the gory deaths, we will not know that when we see the trains full of people on their way to what we are told is a work camp is one of the key moments in the genocide. Pattern Recognition is a skill good counter Disinfolklorists need to develop. If you are scanning for the early warning indicators of an exact replica for the genocide Germany implemented against millions of Ukrainians (including one million Ukrainian Jewish community members) between 1941 and 1945 today, then you may well, as I did, miscategorise the totality of the elements of which Russia’s current genocide is made up. Each holocaust and each genocide has different traits. While you are inside a genocide, unless you are scanning for the Mana of genocide, you may miss it. Alas too many today, around the world, have yet to realise that there is genocide in Ukraine. As one meme circulating since March 2022 (when it became clear Russia was executing genocide against Ukrainians) puts it:

“If you ever wondered what you would have done to prevent the holocaust, well, you’re doing it now.”

Those Donetsk residents - Ukrainians - who were to perish in the pointless “meat assaults” were radicalised by Disinfolklore. They became part of a system designed by Russia in Ukraine from 2014 onwards that would force them after 24^th February 2022 into participating in endless “meat assaults.” Their destiny was to be killed by their fellow Ukrainians lawfully defending their country’s territorial integrity and freedom from Russian occupation. And Disinfolklore was the method of propelling them towards a destiny few could have imagined was possible when in 2012 Donetsk hosted the European football championships.

This is what is at stake in Counter Disinfolklore: Controlling War Magic. If Russia can achieve that dastardly feat in Donetsk using Disinfolklore, Russia and other bad actors could, similarly, convince, using Disinfolklore, any population group of humans anywhere to participate in genocide against members of their own community. The United States embassy in Vienna quoted the following words spoken by Gubarev in a film released in October 2022:

“…if you [Ukrainians] don’t want to be convinced [that Russia should rule Ukraine], we’ll kill you. We’ll kill as many as we have to: one million, five million, or exterminate all of you.”^[3]

These are sentiments which reflect official Russian state policy as enunciated by senior Russian officials, including the Nordic Russian troll king Putin, and as executed by their minions who murdered hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians after 24^th February 2022. As an aside and to show how folklore is never far from any of our subject matter it’s worth adding that before 2014 Gubarev ran a company that supplied Santa Claus costumes in the Donetsk region.

I had a ringside seat while Russian Disinfolklore brainwashed some Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Ukraine into thinking, wrongly, their fellow Ukrainians wanted to kill them. There is a similar pattern of designed division we have seen with less deadly consequences (so far) rising elsewhere in the world. And if we can pinpoint how powerful Disinfolklore created and embedded division inside eastern Ukrainian society, where none before had existed, then, we will have a better chance to recognize and defeat similar efforts elsewhere.

Those Ukrainians who remained behind in Russia-occupied Ukraine after the 2014 invasion were kept, by Russia, on subsistence diets. In its classic victim-blaming way Russian Disinfolklore propagated myths that Ukraine was starving those under occupation. In international law a military occupier is responsible for provisioning those living under occupation. Russia then portrayed itself in its Disinfolklore as the Knight in Shining Armour when it sprinkled a few breadcrumbs inside a community that had had no problems accessing food or fresh drinking water before Russia invaded.

Russia destroyed private enterprise in the areas it occupied. Every family, unless they had an entitlement to a Ukrainian social welfare system payment, became dependent on the occupiers for their subsistence. Russia was able to exile, torture, kill, or imprison anyone who expressed dissent inside Russia-occupied Ukraine. Or Russia’s coercive control operated more subtly. People understood that if they spoke out, they would lose their Russian-state funded job. They and their family would have no means to live on. This was another manifestation of the Russian coercive control governance model.

Russia ruined the economic viability of those parts of Ukraine it occupied by disassembling the factories and exporting their machinery as scrap metal. Through negligence and the looting of valuable water pumping equipment Russia destroyed the viability of coal mines in the region. By August 2022, there was no freshwater left in Donetsk city - online resources spoke of Donetsk residents waiting for rain to collect water to drink, cook with, wash their clothes, and flush loos. Prior to being occupied by Russia in April 2014 Donetsk, then a city of over one million souls, had ample fresh water.

Often the only means of subsistence for families stuck in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2014 and 2023 were the Ukrainian pensions of their older relatives. In desperation, those entitled to social welfare payments from Ukraine needed to risk their lives on the bridge to collect these payments in free Ukraine. This was the context of my job in Stanitsia Luhanska. I provided what is known in human rights work as “protection by presence.” The assumption was that merely by seeing me and my fellow peace-keeping diplomats there each day, Russia would be less likely to fire their weapons or behave contrary to the laws of war.

Occasionally, the similarity between the Donets and the ancient Greek rivers of the Acheron and Styx which separated the afterlife from our world manifested with ridiculous clarity. For example, I often performed a bit part as the Heroic Healer. I would resolve endless negotiations over a ceasefire at the bridge so a dying person could be brought from one shore to the other by, like Charon, helping to ferry the person on a stretcher myself.

Some days I was the fool, there to absorb, calmly and humiliatingly, the trolling, rhetorical slings and arrows fired at me by angry, cold, bedraggled, and ragged-trousered Russian occupiers. I was, for the Russian occupiers, as out of place there as I was for myself. To them I was a scapegoat; a tangible emissary embodying everything their Disinfolklore told them to hate of the Western world. I was no longer human. I was a stereotyped Other. I was the unbelonging Outer Realm foreigner whose endless stupidity in their world was a source of limitless mirth. In Russian parlance I was the “idiot” and a “superfluous man.” As Dostoyevsky had portrayed in his novel entitled “The Idiot” such roles in Russian society are held by those who would refuse to play along and pretend the corruption and savagery was acceptable.

Sometimes I wore the mantle of “Hostage,” ambiguously held captive for hours by Russian bridge trolls who were trying to make one point or another to my diplomatic mistresses and masters in Vienna. And, yes, some days actual goats crossed the bridge, and negotiating their safe passage was every bit as fraught and difficult as it was for the three billy-goats of lore. 

This was a liminal zone. A fault-line between two civilizations. When mists rose over the Donets of an early winter morning, the Muses incanted a clumsily portentous song. In ancient Irish and Welsh mythology looming fog portends Otherworldly journeys. That bridge, like Hades in Greek mythology, performed the function of a portal between two opposed realities. On one side a Russia-occupied totalitarian fake “state.” And on the other, democratic Ukraine.

Even the name of this eastern-most region of Ukraine “Luhansk” summoned the supreme Celtic god Lugh / Lugus, who is memorialised in English culture as King Lear. For a millennium before Christ Lugh’s writ had run from Ukraine as far west as Ireland and as far south as the Pillars of Hercules.

The Donetsk region of Ukraine takes its name from the Donets River. Like Crimea and Luhansk, Donetsk had been partly occupied by the Russians since 2014. Donetsk also had a name associated with pre-Christian Indo-European religion. According to an early eighth century Irish text, Donn was the deity for whom all poetry was composed – “poetry” was that era’s Disinfolklore, and counter Disinfolklore. The caste of poet in early Irish, as in early Indian society, and across the whole of the Indo-European cultural zone, also performed the role of singing praises and justifying the rightful reign of their monarch, through songs, incantations, legislation, prayers, and propagating the official history of the regimes they served and conjured into being. The *lex lexeme that means “law” across communities which speak Indo-European languages manifests in the words “Legend,” “Lore,” “Legitimate,” and “Legislation. Knowing this, it is easier to see how sovereignty depends on the lawyer, law-giver, legend-teller (or, as we might say today, Disinfolklorist), sermon-delivering priest (Magi), philosopher, and poet in Indo-European cultures. As a law student I was taught through common law cases that were essentially stories carefully structured so that the principles immanent in them could be elucidated. Often legal, poetic, story-telling, and rhetorical skills have been mastered (Magistered) and ministered by the same person whose importance in administering a state run in accordance with the Indo-European model of Good Governance cannot be overstated.

In the “Book of Invasions” the twelfth century Irish scribes wrote down a much older story of Ireland’s conquest by the Milesians. Those monks told of how Donn’s grandfather had been the king of Scythia (an old name for Ukraine). Even today, Ukraine’s great rivers sound for Donn: the Don, which in antiquity marked Europe’s border with Asia, flowed through Ukraine’s historical lands into the Azov Sea. I lived for four years on the banks of the Dniepr (Don Hyper) river that, like the Danube and the Dniester (Don Istris), also flows through Ukraine, and into the Black Sea.

In pre-Christian Irish religion Donn was the first Irish king to die. Donn drowned himself when, after defiantly and proudly speaking of his qualities to the wind, he refused to take shelter from the storm. Donn’s boat had been just beyond the seventh wave from the island of Ireland. Espying the incoming invaders, the then occupiers of the island - the Tuatha de Danaan, the community who worshipped the Goddess Danu - used War Magic to summon a storm - soon we shall look at hyper-modernity’s manifestations of such War Magic.  Despite Donn’s death, his brothers, including Érimón, guardian of Ireland’s Mana, and Amergin, Ireland’s first judge, druid, poet, and magician king, landed and, overcoming the Tuatha de Danann’s War Magic, defeated them in battle.

Donn like many other founding kings of Indo-European cultures (for example, Odin, Yama, Yima, Ymir, Brennnos (Bran and Brân), Rymus (and Romulus), *Yemo) sacrificed himself so that the culture he would found could thrive. Donn, like Odin, Yama, Yima, and Ymir, became a Lord of Death. When it is time for Irish people to die, Donn welcomes us into the afterlife which was known in Irish culture as the “House of Donn” and is located off the south-west coast of Ireland. We will return to this idea later, particularly as the Russian army Nazi-ideology worshipping “Wagner” unit’s Disinfolklore production factories often wrote of their dead soldiers going to Odin, the Germanic / Norse God shamanic, trickster, Lord of Death, and God of runes who is memorialised as our Wednesday (*Wodhanaz Dyēus). Odin / Woden / Wodhanaz (there are many different spellings of his name whose “din” element is, incidentally, cognate with Donn) killed himself by hanging, through nine days and nights, stuck with spear, on a windswept World Tree by the Royal Mound in Uppsala, Sweden. One of the strangest accounts of this self-sacrifice so that his culture might live is in the ancient “Havamal” where Odin himself characterises his self-sacrifice as an act in which “myself (was) given to myself.”

During the summer of 2022, a Ukrainian missile strike on one of the Chef of Disinfolklore’s “Wagner” army bases in Russia-occupied Popasna killed the head of its Disinfolklore propagating online Greyzone social media channel. Russia’s genocidal soldiers in Ukraine then consoled themselves over the death that he had gone to “Odin’s army.”

Lugh, Donn (and Odin) were aspects of the ancient Ukrainian supreme sovereign deity “Sky Father.” In the Ancient Ukrainian language (Proto-Indo European) from which all Indo-European languages evolved *Dyēus pḥᵃtḕr (literally: “Sky Father”) is how we today write the sound Ancient Ukrainians used to invoke this deity (even the words “day” and “deity” come from the *Dyēus part of Sky Father’s moniker). Dis Pater, whom Caesar said the Celts worshipped, the Greek supreme God of Zeus Pater and the supreme Roman God Iuppiter (Jupiter) were, along with Lugh, Donn, and Odin functional, cultural, and religious descendants of Ancient Ukraine’s Sky Father.

Often while I crossed the Donets River, I would see Ukrainians with their possessions in Dunnes Stores plastic reusable shopping bags. I was perhaps one of the only people ever on that bridge who knew that Dunnes Stores was a chain of Irish shops named for a family whose name demonstrated descent from Donn (I never did solve the mystery about how someone in Russia-occupied Ukraine had gotten what must have been many thousands of Dunnes Stores bags).

Perhaps I was predisposed to associate scenes in Arcadian rural Central Europe with folklore. Until this unasked-for war against Ukraine came to visit, the biosphere reserve which surrounded the bridge at Stanitsia Luhanska was as idyllic a place as you are likely to find on Lugh or Donn’s earth. It was an archetypical Locus Amoenus (“Pleasant Spot”) that, like Virgil’s Calypso or the scene-setting for Plato’s Phaedras contained trees and shade, grassy meadows, running water, songbirds, and cool breezes. The original Elysian field in ancient Greek lore had been physically located in what today is called Ukraine. The land of the Hyperboreans to which the God Apollo, son of Greece’s supreme God, Zeus Pater, commuted on a pair of swans from Mount Olympus lay along the Black and Azov Sea coast of ancient Ukraine, an area I would get to know very well after my three years on that bridge. Before the Russian invasion, this narrow and forgotten thoroughfare that ran to and from the bridge had divided only peaceful meadow steppe, woods and riverbanks overhung by willows. Trolling and fly fishers baited prey in the Donets, a river known since antiquity as running close to the edge of Europe’s border with Asia.

Such halcyon scenery would have been a worthy inspiration for the backdrops of any Christmas season pantomime, Tolstoy village story, Brothers’ Grimm folktale, or traditional Disney amusement park experience. Except that, wherever you zoomed in, you would have seen signs warning of landmines, soldiers carrying guns, and heroic mothers pretending to their children, as they navigated narrow paths around the munitions strewn about everywhere, that everything was completely normal. Nothing in its existence since its last walk-on part in world history during the second world war had hinted that this one-and-a-half-kilometre long stretch of no-man’s land / grey zone would again host two of the greatest armies the world has ever known.

Maybe it was inevitable that I would be the first to notice the patterns of Disinfolklore swimming in the mesmerizing ocean of Disinformation that began to lap against all our lives from 2015 onwards. Much of the high art I loved had folkloric echoes. The composer Wagner, like most classical composers, had mined deep folk melodies that had been hummed for millennia for their great works. My late mother had read Tolstoy’s “Village Tales” to me when I was a child. It was one of her favourite books. I read “Crime and Punishment” at law school. Raskolnikov was, like the Nordic Russian troll monarch Putin Disinfolklore character of our era, an ingenue dunce of a Saint Petersburg law student. He, like Putin, staked everything on getting away with murdering women, who may or may not be personifications of the Goddess Europa.

As a post-graduate student at Georgetown University, I had studied Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov.” Following a familiar folkloric pattern, three brothers representing different stereotypes vie with one another for the inheritance of their wicked father, who one of them kills. Ivan Karamazov is yet another stereotypical Russian dunce masquerading as a “Deep Thinker.” Ivan metaphorically tortures himself (and debauches his holy brother Alyosha’s saintly mind) with his obsessive messianic parsing of the apparent contradictions between ideas he had encountered as a student in “enlightened” western Europe and Russia’s values inculcated in him by his family’s slaves. 

As filtered through such literary renditions of folklore-like stories about the wickedness of (Russian) human nature, I was ever aware that the Ukrainian controlled land running north of my bridge stretching as far as the west of Ireland contained all that was bright and good in European civilisation. Yet, beyond the southern end of the bridge, lay Moscow-occupied land, shrouded in mediaeval darkness, as far as the coast of Japan.

The folkloric resonances of Russia’s “Little Green Men” 2014 invasion of Ukraine had erupted into my mind’s eye even before my seven-year tour of duty as a peacekeeping diplomat in eastern Ukraine (2015 – 2022) had begun. In March 2014 when I first heard a tale of unmarked Russian soldiers posing as “Polite Folk” and “Little Green Men” occupying Ukraine’s Crimea, I knew immediately which side of the law Russia’s act of aggression rested. I was, above all, an international lawyer trained at Cambridge University! No amount of propaganda, disinformation or what I now call Russian Disinfolklore could conceal the overriding truth that Russia had invaded Ukraine! I recall my immediate thought when I heard of the invasion (just as soon as I had located Crimea on a map) - If this unlawful military occupation stands, the entire post-World War Two legal order will fall apart. 

Note here my hubris! Bookmark this! My claim to be immune to Disinfolklore.  We will return to how such self-professed immunity is frequently an indicator of susceptibility to Disinfolklore (pride comes before a fall, and all that). None of the Ukrainians living in occupied Ukraine who had been subjected to eight years of Russian Disinfolklore-induced brainwashing would believe that they had been manipulated. In their minds it was their fellow Ukrainians in free Ukraine who had been manipulated. In February 2023 Associated Press printed transcripts of intercepted phone calls between Russian occupying soldiers in Bucha and their mothers:

“They blame the United States & recite conspiracy theories pushed by Russian state media. But Maxim and his mother believe it’s the Ukrainians who are deluded by fake news and propaganda, not them.”

This belief of Maxim and his mother illustrates a central problem that Counter Disinfolklore resolves for the first time: How do we know who is right here? How can we assess and decide whether it is the Ukrainians, as Maxim and his mother believe, who are brainwashed by Disinfolklore or, as most westerners would believe, Maxim, his mother, and those living under the cloak of Russian Disinfolklore who are hypnotised by nonsense?

In Counter Disinfolklore, as we shall see, we set out objective criteria that constitute a standard against which we can determine that Maxim and his mother, by supporting and participating in activities that contravene the settled consensus embodied by international law are indeed the brainwashed ones. It is also worth saying that an award-winning and forensic investigation published in the New York Times^[4] found that the huge dataset of intercepted phone calls between Russian occupiers in Bucha and their loved ones back in Russia had been collected because the Russians were using the phones of Ukrainians they had just executed. In another call Maxim tells his wife it’s easier to shoot civilians when he is drunk, and he admits to stealing phones from Ukrainian civilians. Therefore, if you ask me to make a call on whether Maxim and his mother’s analysis about who is living under a delusion - Russians or Ukrainians - leaving aside the fact I lived and worked in eastern Ukraine for seven years and found no evidence that Ukrainians were living under a mass delusion - I think beyond all reasonable doubt we can make the call that it is Maxim and his mother who have been mesmerised by nonsense.

Certainty that one is immune to Disinfolklore is an obstacle to recognising how susceptible we all are to having our Mana roiled, rolled, and trolled through emotionally resonant linguistic and visual memes. Understanding how Disinfolklore works to move our emotions (including that feeling of injured pride that is triggered when someone accuses you of having been manipulated by Disinfolklore) also helps us to create effective counter Disinfolklore. It is often said that it is easier to manipulate someone’s mind, than it is to convince someone that they have been trolled.

Counter Disinfolklore requires us to be always alert to the possibility that we are being manipulated. We must always consider how others might use our certainty we are invulnerable, our ego (injured pride) to target our psychological vulnerabilities with information that will provoke in us feelings of anger, fear, disgust, sadness, or enjoyment. When someone tells you how smart you are or what a good person you are, you experience enjoyment (unless you are, rightly, suspicious). While you bask in that sense of enjoyment, with your defences down, a charming and strategic interlocutor can smuggle in almost any troll directly into your mind. On the other hand, when we have been trolled into a state of fear or anger or great disgust, we suspend our ability to assess rationally the “solution” that is being offered to alleviate the fear a Disinfolklorist has provoked in our mind with some tale. Understanding how this works is an important aspect of Counter Disinfolklore.

It is a foundational tenet of Counter Disinfolklore that we are all susceptible to manipulation. I in fact am doing my best to troll you into continuing to read this text. I am trying to manipulate your intention to continue reading viaprovoking your emotions. “Manipulate” breaks down into the idea that I am trying to access your Mana and reprogramme it so that it orients you into reading Counter Disinfolklore.

My immediate motivation is to support Ukrainians freedom from genocide, Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and Ukraine’s possession of its own sovereignty, all of which are protected by international law. In “Sovereignty” is the element *Reg, which is a term that appears in every Indo-European language and culture - in English the Mana of *Reg is these sounds: “Right,” “Reign,” “Writ,” “Authority,” “Regime,” “Foreigner,” “Realm,” “Reich,” the “Rch” of “Monarchy,” “Security,” and “Regulation.” This means that these sounds are cognate with the *reign element in the English word “Sovereignty.” “Dieu et mon droit” is the French-language motto on the English monarch’s Coat of Arms - the “droit” in French signifies both “Law” and “Right.” If you say “Roi” (“King” in French), “Right,” and the “roit” in “Droit” you might notice that despite the different spellings they all sound similar.

*Reg means “Rod” in the earliest Indo-European language that we know. Because of this, we know that monarchy was symbolised as the monarch stretching out a straight rod that signified the right of the king (Rex in Latin, Rí in old Irish, and Raja in the ancient Indian language Sanskrit are cognates meaning they come from the same Common Source) to rule. In the most recent coronation of a monarch in England, its sovereign is photographed holding, in his right hand, a straight rod symbolising sovereignty. In England, there is only one sovereign - the Monarch - whereas in republics, sovereignty and right (the “re” in “Republic”) resides in the people or public, rather than in one sole human in whom the Mana of the entire community is invested.

When the troll rex Putin attempts to usurp Ukraine’s sovereignty by, as his forces tried on many occasions, aiming to assassinate Ukraine’s rightful ruler at the time of their full-scale invasion on February 24^th, 2022, what he was doing is attempting to claim the right to determine what is lawful rule in Ukraine - its sovereignty. By instigating in you, through Counter Disinfolklore, the means of supporting Ukraine’s sovereignty, as set out in international and municipal Ukrainian law, I am positive trolling you. The “positive” qualification of “trolling” corresponds to my intention to support the consensus of humanity as solidified into the post- World War Two legal framework governing the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states, international human rights law, international humanitarian law/laws of war, international criminal law and the laws governing crimes against humanity.

This standard of what is “Right” is also how we distinguish between Disinfolklore and counter Disinfolklore. Immanent in all forms of Disinfolklore is an intention to promote the violation of ancient taboos in Indo-European culture, as reified in that post-World War Two legal consensus. Disinfolklore seeks to legitimate Russia’s unlawful occupation of Ukraine, whereas counter Disinfolklore works to undermine such Disinfolklore.

Since Russia is unashamedly working against international law therefore Russia’s messaging supporting its violations of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the United Nations charter, laws governing Crimes Against Humanity, International Criminal law and International Human Rights law is Disinfolklore. I believe that the more people there are who can understand what I learned while working monitoring and reacting to Russian Disinfolklore in eastern Ukraine, the more resilient our democracies will be. This is my intention. The Mana or identifiable energy of my intention should be immanent in everything I write in Counter Disinfolklore.

Likewise, when you are assessing any data artefact for its Disinfolklore content and the ultimate intention or meaning of it, this idea of Mana is key. In this sense “Mana” means “What is the intention, motivation or meaning immanent in the informational unit we are assaying?” Counter Disinfolklorists identify the Mana in the meme by asking this question of information: “Is the effect of agreeing with this or that unit of information, whether in the form of a linguistic or visual meme or in a speech by a head of state or an online post, to support civilisation or to undermine it?” So, we look for the “Mana in the Meme” - let this be our mind-protecting mantra! Like a chemist distilling impurities out of liquids, we then isolate it. Then we parse the Mana to determine its quality: is it Positive, Negative, or Neutral? Is this Russian Disinfolklore? Finally, we make a call. If we cannot read any subtle energy inside this meme’s Mana, we say so. But, where we can determine the quality of the Mana in the thing (mens rea) and we can assess its Mana, we classify it as Disinfolklore or counter Disinfolklore.

Since Counter Disinfolklore is a manual, let us summarise this method:

1. Discern the Mana in the meme or the troll - it will be there. It might be manifesting positive, neutral, or negative energy.

2. Assess the quality of the subtle energy the Mana represents, encapsulates, and promotes.

3. Make a call: Russian Disinfolklore, counter Disinfolklore, or indeterminable (literally meaning "unidentifiable, unassessable Mana (“Mina” as another M-N- word is simply another form of the same thing))?

The means by which we exchange emotions and intentions through almost all forms of communication (literally, a “comingling of our Mana” (muni)) can seem magical. It is enchanting. With the help of the Dalai Lama / Ekman “timeline of emotions” cognitive model which I will introduce in the next chapter, though, we can perceive this passing between us of intentions / Mana / emotions / energy as being quite mechanical. It just happens so fast that we are not aware of all the stages we go through while our minds are transformed from one state to another by Disinfolklore.  Also, because until I coined this word “Mana” to describe this process, you did not have a means to isolate this aspect of what it means to be human. Now with Mana we can, at last, meditate on and control the exchanges of Mana that Disinfolklore uses to undermine all our communications.

One way to think about this as a mechanical process is that in communal situations, we exchange an energy which we can use the word “Mana” to signify - note how the same M-N- sound is inside the word “Communal,” “Mean” (a meaning is what shines through a sound, or a word: it is an expression of an intention), “Monitor” (the act of monitoring is the practise of discerning the “Mana” (“Moni” as an M-N- word is simply a different orthographic means of signifying the same thing - Mana)), “Criminal,” “Domain” (a unit with Mana (“main”) that has at least one family resemblance in terms of its qualities: an estate belonging to one human, or, in the realm of knowledge, say, the topic of the conduct of Russia’s genocidal war in Ukraine), “Manipulate” (which means sculpting the Mana in someone else’s mind using a variety of means, and especially Disinfolklore or counter Disinfolklore), “Determine” (the act of assessing the quality of the Mana (“Mine” again is the same “Mana” written in an orthographically different manner) in a phenomenon), “Human,” “Common” and “Mana” itself (an ancient term that signifies, variously, vitality / soul / spirit / Geist / (miraculous) lifeforce / strength / active principle / authority / force / wealth in a wide variety of Indo-European languages).

We can use words with this M-N- sound immanent within them as a handy mnemonic for this phenomenon of the passing between us of discernible energy that I am identifying here for the purposes of Counter Disinfolklore as “Mana”.

Immanent in Counter Disinfolklore’s use of the very ancient (so ancient that this M-N- lexeme is very deeply embedded in most Indo-European languages including contemporary English) concept of this M-N- sound (that I am here referencing as “Mana”) is a mélange of the intention of the original author(s) of the idea in question, their motivation, and how that idea, once communicated into our mind (into our Mana), affects us, and determines a new quality in our Mana. We can even use the mantic phenomenon of “M-N-” being immanent in “Immanent” to remind us that Mana is what remains of us the things we do and say. And that others’ Mana becomes immanent in our Mana when we allow them to manipulate us into performing activities of which we would be rightfully ashamed should we reflect on them in the cold light of morning.

So let us use this M-N- sound in common or garden words as a helpful mnemonic to help us keep in mind in real time the importance of guarding against falling for negative trolls. Let us visualise the way Mana flows between us, adds, subtracts and adulterates the quality of our own and others Mana according to its qualities in the manner of mercury. If you have ever played with that strange poisonous yet devilishly useful means of measuring the temperature you will know what I mean. Two distinct silver globules of mercury when moved in certain complementary ways flow into each other, as drops of water do too. Then, a globule of mercury can be divided into seemingly infinite numbers of minor blobs, which again can be joined up again with the right stimulus. This is one way to visualise this amorphous Mana, the subtle energy we communicate between and through as we exchange our emotions.

When we repeat, knowingly or unknowingly, an example of Russian Disinfolklore, this tarnishes our Mana and is forever branded into our Mana (“Manes” in Latin and “Amhain” in old Irish are often translated into contemporary English as “soul”). This is part of the reason why Counter Disinfolklore is so important. Recognising the Mana in memes is essential for controlling our Karman, or as Tibetan Buddhists express the idea of Karman, the activity of which we as humans are composed (“compositive activity” is an analogue of what is often called in contemporary English “karma”).

“Mana” is an important part of what we need, as counter Disinfolklore administrators and artists, to understand. In English criminal law the Latin term Mens Rea is used to communicate the intention of the person accused of a crime. For you to be liable for a criminal act (actus reus), the law holds that you must have intentionally committed that act. So those, like me, schooled in English law are taught to look for the Mens Rea in those potentially liable for criminal acts. Mens Rea literally means the “Mana” or “Mind” in the “thing” where the “thing” is the Actus Reus of the crime - the action for which the court is trying to establish criminal liability.

In counter Disinfolklore, we look for the “Mana” or intention immanent in the “thing” (usually a unit of information or a meme) which we are analysing - sometimes the object of our study is the original intention or motivation of the ultimate author of the Disinfolklore. At other times, it is clearly recognisable whether or not the author meant to repeat, say, a Russian troll that what they have communicated is a Russian troll that may have emanated from a Russian Disinfolklore spewing troll farm owned by the character we will meet in a later chapter whom I have termed the Chef of Disinfolklore. The Chef of Disinfolklore was indicted by the United States and placed on the F.B.I.’s most wanted list for, among other matters, interfering in the 2016 United States presidential election through the troll farms he controlled. Due to our mastery of any information domain (and we are all masters of many information domains, including our family history, the folklore of our workplace, our favourite football team’s performances this season, etc.), we understand the meaning of a variety of symbolic systems being referenced in any story about this information domain. And we can compare a new informational unit’s Mana to everything we know in that information domain, and draw our conclusion: it is Disinfolklore, or it is counter Disinfolklore. That “thing” may well just be an Internet meme, or it could be a news story or any unit of data that moves our emotions.

In the Disinfolklore Domain of “Ukraine” we can quickly grasp what Russia’s Mens Rea (or Mana) feels like or looks like - it Smells Like Disinfolklore! Its Mana reeks of Coercive Control. Even when Russian Disinfolklore is masquerading as Ukrainian information, the Mana of Coercive Control is immanent in it. Russian state Disinfolklore projects into everyone else its own misogynistic and coercive control qualities. It cannot imagine that anyone else is different. Its lack of empathy is a signature we can use to detect its Mana in Disinfolklore.

If any unit of information bearing on Ukraine minimises or justifies Russia’s crimes in Ukraine since February 2014, then, Russia’s Mana is clearly discernible. Traditional definitions of “Disinformation” distinguish it from mere “Misinformation” on the grounds of intention to mislead. If you are trying to define some unit of information as “Disinformation” rather than “Misinformation,” then you are acting as a lawyer does in English criminal law: you are making a call about the intention of the author of the meme or the intention in the inanimate unit of information. You are saying that the person spreading this is purposely trying to deceive us, or that the intention inside the unit of information is to trick us. The problem, here, which Disinfolklore as a new analytical method for parsing Disinformation solves is that the same item of information may end up, in different contexts, being classified correctly as both “Disinformation” and “Misinformation.” Instead of making declaratory statements about what is and what is not “misinformation” or “disinformation,” we take units of information, and we attempt to discern the quality of the Mana inside them. Only then do we make a call about whether the story that meme is embedded in is Disinfolklore or counter Disinfolklore.

I am illustrating the Disinfolklore method of parsing Disinformation, mainly, with examples from the information domain of Russia’s genocidal war in Ukraine. Yet, it can be used in other domains. I justify focussing on this particular information domain by reference to the historical fact that Russia was one of the first countries to use “Disinformation” as a hybrid-warfare tactic. And because in Counter Disinfolklore I am trying to communicate the method I evolved in eastern Ukraine that has become almost intuitive to me into your mind. I did not initially begin to think in terms of “Mana” or “information domains” or memes. As a diplomat on that bridge, I was simply trying to parse vast amounts of demonically confusing Disinfolklore for some truth. And now having spent a decade on this problem in Counter Disinfolklore I am laying out the steps my mind takes in the blink of an eye when it is confronted with potential Disinfolklore.

Say, the person we shall get to know in a later chapter as the Chef of Disinfolklore claims that he lost twenty-five thousand soldiers over nine months in the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. This is Disinformation. We know this because the Chef of Disinfolklore never says what is right or true. Their every activity, individually, and on behalf of the Russian sovereign state, their troll farms was orientated towards adulterating the Mana through trolling, roiling, and emotion-moving linguistic and visual memes. Everything they said and their industrial scale troll farms said is aimed at hacking our intentions so that we support Russia’s violation of the post-World War Two legal consensus - this signature Mana is part of everything that emanates from the Chef of Disinfolklore and their businesses. As we will see in a later chapter I brand the Chef of Disinfolklore as the Chef Saucerer and apprentice Magus in Chef to the Chief Sorcerer Putin.

When a global media brand repeats as a fact that it cost Russia twenty-five-thousand Russian souls to conquer Bakhmut (, that media outlet is engaged only in misinforming its consumers if we take this traditional definition of the difference between misinformation and disinformation as gospel truth. Russia knows that it can launder disinformation by using resonant memes to persuade well intentioned media outlets, like the BBC or New York Times or Bild or Le Monde, to repeat its trolls. We do not impugn the intention of those legacy media outlets - they aspire to tell the truth. Yet if they repeat that undercounting troll of how many soldiers Russia lost in Bakhmut, they’re repeating Disinformation. Counter Disinfolklore offers the world’s first basis for solving this problem with its associated concepts of Disinfolklore, counter Disinfolklore, Mana, and the stipulation of an objective set of criteria for determining what is positive, negative, or neutral trolling.

Russian Disinfolklore becomes a part of you when you consume Russian Disinfolklore, and you absorb its intention to deceive and undermine the post World War Two rules-based order as your own. It becomes a part of your Mana, which in this sense is the well from which the intention in all your activities flows. In the example above, Russian Disinfolklore’s purpose is to embed a false view of how many Russian soldiers under the command of the Chef of Disinfolklore were killed in Bakhmut. After reading Counter Disinfolklore, you will understand the mythological significance of the battle for that city (see the “Terrible Beauty of Bakhmut” chapter). You will also get the true significance of the Chef of Disinfolklore. You will learn to classify any information emanating from the Chef of Disinfolklore (or their stable of Disinfolklorists) as necessarily Disinfolklore.

So, in this case, it is quite easy to avoid being trolled into falling for their trolls about the number of men they lost in endless meat assaults trying to conquer Bakhmut. That said, too many people fall for such obvious Disinfolklore, including the legacy media outlets that constantly reprint Russian Disinfolklore without alerting superficial readers to the Russian Mana immanent within it. In other cases, it is really hard to identify the quality of the Mana in Disinfolklore - if for example you encounter that twenty-five thousand number of dead without any further information, you might think it is a shockingly high number (which it is) of casualties, without understanding that it is a shockingly low estimate given what we know happened day-to-day over nine months in the struggle to defend that city from Russian occupation.

One solution to the complexities of determining the quality of the Mana immanent in Russian (and other forms of Disinfolklore) is to read Counter Disinfolklore! We will soon learn a set of criteria that will help us benchmark and distinguish between Disinfolklore and, what I am engaging in here, counter Disinfolklore; between positive, negative, and neutral trolling. Effective counter Disinfolklorists only accept my interpretations of Disinfolklore after, like a goldsmith, you have assayed by rubbing, cutting, and melting the truths I share with you. Accept my word, not out of faith, but because it has passed your stringent mental testing regime. By the time, you finish Counter Disinfolklore you will be such a goldsmith and you will also be an alchemist. You will be able to parse information to determine the quality of its Mana. And, like an alchemist, you will be able to cook up in a cauldron of Disinfolklore of common-or-garden ingredients potent quantities of effective counter Disinfolklore.

Continues in Chapter Two here:

---

^[1] “Controlling or coercive behaviour” by individuals of other people became a crime in England in 2015. Among examples of what such Coercive Control behaviour involves in English law include the following, which also apply to how Russia acts in occupied parts of Ukraine towards Ukraine and Ukrainians: isolating a person from their friends and family; depriving them of their basic needs; monitoring a person via online communication tools or using spyware; using digital systems such as smart devices or social media to coerce, control, or upset the victim including posting triggering material; taking control over aspects of their everyday life; depriving them of access to support services, such as specialist support or medical services; forcing the victim to take part in criminal activity … to encourage self-blame and prevent disclosure to authorities; economic abuse including coerced debt; controlling the ability to go to school or place of study; taking wages, benefits or allowances; threatening to hurt or kill; threatening to harm a child; threatening to reveal or publish private information; threatening to hurt or physically harming a family pet; assault; sexual assault or threats of sexual assault; reproductive coercion; limiting access to family, friends and finances; withholding and/or destruction of the victim’s immigration documents, e.g. passports and visas; and threatening to place the victim in an institution against the victim’s will.

^[2] “An Independent Legal Analysis of the Russian Federation’s Breaches of the Genocide Convention in Ukraine and the Duty to Prevent”(https://newlinesinstitute.org/an-independent-legal-analysis-of-the-russian-federations-breaches-of-the-genocide-convention-in-ukraine-and-the-duty-to-prevent/)

^[3] https://osce.usmission.gov/the-russian-federations-ongoing-aggression-against-ukraine-27/

^[4] https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/europe/100000008299178/ukraine-bucha-russia-massacre-video.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare