Disinfolklore (1)
Disinfolklore (1)
Færy Tale Beginnings - Disinfolklore is a new analytical method to parse disinformation.
As a young child my late mother had repeatedly read to me Tolstoy’s Village Tales, one of her favourite texts. As a young aspiring lawyer, I had read more than once “Crime and Punishment,” which is at its heart a subversion of a simple morality tale. As a post-graduate student at Georgetown University, I was taught government through the medium of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. “True Russian” Ivan Karamazov is tortured by the contradiction between ideas he had encountered as a student in “enlightened” European Paris and the values inculcated in him by the Deep People of Russia where his soul was forged.
Nevertheless, having trained in international law at Cambridge University, when I heard of Russian soldiers masquerading as folklore-like performing “Little Green Men” occupying Crimea, I knew immediately where right lay. No amount of propaganda, disinformation (or what I now call Russian Disinfolklore) could mask the truth: by occupying part of Ukraine, Russia is using Ukraine as an instrument to destroy the entire post-World War Two legal order.
Yet for almost a decade Russia has pumped pure poison in the form of hypnotic Disinfolklore into the bloodstream of our civilisation. These Sirens Songs of emotion moving nonsense have had the effect of fooling many wise foreign policy professionals, politicians, diplomats and lay people. Strong advocates of our post-World War Two legal order are heard repeating transparent invented tales masquerading as True History from Putin downwards. It’s like the power of contemporary Russian Disinfolklore, such as Putin’s bogus history essays, is to place into a slumber everyone with the power to help Ukraine enforce its inherent right to self-defence. I call Russian Disinfolklore “War Magic.” And as even the most inattentive student of Harry Potter knows: the only means of fighting magic is with stronger, more powerful magic. Disinfolklore helps us tap into the power of our inner Magi.
Disinfolklore as an analytical method to parse Russian Disinfolklore was born of my desire to help others see through this poisonous miasma of enticing, seductive and disorientating nonsense Russia uses to conceal its genocide in Ukraine.
Take, for example, this “Little Green Men” trope. Let’s look at it through the Lenses of a Disinfolklore Perspective. Let’s first introduce this dual structure: Vector (“Little Green Men”) and Meaning:
Meaning One: Deception - Concealment of an armed attack in violation of the United Nations Charter and the Laws of War on a sovereign nation by heavily armed soldiers without insignia. We’ll return later to the significance of the treachery involved in stealing another’s property through deception.
Meaning Two: Ironic detachment creating repeatable “in-joke” thereby forging an in-group (Inner Realm comprising Russians and those who get the arch joke of soldiers acting as “Little Green Men”) and an “out-group” (Outer Realm of international lawyers and other humourless party-poopers from central casting who don’t think it is fun to violate the post World War Two consensus that international borders are inviolable).
Meaning Three: Triggers folk memory, in Russian Federation, of Ukraine as a condescended to land of “Little People” and “Little Folk.” It is reminiscent of the derisive use of terms like trolls, leprechauns, dwarves, eunuchs, and the like across the Indo-European cultural zone. Then, because we encounter folklore mainly as children, we associate such tales with being children. We might be disarmed. We can feel unthreatened, when we should feel very threatened.
Folklore, as the German academics Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm so brilliantly showed during the nineteenth century, is a powerful vehicle, propagator and storehouse of values, language, identity, and mythos. A whole genre of Communist Folk-Tale Films, for example, was established in Russia during the twentieth century. Folk-Tale films embedded Communist values and a unifying ideology in the minds of the plethora of nationalities that made up the Soviet Union. Hiding ideological education and indoctrination inside the cloak of ancient and disarming child-like stories was a key instrument of internal Russian propaganda. These “Little Green Men” created in the hyper-modern Disinfolklore forging propaganda studios of the Russian security services are the genetic descendants of Communist Folk-Tale film characters.
This Disinfolklore content repeated and propagated in billions of memes since early 2014 managed to enspell entire foreign ministries and numerous hard-nosed politicians, law makers and policy professionals. Such “Realists” who would have been the first to describe themselves as “No Nonsense” people, fell for complete nonsense, and the “Little Green Men” were the gateway pill they consumed almost without thinking. Yet, they fell so hard for the “Little Green Men” troll as well as all the nonsense bogus history tales from Russia that they allowed themselves to lose sight of the fundamental lore of our post-World War Two era: the United Nations Charter and the complex of international laws established as universally applicable as law in the wake of World War Two.
Meaning Four: Diminishes and emasculates Ukraine as not being able to deal with even invading “Little Green Men.” Ukraine is constantly portrayed in Russian Disinfolklore as the Russian traditionalist masculinist model of a weak woman (as is decadent Europe and the West with the dozens of genders Russian Disinfolklorists that haunt the nightmares of Putin down to the people interviewed in vox pops on the streets of Moscow).
Meaning Five: Qualification of the Little Men with the use of a “Colour” mirrors and subverts (from the Russian Disinfolklorist’s standpoint) one of the Russian Federation’s main fake grievances (see Disinfolklore (13) – Russia’s Fake Demonstrations (https://disinfolklore.substack.com/p/disinfolklore-13)): the West fomented the “colour revolutions” in former Soviet colonies & throughout the fertile crescent during the Arab Spring. So, according to this bogus logic, Russia can do likewise.
And, whatever Russia does, its will to power is justified, because Someone Else Did It First. We’ll return again and again to this Mirroring. “Accusation in a Mirror” is common to virtually every genocide: the perpetrator accuses the Other (the victim) of the very behaviour the perpetrator is planning or executing. This then justifies the perpetrators’ actions. “Mirror, mirror on the wall…” is the main reservoir for the content of Russian genocide-justifying disinformation:
Russia, according to this provocation-cycle troll it sells constantly to its internal and external audiences, was “provoked.”
Russia is the ultraviolent spouse who did just what any other “normal” country would do in response to such a provocation (even though Russia forges the “provocation” then justifies its response to the provocation through further invention).
There is also a more specific key message in the use of this folkloric motif to describe its aggressive invaders: it propagates the idea that Ukraine has no agency. This enshrines the idea that Ukraine does not even have the Mana to resist “Little Green Men.” This further inculcates a perennial colonialist theme that Ukraine, like all colonies, only resists Russian Federation domination of their State, when, like children, Ukrainians are corrupted by a “colour revolution” engineered by the West.
Little Green Men as a euphemism for Russia’s army also projects Russia’s power: “Look, we’re so strong we can invade another state with Little Green Men who huff and puff and blow their entire State away. If we can do that, then Ukraine has no right to exist. Might is right!”
The arch use of the Little Green Men trope is a clue to the power of what I term Disinfolklore. It sneaks into normal conversations as a hypernormalised meme. This means that we repeat the three words together as a unit, without interrogating its components. A westerner wishing to signal knowingness about, say, Russia’s occupation of Crimea has a ready-made meme with which to do so.
I engineered the term Disinfolklore from my experience as a diplomat on that bridge at Stanitsia Luhanska in eastern Ukraine. For several years I negotiated daily with armed Russian bridge trolls guarding one side of the bridge, and with the Ukrainian armed forces guarding the other. The Donets River over which the bridge spans at that point has been a civilisational fault line for millennia. As it was during World War Two when German and Soviet forces faced one another at that very place, it was four-thousand-years-ago when the Old European Dnieper-Donets culture was infiltrated and eventually subsumed by the culture of the first speakers of an Indo-European language anywhere - the ancient Ukrainians who occupied what we today call the Yamnaya / Pit Grave culture.
In 2014 with Russia’s violent occupation of the part of Ukraine on the south side of the Donets at that geographical location, here we were again. This locality and indeed the region of which it formed a part is the epitome of the perennial troll from Scandinavian folklore popping up repeatedly, mysteriously in places where you would never anticipate.
My job on that bridge was to ensure the safe passage of ten-thousand-civilians crossing from Russia-occupied Luhansk (what I referred to as the Rebel Troll Kingdom) into Ukraine government-controlled Luhansk, and back again. The folkloric and deep cultural resonances of the daily antics of all the participants (including me) in this infernal staged setting were never far away, once you tuned your eye, ear, nose and mind into them.
The folkloric echoes in that situation were manifold. They were embedded in the geography, the structure of the situation - a bridge in a forest guarded by armed militant bridge trolls. Even the name “Luhansk” invoked the name of the Gaulish God Lugus and the Celtic God Lugh, one of Europe’s most important deities. Lugus / Lugh is memorialised in mythological tales, tribe and place names (Laon, Leiden, Lügde and Carlisle) across Europe from before the time of Caesar (who saw Lugus as the Gaulish Mercury or Odin). Lugus / Lugh is derived from the Indo-European root *Leuk meaning “to shine.”
The Russian occupier bridge troll commander tried to corrupt my view of reality every day during these negotiations. He would recount folklore-like tales of the nightly heroics of his simple green men as they “defended” their positions from Ukraine’s government forces. He would speak of ancient Germanic gods Thor and Odin (the deities for whom our Thursday and Wednesday are, respectively, named) as if they were his friends. Years later, I would understand that here the ideology driving the Russian “Wagner” Nazi-mediated legendary German Landsknechts (soldiers) was born in its modern form.
The chief bridge troll hoped I would report these legends unmediated by analysis to the governments in Vienna for which I worked. And, then, that these tales would directly impact on the geopolitical strategies of the great powers as they tried to understand how to overcome what would come to be known as Ruschism. The folkloric vibrations inside these daily conversations were also somewhat mysterious - they seemed to mine the deep reservoirs of the Subtle Energy or Mana of which our human world is made.
I have spent the last few years unpacking that experience in the context of cutting edge research on different aspects of cultural archaeology: comparative mythology, history, comparative linguistics, psychology and of course the structural components of folk and færy tales.
While working there as a diplomat in eastern Ukraine, I was also doing a masters degree at Oxford University. I would travel from that war zone every six weeks or so to spend a week or two enmeshed in the libraries of an other Other World - the ancient city of Oxford. Out of these two clashing experiences is wrought this series: Disinfolklore.
As I patrolled it every working day for three years the eternal back-and-forth tournament of artillery strikes would sometimes occur in my sight and sometimes only in the Russian propaganda media. When I witnessed such violence, the causes and chronology were very difficult to interpret definitively - bombs exploded but who or what was responsible was impossible to discern - was it a wild boar striding across the forestry, or a diversionary tactic engineered by the Russians to feed its latest disinformation-filled rationales directly into the foreign ministries and government-thinking around the world. Everyone who witnessed such phenomena had a slightly diverging and diverting story to tell. As part of my job, I would write daily reports to be read by the fifty-seven nation states that I served as a diplomat working for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
Yet, the reality which I was representing in these reports was always being purposefully skewed by the accidental and intentional activities of Russians and their agents whom I would meet and negotiate with each day. Discerning truth inside this manipulated reality became the most important thing I could do to try to deescalate the war in Ukraine.
This was early 2015 - before the term Disinformation became widely known. Disinformation as a signifier and as a meaning had yet to impact our civilisation, visibly. Soon Disinformation would be mainstreamed. At that time on that bridge, I grappled daily on a micro-scale with person-to-person and media-borne disinformation, without having a word to describe the phenomena. Yet, I recognised that what I was dealing with on that bridge bore a Family Resemblance to what was going on a geopolitical scale. Indeed, on that bridge the geopolitical met the Every Day, in terms of the mechanics of disinformation on our emotions.
I began to see the continuities between the Disinfolklore that I dealt with every day on that bridge and disinformation-borne challenges to democracy, international law and the post-World War Two order everywhere. During my forays back to Oxford, I watched as England was being convulsed by Disinformation persuading it to Brexit. As an American diplomat, then, I also felt the onslaught of “truthiness” and reality denial that took hold during and after 2016.
At Oxford while studying Strategy and Innovation, Dr Marc Ventresca introduced me to the idea encapsulated by the meme attributed to William Gibson:
“The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet.”
In the part of Ukraine where I worked as a diplomat for seven years, the core culture that would infiltrate and conquer the geographical space between India and Ireland after 2,500 BCE was melded.
Out of the ancient Ukrainian Yamnaya Culture’s sustained encounter with two ancient Ukrainian Old European (6,500 BCE - 3,500 BCE) cultures - Dniepr-Donets and Sredni Stog - sparked the main part of Indo-European culture that we still experience today.
These ancient Ukrainian Yamnaya created right there in those ancient Ukrainian wooded valleys the seed that would grow into the syntax, grammar, roots of verbs, and word-stems characteristic of all Indo-European languages.
But, it wasn’t only the language that today over half of the world’s population speak that was born in eastern Ukraine. The language, as all languages do, brought with it to those who mastered it an entire ideological education.
The defining core of Indo-European religions (particularly the trope of the glorious self-sacrifice by the twin first man who would lead all others after them into death - Yama (India), Yima (Persia), Odin / Ymir (Germanic), Donn (Irish), Romulus / Remus (Rome)) were created there, as well as the following: The dominant patriarchal mode of community organisation; the institution of kingship / monarchy; pit-grave burial and inauguration mounds (kurhans); the tripartite social (e.g. India’s castes) and mythological stratification systems (sovereign (monarch/magister-priest/poet/minister), warrior, cultivator);
Each function manifested itself both on the level of sociopolitical organization and on the level of theological or mythological system. A summary scheme of how this structured ideology was transmitted and embedded into the geographical zone between Ireland and India from 2,500 BCE would include the following elements:
The domestication of the horse;
Mobilisation of the first wheeled carts around which economies were designed;
Efficient cattle rearing;
A chiefly complex involving the first Indo-European inauguration, communal, and burial rites.
Divinely inspired praise poetry and song which made its way into mythology (including significant parts of Greek and Roman mythology), Indo-European religions like Zoroastrianism, Western Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism, epics, folklore Russian Disinfolklore, and eventually into my invention of Counter Disinfolklore.
These core defining elements of Indo-European culture from India to Ireland were forged right there in eastern Ukraine, before 2,500 BCE.
So, in retrospect from the standpoint of our post-24th February 2022 world (though I did not know any of this when I first arrived in 2015), it is hardly surprising that our unevenly distributed future would evolve in eastern Ukraine. I had a front-row seat! And of that experience is born Disinfolklore.
These experiences and the questions they raised sparked a hyper-modernist (“Too Much, and Never Enough”) deep dive into Indo-European culture, history and the way phenomena which resemble each other in curious ways crop up again and again in Disinfolklore. Like trolls in some Scandinavian folktales, Disinfolklore’s motifs appear, reappear as shape-shifting (dis)orientation points in the ways we perceive reality.
Initially, I sought answers just to these questions: “How consciously is Russian Federation Disinfo reflecting folkloric and mythological themes?” and “How can we counter Disinfolklore?”
Over the next one hundred episodes, I shall report what I discovered. And I shall communicate to you additional means for combatting the disinformation afflicting your lives. I have been engaged in a Counter Disinfolklore operation against Russian Disinfolklore since 24th February 2022. I shall include elements from my Counter Disinfolklore operation in these episodes (as I’ve already started doing with Twitter screenshots from my DecodingTrolls Counter Disinfolklore Twitter account).
Disinfolklore, as I will demonstrate, uses the same principles to work its magic on the geopolitical as it does on the interpersonal realms of our lives. Disinfolkore, once you get your eye in, is visible and felt in the commercial and political advertising realms, as it is in the ways we are manipulated naively, innocently and malignly.
In Disinfolklore, we shall constantly switch, therefore, between the micro (for example, the bridge where I first detected the folkloric echoes in what I now call Russian Disinfolklore) and the macro civilisational impacts of Disinformation.
