Disinfolklore (11)
What Is Disinfolklore? - Disinfolklore is a new analytical method to parse disinformation.
Origins of Disinfolklore
As a small child one of my first encounters with folklore was through Tolstoy’s Village Tales, one of my late mother’s favourite texts. As a law student at Cambridge, I read Crime and Punishment more than once. And at Georgetown as a post grad, I wrote a term paper on The Brothers Karamazov.
On the bridge in eastern Ukraine and its surroundings (where I worked as a diplomat between 2015 and 2018), I was often struck by the family resemblance between the lore I heard each day from the Russian occupier bridge trolls guarding access and egress from their rebel troll kingdom of Russia-occupied Luhansk and what I knew of Russian folklore through Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Out of my daily encounters there, Disinfolklore as a publication, and as an analytical method for parsing disinformation was born.
Lore is what is taught and what is learned. “Folk Lore” as a term has been invented twice in the English language. Folc-lār in Old English signified sermons, what is preached. Then, in 1846 “folk-lore” was coined again. War Lore (Telegram is filled with it!) is what most of us have experienced a lot of since 24th February 2022 - since my arrival in eastern Ukraine as a diplomat in early 2015, though, without using that term, I was embedded inside Russian and Ukrainian War Lore.
Disinfolklore, as a publication and as a new analytical method to parse disinformation, is a species of War Lore. Russian Disinfolklore uses (consciously and unconsciously) folkloric motifs, methods, and resonances to embed trolls in others’ minds. Trolls are emotionally resonant activities of body, speech and mind which smuggle memes into our unguarded minds. Russia has operated a (what I term in Disinfolklore (2)) "Stealth Genocide" in eastern Ukraine, under the radar since 2014 - today without using that nomenclature the New York Times wrote about the problem of propaganda in eastern Ukraine.
The mayor of Stanitsia Luhanska in eastern Ukraine (where much of the action of Disinfolklore takes place) said to me in 2015 that his biggest problem was Russian domination of the info space. I remember being surprised by his request then: television broadcast aerials to outpower Russian kit. This is one of the first times I have seen western media identify and describe a phenomenon I and many of my former colleagues (and indeed Ukraine) have been dealing with for almost a decade. Russian Disinfolklore hacks our System 2 deliberative thought processes. Counter Disinfolklore engages with Russian (and other forms of) Disinfolklore to neutralise its power to hack our consent.
I did not invent the practice of Disinfolklore - Disinfolklore is a product of the deep Indo-European cognitive structures implanted in, moving, accelerating, and characterising our minds. I am the first anti-disinfo practitioner to identify the Disinfolklore components of Russian (and other forms of) information operations. I am also the first to harness the power of conscious Counter Disinfolklore operations to neutralise Russia’s military strategy of Cross Domain Coercion.
We learn the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary that make us susceptible to Disinfolklore over millennia. We memorise, reproduce and act out our culture through the media of myth, legend, fantasy, tradition, religious testaments and rituals, færy tales, folklore, stories, sagas and mythological truths - “Metis” the Indo-European root for Media means “device” or “measure”.
Disinfolklore is a device for seeing the common threads through these different forms, whether they appear in ancient texts, or on Russia Today or in a speech by Russia’s current dictator Putin. Russian Disinfolklorists consciously / unconsciously use Disinfolklore as a means to goad otherwise civilised people into baying for Ukrainians’ and all of humanity’s blood.
Here Ukrainian intellectual Larysa Yakubova gives a master class in deconstructing Russian Disinfolklore.
Sources and Dimensions of Russian Disinfolklore
Dr Yakubova mentions two of Russia’s greatest contemporary Disinfolklorists Vladislav Surkov, former deputy prime minister of Russia and Pavlovsky. Surkov is good example of a Disinfolklorist. Surkov was in charge of Russia’s Ukraine policy from around 2012 until 2020.
Russia’s interference in Ukraine had several dimensions, including military, economic, political, and informational. The informational dimension which is ostensibly what Disinfolklore is about primarily cross-cuts across all the dimensions of Ukraine which Russia hacked in order to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty. Surkov had the power to observe and interpret the reality that was Russian interference in Ukraine. And Surkov had the power to create that reality (or more properly, the ‘hyper-reality’). “Hyper-reality” captures the idea modelled here.
Surkov arranges fake protests in Ukraine. Surkov’s email account was hacked in 2015. So we are able to glean a near perfect insight into the mechanics of organising fake demonstrations in Ukraine.
As a diplomat in Ukraine, discerning whether protests were for real or staged was a tough challenge. Any protest that invoked the holocaust, though, I knew was a Ruschist provocation. Comparing gas price rises to genocide was clearly over the top and had the hallmarks of being a Russian operation.
Recently leaked US intelligence documents reported in the Washington Post set out in detail how Russian continues to organise fake demonstrations and manipulate public opinion by covert means in Germany:
@DecodingTrolls 21st April, 2023: “Russian 'War Magic' Lulls Germany Into Pacifism - the Receipts ‘When 13,000 demonstrators gathered at the Brandenburg Gate on Feb. 25 to call for an end to weapons supplies to Ukraine...the documents record meetings between Kremlin officials and Russian political strategists, and the Kremlin's orders for the strategists to focus on Germany to build antiwar sentiment in Europe and dampen support for Ukraine...” In the past week, the United States Department of Justice has indicted Russians (and Americans allegedly operating under the direction of Russian intelligence agents) for sowing discord and spreading Russian propaganda through, among other activities, organising fake protests.
Since we have seen the content of Surkov’s emails, we know how the existence of these faked demonstrations are used to provide content and Disinfolklore. So the Russians are creating a reality (the protests) in order to create another reality (media content) in order to provoke another reality (sow discord, spread Russian propaganda, provide a bogus cases belli, mislead bystanders, etc). These are three levels of Disinfolklore. And this is why “hyper-reality” is a useful term, as is hyper-modernism: Too much, and never enough.
This is a relatively simple model of how this interference occurred. The point in this context is to communicate how Disinfolklore operated on multiple levels:
The fake protests themselves were provoked by, instances of and generators of Disinfolklore.
The Disinfolklore about the fake and real demonstrations.
Russia would designate organic and spontaneous demonstrations as “fake” or a “coup.”
Surkov was one individual executing the decades-old policy by Russia to use fake events invented solely in order to provide media content. This Disinfolklore is then directed at particular audiences to troll them in a particular direction. And in the parts of Disinfolklore in which I am using my experience in eastern Ukraine 2015 - 2022 to elucidate how Russian Disinfolklore works - for instance in the Cut Into Tiny Pieces and the Luxury Sausage Troll Saga episodes, we’ll come back again and again to these same kinds of faked events.
It is even possible to conceptualise the whole of the Ukraine invasion as a means simply to provide Disinfolklore content for consumption inside Russia.
If we look at the war through this kind of lens, we see that Russia is using Ukraine as a prop in a diabolical theatrical play merely to prolong the current regime’s rule in Russia. In this context, it’s worth remembering Surkov is a theatre studies graduate. And long before I even knew who Surkov was I felt on that bridge like I was a bit player in some infernal entirely manipulated and artificial drama.
For all these reasons, when we conceive of a Disinfolklore approach, Disinfolklore lenses, hunting for continuities in Russian activities in Ukraine and how they are communicated becomes much easier.
Then, we can implement Counter Disinfolklore strategies, as I have been doing since February 22nd 2022.
Bridge to the House of Lies
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 Ukrain…
These memes illustrate throughout Disinfolklore with @DecodingTrolls’s Tweet screenshots. They tell the story of Russia’s war in Ukraine - they are an instance of War Lore - while illustrating the power of the Disinfolklore and Counter Disinfolklore communications’ method. This is the value of this new analytical approach to parsing Russian disinformation into interpretable units or chunks of memes.
Conceptual Framework
I set out the model here of the Disinfolklore perspective:
Lore —> War Lore —> Disinfolklore ←←← Counter Disinfolklore.
So, Disinfolklore is the name of this manual. Disinfolklore is also the subject of this book. Disinfolklore is a phenomenon in our info-space. Disinfolklore notices and elucidates Disinfolklore for the first time in human culture.
Disinfolklore is a perspective; lens and looking glass (as in “Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There”). It’s a mirror. When we mainstream a Disinfolklore Perspective on Russian Disinfolklore, we can consciously unleash our batteries of Counter Disinfolklore.
Lenses of Gender
You might have heard of the Lenses of Gender? Well, the Lenses of Disinfolklore help us see through the artifice of the Every Day stories that embed and entrench Disinfolklore in your mind. Disinfolklore surfaces the deep structure embodied and manifested by the main means Russian Disinfolklorists use to recruit your unknowing support for its breaches of international laws governing the use of aggression, genocide, the laws of war, and human rights.
Disinfolklore also mainstreams a gender perspective throughout. This is not to be politically correct. It’s because we can’t understand wholly what Russia is up to unless we take a gender perspective and filter its nonsense through our own evolving lenses of gender. Russian propagandists constantly talk about Ukraine in gender terms. For example here is what Putin said of Ukraine on February 8th, 2022, dipping into folklore:
Without mainstreaming a gender perspective, we would miss the significance of these utterances which have important emotional resonances in his audience. They also form part of the legal argument that demonstrates Russia’s genocidal intent.
Vectors and Meaning / Temnik Distinction in Disinfolklore
Disinfolklore takes as its subject this dual structure:
Vectors (the stories); and
Meanings / Temnik (what those vectors are communicating).
Russian Disinfolklore for example tries to embed fear (the meaning) through repeatedly threatening a nuclear holocaust (vector). I will try to avoid the muddled term “narrative", which fuses both the story and its meaning together.
Disinfolklore is a mode of noticing these folkloric, epic, and mythological patterns immanent in effective Disinformation. Taking a Disinfolklore perspective on linguistic and visual memes is an on-the-fly means of parsing Disinformation into the layers of dangerous nonsense it often conveys.
In real time, a Disinfolklore Perspective, like taking a Gender Perspective, aids your discovery of the components of Disinfolklore’s folkloric tropes that litter our language and discourse. From these components you can assemble a meaning that lies outside the meaning the Disinfolklorist vector wanted to embed in your mind. Disinfolklore reinforces your arsenal of critical faculties. Disinfolklore helps you spot artifice in Disinformation. Disinfolklore empowers you to rain Counter Disinfolklore against the enemies of our post-World War Two rules based legal order (UN Charter, UN Declaration on and European Convention on Human Rights, Genocide Convention,…).
Disinfolklore enables us to group into one unit the most prevalent form of Disinformation out there - Disinformation containing the same tropes and motifs as legendary folklore that’s so memorable we can see through it to the first moments of Indo-European culture.
Disinformation is parasitic - it borrows, mirrors, and steals, consciously and unconsciously, just what works to infect our minds with memes. Disinformation infuses folklore, fantasy, legend, mythology, tradition, sagas, testaments, religious texts, parables, and stories that are passed through the generations. So Disinfolklore, as an analytical method and form of story-telling, enables us to untangle, disengage, and disembody these Mag Pie nests of shiny layers of vectors and meanings.
Disinfolklore takes as its subject matter the deep folkloric structure of these informational, identity changing Disinfolkloric weapons.
I worked as a diplomat establishing the facts in relation to Russian information operations in eastern Ukraine for seven years. This is how I came to notice these Disinfolkloric echoes in Russian communications. I call the process through which Russian Disinfolklore forced Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Ukraine to hate their fellow Ukrainians enough to want to participate in the genocide against all Ukrainians: Stealth Genocide.
Since the beginning of Indo-European culture in eastern Ukraine in the fifth millennium, across the traditional Indo-European world between Ireland and India, ideas have been embodied as people who have been remembered as heroes who have become monarchs who have been deified and then turned into the names of stars (celestialised). Again and again this process reoccurs. Lore, legend, fantasy, legend, mythology, law, mythology, religions, tradition and stories (like what we hear every day on our news broadcasts) perform the same roles poets across the Indo-European world have discharged since the fifth millennium.
Inner / Outer Realm Othering Trick from Disinfolklore
Without Disinfolklore the Inner / Outer Realms trope in Russian Disinfolklore, Brexit Disinfolklore, and Trump Disinfolklore is harder to see. “Othering” of Ukraine to Ukrainians in occupied Ukraine was a very effective means of Russia’s information warfare in Ukraine since 2014. Through billions of communications Russia convinced Ukrainians in occupied Luhansk, Crimea and Donetsk that Ukraine was trying to kill them and that they were not Ukrainian.
Sovereignty of the Inner Realm is portrayed in Disinfolklore as being threatened by Outer Realm Others: Migrants, dark males, invaders,…
Security of the Inner Realm is undermined precisely by those promoting War Magical Disinfolklore: the perpetrators of the violence use Disinfolklore to pervert our cognition. We perceive the cause of the threat to the Sovereignty, Security and Fertility of our Inner Realm as our saviour. Russia generates the threat to the Damsel in Distress, then swoops into purporting to save her.
Fertility / Fecundity of the Inner Realm: Sexual. Kidnapping. Threats to fertility. Disrupting food supply. Famine.
This is the Indo-European structure nestling inside our culture for the past six thousand years. Almost every instance / observable of Russian Disinfolklore, like the folklore which inspires it, carries within it aspects of this immanence.
This Disinfolklore manual will demonstrate the power of this analytical method through examples of DecodingTrolls Counter Disinfolklore operation on X and Substack that began after the February 24th 2022 full-scale invasion. These Tweets and instances of Counter Disinfolklore both reveal the Disinfolklore they’re mobilised to counter, as well as the range of responses available to Counter Disinfolklore practitioners.
X analytics as at April 2024 for my Counter Disinfolklore operation::
1. Threats to Inner Realm’s Fertility. Sexual. Kidnapping.
As Disinfolklore (10) showed, Russian Disinfolklore conceives Ukraine as a shapeshifting Other / Inner Realm quantity.
Note how the Russian Disinfolklorist also promotes perception that Ukraine’s resolute self-determination is also a manifestation of “the West’s” plan to annihilate what Putin calls the “Russian Ethnos” (sic)).
Disrupting food supply. Famine.
3. Security: Maim, Hurt, Kill Outer Realm Ukrainians, as Russia represents them in its Disinfolklore.
Disinfolklore takes as its subject matter the deep folkloric structure of these informational, identity changing Disinfolkloric weapons. I worked as a diplomat establishing the facts in relation to Russian information operations in eastern Ukraine for seven years. This is how I came to notice these Disinfolkloric echoes in Russian communications. I call the process through which Russian Disinfolklore forced Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Ukraine to hate their fellow Ukrainians enough to want to participate in the genocide against all Ukrainians: Stealth Genocide.
It was stealthy because as a lawyer trained in international law at Cambridge University, it’s easy for me to conceptualise events in Russia-occupied Ukraine as a genocide by Russia against Ukrainians. What is stealthy about how Russia executes genocide, however, is that it outsources the execution of genocide to Ukrainians.
Sovereignty: Russia’s plan is to usurp the Sovereignty of 42m Ukrainians. If they won’t surrender, Russia promises to kill them.
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 is symbolised by a straight “Rod” in the earliest Indo-European cultures that we know. Monarchy (note the -rch element in the term, as it is cognate with the word for monarch/king in many Indo-European languages) 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 24th, 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...
Disinfolklore that embeds these three perennial themes from Indo-European legends, stories, sagas, myths and folklore in the minds of those of us, including Russians, who consume knowingly and unknowingly Russian Disinfolklore then is used to justify genocide against all Ukrainians. This Provocation Logic Cycle is a core mental routine inside Russian Disinfolklore. And as far as I am aware, I am the first person to draw attention to this pattern from a Disinfolkloric perspective.
Russian Disinformation surfaces and creates entirely fictional deeply encoded mythical threats against itself as its rationale for genocide of Ukrainians (including of native Russian speaking Ukrainians by subject people in Russia who, in disproportionate numbers, from central Asian Russian Federation units are sent to Ukraine to kill Ukrainians).
Russian Disinfolklore consciously / accidentally / ineluctably notices pre-existing mental architectures that are ripe for manipulation. A Disinfolklore perspective on this genocidal rhetoric masquerading as simple media content helps us to build more resilient defences to Disinfolklore.
This building up of mental resistance to manipulation through Russian Disinfolklore (what Russians call Reflexive Control) is the main goal of Disinfolklore qua book.
Through Disinfolklore, we can notice for the first time common or garden kinds of emotionally resonant Disinformation vectors (trolls) that draw on deep reservoirs of themes, events, and mental architectures in our Indo-European forged minds.
Disinfolklore can be positive, neutral or negative. Or, to put the qualification of Disinfolklore into Disinfolkloric language:
Disinfolklore can be Good or Evil. Russian Disinfolklore is always evil. Russian Disinfolklore turns reality upside down, not to teach us another perspective, but to persuade us that genocide is okay, that borders do not matter, and that might is right.
Then when Ukraine physically beats Russia into retreating from Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson, Russia switches into taking a “constitutionally legalistic” approach: it purports to “annex” in some proper legal sense land Russia is incapable of capturing militarily.
Russian Disinfolklore fills the gap between yesterday’s reality (unlawfully purporting to annex part of Ukraine you occupy militarily, according to (tactics that breach) the Laws of War) and today’s reality (losing control of a part of Ukraine, you held militarily at the moment you purported to annex it).
Please don’t blame me if Russian Disinfolklore sounds like nonsense. It often is. Yet, its folkloric character enables it to take on horrifying shape-shifting guises that sneak into our minds on vectors of nonsense so that we are paralysed or confused into inaction against this corruption of reality.
In other contexts we can adjudicate between Good and Evil Disinfolklore by proofing instances of Disinfolklore according to these six dimensions: Is it generous? Is it Right (is this Disinfolklore supporting international law, for example, or is it public and direct incitement to genocide?)? Is it patient? What is it’s Mana / Energy - is it right? Is it balanced? What wisdom is in it?
If the unit of Disinfolklore we’re evaluating conforms to all of those characteristics, then it is Good. If not, it may be Evil. Russian Disinfolklore, by definition, never teaches all these practices at once: generosity, ethical discipline, patience, joyous perseverance, balance and wisdom are absent from Russian Disinfolklore. Therefore, Russian Disinfolklore is always evil. That’s why it’s important for us to begin to recognise it for what it is and to be empowered to understand it from a standpoint beyond it - the standpoint of Disinfolklore.
The tabloid journalist or the Russian propagandist does not always consciously set out to use motifs, structures, themes and functions inside Indo-European folklore. However, in their search for powerful modes of communication, they draw on this deep reservoir of available folkloric echoes.
The Disinfolklorist consciously and unconsciously invokes these deep cultural folkloric motifs to service their own political projects. This might be benign, as mine is, if you understand this perspective, and don't abuse what it reveals to pursue Bad Ends. Or, in the case of deceptive Russian, Trump and Brexit Disinfolklore, it is Bad Disinfolklore which pursues Bad Ends.
Disinfolklore is empirical: it looks at the product and environment from which Disinfolklore flows. As the first manual on counter Disinfolklore I shall draw out the perennial themes from many years worth of media from inside Russia-occupied Ukraine.
I’m also aware that the Counter Disinfolklore we use to counter Russian Disinfolklore (for example the tweets that are interspersed in this text are examples of the Counter Disinfolklore operation I have been running since 24th February 2022) must itself conform to the Six Criteria in the Code of Positive Trolls. Our Counter Disinfolklore must contain the Mana of generosity, rightness, patience, energy / mana, focus, and insight. Noow that the Disinfolkloric Genie is out of the bottle, we must counter it through generosity, ethical discipline, patience, energy, focus, and insight. The post-WWII legal order’s survival demands this of us.
Read on:
Bridge to the House of Lies
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 Ukrain…
That poor mermaid has had quite a bit of abuse over time - it's such a simple unoffencive statue - why - well one explanation now has been given