Disinfolklore (14)
Disinfolklore (14)
Axis of Misogyny - Disinfolklore is a new analytical method to parse disinformation.
The Damsel In Distress folklore motif is a favourite of Russian Disinfolklorists. Immanent in such stories is the idea of a weak female. The Ruschist loves women who need men to protect them. The Ruschist male is so sensitive to their own impotence in the face of the State that violence against women and others is a dominant mode of self-realisation. Recent legal changes in Russia roll-back protections for survivors of domestic violence.
We showed in the Cut Into Tiny Pieces episode of Disinfolklore that this motif was present in Russian Disinfolklore in occupied Ukraine from earliest times. We also mentioned that its obvious stereotypical resonances are what helped us to discern the artificiality of the story. The raw primal emotion of protecting the woman and her underage daughter that the story seemed set up to evoke was, for us, even then, long before we discovered the Code of Positive Trolls, Positive Trolling or Decoding Trolls, a marker of its fakeness. “Me thinks the [Russian Disinfolklorist’s invention of a] lady doth protest too much” and all that.
Studies of folklore, mythology, religion, legends and Russian Disinfolklore demonstrate that such stories present certain discernible cultural values. The evolution of fairy tales and folk tales over time reflects the values of the periods in which they are consumed and transmitted. Likewise, Russian Disinfolklore reveals the primitive values of those who compose and propagate it. Often the Ruschist invents the very Bogeymen whom the Ruschist promises to save its preferred weak female from - see Disinfolklore (7) - Provocation Logic Cycle (a).
Interestingly, immanent in Russian Disinfolklore, also, are the values Russian Disinfolklorists believe its intended audience share. The Russian Disinfolklorist attempts to empathise with their target audience so that they can troll their emotions with trolls that provoke the receiver to act in certain ways.
So, having predicted empathetically how we will react, the Russian Disinfolklorist will design a stimulus that will provoke us to act in a certain way. Often such operations are quite primitive. They will provoke a primal emotion (for example, fear) by, for example, threatening a nuclear war. Then they will offer a “solution” such as “Stop Arming Ukraine!” which the innocent target will adopt as a policy without even rationally assessing it.
Authoritarian demagogues know intuitively what we know from decades of research: arousing your audience’s fear hacks their rational thought processes. Then, once hacked, almost any troll can be smuggled into their minds. This is the core tool in Reflexive Control operations.
Ruschists create the pretext, promise ultraviolence “Unless…”, and, more often than not, even if you surrender to the blackmail, the Ruschist carries through the threat anyway. The arousal they derive from humiliating others salves the powerlessness they experience throughout their lives under their unchosen Czar, under their corrupt cosh, and in a world where the only thing that makes sense is nonsense.
The Russian military strategy of Reflexive Control (which we reference copiously throughout Disinfolklore) is mainstreamed through all instances of Russian disinformation, Russian Disinfolklore, and Russian military activities. Reflexive Control depends on being able to intuit how the target will reflexively react to certain trolls.
As we love to quip, though, reflexive control works both ways. And if we can understand the psychology of those who fall for and create Russian (and other forms of) Disinfolklore, then we can design counter Disinfolklore that Reflexively Controls them.
This episode of Disinfolklore - Axis of Misogyny - does not simply diagnose the phenomenon of misogyny inside Russian Disinfolklore and among authoritarian Russians. We also delve deeply into work done after World War Two to understand the psychology of those who follow authoritarians and who, when triggered by anti-democratic leaders who are high on the right-wing authoritarian and social dominator psych scales, are always misogynistic.
Usually, authoritarian leaders are high on the Right-Wing Authoritarian as well as the Social Dominance psych scales. Those who chart high on the social dominance psychological scale differ from Hight RWAs in one key regard: High Social Dominators hate equality. They are repelled by equality, as a vampire avoids garlic. Seeing women in decision-making roles appals those high of the Social Dominance psych scale.
So when you encounter such misogyny, feel free to use it as a proxy for those high on the Social Dominance and/or Right-Wing Authoritarian psych scales. Then we can use this understanding in our work elucidating Disinfolklore and designing Counter Disinfolklore strategies.
Here is how a military analyst describes the Russian military doctrine of Reflexive Control1:
“If successfully achieved, reflexive control over the enemy makes it possible to influence his combat plans, his view of the situ-ation, and how he fights. In other words, one side can impose its will on the enemy and cause him to make a decision inappropriate to a given situation. Reflexive control methods are varied and include camouflage (at all levels), disinformation, encouragement, blackmail by force, and the compromising of various officials and officers.
Thus, the central focus of reflexive control is on the less tangible element of"military art" rather than more objective "military science." Achieving successful reflexive control requires in-depth study of the enemy's inner nature, his ideas, and concepts, which Leonenko referred to as the filter through which passes all data about the external world. Successful RC represents the culmination point of an information operation.
If Ruschism was a person, it would be the drunken spouse who repeatedly baits, beats, apologises, then batters their wife again. And again.
No other country in world history has threatened so frequently to genocide so many other countries.
Just in the past week (though take any week at random!) the three most powerful men in Russia have threatened to end humanity, annihilate America, and nuclear holocaust Europe using nuclear weapons it wants to locate in Belarus.
State-run Russian television is very tightly controlled. In the last week, Ruschist television has repeatedly threatened genocide against Germany, Poland, England, Ukraine,…
These are the cries of traditional masculinity which invents a threat to itself as a pretext to act out its rage against… Against everything. It’s also the stance of classic misogynists, who are always authoritarians. Always anti-democratic. And extremely cunning about smuggling emotionally-resonant trolls into our minds that serve their purposes.
Every Ruschist activity promotes so-called “traditional” paleo-masculinist values. It’s an authoritarians’ strategy to overturn democracy. Ruschia claims its inherent misogyny is its sovereign “cultural value.” It uses a cartoonish view that its “human rights” are violated when others remind it, respect for equality of opportunity is not just a value, it’s protected by multiple treaties, including the most ratified treaties in the history of humanity.
Authoritarians and their followers promote the idea that their authoritarian bent of mind is akin to an ethnicity that is at war (they love war metaphors) against an Other - “Liberals",” “Democrats,” “LGBTIQ+ equality,” “Wokeness,” “Human Rights lawyers,” “Black Lives Matter,” or, as former Nixon to Trump adviser Pat Buchanan (the man who created the Cultural War troll in 1991) put it in his 2013 paean to Ruschist dictator Putin:
“As the decisive struggle in the second half of the 2oth century was vertical, East vs. West, the 21st century struggle may be horizontal, with conservatives and traditionalists in every country arrayed against the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.
Putin's Paleoconservative Moment
By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN • December 17, 2013.
This is a classic manufacture of an Other into which is invested all the bile and fearsomeness reserved in folklore for the Bogeyman from the Outer Realm. Note the division here is set out between two tribes:
Inner Realm: Conservatives and traditionalists in every country.
Outer Realm: Militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.
Here is the elite rhetorically Othering itself to disguise its own eliteness, to scapegoat an invented elite, and to fool ordinary people into thinking all the problems in their lives are not caused by Buchanan and his followers, but by some Other. This is the same troll we saw earlier with Brexit Disinfolklore using migrant flows from Syria, provoked purposefully by Russia, to scare the English into scapegoating their pauperisation on migrants and foreigners, rather than its rapacious authoritarian-minded ruling party. Brexit itself, to the extent that Russia actively and financially supported it, can be conceived of through Reflexive Control spectacles.
At the 1992 US Republican Party National Convention, the same Paleo-Putin Pat Buchanan invented the “Cultural War” political strategy. Right-wing authoritarian-minded political parties the world over have now adopted this strategy of provoking division through divisive rhetoric along “cultural” lines:
There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a
cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as
the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America.2
Currently, England’s ruling party is running the entire country in sync with Cultural War campaigns, including a “Stop The Boats” carrying asylum seekers arriving from France. Brexit itself was run using Cultural War and Disinfolkloric tropes of invaders coming to weaken the country’s bloodlines (see Disinfolklore (1)). A third Cultural War campaign which England’s ruling party has been running off-and-on during its twelve years of power promotes the idea that first-generation immigrants into England are grooming English women for sexual exploitation.
There are repeated links between the actual people promoting these Cultural War dividing lines, as well as continuities between their political programmes of gaining power to abolish human rights, restricting women’s rights (e.g. the overturning of Roe vs Wade in America), and Disinfolklore (embodying as it does the perennial themes from folklore - for example, Invasion of the Inner Realm by Outer Realm males. Kidnapping. Weakening of the Inner Realm’s bloodlines by Outer Realm males treacherous robbery of the Inner Realm’s fertility.)
Ruschists, authoritarians, some oligarchs, and right-wing politicians all over the world have realised the power of generating polarisation in society over issues related to what used to be called “Family Values”. The impeached former US President Trump’s jailed campaign manager Paul Manafort was responsible for running several presidential campaigns for Ukraine’s impeached president Yanukovich. The fees for Manafort’s work in Ukraine, according to the US Government’s Mueller Report on ties between Trump’s campaign and the Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election, were paid for by Kremlin-supported oligarchs. Manafort’s different campaigns in Ukraine played up cultural divisions between the east and western parts of Ukraine.
These are not just cynical attempts by a group of connected individuals (an Axis of Anti-Egalitarian authoritarians) to exploit division in society in order to win control. There are deep psychologically identifiable continuities between the authoritarian-minded individuals leading and funding these campaigns. There are similarities in approach by these campaigns’ leaders as well as the themes which they use to create an environment in which voters are trolled (often deceptively) to vote for the candidates they are promoting, in societies as diverse as Russia, America and England.
If we can better understand the psychological ties that bind these people, and their followers, then we might be better placed to counter their campaigns against equality, and democracy.
In Disinfolklore the Axis of Misogyny materialises as a coalition of States, authoritarian personalities, and genocidal practices. They are always anti-democratic, and usually misogynistic.
The Axis of Misogyny is characterised by those who are high on either or both of the “Social Dominator” and “Right Wing Authoritarian” psychological scales. Such people hate equality -equality of opportunity for women, children, minorities, and any aspiration towards greater equality for any group will immediately provoke their bile.
Russia is, naturally, part of the Axis of Misogyny, along with the Iranian regime, as well as the Chinese Communist Party. We refer again to one of the core themes of Disinfolklore: how the micro (in this case, the authoritarian-minded individual) and the macro (the groups, political parties and countries authoritarian-minded individuals participate in designing) interact. Authoritarians will never design a society in which they can prosper in tandem with those of us who believe in equality of opportunity, human rights protected by law, and democracy. Like, the Nazi party, authoritarians see an opportunity in a democracy to gain power only to abolish power. It’s no coincidence that in setting out its war aim in Ukraine, Russia chose the idea of “denazification.”
"Denazification" was first defined AFTER Russia lost the Battle of Kyiv, & after it withdrew to focus on failing to capture the Donbas.
This is what "Denazification" means, according to the #Russian State:
1. Ukraine's democratically elected Parliament lawfully impeached Pro-Russia Ukrainian president in Feb 2014.
2.Ukraine properly elects two further presidents which Russia claims are weak (I monitored President Zelenskyy's election for Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe - President Zelenskyy won with 73% and every district in Ukraine (except one)).
Everyone in Ukraine who supports Ukrainian self-determination is branded a "fascist" and a "Nazi" by the Russian regime, which was elected in undemocratic fake “elections”.
4 Ukraine's democratically elected presidents are accused of "appeasing" the vast majority of Ukrainians who support Ukraine’s Self-determination.
5 Russia brands its paid agents, like Viktor Medvedchuk who would have been Russia’s authoritarian dictator of Ukraine had Ukraine not defeated Russia militarily, in Ukraine as "anti-fascist" (even though the Ruschist State they represent is itself led by the unelected).
6 Russia then argues anyone who opposes its paid agents undermining Ukraine's sovereignty is a "Nazi" who needs "denazification." "Denazification" equals death to anyone who is branded as a Nazi.
This is the fundamental casus belli in Ukraine. As Soviet Russia did with antisemitism (disguise anti-semitism in the clothes of "anti-zionism") Muscovy now disguises mass murder of democratic Ukrainians by dehumanising them as "Nazis." That's all there is to it.
So Russia, a fascist state led by an undemocratic mad king gets to decide who and who isn't a "Nazi." Then the Mad King gets to murder anyone who he brands as a "Nazi."
The family resemblance between the actual Nazi regime and the Russian regime which exploits the abhorrence most right thinking people feel for all aspects of Nazism is not a coincidence. Nazis promoted “kinder (children), Küche (kitchen), Kirche (church)” for women. Hitler declaimed in a speech in 1934 that for the German woman, her “world is her husband, her family, her children and her home.” Likewise, the Russian dictator came to power under some semblance of an election and promptly disassembled all the institutions upon which democracy depends. Fans of authoritarianism promoted him as a “strong man” who gets things done. Yet, inside the core aspect of authoritarianism - excluding 50% of people automatically from even elite decision-making power verticals - is the seed of its destruction. Terrible decisions are continually made because the leaders are so “decisive” and they will brook no debate.
After the Second World War, researchers tried to understand what had just happened in Europe. Instead of choosing — as we often do — authoritarian leaders as their units of analysis, a number of researchers after World War Two, including the Frankfurt School’s Theodor Adorno, focussed instead on trying to understand authoritarian leaders’ followers: those who march in step behind their leaders.
What some of these researchers came up with was reported in a 1950 book entitled “The Authoritarian Personality.”
To date, according to Google Scholar (www.scholar.google.co.uk<http://www.scholar.google.co.uk> “Authoritarian Personality”), there have been over 17,000 citations in further papers inspired by this work (including in a recent paper that found a correlation between those intending to vote for Brexit and the psychological traits of those with Right-Wing Authoritarian attitudes).
Despite some valid criticisms of “The Authoritarian Personality,” it did provide valuable groundwork for the idea that you could predict, using surveys, who amongst us was more likely than the average person to be susceptible to being mobilised into practising the hateful ideology of violence against the other that led to the Second World War.
Bob Altemeyer’s research, in particular, led to the isolation of the three propensities of those most likely to become authoritarian followers.
Mr Altemeyer’s research findings have been replicated in societies as diverse as Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation.
In the context of understanding the epidemic of violence against women and violence against minorities, the results of this research are quite interesting:
Altemeyer’s survey work makes it possible to identify “High Right-Wing Authoritarian Followers (RWAs)” in any general population.
To understand the idea of “Right-Wing Authoritarian Followers (RWAs),” it helps to start with the old English word of “Writ”.
“Right-Wing” in this context doesn’t refer to supporters of conservative political ideologies. Nor are we talking about people who are economically conservative or people who believe in small government.
According to the outcome of this empirical research what distinguishes “High Right-Wing Authoritarian Followers (RHAs)” from average RHAs are three propensities:
First, an unquestioning obedience to what authority figures decide is “right” or “normal”.
Second, High RWAs tend to get self-righteously aggressive in protecting, as they see it, that “writ”.
Leaders in every civilisation since time immemorial have noticed patterns in how to mobilise followers. They were able to motivate them using certain linguistic patterns and tics (repeating certain phrases or ideas ad infinitum is a favourite of those trying to activate High RWAs to whatever cause such leaders are themselves promoting).
But what happened in Europe in the 1930s was so historically unprecedented that it inspired the work that has led to us being able to accurately identify High RWA Followers in any population.
Third, High RWA Followers have a higher than normal desire to be seen as conventional. They just want to “fit-in”. They don’t want to stand outside of the crowd.
That’s why, for instance, you will very seldom get people who are High RWA Followers who will say “sorry” or admit that they were wrong.
Those who voted in favour of the Iraq war for example, seldom admit the gravity of the consequences of their mistake.
Even, as Bob Altemeyer has noted, if you get ten of them in a room addressing an issue that each in their own minds feels is wrong, they don’t admit it. This is because they don’t want to stand out of the crowd.
For many millennia in many societies women were excluded from positions of power. It was not “normal” for women to lead.
For many millennia, people denied that LGBTIQ+ community members even existed.
So when High RWA Followers either of their own volition or because they are being manipulated by those whom they look up to as leaders notice that a narrow and confined idea of “normal” is being transgressed, they become fearful that this is “the thin end of the wedge.”
They’re scared that the “world is being turned upside down” and that unless they act, soon the chaos which they most fear will prevail.
In High RWA Followers’ minds, there are “laws” which say “women must stay at home”, “women must look after the children”, or “women should not be in authority.”
When such “norms” are transgressed, that’s why we see this aggressive piling-in in all of its various forms: online or gender-based violence (whether psychological, economic, physical or sexual).
When we see self-righteous aggressive violence against LGBT+ activists often it’s not even the immediate “trigger” the High RWAs are really responding to.
It’s what that trigger event symbolises in their minds. The world is turning upside down.
This is why we often see such disproportionately violent responses to breaches of what they consider to be “norms” by High RWA Followers.
In their minds they are defending western civilisation, whereas in ours, they are breaking it apart.
Because “normal” often expands to include, as it has in Ireland, for instance since Mary Robinson was elected president, what was previously considered to be unorthodox, such as equal marriage, High RWA Followers march in step behind this new normal.
On the other hand, if authoritarian leaders promote a narrowing of what is “normal” for example the idea that it is okay to fight against equality or that global warming is a hoax, then, that’s what brings us to the most worrying aspect of today’s world: High RWA Followers in every population begin acting up.
Unless we recognise the impact authoritarian rhetoric has on the 30% of our population who are responsive to High RWA tropes in Russian Disinfolklore and from other authoritarians, it’s difficult for those of us who care about it, to find the tools to work towards moving our societies further towards the aspiration of equality of opportunity for all.
It’s interesting to note that two of the world’s most successful authoritarian leaders’ essential misogyny has been their undoing. The former US President was indicted by a grand jury for the crime of violating campaign finance laws designed to protect our democracies from being hacked. The former president’s lawyer had been jailed for paying Stormy Daniels, a US adult film star, so she would not sell her story of their alleged sexual encounter to the media as the 2016 election was culminating.
The Russian dictator and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights are sought by the International Criminal Court as suspects for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation. Note how in using the language of “children’s rights” Russia subverts not only the rights of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children by forcibly transferring them away from their home, it also uses the cloak of the rhetoric of human rights to undermine human rights.
Lvova-Belova, Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, is famous in Russia for espousing so-called “traditionalist” female gender role values. She had been head of “Mothers’ Russia” an organisation that promoted the idea that women belong in the home, not as decision-making public officials.
There is ample televisual evidence released by the Russian State showing Putin himself on camera directing and ordering Lvova-Belova to engage in the activities that have led to the issuance of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant to them both. In his urge to seem in charge and acting out a traditionalist masculinist role, by ordering his children’s rights commissioner on television to commit war crimes Putin self-incriminated as guilty of war crimes and genocide.
The Chinese Communist Party, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Russia are the Axis of Misogyny. Their state’s embody male-dominated power verticals and they promote ideas of normal which automatically exclude 50% of their populations from meaningful participation in public life - public participation in decision making on the basis of equality is a human right guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights. For this reason alone - wasting 50% of their Human Resources - the Axis of Misogyny will fail geopolitically. But inside all societies are lurking these authoritarian followers and their cynical leaders.
So we cannot be complacent about the scourge of authoritarianism, misogyny and the cynical manipulation of those high on the Right-Wing Authoritarian psych scale whether it is in Russian Disinfolklore, or other forms of anti-democratic manipulation. Understanding what makes these people tick enables us to design and propagate more effective Counter Disinfolklore.
P.S. Bob Altemeyer’s “The Authoritarians” is a pithy summary of his lifetime peer-reviewed work. It is available to download for free at www.theauthoritarians.org.
“Cross-Domain Coercion: The Current Russian Art of Strategy” by Dmitry Adamsky, Institut Français des Relations Internationales (2015): https://www.ifri.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/pp54adamsky.pdf
“Is There a Culture War? Conflicting Value Structures in American Public Opinion,” by William Jacoby (American Political Science Review Vol. 108, No. 4 November 2014). Mr Jacoby, basically, concluded after an immense amount of empirical work that the dividing lines Buchanan set out did not correspond to true ideological divisions in US society which, at the time, he found to be relatively “heterogenous” and clustered around a remarkably stable consensus about economic security and social order. Another pre-Trump-era books summarised research into the issue and arrived at a similar conclusion: “Culture War? The Myth of Polarised America” (Fiorina, et al.): “In sum, contemporary observers of American politics apparently have reached a new consensus around the proposition that old disagreements about economics now pale in comparison to new divisions based on sexuality, morality, and religion, divisions so deep as to justify fears of violence and talk of war in describing them. This short book advances a contrary thesis: the sentiments expressed in the previously quoted pronouncements of scholars, journalists, and politicians range from simple exaggeration to sheer nonsense. Such assertions both reflect and contribute to a widespread mythology about contemporary American politics.”