Disinfolklore (3)
Disinfolklore (3)
Disinfolklore's immanence in mythology, propaganda and disinformation - Disinfolklore is a new analytical method to parse disinformation.
In Disinfolklore (12) we’ll describe what a Disinfolklore perspective is. In the rest of Disinfolklore, we’ll show you the benefits of mainstreaming a Disinfolklore perspective. It’s a foundational assumption that Disinfolklore Literacy can help us avoid being trolled by Russian (and other forms of) disinformation. Moreover, by understanding Disinfolklore we can turn the tables and, as this entire Disinfolklore project is doing, engage in Counter Disinfolklore operations.
For now let’s take as our working definition of “Disinfolklore” the following:
“Disinfolklore” is a specific form of disinformation. Disinfolklore is a medium for affecting our mood / intentions / motivations and attitudes in ways which help the Disinfolklorist. For example, we intend to donate to help Ukraine develop its drone-based warfare capability. But the New York Times tells us takes whose message / Mana is: “Ruschia will win.” Instead, we donate our money to another cause. Disinfolklore is also disinformation which can be usefully parsed into some folkloric elements.
It is clear that legend, epic poetry, mythology, the wisdom sayings from ancient times all contain folkloric elements. In other episodes of Disinfolklore, we’ll use tools from such academic disciplines of Comparative Mythology, Literary Theory, Theology to parse Russian Disinformation into its folkloric components.
There’s a reflexive relationship between legend, law, lore, mythology, epic, drama,… and folklore. These stories transmit values across the ages. In one age the heroic deeds of humans in a past age become mythological activities of deities. In another age, deities become trolls, nymphs, satyrs, asuras, witches, demons, and other vehicles to explain supposedly supernatural or magical communications. In another age, the echoes of heroic deeds may become localised staples of lore transmitted by and among the Simple Folk. In all cases (and particularly in pre-literate societies) laws, lore, legends, folklore,… all can be parsed for information, in much the same way we can trace different archaeological cultures by digging deeper and deeper in the soil.
Propaganda as a way of deceiving those you wish to conquer and as a means of hacking the consent of those you wish to dominate is as old as the mountains. One person’s propaganda is another leader’s uniting ideology. Nations coalesce around shared stories, legends, folklore, and origin myths. And in the hands of evil doers, countries can be torn apart by malicious, emotion-moving, othering Disinfolklore.
Russian Disinfolklore is one such troll whose job is to prepare the ground for genocide. Russian disinformation operations since 2014 have focussed mainly on directly or indirectly undermining Ukrainian sovereignty. Here, the standard against which we can measure whether or not Russian Disinfolklore (and Russian disinformation operations) is positive, neutral or negative is the post-World War Two legal order. Since Russian Disinfolklore is solely aimed at undermining Ukraine’s right to self-determination which is protected by international law, Russian Disinfolklore is a purely negative phenomenon.
On the evidence of the dataset of thousands of media articles from Russia-occupied Ukraine that we will use in case studies in Disinfolklore, Russian Disinfolklore (at times, consciously and, at other times, unconsciously) integrates folkloric structures, trolls, tropes, and techniques. An example of Russian Disinfolklore that indirectly undermines Ukraine’s sovereignty is its use of an entirely fictional bogeyman (the Ukrainian Nazi fighting Russia) to neutralise bystanders’ support for Ukrainian sovereignty and to promote the troll that Ukrainians deserve to be genocided.
In Disinfolklore’s episodes we’ll deal with multiple examples of how Russian Disinfolklore directly undermines Ukrainian sovereignty. I will integrate my unique dataset of thousands of media articles from Russia-occupied Ukraine from between 2015 and 2022 into these episodes. While I served as a diplomat in eastern Ukraine, I involuntarily participated in many Russian disinfolklore operations, some of which I will recount here.
Arriving at the bridge at Stanitsia Luhanska, eastern Ukraine, in early 2015, I had no idea that the disinformation era was about to convulse our civilisation. I had no inkling, as I was driving in an armoured car, wearing body armour to that bridge that first time, that I was entering Ground Zero of the testing ground for Russia’s information warfare machine.
Russia’s military strategy is well summarised by the concept of Cross Domain Coercion.
“Cross-domain coercion operates under the aegis of the Russian nuclear arsenal and aims to manipulate the adversary's perception, to maneuver its decision-making process, and to influence its strategic behavior while minimizing, compared to the industrial warfare era, the scale of kinetic force use. Current Russian operational art thus involves a nuclear dimension that can only be understood in the context of a holistic coercion campaign, an integrated whole in which non-nuclear, informational, and nuclear capabilities can be used in the pursuit of deterrence and compellence.”1
This means that the informational aspect of Russia’s warfare is umbilically tied to its constantly repeated threats of nuclear genocide not just against all Ukrainians, but also against the entire western world. It’s important to highlight here that the “threat” of nuclear holocaust against Ukrainians and the west operates on the level of information warfare. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons recalls (and the UN Charter binds) Russia to:
“Recalling that, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, States must refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
Here is one of very many not even veiled threats to detonate Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in Russia-occupied Enerhodar:
I was the O.S.C.E.’s Environmental Security officer covering nuclear, biological and chemical warfare threats in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine until April 2022. It became clear within days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24th February 2022 that Russia was targeting occupation of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants. Since the early days of March 2022, I have tweeted over one hundred times about the rhetorical threat by Russia to use nuclear explosions it causes as a means of holding Ukraine, Europe and the world to ransom.
It’s important to understand that occupying these plants and threatening to end humanity through nuclear means is an informational warfare tactic. No other state includes as its military strategy using explicit threats of a nuclear holocaust to gain leverage in negotiations. Once you understand the use of linguistic threats is part of Russia’s military doctrine, then you can assess the credibility of the repeated threats and the motivations of those making them. If a state which does not have as an explicit part of its military strategy the threat of nuclear war threatens to explode a nuclear power plant it is occupying during a war of aggression that is one matter. However, it is quite another matter, in the case of Russia.
So we can understand the occupations of Chornobyl and Enerhodar nuclear power plants as props to add to the credibility of their rhetorical threats of a nuclear holocaust if they are not allowed to continue their genocide in Ukraine.
Our Information warfare response is not to threaten a counter nuclear strike - that would be a violation of the spirit of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Our response is to threaten annihilation, using conventional weapons, of Russia’s forces in Ukraine and elsewhere.
This is but one example of a constantly recurring theme in Russia’s information warfare arsenal. Its purpose is to act as War Magic. Its purpose is to achieve military goals - destroying Ukraine’s existence as a sovereign independent state - through informational activities. One of its main operational modes is disinformation and disinfolklore.
When I first arrived in eastern Ukraine in early 2015, I did not suspect that Russia;s warfare machine’s output would convulse our civilisation (and whether we knew it or not) impact on our minds, our democracies and how we behave in our daily lives. Disinfolklore will help us understand this phenomenon2, and protect our minds against it.
Going through the dataset of fifty-thousand uses of the word “Disinformation” in DowJones Factiva database is an interesting exercise. The first use of the term - in 1974 - is in the Israeli media. A good portion of the rest of the uses of the word are in relation to Russia and America. For example, during the 1980s there are examples of when the US accuses the Soviet Union of sending death threats to black leaders in America, and then publicising these threats as evidence of division in America. However, the explosion in the use of the term “Disinformation” around 2014 in the context of Russia undermining Ukraine’s sovereignty is remarkable.
Awareness of propaganda and its power to change the world has been widespread in societies for millennia. I first studied propaganda at Trinity College Dublin. Much of the output of Europe’s first printing presses in German principalities and cities in the first part of the sixteenth century was dedicated to the propagation of grotesque imagery about the corruption of the papacy.
For example a coloured woodcut like this image (see below) was reproduced again and again using some of the first printing presses in the early 1520s. “Simple folk” who could not read words were highly visually literate. Indeed stain glass images in churches told highly complex stories in detail that we, unused to reading such images, can only guess at.
Robert Scribner’s “For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation” takes as its starting point de Saussure’s dualist distinction between Signifier (sign, word, symbol, engraving,…) and Signified (meaning). In Disinfolklore, we’ll also use this way of parsing Disinformation.
“Disinformation” is a relatively new signifier. “Disinformation” has only entered mainstream awareness since I first arrived at the bridge in eastern Ukraine. Uses of the word “Disinformation” in DowJones Factiva database of 33,000 sources in the global media number over 300 only as the twenty-first century begins. In 2014 the number of times the term is used breaks 400 for the first time. Thereafter as shown below the number of uses of the term continues to increase.
The first claim that I am making here is that use of the signifier “Disinformation” exploded from 2014 onwards, and that these data as a proxy for the use of that word in our culture underpins the assertion that the widespread use of this word is relatively recent. I will make some separate further claims too:
At least some of the expanded uses of this term are due to a combination of the following:
(1) Better understanding of the prevalence of Disinformation as a phenomenon in our culture;
(2) More instances of identified or suspected “Disinformation” in our culture than before 2014;
(3) A significant portion of the uses of the term relate to articles in which Russia, Ukraine, NATO and international relations-related themes also feature.
An important caveat is that the use of this word does not in itself evidence a prevalence of the signified phenomenon. Most instances of “Disinformation” do not identify themselves as such. Very few of the thousands of media source documents in the dataset I am using from Russia-occupied Ukraine’s media between 2015 and 2022 self-identify as “Disinformation.” However, it’s clear these explicit mentions of “Disinformation” are a good proxy for the growth and amount of interest in and awareness of the Disinformation phenomenon.
While the specific signifier “Disinformation” is relatively new, other signifiers indicating the same or a similar phenomena, such as “propaganda” have been part of common speech in the decades since the second world war. A similar DowJones Factiva search for uses of the term “propaganda” yields over 600,000 instances since 1969. This higher number is partly explained by the fact that unlike “Disinformation”, “Propaganda” is spelt the same in a number of global languages.
Let’s distinguish then between the signifier “Disinformation” and what it signifies - its “meaning”. We’ll take as our meaning of Disinformation in Disinfolklore as “purposefully deceptive and affecting linguistic, audible, and/or visual memes.”
Russian troll farms operate according to this distinction between Vectors and Meanings too! Each morning, according to first-hand accounts, that day’s micro “Meanings” are distributed among the troll farm operators - “Blame Ukraine on our attack”; “Blame the West on our genocide in Ukraine; “Threaten nuclear annihilation, if Ukraine defends itself”;…. Then, the trolls are assigned tasks to create or propagate vectors to implant these micro Meanings in the minds of whichever audience they’re responsible for targeting.
When the Russian President makes a speech, he’s communicating approved vectors (when he repeats trolls about Russia’s or Ukraine’s history) and meanings (Ukraine belongs to Russia, like a slave belongs to their Owner) to the audience. His followers then take up these vectors and meanings in their own communications. Putin-understanders then earnestly Westsplain them to fellow Westerners. This is one way in which Russia distributes its vectors and meanings at scale.
One of the main macro meanings in Russian Disinfolklore since early 2014 (and its invasion of Ukraine) has been: “Undermine Ukrainian sovereignty.” There have been billions of micro meanings and associated vectors that have communicated this macro meaning into billions of human minds.
For example, every time the association of “Nazi” with Ukraine is made in some Disinformation vector, then, the meaning communicated is: “Ukraine deserves to be genocided - Don’t support Ukraine’s self-defence.” Very many highly intelligent and geopolitically powerful people have been trolled by “Nazi” vectors embedding this meaning in their unguarded minds. Part of Disinfolklore’s purpose is to help us operate real-time troll detecting radar at the gateways to our minds.
The word “narrative” was once the preserve of esoteric literary theorists schooled in the work of the Critical Theorists who, mostly, escaped from the actual Nazis to America during the Second World War - the Frankfurt School. These days the term “narrative” is thrown around like confetti. The rise of the usage of the term “Narrative” correlates, to some extent, with the rise in the use of Disinformation in our culture.
Generally speaking, when you hear someone employing the term “Narrative” in the context of Disinformation operations, they’re (usually unknowingly) confusing, occluding and fusing the “Vector” and “Meaning” components. It’s useful to keep this in mind as you build your own mental troll detector system with Disinfolklore’s assistance. As soon as you notice someone using the word “narrative” try mentally parsing what they are saying into this “Meaning” and “Vector” dual structure. More often than not they’re using the word “Narrative” to brand someone else’s “Vectors” and “Meanings” as “Disinformation.”
This dualist Vector/Meaning Sign/Signified analytical technique can be used to elucidate the term “Disinformation” too! It’s worth noting that instances what “Disinformation” signifies - deceptively communicating meaning into unguarded minds by means of a linguistic or other kind of vector (a story, perhaps, about Nazis in Ukraine) - can be traced back to the beginning of human culture.
Folklore has always been used as a storehouse for communicable values in communities. The words “lore” “legends” contain within them verbal reminders of their origins as being concerned with society’s laws. Disinformation which either accidentally or purposefully employs folklore techniques is the main focus of this Disinfolklore publication.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I understand that one of the main micro meanings of the vectors used by the Russian occupiers in eastern Ukraine from the time I arrived there in early 2015. The purpose of many of the billions of vectors and the meanings which they communicate into the minds of westerners and Ukrainians living in Russia-occupied Ukraine was and is:
Ukrainians are Russians.
Ukrainians who oppose the occupation of their land by invading Russians are Nazis.
Nazis should be exterminated.
The entirety of Russian Disinformation and the Disinfolklore that embodied this main micro meaning was focussed on undermining Ukrainian sovereignty and, for example, mentally preparing Ukrainians living in Russia occupied Ukraine to take up arms against their fellow Ukrainians. I call this Stealth Genocide. And every genocide requires public and direct incitement through the use of Disinformation. Disinfolklore is a particularly effective means of normalising the forcible transfer of members of the group into another group, as well as the “acceptability” of murdering vast numbers of people in the minds of otherwise law-abiding and pleasant child-rearing citizens. This is why Disinfolklore as an analytic technique is so important and indeed powerful. The preparatory acts of this genocide began in 2014.
We witnessed after Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24th 2022 the murder of, for example, of 100,000 native Russian language speaking Ukrainians in Mariupol and the killing of 10,000+ native Russian language speaking Ukrainians in Severodonetsk (where I lived from 2015 to 2018). We have also witnessed the celebration of these activities inside Russian information space. Understanding the preparations for this genocide by Russia is of the utmost importance. And drawing on my unique experience embedded in the information-space of Russia-occupied Ukraine, Disinfolklore offers a way of learning how to recognise Stealth Genocide which we can all perhaps benefit from: so that we will interpret properly future such efforts, in time.
The purpose of Russia’s Disinformation machine in that area, I now understand, was to prepare Ukrainians living under Russian occupation to participate in genocide against their fellow Ukrainians. By brain-washing residents in occupied Luhansk, Russia was creating a zombie army it could use to try to conquer the rest of Ukraine militarily. Even though I am a Cambridge University-trained international lawyer, I did not realise (and many people still don’t realise) that what I was witnessing from those first days at the bridge was genocide. This did not become apparent to me until after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on February 24th, 2022.
Genocide in Europe 2014 - 2023, just as genocide against European Jewry in 1932 - 1945 is made up of heaps of what I call dual-use moments. The person in 1942 watching the trains bring European Jews to the German death camps had no idea they were observing genocide. Recently I read Sebastian Haffner’s 1939 memoir of watching the rise of the Nazi Party in 1930’s Germany - Defying Hitler. I felt more than a pang of recognition at this (and many other) passages:
“There are few things as comic as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater. It was after all a movement with the declared intention of doing away with us. Perhaps the only comparably comic thing is the way that now, years later, Europe is permitting itself exactly the same indifferent attitude, as though it were a superior, amused onlooker, while the Nazis are already setting it alight at all four corners.”
On March 11, 2022, for example, a tank operated by a Ukrainian from the part of Luhansk province that had been occupied by Russia since September 2014 (and which the bridge at Stanitsia Luhanska divided from the rest of Ukraine) fired at a nursing home in the city of Kreminna. Fifty-six Ukrainian pensioners were killed instantly by the Ukrainians operating that tank. These Ukrainian tankers had lived under occupation by Russia, been subjected to anti-Ukrainian disinformation for eight years, and now were willing to murder dozens of harmless fellow-Ukrainian pensioners with a single shot from their tank. There was, as this investigation by The Washington Post found, no sense of shame about this horrific act. It was Russian propaganda channels which boasted of the war crime, as a badge of honour. So the disinformation prepares the perpetrators to kill their fellow Ukrainians. Then, the disinformation machine uses this act to normalise and inspire further acts of brutality.
This disinformation machine which impacted on every single moment of my work on that bridge has been purposefully designed to prepare soldiers who, like the Kreminna murderers after February 24th 2022, would execute Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine. Schools, the mass media, universities, the legal “system,” and every aspect of occupied Ukraine’s society was infiltrated by rhetoric that normalised hatred against Ukrainians and the West.
“Direct and public incitement to genocide” is a breach of the 1949 Geneva Convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide. When Russian television threatens to fire a nuclear missile at Britain or the West, they’re threatening genocide. Yet, we don’t always see this. We allow them to smuggle in such unlawful hate-speech, as if doing so has no consequences. Observing this same mind-numbing, genocide-normalising process in eastern Ukraine and how, in plain sight, it evolved into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Disinfolklore’s message is: understand this rhetoric has terrible and intended consequences. Understand that rhetoric is a form of activity. As I point out here to China’s E.U. Ambassador, China cannot promote anti-Westerner disinformation meanings and vectors, in synchronicity with Russia, while saying its “only rhetoric.”
Every aspect of Russia’s manipulation of reality was designed to enable its erasure of Ukraine and Ukrainians. Russia used every form of media as well as direct person-to-person strategies to implant a version of reality that benefitted Russia’s war aim of the destruction of Ukraine and anyone who is Ukrainian. I would experience at first hand these techniques while dealing with Russian officials in eastern Ukraine. Even though I was a trained international lawyer who had studied the holocaust, I never realised while working on the bridge that I was inside a slow-motion genocide.
Very few, if anyone, apart from the Russians organising the disinformation machine itself, understood what purpose it served.
It is perhaps worth emphasising that February 2015 was before Russia’s accelerated intervention in Syria which would stoke a sudden influx of over a million Syrian refugees into Europe. Brexit (June, 2016) was not even a remote possibility at the moment. And Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States (November, 2016) was only a faint possibility. The “Post Truth” or “Truthiness” era was more than a year away from becoming a meme across the western world.
In fact, the Dow Jones Factiva database of over thirty-three-thousand media sources charts five-hundred-and-twenty uses of the word “Disinformation” over the course of the whole of 2015.
At the end of March 2015 the preeminent decision-making body of the European Union noted after a meeting of the twenty-eight heads of state:
The European Council stressed the need to challenge Russia's ongoing disinformation campaigns and invited the High Representative, in cooperation with Member States and EU institutions, to prepare by June an action plan on strategic communication. The establishment of a communication team is a first step in this regard.
All of this is to say neither the moniker “disinformation” nor what it meant was on my radar when I arrived on that bridge in early 2015.
“Cross-Domain Coercion: The Current Russian Art of Strategy Proliferation Papers, No. 54, November 2015” by Dmitry (Dima) ADAMSKY. French Institute of International Relations: https://www.ifri.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/pp54adamsky.pdf
Words in bold are words which contain the M-N sound - see Power of Mana for more details (or simply ignore them. Understanding this phenomenon is not necessary to benefitting from Disinfolklore as a new analytical tool to parse disinformation).