Disinfolklore (8)
Disinfolklore (8)
Lenses of Gender (a) - Disinfolklore is a new analytical method to parse disinformation.
Russian Disinfolklore perceives and portrays Ukraine through its lenses of gender.
We acquire our cultural-specific lenses of gender, first, as children. As we absorb our culture’s norms, we allocate certain transient roles to our sex. These roles are the attributes of gender. They’re not biologically determined. They are a function of the particular model of gender roles assigned to people with specific biological determinants in whichever society we grow up within. We then perceive reality through these lenses. Most of us upgrade constantly the the prism through which we run our perceptions constantly, according to new data. Some, however, stick to an ossified view, and arrange reality to fit their preconceived notions.
Since I was my diplomatic team’s gender equality expert in Ukraine, it fell to me to explain the difference between “gender roles” and “biology” to a Russian diplomat on one occasion during negotiations. I chose the example of dogs. I explained that female and male dogs do not disclose different behavioural traits (gender) according to their biological sex. The Russian diplomat responded by telling me they had kept many female and male dogs in their time. The female dogs, according to the Russian diplomat, were always needy and emotional. By contrast, the male dogs were always strong, and never barked except when someone threatened their owner. These, of course, are the very behavioural traits traditionalist masculinist Russia projects onto humans according to their biological sex assigned at birth!
On another occasion, this same diplomat, somewhat triumphantly, asked me how many women by comparison to how many men had won Nobel Prizes. They had prepared for this encounter, as they had to hand a print out of each year’s winners since the inception of the award. We started going through each year, one-by-one. I tried to explain to them how the engendered structures of university research science determined not only how women scientists were perceived and allocated resources, but the Swedish Academy itself which awards Nobel Prizes has perceived success through its blinding lenses of gender up until quite recently.
The Russian state’s approved mental model of women represents its culturally determined perspective as somehow related to the biology of the women it’s interpreting. Ukraine, like women, according to this Russian mental model promoted and enshrined in its Disinfolklore, needs strong, ultraviolent, coercive, leadership by a Russian man. Ukraine, like the West and all women, is decadent, weak, and emotional. Ukraine, like all Russian women according to Russian state Disinfolklore, needs to be led through coercive violence, as this is the only way it will self-realise according to the Russian model. Easily led Ukraine, according to the internal monologue that led to Russia’s fiasco of an invasion, would be easy to scare, rape, tie-up and take through relentless gas-lighting.
As has been noted by New Lines Institute, on February 8, 2022, Putin threatened Ukraine thus:
“like it or not, take it, my beauty.”
This is a reference to a common Russian rhyme about necrophiliac rape. It clearly communicated the intention to inflict similar destruction on Ukraine and a view of Ukraine as a corpse1.
It’s an incredible irony that Russia, like the traditional cultural conservatives in every country which use Cultural War issues to embed their power, mocks the very idea of gender - that traits apportioned to sex are cultural, not biological. The seeds of Russia’s destruction are growing out of its misogynistic cultural model and its relishing of its inability to catch up with democratic approaches to improving equality of opportunity. Excluding 50% of your population, because of their sex, from decision-making positions virtually guarantees bad outcomes.
Yet, if it was able to step outside its provincial view of the unchanging character of womanhood, Russian leaders would find a clue as to why its view of Ukraine itself as weak has led to its catastrophic invasion, and its inability to change course.
The problem for the Ruschist is not that Ukraine is effeminate - though that there are so many female leaders in Ukraine is a key aspect of its democratic resilience.
It's just that the Axis of Misogyny ascribes the wrong traits, unchangingly, to 50% of humanity. Ruschia ascribed a contingent model of "feminine" traits to a whole sex for all time. Russian Disinfolklore transfers this traditionalist conservative perspective of so-called female characteristics to our entire European civilisation. Then, despite all the data, persists in seeing its own women, Ukraine, and the West as the Russian state sees women: as easily beaten.
This misogynistic bias blinds Russia’s leaders to the truth that in reality Ukraine is stronger than the biased hen-pecked strong-man Russian males who are championing the invasion.
Russian Disinfolklore hates women. Russian Disinfolklorists are obsessed with violence against women. They use ultraviolence as a tool of communication. Here is a war crimes investigator giving evidence after the liberation of Irpin when the Russians retreated on 29th March 2022 after they were defeated in the Battle of Kyiv:
"We dug up one grave [in Irpin] and pulled out of it a young dead woman of 20-25 years old who is holding her dead child in her arms, and they are wrapped in tape. When the sapper started to separate the child from the mother, the bomb squad stopped us, the Russians had lodged a mine between the mother and her child."
Authoritarians and their followers are avid creators and consumers of Misogynistic Disinfolklore. They feel inadequate, so they feed on those they perceive consciously as weak. Really, they fear women’s power. Their minds are captured by folkloric tropes of bewitching women who troll, and manipulate them. They respond through personal violence against women, and through enacting this hatred through patriarchal institutions whose purpose is to stop fifty per cent of the population participating in decision making. We can use this recourse to violent imagery that shines through Russian Disinfolklore like a fluorescent dye to identify itself as artificial Disinfolklore masquerading as “news”.
The Damsel in Distress motif in Disinfolklore’s origin myth demonstrates the value of taking what’s known technically as looking at data through the Lenses of Gender. At the very first hearing, I sensed the artifice in the stereotypical Damsel-in-Distress pattern in the faery story my manager had recounted to me. The archetypal odd-sounding “common-law wife” and “under-age daughter” qualifiers of the bait who were about to be cut into “tiny pieces” had aroused my suspicions. The addition of “common law” and “under age” to the characters’ descriptions did not add credibility to the færy tale, as I assumed they had been intended to. They seemed to be like the two extra blobs of paint that Jackson Pollack might add to a canvass that transformed a masterpiece into hotel art.
Russia was using its vast Disinfolklore distribution web involving hundreds of media outlets in every format to scare Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Luhansk into believing their fellow Ukrainians were all villains trying to kill them. For this purpose too, it was natural to see the perennial bogey man of Russian Disinfolklore about Ukraine - the Ukrainian nationalist - pressed into service. That this stock character would cut into tiny pieces a mother and her under-age daughter suggested a kind of primeval evilness. Russia’s genocidal information war tactics in Ukraine from 2014 onwards worked hard to inject this wholly concocted inhumane evilness into the minds of Ukrainians, Russians and foreigners. It was part of the process of dehumanising Ukrainians by Russian state Disinfolklore. To this end, that tale was so perfectly matched to the the common Disinfolklore vectors (eg. far right bogey man) and meanings (undermine Ukraine’s legitimacy), it had instantly reeked of artifice.
To me anyway. Even before I had invented Disinfolklore as a new method of parsing Disinformation.
If you wanted to provoke an organisation that is woke to inequality between the sexes and the positive impact of involving everyone in solving armed conflict, not just men, mention of a Damsel-in-Distress and their under-age daughter at risk was a perfect troll.
Such a troll might well succeed, as all effective trolls do, at hacking rational, System 2 thought processes. It would engage their emotions. You would test whether or not the Russian intelligence service could use Reflexive Control (manipulating your enemy into acting against their interests and in yours) on me and my colleagues:
Another key part of taking a Lenses of Gender approach to parsing Disinfolklore is children. Children form part of the Gender Mainstreaming2 toolkit. Specific culturally-specific and contingent social roles (gender) are entrenched to particular classes of humans (biology/sex) while they are children. It can be a very useful analytical means of parsing Russian Disinfolklore to consider instances of disinformation as we would the uttrances of children. The Grievance Mining declaratory statements of core Russian Disinfolklorists like Putin would not be tolereated in our children. If our children were constantly whinging about, say, the West collapsing the Soviet Union, even if the matter being moaned about was true, we would teach them to focus on the future not the past. If, as Putin does constantly, our children were using this bogus grievance to justify and explain, say, committing genocide against Ukrainians, we would also explain to our children that nothing justifies torture or genocide. “No matter how aggrieved you are, darling, it’s simply not right to invade a sovereign state and commit genocide,” is how we might communicate this key life lesson to our misdirected child.
Throughout Disinfolklore we will not approach the utterances of Putin and key Russian Disinfolklorists in the same way we would approach the carefully weighed words of a normal democratically elected leader acting in good faith. We will use a number of different methods - we will take a Lenses of Gender approach, and we will take a Lenses of Disinfolklore approach. We will also assay the weight and meaning of Russian Disinfolklorists’ words as if they were from a child. This will help demystify the nonsense which often flows through statements by those leading the genocide in Ukraine.
As in all arts, Disinfolkore, while taking a scientific approach to parsing Disinformation, also requires the balance of an intuitive approach too. And in the cut-into-tiny pieces episode, my immediate intuition was that here the Russian intelligence service which had conjured up the troll was not only exploiting the damsel-in-distress motif from Indo-European folklore, it was doing so to manipulate its hearers into particular modes of thinking.
Russian Disinfolklore drips with misogyny.
Russian Disinfolklorists from Putin downwards promote the patriarchy that brought them to power.
Very few women achieve powerful positions in the Russian power vertical. The European Nordic and Slavic Russians who dominate the power vertical across Russia espouse a model of a perfect society in which there is no democratic accountability. Excluding 50% of the population from participation in public decision making is a great start, if you oppose democracy.
Disinfolklore (2) introduced the importance of the theme of genocide to parsing Russian Disinfolklore. Kidnapping, sexual crimes and invasion aversion / obsession are inextricably linked with genocide and the white power “replacement theory” demographic obsessions of oligarchs and demagogues like Putin (those around him and those who support him). Putin dedicated most of his 2019 State of the Nation address to his fear that what he calls the Russian Ethnos here will disappear:
In the midst of its chaotic genocidal occupation of Ukraine, Russia has dedicated vast resources to kidnapping children. Helping children understand how to avoid being kidnapped is a core function of Indo-European folklore. From Hansel and Gretel to Chetty-Chitty Bang Bang our culture is infused with stories that help embed this useful fear in children.
Russia has forcibly transferred millions of Ukrainian women and hundreds-of-thousands of Ukrainian children (many of whom its forces have orphaned) into the Russian Federation.
The Arrest Warrant that the International Criminal Court issued for the Russian leader and his children’s rights commissioner cited the forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to the Russian Federation.
One of the main tropes that Putin uses to divide his opponents and unite his supporters across the world is the Cultural War political strategy invented and perfected by an American Republican strategist Pat Buchanan.
In 2013 Buchanan, who has advised ever Republican president since Nixon, wrote an article entitled “Putin’s Paleoconservative Moment.” Buchanan lauded Putin for being the strategic value of rhetorically dividing societies into two camps: “conservatives and traditionalists” versus the “militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.”
Russia uses the misogynistic troll contained in Buchanan’s paleoconservetism piece as an organising fiction. It suits perfectly its preferred role for women in Russian Disinfolklore: damsels-in-distress or witches or worse who lure westerners to their fate. In Ruschism, women are instruments. This is why in Counter Disinfolklore we take a Gender Perspective. And why in illustrating the power of taking a Disinfolklore perspective, we use the example of Gender Mainstreaming to illustrate what we mean.
Fear of adulteration of the Inner Realm by bad blood and invaders is one of the primary motifs in Indo-European folklore, as it is in Russian Disinfolklore. The fertility of the so-called Russian “ethnos” is one of Russia’s leaderships’ obsessions. Ukrainian women and children being forced from Ukraine into Russia in order to service the Russian state’s obsession with demography and white power over its Asian subject peoples is one of the primary motivations for and means of Russia’ genocidal war in Ukraine.
So, as I had intuitively noticed as far back as 2016 with the “cut-into-tiny-pieces” piece of Disinfolklore, taking a gender perspective is a key tool to use in parsing Russian Disinfolklore. So we will return again and again to mainstreaming this analytical method to elucidate Russian (and other forms of) Disinfolklore throughout this manual.
From Footnote 60 in New Lines Institute May 2022 “A Independent Legal Analysis…Genocide...Duty to Prevent”: “For the comment, see Пресс-конференция по итогам российско-французских переговоров. (n.d.). Президент России. Retrieved May 26, 2022, from http://kremlin.ru/events/president/ news/67735 For background on the reference to a rhyme, see: «Терпи, моя красавица» Все решили, что Путин слушает «Красную плесень». На самом деле президент цитировал частушки (но все равно матерные).”
In 1997, the United Nations Economic and Social Council, in their agreed conclusions 1997/2, defined gender mainstreaming as:
“...the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality... Gender mainstreaming does not replace the need for targeted, women-specific policies and programmes or positive legislation, nor does it substitute for gender units or gender focal points.” (UN Women)