Disinfolklore (9)
Disinfolklore (9)
Luxury Sausage Troll Saga (a) - Disinfolklore is a new analytical method to parse disinformation.
That day – the day of the dead - had begun like almost every other day at that moment in my life in early 2016. My Danish collaborator Eir and I were rolling towards that iron and wooden bridge in our armoured Land Cruiser. My Motorola crackled alive as we came within radio range of our team, across the bridge, on the other side of the river, in that Otherworld of Russia-occupied Ukraine.
“Sierra One. Copy? Lima Three calling Sierra One? Over.”
All day long we paced between these two trolling armies. I tried to alleviate the suffering felt by the ten-thousand-people who crisscrossed the bridge on foot each day. Just seeing us there assuaged people’s fear. We provided what’s known in human rights work as Protection by Presence. My Buddhist teacher had once directed me to study an ancient text that described protecting other ‘sentient beings’ as one of the definitions of the practice of generosity. It was that insight which inspired my business idea based on my recently trademarked invention of the Code of Positive Trolls. I’ll get back to this later.
All night long, these soldiers trolled each other’s emotions, like fear, anger, disgust, and sadness, by firing rocket-propelled grenades, artillery, tracer fire, and sniper bullets expertly targeted at glowing cigarettes, exploding ballistics, and machine guns across the territory I patrolled each day. On such mornings, as we moved towards where the previous night’s ritual of violent action, counter-reaction, and escalation had been enacted, I knew what to expect. I also knew that the unexpected could occur.
Our own mission ritual each morning, when we arrived at the bridge, included being taken on a tour by soldiers and then the Russian occupiers. Each side, based on opposing banks of the Donets, would weave their Disinfolklore meanings inside Disinfolklore vectors – modern legends – relaying the previous night’s orgy of violence, of which they had been the victim, never the initiator. They would point out bullet holes, the concrete dust and rusted metal detritus of former military posts, and the splash marks from rockets that had melted the asphalt of an old country road.
Only a year earlier, this throughfare had run between peaceful meadows, woods and riverbanks overhung by willows where trolling and fly fishers baited prey in the Arcadian Donets. Just as it had been decades earlier during the Second World War, and millennia ago during the struggles between Old Europe’s last tribes and the first ancient Ukrainian Indo-European-speaking people, this former idyll was a civilisational fault-line - the centre of a war zone. For millennia the Donets had been Europe’s second-line of defence against Asia, which lay, according to ancient maps for millennia, just east from here accross the Don River.
Now, in those same foxholes which had, three-quarters of a century ago been occupied by the Soviet army fighting against the Germans, there lived Russian soldiers. During the Second World War, the Soviet army had held the line there against the Germans, who, for a time, occupied the land on the north side of the bridge, stretching as far as Norway and west as far as Normandy.
“This is Sierra One. Proceed. Over,” I radioed to my German fellow peacekeeper, Ewelina, located in rebel-held territory across the bridge. Eir and I were running a bit late. We should have been there already to relieve our teammates.
“Lima Three’s in position,” Ewelina replied. “We’re ready to return to base. Awaiting you, Sierra One? If you do not arrive soon, I will report you to our leadership. You are always late. Your position, PLEASE? You in sight of the sausage mountain?”
“Sausages?” I repeated, surprised by the intrusion of a word so unrelated to our work on the bridge. I decided to ignore the passive aggression and the threat to report us for being late. How could we ‘de-escalate’ conflict between the warring sides, if inside our organization we didn’t practise what we preached?! That said, being accused on the open radio of ‘always’ being late really grated. It trolled me, almost beyond my capacity to remain calm. The last thing I needed at that moment was her complaining up her chain of command across the river only for it to descend our chain of command on our side of the river. My Volatile Balkan line manager, who never left our base one hundred and fifty kilometres safely away from the front line, loved nothing better than an excuse to wreck my head with criticisms. “We’re about five to ten minutes from position. Please confirm you said ‘sausages’? Over,” I responded, hopefully not too aggressively.
“Sierra One. This is Lima Three. Have you seen the sausages? I repeat ‘sausages.’ We have an escalating situation here! Over,” Ewelina responded, ignoring my question. Working in such a multi-cultural environment, you didn’t always know whether others had picked up your signals and were ignoring them on purpose to make a point.
I looked to Eir, a retired Special Forces officer. She was driving our armoured Land Cruiser that day. “Did she say sausages?” I asked.
“Affirmative,” Eir responded. She could have just said ‘yes.’ Her use of that robotic word added a hint of irony and was a welcome reminder of our easy familiarity with one another. We had a sense of trust that was uncommon between others in our patrol group or in our mission. The purpose of our diplomatic mission was to keep the peace between the Russian-occupiers of eastern Ukraine and Ukrainian government forces. Our mission was composed of odds-and-ends from the police, military, and diplomatic corps of fifty-seven different countries from Vancouver to Vladivostok, and from Dublin to Ulaanbaatar.
My role - our role as a Mission - was to establish facts in relation to specific incidents. That was the precise wording in the document known as a “Mandate” which these fifty-seven states, including Ukraine and Russia, had voted for and which gave me the right to be there. It was out of my fulfilment of this task of “establishing the facts” that the entire Disinfolklore method to parse disinformation was born. It was the folkloric echoes of every dimension of my situation there, including incidents like the Luxury Sausage Troll Saga, which led me to invent Disinfolklore.
My radio was still crackling, conveying the anxiety of our team on the Russia-occupied side of the river. I was no closer to understanding what all this sausage-talk was about. Eir and I were exchanging ‘I don’t know what she’s talking about either’ glances of incomprehension. I turned back to our Ukrainian language translator sitting behind us. She hadn’t heard anything, she said. Her headphones were over her ears. I switched channels on the radio and asked our escort vehicle if they understood what was happening. Nope… [TBC]
