Disinfolklore Inculcates Rules
Disinfolklore Inculcates Rules
Færytale Beginning II: Counter Disinfolklore ~ Controlling War Magic.
This repeating pattern (or routine) of Coercive / Control Mana-laden communications was immanent in the Russian state’s rhetoric, its actions, and in the language and activities of individual actors operating on behalf of the Russian state.
This coercive control routine shone through the antics of Russia as a permanent member of the United Nation’s security council in every security council session, and in the quotidian situations I found myself in on the bridge.
The entire bridge tragedy in which I played a walk-on role for three years was an emanation of Russian coercive control strategy.
The only reason the Russian and Ukrainian armies faced off at that geographical point was because Russia had invaded Ukraine. Russia was holding the Ukrainian land it occupied (occupied in the sense of the Geneva Conventions, which govern the laws of war and how military occupations must operate) and the Ukrainians who lived there to ransom: Conform to our diktats which violate the Geneva Conventions, or Russia will exile, torture, detain, starve, or kill you. Now that Russia had invaded Ukraine, Russia could not simply let people pass over the bridge unmolested - that would be against its nature as a coercive control addict. Russia had to use the bridge as a means of coercively controlling, herding, tuning, and conditioning the behaviour of everyone involved in that demi-monde.
It is worth noting that, as in all matters in Counter Disinfolklore, there is an objective, agreed, and lawful standard against which to judge Russia’s actions at that bridge: the Geneva Conventions stipulate that occupiers must allow those living under occupation to leave the occupation unmolested. Every day I bore witness, on behalf of the international community, to Russia’s violations of multiple international legal obligations.
Russia, like any grievance-mining gaslighting wifebeater, also blamed its victim Ukraine for the consequences of Russia’s own law breaking. In promoting the troll that someone else was responsible for the choices Russia made to continue its unlawful and violent occupation of Ukraine’s land, Russia (and the individual army bridge trolls under its command) were executing one of its main objectives in Ukraine: the creation and entrenchment of physical and mental separation between previously united Ukrainians either side of the Donets.
Then, in 2015, I had no idea why Russia was using its monopoly in the information space inside Russia occupied Ukraine to ignite in the minds of Ukrainians left in occupied Ukraine the idea that other Ukrainians belonged to an Outer Realm and that such Outer Realm Ukrainians wanted to kill those Ukrainians left inside the occupation. Later, we will understand how important the Disinfolklore content propagated through Russia’s propaganda apparatus is in concealing genocide.
Russia, like an evil monarch in a færy tale, had trapped over one million Ukrainians inside a ten-thousand-square-kilometre prison in the parts of Ukraine that it occupied after its February 2014 invasion.
Enclosed in this giant concentration camp, with walls concealed by Disinfolklore, Russia exercised the full panoply of coercive control strategies which I now recognize as preparatory acts to genocide.
A core enabling condition of Russia’s Ukrainian genocide was its Disinfolklore production and propagation apparatus inside occupied Ukraine, as well as Russia’s use of Disinfolklore inside the information space of countries which are duty bound, by law, to act to prevent genocide. Counter Disinfolklore will often reference the vast array of propaganda inside occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2023 which it was my job to collect and interpret.
At first, the content I had to collect, parse, and interpret each day was mesmerizingly confusing. It was non-sensical, in many cases. There were repeated stories about ten thousand “Polish mercenaries” assembling in localities near the bridge which I would be ordered to visit by my supervisors where I would only find a few mystified village elders.
There was the “Luxury Sausage Troll Saga” which I will tell you about later. The “Cut Into Tiny Pieces”episode that I was sent by my bosses to investigate was so preposterous that it led directly to my detection of Disinfolklore which, again, we will look at later.
I did not know then what experts in folklore wrote about the Lapplanders who use imaginative stories to inculcate their children with rules to keep them safe:
“When children are very small the Lapp parents give them rules to follow. These rules are often hidden in stories or tales. The stories are told by the elderly Lapps to the children. One story tells about the Big Sea Snake that lives in the deep and very cold fjeld-tarn. When the Big Sea Snake finds a child alone on the shore, she may come up from the depth and swallow that child. One story advises every little child to keep a little bell in their belt. When moving outside the village the bell must be jingling to keep the Mountain witch away.”
Russian Disinfolklore operates using the same methods to conceal its meanings long enough for them to become a part of the minds of those who uncritically read and share its engaging trolls. I possess a huge collection of the daily array of Disinfolklore emanating from Russia’s “media” outlets and troll farms inside Russia-occupied Ukraine. Content from this data set, with which I shall illustrate the Disinfolklore analytical method for parsing Russian Disinformation, successfully brainwashed Ukrainians in occupied Ukraine.
Our leaders, too, and our people, outside Ukraine, were expertly targeted by individual and mass media borne Disinfolklore. This Russian Disinfolklore concealed itself in jokey memes or stories about jokey characters like the drunk former president Medvedyev.
It communicated into our minds rules as effectively as those immanent in the stories Lapplander elders shared with their communities’ children. Russian Disinfolklore affected how we interpreted the reality of Russia’s genocide in Ukraine. And it was so effective our communities were bamboozled into tolerating Russia’s unlawful genocidal military occupation of Ukraine for far too long.
Continued…
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