Welcome to the Disinfolklore podcast!
Hi there, my moniker is Decoding Trolls. This is the Disinfolklore podcast. This is the first Disinfolklore podcast, so thank you very much for being here. Today I want to look at the newest addition to the arsenal of the Disinfolklore analytical method for parsing Russian, MAGA,and in fact any form of disinformation which is communicated through stories.
So I invented disinfolklore and have elaborated upon disinfolklore since February, 2023. I marked its invention with a tweet.
I was trying to find a moniker to communicate all of the work which I had done since first being posted on a bridge in eastern Ukraine in early 2015. as a diplomat, as a monitor, as what I now understand myself to be a Counter Disinfolklorist. So I'd had an intuition that on this bridge... surrounded by a biosphere zone of forestry and a bridge guarded on one end by Russian occupying bridge trolls and on the other end by Ukrainian armed forces defending their their land from the Russian occupiers.
I had had an intimation that there was something folklore about the whole situation. And after seven years, eight years almost after that, after I had begun in earnest in early 2022, after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, to communicate publicly everything that I was seeing and interpreting through the Disinfolklore lens.
After in February 2020, around the time COVID struck, I began in earnest to try and interrogate what was it of this scene on this bridge with little green men on one end of the bridge, a folkloric dimension which is used in russian propaganda to disarm us into for instance tolerating as we did as a civilization the march 2014 occupation of ukraine's Crimea Crimean peninsula and so from March 2020, I began in earnest to try and explore what was folklore about it.
And the unit of analysis I settled upon primarily was trolling and trolls and this idea of energy, this idea of a character in a story protecting the bridge. From three goats wanting to cross the bridge.
In this case, they were Russian occupiers, armed Russian occupiers. And every day, as an OSCE diplomat in charge of a patrol group of 25, senior police, army and human rights professionals, we would cross this bridge. We would test what we call our freedom of movement to move between this other land, this other world, this folklore kingdom where the monarch, the troll king monarch, Prigozhin, the chef of disinfolklore, disinfolklore apparatus, this massive multi-channel communications infrastructure, which at the time I was very curious about and I wrote a lot about.
And communicated a lot about it, but I didn't know what it was or what it was doing, and it was only after the full-scale invasion I realised that this dis-folklore apparatus, this multi-channel, so multiple TV channels, TV channels for every personality type, TV channels with the production values of CNN or major American stations, Newspapers which resembled the kind of really low production values and on the other end of the scale very high production values. Websites, hundreds of different websites in this little troll kingdom which I call the house of lies which I take from Iranian, early Iranian, early Indo-European mythology. where at the time of death, we cross a bridge. And this is conceptualized as meeting.
We meet Daena, who is guarding the entrance to this bridge. And if Daena appears to us as a witch, then we will fall over the steep, long the side of the bridge into an eternal ravine, and we will cross into the house of lies. However, if Daena appears as a beautiful woman, then we know we will pass across the bridge into the house of songs.
Crossing this bridge into the rebel troll kingdom, the Russian-occupied Luhansk, I always knew I was going into a house of lies, But I didn't have a moniker for it and I didn't really understand totally what was folklore about the whole situation. I knew the Brothers Grimm, I had read Tolstoy's village tales as a child, my mother loved the book, she read them to me a lot. I was an expert in Dostoevsky. I had studied the brothers Karamazov as a postgraduate at Georgetown University in Washington, where I studied geopolitics through the eyes of what I now call Disinfolklore, but through the eyes of intellectual history. And this idea in, for instance, Crime and Punishment, which I studied as a law student at Cambridge University, I knew that Roshkalnikov was a dunce. So he was supposedly this deep people, the deep folk, which the Russians call themselves. But in fact, he was a folkloric dunce. He murders two women just to see if he can get away with it and then panics the whole time as gradually this police, this detective, who's actually based on the detective in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, So this idea that we perceive reality through folklore, through folklore laundered, through literature, through this massive apparatus, which I now understand since the first, since the full-scale invasion, this massive dis-folklore apparatus. in the House of Lies, in Russia-occupied Ukraine, its purpose was to brainwash us.
Its purpose was to persuade and brainwash Ukrainians into thinking they're not Ukrainians, to brainwash them into being prepared to kill their fellow Ukrainians. And it did through this, through the medium of stories. So all the time I was working on this bridge for three years between 2015 and 2018, there was a constant drumbeat, a repetition of stories which embedded the idea that Ukrainians were trying to kill their fellow Ukrainians and Russia occupied Ukraine. And in Russia-occupied Luhansk, in this house of lies, through this disenfolklore apparatus, was embedded in the minds of the Ukrainians living there, the idea that they were other than Ukraine, that they were Russian, that the Ukrainians, helped by 10,000 Polish mercenaries, were crossing this bridge to try and kill them. And only the Russians were rescuing them. So Russia was endangering the damsel. It was putting the damsel into distress, and then it was purporting to solve the pain of the damsel in distress.
And this trope, this immanence inside every aspect of Russian Disinfolklore at the time, I didn't know, understand what it was doing, but actually what it was doing was preparing Ukrainians in Russia occupied Ukraine to go and try and kill in what, what the Russians themselves call meat assaults, which are, is this idea of absorbing all of Ukraine's artillery and bullets with wave after wave of human beings. And once Ukraine is exhausted of its artillery and its ammo, its ammunition, then they send in their special, their Spetsnaz forces to take the land. And this is the Russian method of operating Russia.
Of operating war and of trying to conquer Ukraine. And so all of these earnest NATO manuals, I now understand, which describe Russian doctrine, they are a distant folklore. All of these Russian manuals themselves publicized and public about their particular military doctrine and that they do this and they do that.
It is in fact also an example of Disinfolklore because the practice, what happens on the ground is not what they do. And so I was sitting there trying to work for a moniker to describe all of the work I'd done, all of the understanding, the millions of texts of people who had read my work online, particularly through since the full scale invasion. when I made a decision to use the knowledge I had of having worked in Ukraine, having monitored the Minsk peace process for three years on this bridge, and then afterwards, for four years, having gone to speak to hundreds of elected officials in eastern Ukraine, in parts of Ukraine,which are now under a brutal genocidal occupation, I made this decision to use this knowledge to try and interpret and promote the importance of Ukraine maintaining its sovereignty, its security and prosperity. By using my knowledge combined with the stories, the Disinfolklore that we were reading on Telegram, the propaganda, the stories that were persuading many of our friends who up until that point we thought were probably quite solid people.
And yet suddenly all they needed to hear was this folkloric dunce, Putin, who just like Rashkalnikov in Crime and Punishment was, in fact, a St. Petersburg law student and a dunce who, like the archetypal dunce in every Bildungsroman, who, unlike, rather, the archetypal dunce in every Bildungsroman, every day they go to bed at night and wake up the next morning having forgotten everything they learned the day before. And this is Roshkalnikov. This is Putin himself. He today, as we'll discuss, has no clue about how badly placed his entire army and country is going that those of us who understand Ukraine and understand Ukrainians understand that Ukraine will not stop until it ejects Russia from all of its territory. And unfortunately for Russia, this means that it will destroy Russia.
So a wise and non-folkloric dunce who didn't fall into their own distant folklore universe, who didn't believe their own or who didn't drink their own Kool-Aid such that they think that they're very strong. They fell in love with an archetype of a strong Russia. And this is what really what we're going to be talking about today.
So I was looking for a moniker to describe all of this work. And I had this folder in my computer, which I had created in around June. in around June 2020. And the folder was called Folklore. And because I had started off looking at trolls and trolling and the origins of the moniker and the idea and what they meant. And so I had this folder Folklore, which by the time I was in February 2023, having just met a publisher who said to me, you need to get practiced at bringing your ideas into people's minds and presenting folklore. uh, your ideas. And so I established the publications on, um, on substack, uh, decoding trolls and then power of mana. And then I was looking for this moniker for what then became, uh, Disinfolklore. And I had this folder folklore on my computer. And then I started writing, okay, distant fate, dis. And I, I got to the N, uh, for writing disinformation.
I was like, Oh my gosh, Disinfolklore this describes everything so Disinfolklore is a diamond it's got so many sides that I've gradually unpacked and unraveled and the Disinfolklore podcast will help me bring these ideas into a new order audio audience which I've been writing about millions of words and have had tens of millions of readers since I first introduced the idea with a tweet and in February 2023. So today we're going to look at what for me is one of the newest pieces of ammunition in the arsenal of Disinfolklore, which is this, in this sense, I mean this distant folklore as the analytical method to parse disinformation.
So we're looking, we're perceiving through the lenses of Disinfolklore any memes, any linguistic, audible and visual memes. And what do I mean by archetype? Well, when we come across somebody who thinks of Russia as having an inexhaustible supply of humans and of being the strong, unbeatable force that. And yet the data tells us it's lost oodles of wars, including in Afghanistan. It's had its, you know what, handed to it in Ukraine constantly. It had to retreat from Kyiv, from Kherson, from Kup’yansk. It's constantly on the run now. Ukraine is occupying, at the time of recording this, around 500 square kilometers of Russian territory itself.
Ukraine has destroyed its... Russia's Black Sea fleet. It has obliterated its naval headquarters. On the other hand, there's inside this thought about Ukraine for people who don't understand Ukraine and haven't had the benefit that I had of spending seven years in eastern Ukraine encountering it. And then since the full-scale invasion following the minutiae of the day-by-day battlefield both on the ground but also in the information space, that haven't had the benefit of that, what we call perhaps low-information consumers of information about Ukraine.
They don't understand that Ukraine has, on almost every dimension of natural resources, from farmland to uranium, to precious metals, to oil, to gas, on all of these dimensions, the largest country entirely in Europe is in the top five and in many cases the first or second most prosperous country in Europe and one of the most important countries in the world. And yet they portray and they've swallowed and they propagate this idea of Ukraine almost as a weak woman.
So this idea of archetypes is what's going on here. So we're looking at Russia as the bear. So the bear, don't poke the bear, is the most important distant folklore meme there is. It influences national security advisors. You're not stupid if you fall for Disinfolklore. I fall for it all the time.
And what I'm trying to do with countering Disinfolklore and learning the method and elaborating on the method is And introducing these new weapons of Counter Disinfolklore weapons. I'm trying to teach myself as much as anyone else how in real time to detect, counter and combat weapons.
This Disinfolklore which affects our moods, intentions, attitudes and motivations. So we begin to read an article and in our mind is the intention to send some money to Ukraine to help the Ukraine resist the Russian onslaught.
But we start reading this article, this example of disin folklore. So we start reading it with that motivation,with that intention, with the attitude of, yes, we're going to help Ukraine. And by the end of the article, we're thinking, oh, there's no point. And so we decide to donate to another charity and nothing to do with Ukraine. We're deflated where we think Ukraine will lose. So why bother?
There's just no point in donating money or spending any time on it. So what's happened in that? Well, we all go on oodles of emotional journeys almost every second of our life. And every conscious moment we're going on emotional journey after emotional journey after emotional journey. And what dissent folklorists have understood is by, for instance, invoking fear or sadness or disgust or joy, schadenfreude, as the Germans might call it, joy at the enemy dying, that they can manipulate our emotions and sneak trolls directly into our inner minds. They can sneak ideas. And what I now understand is At a certain point, many, many different ideas aggregate into becoming archetypes.
And Russia occupies an archetype of the strong, unbeatable force. And this archetype is communicated into our mind through memes. And by meme, I mean any informational unit, whether visual, audible, sensory of any description. So I don't just mean what we understand as memes on computer memes. I mean informational units which communicate ideas and certain kinds of memes, which deliver a certain kind of energy, which has a certain kind of quality into our mind. And some of these are either deliberately or accidentally have the effect of creating in our minds immovable archetypes.
So let's look at Russia's performance in Ukraine since February 24th, 2022. on the one hand, and then the other hand, this archetype of Russia as this unbeatable force that no power can possibly defeat, and especially not little old Ukraine, which in our minds, it occupies the archetype of basket case, corrupt, full of far-right Nazis.
These are all archetypes communicated into our minds by Russian distant folklore on purpose. and accidentally perhaps in the history books in school.
So let's look at... Why, if we look at Russia's performance in Ukraine since February 24th, 2022, how can we still maintain the view that Russia is inevitably going to win? On the 1st of March 2022, I was able to call this war because I'd read War and Peace, Tolstoy's War and Peace, one of the great pieces of literature of our time. all 12 books of it, based on decades of research by Tolstoy himself. And one of the most memorable aspects of War and Peace is how the Russian general Kutuzov is trying to defend against Napoleon, who has entered Russia, Russia proper.
And Kutuzov is being pressured by the Tsar and everyone. And Tolstoy really lays this on. Everyone wants Kutuzov to attack, attack, attack in this huge set piece battle. And Tolstoy shows again and again how Kutuzov resisted this pressure and knowingly replied whenever he was being pressured, whether it was by the Tsar or any of the other protagonists,
“Just wait, just wait. I know what we're doing. I know what I'm doing.” And over the course of two or three of 12 of the books, which constitute war and peace, Kutuzov is shown resisting this. And what he's in fact doing, as we then see, he's drawing the Russians in. He's refusing to directly engage them.
And so on the 1st of March 2022, when I started reading the data that was coming in about the Russian forces, which had, some of us might remember this long convoy of infantry fighting vehicles and tanks, which had come in from Belarus and was all stuck in this massive 30 kilometer long convoy.
And very quickly, Ukraine spontaneously started destroying the convoy. and provoking the occupants of the convoy into running away. And this threat which was looming over in many of our minds, like the archetypal pantomimic, uh devil like the the joker in batman or any of these other characters in our popular culture and in our literature and our film in the stories we we see where we have good versus evil and we have this uh bogeyman or bogey person uh that uh These archetypes arise in our mind. And then when, for instance, a 30 kilometer long convoy of infantry fighting vehicles and tanks starts pouring towards Kyiv, we just have this fear. And every day we go to bed with fear about what's going to happen. And all of us know how this ended about 10 days after it ended. It started looming in the back of our mind. It was no more. It was destroyed.
It was just so many metal hulks, scrap metal, and lots of dead Russian soldiers. It would be a couple of weeks later. Until the Battle of Mostyn on the 27th of March 2022, when Ukraine decisively defeated Russia. And Russia started retreating from the Kyiv region the next day.
And it retreated so fast that it left the dead bodies of all the civilians. Russia's entire model had been to come into the Kyiv region... President Zelensky would run away, as would his people, and it would occupy the buildings in central Kyiv and take over. When this became impossible, it decided it continued to do through military means.
So it started killing of normal villagers, people in these very posh suburbs of Kyiv, like Irpin and Bucha, where people, just ordinary people gathered together to resist the Russians. but the Russians themselves just tried to massacre everyone. And the idea, and this is where Russian model in Russia occupied Ukraine since 2014, it's to do the most despicable acts, torture, murder, genocide, forced deportation, enslaving captured soldiers, and then to hide the evidence because it still possesses the land. But it had to run away so quickly from the Kiev region. as it would later from Kherson, from Kup’yansk, from Kharkiv, that it ran away so fast that it never got to cover the evidence.
Meanwhile, on the other hand, the plucky Ukrainians who spontaneously, children, men, women, whole communities, people who didn't know each other, spontaneously came together to defend and defeat the mighty Russian army, which at the time people thought was the second army, army of the world on the 1st of March 2022. So all that was ahead.
But I was seeing what was going on, what was being reported in the Russian disinfolklore apparatus through Telegram and on Twitter and through other modes of communication, that the Russian soldiers, for instance, were all coming into Ukraine as if… They were going on a parade. They themselves were not mentally prepared for war. They had their parade uniforms. In some cases, there was instructions to arrive in Kyiv by 1455 on the 24th of February 2022. They were complaining then that they couldn't communicate with each other. They didn't have enough food after a couple of days.
These were all the same mistakes Napoleon had made when he invaded Russia. And as I knew from my war and peace, Kutuzov, Russia's general at the time, he decided, OK, the best means of defeating this enemy is to draw them further in and And let them, let the winter, let their lack of logistics, just eat them around the edges. Don't face them down in these big set-piece battles which they wanted. And so I coined the term on the 1st of March 2022, a reverse Napoleon. And this is very important in counter-Disinfolklore, because Disinfolklorists use stories and mean stories.
Stories to affect our moods, our attitudes, our motivations and our intentions. They use stories to do this, to deflate our feeling of agency and to make us think resistance is futile. They coercively control our activities by affecting our manner, which is the well from which all our moods, intentions, attitudes and emotions motivations flows.
They use stories to deflate us and to affect our motivations, which we're not even aware of. We're just consuming a story about such and such thing, about Ukraine and something that might have happened. But at the end of the story, we decide not to donate money to Ukraine.
And the same works with MAGA and with other forms of distant folklore and particularly authoritarian stories. authoritarians who do their best to take away from us any sense of agency. So it's very important that counter-dis and folklorists, which I hope if you're listening to this, you want to learn to become a better counter-dis and folklorist.
It's very important that we also have catchy phrases. And so this idea of reverse Napoleon has been taken up by many thousands of people who have very kindly shared words. my work and shared my counter disin folklore avant la lettre. I say avant la lettre because it would be a year before I coined the moniker disin folklore,
which suddenly within a moment of seeing it, the folder, my folklore folder, my disinformation and realizing, oh my God, disin folklore describes everything, everything I have been working on for the past eight years. And it indeed describes perfectly everything everything the Russians are doing, both knowingly and unknowingly, their mode of doing what I now call stealth genocide.
So they persuade Ukrainians and Russia-occupied Ukraine that they're not Ukrainian. And if anyone has a problem with conceptualizing how this happened, if you know anyone who's gone MAGA or, for instance, who went Brexit, then you will have a really good idea of how quickly, really clever, bright people with whom you felt you had a real connection can be turned by distant folklore. Stories that embed this inner and outer realm. A million Syrian migrants coming to steal your children. to steal your jobs, to steal your prosperity, your sovereignty, the security of your state. In Maga disinfolklore, it's a similar idea.
These Mexicans, Donald, who himself always insists, loves the word Trump because he hated Donald Duck, which is a form of Counter Disinfolklore. to call him Donald, to insist on calling him Donald when he was plagued by this moniker as a child. And so he hates being called Donald. He hates it. But if we're going to be effective counter to some folklorists, we must take the tools in the arsenal of the counter distant folklorist arsenal and use them to battle, to save what I see is the essential battle of our age. And this is what Counter Disinfolklorists are most involved in. We're most involved in preserving that. the benefits, the post-World War II legal and social order.
Disinfolklorists, by contrast, want to return us to the social conditions of the 1930s, where there are no universal human rights protected by law. Territorial integrity doesn't matter. You, as a human, have no right to participate in the decisions that affect you. You will be lulled into sleep like the Russian population. Meanwhile, the oligarchs will control everything.
They use migrants and these outer realm migrants, or in the case of eastern Ukraine, these Polish mercenaries wanting to come across and kill you. These embed this inner outer realm within our minds. and allow the Disinfolklorists like the Russians to pose as the rescuer of the damsel that Russia itself has distressed. So from...
War and peace I determined on the 1st of March 2022. And I'm not special. Lots of other people worked this out quite quickly. So we started off on the 24th of February thinking Russia was the second army of the world. I knew and I know that Ukraine will fight to the death because I had spoken to so many of Ukraine's elected officials and I was often working with a Russian and these elected officials told us again and again and again that they would fight the Russians. So they would say exactly to the Russian diplomat that I sometimes had to work with, we will fight you.
If you come into our land, we will fight you to the deaths. And when you hear this once, twice, 100, 200 times from people who are so representative of their community that they are elected by them, At a certain moment, your archetype of Ukraine as a basket case, as a corrupt country where everyone is far right and which is post-Soviet and doesn't really exist, is not really...
At a certain moment, that archetype can change. And for me, listening to these stories and listening to the vehemence with which... these people took by telling me this in front of my Russian colleague, knowing my Russian colleague would probably become part of the occupying force when it would have been wise to say to him, to, as we say in Irish, to make him feel they were his friend. No, they wanted to tell him very clearly so that he would take this message back to his people, and say to them, do not go to Ukraine. Do not go there. Dragons live there. And this, I know, is Ukraine's message today. And this is why whenever you hear any distant folklore about peace processes, and there's going to be a Minsk 3, and Ukraine should lay down its arms and accept the battle lines as they are today.
Know this. Know this from me, from someone who spent seven years in Eastern Ukraine and who has been embedded in this, all the stories, the billions and millions of stories since the full-scale invasion, every day, these emotional journeys and understanding what is happening in the villages that I visited and got to know well, in the communities I visited, in the schools I visited, the children I met or was shown by teachers proudly demonstrating how European their pupils were, these children now forcibly disappeared by Russia, murdered, transported into Russia, their language taken away from them. These children, 20,000 of whom are named in the warrant for Putin's arrest by the International Criminal Court.
Have you any idea how difficult it is to get a warrant for the arrest of a sitting head of state? The amount of evidence you need to convince all the judges in the International Criminal Court to issue a warrant for the arrest of a sitting head of state is for the war crime of forcibly transferring children. Well, I knew those children. I met those children. I met those teachers. I was in those villages, which today are ashes, which were vaporized by the Russians. So know this when I tell you this.
Counter Disinfolklore, Ukraine will never lay down its arms. And you can use this as a method to determine the validity of anyone who is telling you otherwise. They don't know what they're talking about. They're not parsing the data. Their mind is animated by this archetype of Ukraine as a weak woman who can't do anything and can't defend itself and Russia as this monster which always wins wars.
So listening to the Disinfolklorist in chief, Putler, the other day, as he spent three hours spouting Disinfolklore, brainwashing Disinfolklore to his people on this call in this yearly call in which he does every few years. He talked about his S-400 systems, these anti-aircraft systems, which are so strong, they're actually several generations ahead of Ukraine's ATACMs and Patriot missile systems. And in his mind, he doesn't seem to be lying about this. He seems to really believe this because no one is bringing him the real stories.
Yet those of us who are engaged in the war have seen oodles of S-400 systems being destroyed by the very missiles. They were intended to neutralize. So think about that. They have these anti-aircraft systems which cannot defend against the exact missile systems, which in the case of ATACMS and Patriot missiles, these are systems that were designed in the 1980s. These were systems which were designed 40 years ago. And Russia, this disinfolklore idea, this meme which has been promoted by Putin, that Russia has such strong anti-aircraft systems that nothing can defeat them. This helps promote this archetype in the minds of people. And every time you hear these memes, it just adds, it's like, what would you call sand in an egg timer jumping in, which helps embed and create this archetype.
But we always need to measure these archetypes against the data of what actually is happening. So we see these video footages, and I could show you 10, 20, 30 of them.
We've seen tens of thousands of artillery systems, tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and humans being destroyed by Ukrainian armed forces, even without Western help. So for six months last year, Ukraine didn't get a thing from America, not a thing from America. And Russia only made tiny, tiny incremental gains in land. It set out to conquer a whole country.
And now it's losing, it lost 75,000 men to capture Bakhmut. It thought it would take Bakhmut by the end of July 2022. It didn't capture Bakhmut, this city which leads nowhere, until the spring, the late spring the next year. Then the next town along Chasiv Yar, it thought it would take that immediately.
Russia has lost another 75,000 men trying to take Chasiv Yar, and it seems no closer to doing so. And bear in mind... When Russia captures Chasivyar, then it leads nowhere. It's high, it's at heights, which is great, but it's vaporized. There's nothing there. There's no treasure there. There's nothing to gain there.
So we see the Russian economic catastrophe unfurling at 700,000 casualties, which is generations worth of future workers. Its interest rate is 22%, but reflecting a real inflation rate of about 50%. We see how most of, all of its huge companies, Kamaz, Gazprom, all of its major companies, the value of their bonds in the last week has crashed.
So this means that these bonds, which are denominated in Western countries, currencies, no one thinks that they will be able to meet repayment schedules. And so no one will buy them and everyone's trying to drop them. Its property companies and its property market is crashing. Its currency has crashed. And still, because their minds are full of what I call data-resistant archetypes of a Potemkin state, data-resistant archetypes of a Potemkin state, Useful idiots and well-meaning people that all of us know, and sometimes we may feel it after we've read one article, which, for instance, is talking about, oh, how Russia can keep going forever.
But those of us who look at the data, who parse it carefully... and who understand what is in operation are these archetypes in the back of our minds, bogeymen, great men, small men, weak women, weak children, that these archetypes, which we can use these kinds of expressions to describe, are immanent in the stories and the Disinfolklore and the Counter Disinfolklore that we read. And as the data comes in, as it did for me, from the full-scale invasion, we can begin to challenge these archetypes and understand that they are trying to communicate a sense of inevitability into our minds, which does not match the data.
We remember that Russia has not even conquered any major city in Ukraine. the only major city in Ukraine it conquered to Kherson, it retreated from in September, uh, 2023. And the only reason it, um, it captured Kherson was through the treachery of, uh, people, uh, that, uh, Russia, uh, agents that Russia had managed to implant in, um, the Ukrainian security services, security structures, obviously deceit and deception is a legitimate, um, is a legitimate strategy or tactic in a war. But that, if your argument is that Russia is this great power that was never defeated, obviously that's wrong. It's lost wars against China, Japan, the Nazis until the West bailed it out, Afghanistan. So Somehow, people think Ukraine, as an advanced European power with vast human resources, which powered 40% of the GDP in the USSR of the Soviet Union, somehow Ukraine is weaker than Afghanistan. And somehow Ukraine cannot defeat Russia when Afghanistan defeated Russia plus Ukraine as part of the USSR.
Ukraine contributed the human and financial capital and provided 40% of the GDP of the USSR. And yet the data-resistant archetypes in the minds of people tells us that somehow Ukraine can't win. So that's even in theory. We understand that in theory. But then we look at what has happened since February 24th, 2022, and we try to explain why there is this data-resistant archetype in the back of people's minds.
Now, obviously, some of them and many of them are paid. They're paid Disinfolklorists. We understand how Doppelganger, which is the folkloric moniker given to to this method of Russian Disinfolklorists using spoofed Western media to pretend that stories which it plants are in The Guardian or in the BBC. And so it uses doppelgangers of their websites to spread them out and spread these fakes. And when the European Union's anti-disinformation practitioners discovered this They called it the doppelganger network. They reached into German folklore to take a moniker, which then the Russians themselves took on and began in their internal documents, we now see, to describe their own bot network, which is spoofing Western media outlets as the doppelganger. So it's the doppelganger of the doppelganger. And again, this Russian trope of copying, of mirroring. whatever comes out of the West, out of the Grimm fairy tales or out of the European Union, anti-disinformation practitioners. So that, again, is a common theme we will see imminent in anything which goes on. So another archetype is, oh, Russia's population, 130 million people. And yet we know Russia lies about every single statistic. And yet suddenly Russia We're to believe this population statistic.
There's been no proper census in Russia for decades. But of course they promote the distant folklore, the idea it's 130 million people and the Ukrainians are only 42 million. Ukraine has proper censuses. We understand what the population of Ukraine is. We also understand that in many parts of the Kharkiv front, Russia is losing 10 humans for every one Ukrainian that it kills. So Ukraine may have a population of 42 million, but Russia does not have a population of 420 million. So Russia doesn't even have a population of 130 million. But the Disinfolklorists will promote these ideas of strength and of power.
Oh, Russia has a population of three times Ukraine, therefore it will inevitably win. When you do the data and when you look at the math, as Will Thiel has done... you will see that actually, at current rate of attrition, Russia will run out of men long before Ukraine will. So again, data-resistant archetypes of a Potemkin state. Potemkin, of course, the German Catherine, the so-called Great, who conquered southern Ukraine and then... wanted to show his lover how much he had developed. So they built this village, which was a fake village. It was only the fronts of the village. And when their train passed by it, she went, oh, that's really lovely.
And thereafter, it was called the Potemkin State. But that metaphor, that story that I've just told you, can serve as a means of communicating to you exactly why When we have this data-resistant archetype of a Potemkin state that says to us, Russia is unbeatable despite the data, that really what we're dealing with, which is its eternal soul.
And what I'm trying to plant in your mind is that the archetype of Russia is the Potemkin state. So when we see Russia withdrawing from Syria, and we hear Putin describing this as a great victory, and we watch the actual in Raqqa the other day, we could see the Russians pulling out of their base in Raqqa, which had been the capital of the Islamic State. And then within hours, the American military moving in to the same base.
So again, the data-resistant archetype of the Potemkin state is defeated and overcome when we are looking at the data, when we are seeing the stories in the distant folklore and counter Disinfolklore apparatus.
We're watching the actual retreat of Russia from Syria. Then we see Putin describing this as a great victory. we have to make a call on this and say no it's not a great victory so we look at the uh the the the the claims of all of these in all of this distant folklore and we think well
So let's compare it with the data. So let's take a test case, a case study as our final bit in this, the first Disinfolklore podcast. How does Russia implant these archetypes in the minds of us? And so one of the important tropes that Russia wanted to promote was that Ukraine was a far right state and that therefore it did not deserve, not only did it not deserve our help, And one of the main tropes it uses to do this was a chap called Stefan Bandera, who was Ukrainian, who spent most of the Second World War in a Nazi prison camp as a prisoner. You wouldn't think that from the Disinfolklore. So anytime you see any term stemming from this stock character in Russian Disinfolklore called Stepan Bandara, you know you're dealing with a Ruschist state-funded troll and or victims of brainwashing. So it's very easy when you see a tweet by the famous or the former Russian president and prime minister Medvedev where he refers to the Bandarite regime, because this troll that Russia uses is that actually they're not at war with the Ukrainian people, they're just at war with what they call the Bandarite regime. So there you know you're dealing with someone who's trying to brainwash people.
But what we need in the counter-disinfolklore method and the analytical method I call disinfolklore is to be able to distinguish the imminence, the manner, the energy inside memes when we don't really know, we don't really have that much, information about the source of the meme or the speaker.
So anytime you see any term, you can take this as a thesis, as an axiom. Anytime you see any term stemming from a stock character in Russian to sub folklore called Stepan Bandra, you know you're dealing with a Russist state-funded troll and or victims of brainwashing.
Never mistake an historical figure who also shares the name Stepan Bandara with this stock bogeyman actor in Russia's distant folklore. So Russian distant folklore has these stock characters. They're like... In any tale where you have the dunce or the wise man or the Cinderella character, they're all kind of archetypes. They're not real existence. They're not real people.
They're not complex characters. They're not like a character in a brilliant novel which manages to convince you within a few sentences that you're dealing with a real person here. These are bogeymen. These are meant to scare you. And to perform a function, their function is to embed archetypes in our mind and to connect with archetypes we already have, which are deeply implanted through religious and linguistic memes, which we will get to and which I talk about in Power of Mana today. my other podcast as well. And so one Stepan Bandura is a real person, but the other is a character in Russian distant folklore. They only appear in the tweets of Medvedev.
Their job is to provide a common language for those who have chosen to incite, justify and celebrate genocide. If someone accuses someone of being a Banderite, that immediately identifies the accuser as being a brainwashed Russist or a brainwashing Russist. And I use the term Russist to distinguish between Russians. I have no problem with Russia or Russians.
Russian is a legal nationality. But the Russist is someone who is addicted. This is actually defined by the Ukrainian parliament. in April 2023. But the Rushist is a term that describes a particular form of Russian who believes in an imperial ideology. They believe in the cult of the leader of Putin.
They believe in destroying countries in order to save them. They see themselves as a kind of supermen, as a super country, and their will to power must triumph at all possible costs. Every single Russian in Ukraine today who is there unlawfully, who is fighting there, every single one of the million Russians who has crossed the internationally recognised border into Ukraine, including Crimea, is a Ruschist.
They're there unlawfully and they are executing part or some or supporting some of the at least 150,000 documented war crimes since February 24th, 2022. But actually since March 2014, Russia and Rashists and Rashism has been executing war crimes. So Russia's far-right bogeyman went global in 2014.
Russia invented the idea of a far-right Ukrainian to deter support for Ukraine. Lazy, weak, ignorant and cowardly policymakers and journalists spread that meme. It was useful for politicians who didn't want to help Ukraine. Russia's disinfolk law was helping them out by giving them a stock bogeyman character, the Ukrainian nationalist. This was their vulnerability.
They wanted to do nothing to support Ukraine. And Russia saw that market, saw that vulnerability and provided them with a stock bogeyman, the Ukrainian nationalist. Stepan Bandera branded memes are wholly concocted, hyper-normalised, rashist memes. By contrast, they're just too narrow for any foreigner to get. You don't have to know anything about the real Stepan Bandera's life, the fact that he spent the Second World War in a Nazi prison camp. So the idea that someone who was imprisoned by the Nazis is a Nazi, and then somehow he is a model for contemporary Ukrainians resisting the Russian Nazi, the Russist Nazi invasion of Ukraine.
It's just preposterous. But when you read it in Medvedev's texts, as he's trying to incite genocide and incite in Russians and Westerners alike a feeling that Ukraine isn't maybe a damsel in distress, but is not worthy of helping, You don't need to know any of the facts of the case.
You just need to know that what Russia is doing with this Bandarite discourse istriggering archetypes in the backs of our minds. And that's the function of these distant folklore, these examples of distant folklore, these memes, which trigger these archetypes. Only Russist state-funded troll farms and beyond redemption victims of Russist Disinfolklore and perpetrators of genocide use terms like Bandarites. If Russist disin folklore inspires you to Google Bandara, or worse, to read some academic paper on the historical person, you're already well on your way to being trapped inside a Russist troll universe. Like Hunter Biden, such words work like a mantra on the level of incantation and war magic through repetition. Before you know it, you'll be entering into sincere debates that serve to entrench Russia's Disinfolklore memes in your mind as well as in your culture. So you'll start thinking, is Ukraine far right? Or reading articles about this when Russia That is precisely the purpose of the Disinfolklore that Russia is promoting, which is to distract us from the fact that invading Ukraine was unlawful. The method of invading was also unlawful.
The destruction, for instance, this morning or sorry, yesterday of Kherson Children's Cancer Hospital by Russia and Russian state media apparatus publishing the video of the destruction of a Ukrainian children's cancer hospital. So they're creating distant folklore out of their unlawful invasion, their breaches of the laws of war, to try and create these emotional impacts in our minds so that we just think, oh, there's no point in helping them.
They're so evil that we'll never win. no that's just Disinfolklore and thankfully we have the Disinfolklore podcast and I'll leave it at that for today to help us learn how to combat these memes in real time because this is really important we're all susceptible to this I'm susceptible I’m fall for trolls the whole time i'm just trying to um when I do fall for trolls I then try and work out what happened how did it happen How did it trigger my emotions? How did it overcome my capacity to what I call my incoming troll radar, to my defenses, my rational thought stream? How did it trigger my fear such that I didn't think it through?
And before I knew it, I was sharing that meme or something. broadcasting. My intention hadn't been to promote Russian Disinfolklore, MAGA Disinfolklore, but I ended up telling the story. It was so bizarre. I ended up telling my story to a friend who then told it to someone else. And we kept this troll in motion.
And when I become aware that I've done that, I try and work out what I've done and the outcome of this is really Disinfolklore and Counter Disinfolklore and all my work in Decoding Trolls and Power of Mana podcasts and in writings.
And so it's great to have you with you and thank you for being here for the first podcast. I'll leave it at that for today.
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