Learning to see how abstract concepts take on the quality of characters in Disinfolklore!
In the narrative form which I newly discovered, lurking like a troll, immanent in our every day discourse (and particularly in Disinfolklore and its diabolical siblings like Disinformation, Misinformation and Propaganda), concepts have personalities like characters in your favourite play or film.
Ukraine, a country, is archetyped as weak when Donald Disinfolklore claims it has ‘no cards.’ Russia, inside its own Disinfolklore, switches between being archetyped as David (“the West always betrays us”) and Goliath (“we will nuclear you all”), often in the same item of Disinfolklore. Once we begin to perceive structure in data through the Lenses of Disinfolklore we can sometimes tell when an anomalous troll is being created as a character with a personality.
Russian Disinfolklore takes ordinary words like "separatist" and invests their use with new context-specific meanings. It's called hyper-normalisation. De-anchoring words from their conventional meanings.
Here in the Soviet era the linguistic formula “buried on Red Square by the Kremlin wall” becomes detached from reality. This is how linguistic formula immanent in ordinary speech become hyper-normalised (detached from reality) without most people noticing.
Similarly, Russia invented "Separatism" in Ukraine to conceal its invasion and to confuse and bamboozle casual observers, and those motivated to allow Russia to have its way with Ukraine. See what I did just there? I invested “Ukraine” with “weakness,” I archetyped Russia as the strong male who wants to “have their way” with Ukraine.
The character whom I call Duncey Putin (for to combat archetyping at the kind of scale Russia and Make America Great Again (MAGA) archetyping works, we need to take ownership of our own archetyping) said of Ukraine four days before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022:
‘Like it or not, take it, my beauty.’
Duncey Putin was archetyping Ukraine as a woman who needed to submit to her man (Russia). Duncey Putin is, like his fellow Saint Petersburg lawyer Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, an archetypal folkloric dunce who seldom learns from his mistakes.
His image imprinted in our minds is wholly a creation of careful archetyping – bare chested man on a horse; bare chested man trolling for fish with his bendy rod; nurturing father figure posing with a (anæsthetised) tiger;… Duncey Putin is, like Druidey Don Disinfolklore himself Donald Trump, one of the greatest archetype salespersons we have ever known. Understanding their power / Mana / energy as archetyping shaman-tricksters, by learning to see how they archetype practically every time they speak is, for us mere mortals, a superpower.
It is this book’s purpose to teach you how to perceive archetyping in any kind of data, and to use this power to protect our communities from those who wish to sow division using manipulative tropes. International lawyers, because they are unconsciously literate in Archetypal Disinfolklore, interpreted correctly that line by Duncey Putin as a reference…
“to a vulgar Russian rhyme about necrophiliac rape, implying an intention [mens rea] to inflict similar destruction on Ukraine and a view of Ukraine as a [feminine] corpse.”[1]
The “vulgar Russian rhyme” Putin was referencing has obvious Disinfolklore connotations – Sleeping Beauty is one of the primary archetypal characters in Indo-European culture and folklore. The song comes from a Soviet-era Russian band called “Red Mold.” The exact song lyric is:
“Sleeping Beauty in a coffin, I crept up and f**ked her. Like it, or dislike it, sleep my beauty.”
Becoming literate in Archetypal Disinfolklore will help you to learn the tools I use as a professional Disinfolklore identifier and interpreter. So that you might learn to counteract the Disinfolklore Universe descending upon humanity like a witch’s curse. Honing our Incoming Troll Radars to identify archetyping trolls which have the potential to affect us in manipulative ways, in real time, before we allow these trolls into our Inner Minds is the second tool in our Archetypal Disinfolklore arsenal.
Duncey Putin will repeat the same linguistic formula multiple times over many years. Those below him in the power vertical and Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatus (on TV, Telegram,…) repeat the troll ad nauseum. Sometimes like in a folktale, there is no character development. It’s simply an archetype. ‘Istanbul Peace Talks’ is one such unrounded character. It emerged into public consciousness (for those who pay attention to such matters) around 17 March 2022. Then like any troll it pops up repeatedly.
Think of ‘Istanbul peace talks’ like a character in your favourite film or folktale, and you get closer to understanding Duncey Putin’s love of that linguistic formula.
Russia planted a story in the Financial Times suggesting Ukraine would agree to such preposterous surrender terms, it was obviously a troll.
Then like any self-respecting perennial troll, the Disinfolklore character ‘Istanbul Peace Talks’ has popped up again and again in Russian Disinfolklore and Duncey Putin’s rhetorical obsessions. Most recently America’s envoy to Moscow returned to DC having received his pro-Russia hypnotic top-up banging on about ‘Istanbul Peace Talks.’
Now Putin has responded to Germany, France, England, Poland and Ukraine’s ultimatum with an offer of ‘Istanbul Peace Talks.’
As Russia got its ass handed it to it in the first weeks of its full-scale invasion it believed would be over in 48 hours…
Russia was trying to troll Ukraine into utter capitulation in ‘Istanbul peace talks.’
[President Zelenskyy archetyping himself as Napoleon, before he became actually Napoleonic]
Russian propaganda which Duncey Putin gets high on though has rebranded this ‘Istanbul Peace Talks’ troll as Russia being generous to Ukraine. And as the reason why when Ukraine walked away from this Siren, 100,000s of Ukrainians deserved death. That’s the meaning of the character ‘Istanbul peace talks,’ in Putin’s Disinfolklore-addled mind.
Putin has fallen in love with his own troll.
Ukraine’s chief negotiator in Istanbul in the March 2022 ‘peace talks’ said something which exactly matched my experience of negotiating with Russian army officers in eastern Ukraine:
“They [Russians] are victims of their own propaganda. I found a formula how the Russian [propaganda] really works. First he writes some crazy theories. Then they put this on TV. Then they watch their own TV and start to believe it. It’s like a cycle. It’s like it’s real. And when were talking to these people [Russian government negotiators sent to Istanbul in March 2022 to negotiate Ukraine’s surrender] they really believe that we [Ukraine] is full of Nazis killing people on the streets. 150 million people living in this country [i.e. Russia] and they are watching this TV and believing this thing.”
This was my experience too, when I was dealing with Russian occupiers. They really seemed to believe the nonsense their own propagandists had invented.
The joke of course is on the Russians. They’ve destroyed their state - for a troll.
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[1] “An Independent Legal Analysis of the Russian Federation’s Breaches of the Genocide Convention in Ukraine and the Duty to Prevent” (https://newlinesinstitute.org/an-independent-legal-analysis-of-the-russian-federations-breaches-of-the-genocide-convention-in-ukraine-and-the-duty-to-prevent/)