Little Pacts With the Devil
Little Pacts With the Devil
Færytale Beginning IV: Counter Disinfolklore ~ Controlling War Magic
I also lived in Russia-occupied Luhansk city. While there I worked with many Ukrainians who had remained inside Russia-occupied Ukraine, because they had elderly parents who would not leave. Others expected the occupation would not last very long. Many did not have the foresight to imagine the horrors the occupation would bring. Still others, I suspected, were willing and ideologically aligned collaborators. Many who remained inside Russia-occupied Ukraine both before and after the full-scale invasion of February 2022 were coerced, passively or actively, to collaborate with the Russian occupiers.
They, like all of us, were victims of Russian Disinfolklore. Yet, unlike us who lived outside Russia’s totalitarian-controlled information space, those living inside Russia-occupied land were subjected to unrelenting Disinfolklore that eventually brainwashed all but the most resilient minds into, eventually, surrendering to the Russian fist. The vastly confusing, effective, and psychologically sophisticated techniques that pro-Russia colleagues used to sabotage my work (and the work of teams I participated on) helped me discover Disinfolklore. I owe to these colleagues - traitors that they were to humanity and to their country - a lot.
The ordeals they put me (and other colleagues through) were of immense value in, for example, helping me understand the continuities between the techniques used in online trolling and in interpersonal communications. For them, Kyiv, London, New York, Paris, or Berlin were not shining cities on the hill; Moscow was.
Those who surrender their minds to Russian Disinfolklore’s rules, diktats, and “logic” become compromised by the many and escalating pacts with the devil that living under Russia’s coercive control involved. What applied to those living in 1930s Nazi Germany as stated in Sebastian Haffner’s 1939 memoire published under the name “Defying Hitler” could be said of those who collaborate with and become compromised by Russian Disinfolklore:
“Just a little pact with the devil — and you were no longer one of the captured quarry. Instead, you were one of the victorious hunters. That was the simplest and crudest temptation. Many succumbed to it. Later they often found that the price to be paid was higher than they had thought and that they were no match for the real Nazis. There are many thousands of them today in Germany, Nazis with a bad conscience. People who wear their Nazi badges like Macbeth wore his royal robes, who, in for a penny, in for a pound, now find their consciences shouldering one burden after another, who search in vain for a way out, drink and take sleeping pills, no longer dare to think, and do not know whether they should rather pray for the end of the Nazi era — their own era! — or dread it.”
In later chapters we will see how such brainwashing convinced those who remained behind that other Ukrainians hated them. And for many, over time, this sense of being threatened by the other reached such a crescendo that Russia was able to recruit them into its army to fight against the Ukrainian army. Russian Disinfolklore created an Inner Realm in the information space of occupied Ukraine that was defined by the idea that the sovereignty, security, and fertility of the Russian Disinfolklore manufactured Inner Realm of occupied Ukraine was under mortal threat from an Outer Realm constituted of the rest of Ukraine.
Then, this Inner Realm / Outer Realm division became a part of the consciousness of the population who were being stewed in this engaging nonsense. Their minds became afflicted with mythical threats that engage their anger, fear, disgust, and sadness.
Continued:
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