Meta-Disinfolklore (6)

Analysing Disinfolklore - Case Studies: "Bandera" and "Donbass Samizhdat"

Disinfolklore is a powerful analytical method we can use to identify, parse, and then counter all kinds of Disinformation, including Russian Disinformation. The first chapter of Disinfolklore was published in May 2023 in an English online news magazine:

Here’s the first of an occasional series of implementing aspects of the method on the fly and in the wild.

⚡️Stepan Bandera and Banderites.

Anytime you see ANY term stemming from a stock character in Russian Disinfolklore called "Stepan Bandera" you know you're dealing with a Ruschist State-funded troll and/or victims of brain-washing.

Never mistake an historical figure who also shares the name Stepan Bandera with the stock bogeyman actor in Ruschist Disinfolklore.

One was a real person. While the other is a character in Ruschist Disinfolklore. 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 brain-washed Ruschist. That is its only meaning.

Ruschia's far-right bogeyman went global in March 2014. Ruschia invented the idea of a far-right Ukrainian to deter support for Ukraine.

Lazy, weak, ignorant, and cowardly policy makers and journalists spread that meme. It was useful for politicians who didn't want to help Ukraine. Ruschist Disinfolklore was helping them out by giving them a stock bogeyman (the Ukrainian nationalist).

"Stepan Bandera" branded memes as wholly concocted Hyper-Normalised Ruschist memes, by contrast, are just too narrow for any foreigner to get.

So only Ruschist state-funded troll farms and beyond-redemption victims of Ruschist Disinfolklore (and perpetrators of genocide) use terms like "Banderites."

If Ruschist Disinfolklore inspires you to google "Bandera" or worse to read some academic paper on the historical person, you're already well on your way to being trapped inside a Ruschist troll universe.

Like "Hunter Biden" such words work on the level of incantation / war magic through repetition. Before you know it, you'll be entering into sincere debates that serve to entrench Ruschist Disinfolklore memes in your mind as well as in our culture.

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A Twitter account Donbass Samizhdhat” (DS) suddenly started appearing in my timeline a few months ago. Its sudden appearance as well as its aesthetic, its negative othering of “Westerners” and its “me thinks the lady doth protest too much” attempt to pushing Nazi Russia is a negative light provoked my initial suspicion. So I took a closer look.

DS builds audience by promoting a combination of truth and lies about Ruschia's occupation of Ukraine.

For example, it promotes lies (the ❌) in the Tweet above like "women in occupied Luhansk were banned from bars".

I worked in Russia-occupied Luhansk. Women were never banned from bars.

If DS had been to occupied Luhansk, they would know this is a lie.

Therefore, don't trust them.

If DS wasn't in occupied Luhansk, why are they playing the part of a "Donbass" (sic) truth teller, smuggling the "truth" out of Occupied Ukraine?

They're promoting lies, so why listen to them?

Few (if any) mentions of occupied Crimea, while focus on Donbas is suspicious too.

As DS builds its audience among English-speaking Ukrainians and foreigners, they promote Ruschist themes that serve to depress, distract, and soak up oxygen inside pro-Ukraine info-space.

Most if not all of DS's audience (including Ukrainians), understandably, never visited Russia-occupied Ukraine. Very few outsiders did or could which is why a truth teller from inside the occupation is such an attractive niche for a Ruschist Disinfolklorist like DS to occupy.

I was a diplomat which is why I travelled into Russia-occupied Luhansk every day for three years and as part of my work I analysed Ruschist Disinfolklore in Russia-occupied Ukraine.

This DS Tweet from March which popped up on my timeline today (I'll block DS now) is a perfect example of DS's method:

DS is supposedly repeating a message from the highly credible Kharkhiv Human Rights Group @khpg.

DS is needlessly attacking what DS calls "MSM" (this is of course one of Ruschia's main policy aims - undermine objective reporting globally). DS thereby unnecessarily situates itself as a truth teller, by comparison to "MSM."

DS is also, cleverly, Getting Into The Mind of a Ruschist, by revealing to us the intention of Ruschia promoting its own violence.

Well, it takes a Ruschist to know a Ruschist's mind!

It's a clever rhetorical feint explaining how and that the Ruschist intended to manipulate "Ukrainians" to a western English-speaking audience.

I'm aware of the irony of a westerner here doing something similar: I'm explaining my hypothesis about why DS (and Ruschists) love to celebrate genocidal acts because they love them.

But they also do it to wound further their victims. They twist the knife in.

Putin does this almost every time he speaks.

It's the essence of Negative Trolling. It's War Magic whose main effect (like blowing the dam) is to depress its chosen enemy (democratic free Ukraine). To stop Ukrainians from bothering to resist genocide.

Beware of sorcerers who claim monopolies on truth-telling. At best it's an indicator of a messiah complex, and a tad narcissistic. Very Ruschian.

DS always amplifies horrors. They go on about the Odesa fire which Putin obsesses over too - Putin justified his impending invasion to Macron in a 20th Feb 2022 phone call by reference to the Odesa fire incident.

After Ruschist Nazis murdered hundreds-of-thousands of Ukrainians since March 2014, anyone who goes on about the Odesa fire is probably a Ruschist.

When a UN report or KHPG or others sensitively report documented horrors by Ruschia in Ukraine, this is one matter.

Ruschist Disinfolklorists however report their own horrors to further wound, humiliate, and depress Ukrainians.

DS does this a lot.

And just because DS accuses Ruschists of the very thing DS is doing doesn't mean DS isn't a Ruschist.

In fact, this Accusation in a Mirror rhetorical technique runs through Ruschist Disinfolklore from Putin down, like a fluorescent identifying dye.

Ruschists are like small children itching to pick at a scab on the arm of the child whose arm they tried to machete off.

In this Hall of Mirrors, we have to make quick decisions as to what is real, bona fide, well intentioned "truth telling."

My call is: DS is a Ruschist Disinfolklorist.

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In Counter Disinfolklore operations the point is to make judgments; to weigh evidence, instinct,… and to make calls. Specifically, we avoid the pandemic of undergraduate essay Both Sides’ism that is afflicting our information space.

As an expert in Russian military strategy, current and historical battlefield dynamic in southern Ukraine, and in Disinfolklore, it took me mere milliseconds to make the call that Russia blew the Khakovka Dam.

It took me even less time to react and to know what was called for in response to the War Crime, and the cascades of nonsense Disinfolklore Nazi Ruschists would flood our info space with.

I composed and posted this Tweet:

Meanwhile, supposedly expert security correspondents and legacy media outlets like the BBC, NYT and many others fell into a false framing of the War Crime: “Ukraine Accuses Russia of Blowing The Dam.”

They refused to listen to the experts like me who know enough immediately to make the call. And instead they fell into their default “Argument to Moderation” framing of the issue.

It’s a core tactic in Russian Disinfolklore to inject a modicum of doubt into an issue. It’s intentionally done to hack our risk averse modelling legacy media. Russia understands how our legacy media models “objectivity” by refusing to make calls. It’s like their editorial offices are run by people who never evolved beyond writing first class undergraduate essays in which the ending must always be: On the one hand, and on the other hand.

We’re fighting a war though in real time. Lives are at stake - Russia left untold numbers of animals and humans to die on the side of the Dniepr that they control after they blew the dam. Russia prevented using weapons of information and conventional warfare anyone coming to save those people. While legacy media prevaricate, people died. If they wanted to Both Sides the issue they might have chosen to “debate” which part of the Russian Nazi power vertical had blown the dam. Or they could have turned it into an urgent fight to get the Russia-neutered UN and ICRC to save those people and animals lives. Instead they chose to frame the “debate” for a week as a question of blame between Ukraine and Russia.

We are information warriors fighting a wily and capable enemy here. Therefore, we must make calls, and then move on. Sometimes we’ll be wrong. But we’ll adjust our algorithm and our instinct after mistakes are made.

So you may agree or not agree with my judgements in this piece.

All I can do is reveal the state of the art of how I’m applying the Disinfolklore analytical method. And, like the Buddha, I don’t want you to agree with these judgments because I am making them. I'm hoping that if we all assay the content in our information-space as one assays gold by rubbing, cutting, & melting, we will defeat Ruschism and all those trying to destroy the post-WWII legal order.