Podcast | Combatting Russia’s Mental War

I felt bad all week.

I left you on a bit of a downer in this Podcast:

That the mental war that Russia has launched against all of us in all of our countries, wherever we’re from, will continue after Ukraine’s victory.

I wanted to situate that description of how I see that reality- that the Russians’ war against us will continue after victory. Even if, as I do in this piece below, I can foresee the gentle eradication of what Putler referred to as ‘the Russian Ethnos’ which has, as we see in Ukraine, a remarkable propensity to commit war crimes - 300,000 or so registered war crimes in Ukraine since Feb 24 2022.

The German and Japanese Ethnos’s survived after World War Two because they repented, acknowledged their crimes, surrendered their war criminals and got on with credibly rebuilding their cultures, communities and countries with the help of benign occupation forces of Canada, England and the United States.

Russians themselves say that they are going to continue to prosecute their mental war after the end of the kinetic phase. Russia’s mental war is hidden inside Disinfolklore (qua the narrative form which I am the first writer to identify and name and the analytical theory which I invented and which I’m elaborating upon here for parsing all forms of disinformation).

See here how Galina Rymbo, a poet, translator, feminist and anarchist of Moldovan-Romanian and Ukrainian origin who was born and raised in Western Siberia and now has found sanctuary in Ukraine wrote about what I call the Disinfolklore Universe:

I am proposing a solution which many of us can integrate into our own mental algorithms. To vaccinate ourselves against the contagion of Russia’s mental war against us.

Disinfolklore, the analytical theory, is supposed to help us in real time.

The challenge I had set myself was to come up with a method that we can all use on-the-fly in our daily lives to parse data/informational units/memes.

I use those words or those terms interchangeably.

The visual memes that we have come to associate with the moniker Meme. I go back all the way back to, I think it was 1976. Richard Dawkins coined the term or the moniker ‘Meme’ to describe cultural ideas that pass around through the ether, as it were. Through human culture.

It’s always fascinated me that that word ‘Meme’ didn’t need to be created until that book.

Actually, when I think about it, the concept of Mana, which I use a lot in my work. The concepts of contagion or medium - something which is passed between us - actually serves the same purpose as Meme does in the English language.

By meme, I mean any visual, audible phenomenon. Anything that affects our energy, our Mana. Anything which comes inside into your Inner Minds through, through or even actually inside our own minds.

Part of this idea of Contagion, in Cultural Psychology and Anthropology (which I mentioned three weeks ago) that once something is lodged in your mind,that it has its own energy and it works away by itself into provoking our own emotions.

we’ve all had sleepless nights over ideas or woken up thinking of something and can’t get back to sleep about it. And in many ways, the purpose of Russian disinformation is to plant these memes in our minds, these informational units, which burrow away and affect our attitudes, our intentions, our moods and our motivations, those four ideas.

That’s how I look at, that’s the kind of the cognitive model which I use in Disin folklore as an analytical method for parsing Russian and any form of disinformation, but also any form of data really coming in from the outside that it affects the cognitive model that I’ve established or elaborated on, which has been pretty stable now for about two years. aspect I added was moods during a trip to Turkey last on the Turkish Riviera last, not last summer, the summer before last. And I’m very interested to see that moods are often used in the analysis of how

fairy tales and various things affect people’s minds. So the cognitive model is that we have an energy, we have a manna, we are human. MN is in human. This is our energy. This is what shines through us. It’s in our mind. And external things come in and they impact this manna.

Mana is the source from which all our moods, attitudes, motivations and intentions flow. This is what I believe Russian disinformation attempts to hack. It attempts to hack our Mana, our energy.

The 'X Energy' Mana

Then this has an impact on our attitudes, on our moods and or on our motivations or on our our intentions. Any of those four elements.

So in that sense, the tool which is most useful on-the-fly to deal with misinformation from my perspective. This mental war which is being prosecuted against all of us. Which, as I argued last week, will persist after the kinetic war has ended. After victory. After Ukraine has these 150 to 200 fourth generation fighter jets. Zillions of different drones and all of that matériel. This mental war will continue in our communities. I take note of what was being discussed today by Genesis Man and Midwest Fella and some of the callers in about how hopefully Orban will lose. That this will hopefully turn the tide on this epidemic of far-right and far-left madness which has which I associate with Telegram as a mechanism, and I associate with Russia, whether in the sense that they’re either creating the division where none existed before, or they’re finding, identifying very early on these divisions in our community wherever we are. They’re exasperating the divisions and making them bigger.

Take this idea of ‘look for the Mana in the Meme.’

Disinfolklore’s (as an analytical method) main Mantra. Look beyond what is immediately given in the particular meme. The Disinfolklore analytical method should be useful independent of the source of the data or the source of the meme. Because you can’t always discern the source. The most conventional methods, I spoke about it, I think it was in the fourth episode, when I set out the European Union’s External Action Service or Diplomatic services Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) framework. Now that Donald has closed down all of the disinformation unit in the State Department looking at FIMI (which is kind of the the grown-up word or an alternative word for what I call Disinfolklore (qua narrative phenomenon sneaking trolls into our Inner Minds millions of times a day these days). Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference is quite a mouthful!

Helpful people sometimes wrote to me to say ‘Disinfolklore is a bountiful. It’s hard to say. Can’t you vile up with a better moniker!’ ‘Try saying FIMI is my usual response!’

FIMI defines itself as ‘foreign’ interference in our information space. Manipulation of our information spaces is okay, according to this model, if it is not foreign. So the same Meme would be okay if uttered by a domestic source. Obviously Russia then just persuades, hypnotised, trolls, manipulates EU nationals to promote its Disinfolklore. That weakness is immanent in the FIMI framework.

In the context of the European Union ‘foreign’ means our enemies China and Russia (and to some extent Iran and North Korea) when it comes to FIMI. Therefore, if you can trace any particular Meme back to those sources, then you know it’s foreign interference, and it’s prima facie wrong.

Obviously, one of the intrinsic features of Russian disinformation (as Galina Rymbo notes above) is that Russia plants its trolls in the voices of people in our own community. So it’s harder to see it.

So this English MP who we’ll all have seen this week, Zarah Sultana whose ‘Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class’ absurdity this week went viral. She naturally name checks that “of course, Putin is a dictator and has done war crimes.” Then she goes on to say: “but President Zelensky is no friend of the working class.”

So when you’re looking at a Meme like that… Let’s take that as an informational unit from an English MP. She’s saying, ‘of course, Putin is a dictator and has done war crimes,

but President Zelensky is no friend of the working class.’ All of us can see through that immediately because we’ve spent so much time in the Ukrainian information space. We’ve seen, I’m not going to say we’ve seen it all, but we have seen a lot of it. Someone like me, for instance, who was a great fan, actually, of Jeremy Corbyn up until that Panorama documentary.

It basically... revealed that this group set up by the Labour Party to investigate allegations of anti-Semitism was stopped at every possible turn. Those committed Labour Party members hired specifically to deal with the wave of antisemitism claims against the party, then blew the whistle. All these very committed young Labour Party officials who reminded me of myself when I worked for the Irish Labour Party, the Irish Green Party, the antisectarian Alliance Party of Northern Ireland and the English Labour Party as well. Just committed to the cause and trying to help it. I lost faith then in leftist, formal leftist, self-declared leftist politics at that point. I had no idea of this whole tanky thing.

I’d never come across the term tanky until relatively far into the war.

It might have been when those American legislators, AOC and co, wrote that draft letter. I think it was in September 2022.

Basically... Donald’s position up until now is their position, which was ‘Blame the Victim’ Ukraine should make peace. Everyone at the time went nuts. That was way back in the historical era of 2022, before Donald had hypnotised humanity with Russian Disinfolklore tropes like ‘Ukraine is an obstacle to peace.’

So I discovered the term tanky. Now I recognize the energy / Mana of tankydom in many memes. The Mana of tankydom. When I hear the stock qualifier of an anti-Ukraine positioning attempting to conceal itself -“of course, Putin is a dictator and has done war crimes….” This is exactly the kind of thing we hear when we hear the Russian opposition.

When then they go on to say, “…but President Zelensky is no friend of the working class.”

There’s been some fantastic... take towns of Sultana on this.

I’m quite optimistic that this whole episode certainly has served to help educate some people anyway into the contradictions of tankydom.

I wondered how I would use the Code of Positive Trolls. There are these 12 analytical tools which are part of the Disinfolklore analytical method, which I’ve spoken about before.

Half of those tools are archetyped into what I call the Code of Positive Trolls. That’s code in the legal sense. The legal order. It’s also code in the sense of moral code. That if you want to proof outgoing informational units, outgoing memes, if you... This is not just for me, the Disinfolklore analytical method is not just to help me interpret distant folklore incoming trolls.

Branding Others "Socialists / Leftists / Communists / Woke"

So I’ve got my incoming troll radar, which is scanning for the energy in incoming informational units to determine whether they’re positive, negative, or neutral. But it’s also about outgoing because I don’t want to be like Zoltana. I presume she’s well-meaning. She went to this conference in Paris and is a full-on tanky.

We certainly have no evidence that she And nothing I’ve seen about her, I don’t know that much about her, hardly heard of her before, but I did look her up on Wikipedia. Nothing makes me as suspicious of her as I am of say, Farage or Jeffrey Sachs or people who are actually paid to be tankies and have

taken money, whether it’s from RT or from other Russia connected sources in order to promote particular trolls or particular memes. So she goes to this conference and I read a brilliant critique of some of the people in that conference in Paris which Sultana referenced and particularly Ukrainian people there who are basically Russian patsies,

I’m going to say that. The person who’s analyzed this Romanian Anarchist, Romanian stroke Moldovan anarchist who’s currently living in Lviv, feminist, self-declared leftist. I’m not sure she describes herself as an anarchist, but certainly she’s very proud. to be a feminist leftist and she was critiquing Sultana and also critiquing some of

the people who are at this conference in Paris and there is these in particular these Ukrainian leftists who are against the war and they want peace and they gave speeches at the conference and some of us might have watched those excerpts. But these are a species of people that I encountered as a diplomat in Eastern

Ukraine and it took me a little while. One person in particular that I met at a court hearing And I spent about a year meeting him as a diplomat to collect information and to take the temperature, as it were, in eastern Ukraine. And it took me a year to work out that actually, beyond all reasonable doubt,

and certainly beyond my need to take a risk, that he was basically a Russian knowing or unknowing person. useful idiot. So once you know that there are people who profess these views, of course, Putin is a dictator and has done war crimes, yet at the same time may well be pushing informational memes.

that are contrary to Ukraine’s best interests. Once you know that’s possible, then it’s easier to understand that if you’re at this conference of socialists or leftists in Paris and you hear someone criticizing Ukraine, and then their words are then repeated, and this happens to be an English member of parliament,

is repeating the words of these anti-patriots and not Ukrainian patriots yet trying to represent themselves as patriots and are being archetyped as Ukrainian as an example of how not all Ukrainians are in support of President Zelenskyy or servant of the people and or the country which is at war.

And then like Jeffrey Sachs, mysteriously they get platformed constantly. and their memes influence influential people like Zoltana. Most of us don’t have the time. Well, actually most of us do have the time here because we spend our old days, whatever, even in between our jobs and everything like that, we’re just on this constantly.

But most normal people don’t have the time to go through what I’ve just gone through. And I did only very cursory research on all of this. So I want the code of positive trolls and look for the man and the meme just to be little mantras that we learn and that come into our mind, go, okay,

I have a feeling something’s off about, of course, Putin is a dictator and he has done war crimes, but Z is no friend of the working class. You immediately have a reaction to this. You think, God, that’s not like... And it’s quite a clever non-secretary or balancing or both sides.

And then to go on about how to mention that President Zelensky is a dictator or so. I mean, it just so happens I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the apartment building in Privyry where President Zelensky grew up. And because I used to visit, as a defendant,

I used to visit a civil society organization which was based in that building. And I went there before he was president, when I didn’t even know who he was. And then after he was president, when the police would be there protecting him. And Krivi Rhee, as most of us know, is like,

if you want to get into a pissing contest, excuse me, pardon my French, about who’s working class or not, I don’t know anything about where Sultana grew up and her background was, But I would, just because President Zelensky’s parents happened to be academics, everyone who grew up,

most people who grew up in the Soviet Union grew up in the same kind of apartment buildings, the same kind of apartments. And President Zelensky’s apartment building is what people in London, what people say from West London might look at in Elephant and Castle or in East London as being, or in America as projects.

They have that vibe about them. And Krivi Rhee is a very serious industrial town. In fact, the first time I went there was to investigate some far-right guys who had attacked an LGBTIQ campaigner, a really brilliant campaigner. in Kriviri who, like President Zelensky, tried his best to operate in this environment because he’s a really courageous

person like President Zelensky. And some of us will have come across the story about when they built this underpass in the center of Kriviri under this roundabout. It was a big thing. and it happened I think when he was maybe 15 or something and this was a story one

of his best friends told after he became president that President Zdansky went out with his guitar and they took bets, his friends took bets about how many songs he’d get to sing before he got beaten up. And he got to sing one or two songs and then he got beaten up and his guitar broken.

So, you know, it’s really tough, tough place. And this is why it’s completely consistent with the real Z, as it were, the real President Zelensky, that he wouldn’t run away, take a ride and run away because he’s a tough, he’s a tough cookie and he grew up in a tough neighborhood, really tough neighborhood, really tough town,

steel making town. And whatever environment Zoltana grew up in, I would say his would give her a run for his money. But again, you don’t have to know all of that to know there’s something wrong or something off about what she said. So I would... The first element of the Code of Positive Controls is generosity.

This is something I’ve come to realize recently is that if you want to archetype yourself as a leftist, then you just profess care about the working class. So this is a self-archetyping when Zoltana talks about he’s no friend of the working class. She’s situating herself as a friend of the working class And while she was at,

I think it was Birmingham University, which is now a top university in England. But while she was there, her Wikipedia page says that she worked in Primark and various kind of fast fashion type stores. So she would consider herself working class, but actually informal as a former student or scholar in Marxist, Marxian philosophy.

I understand that formally a proletarian is someone who creates value for the capitalist and their essence, their being, their manner, their energy is alienated from them invested into the product of their labor. And then the capitalist for whom they’re making this widget then takes it from them. And it’s that sense of psychological alienation arising from the physical

alienation of what you’ve spent four or five hours of your life creating, out of that comes the need for revolution and the alienation that capitalism provokes in our minds, in our sentiment. And while in the late 19th century, the mid 19th century, there were many people who weren’t proletarians and creating labor.

Today, most people fit into this definition of proletarian. Zoltan are not because she’s actually a member of the English parliament, but everyone from even people who work in the city of London or on Wall Street or on Facebook, these guys who’ve been recently hired by Facebook for 100 million a year to make AI algorithms, improve them,

they are all formally proletarians and in the working class. So Zoltana’s idea of working class is completely anachronistic. But aside from that, the idea of manifesting support for the working class and for the proletarians and for those who are exploited or those who feel alienated from themselves by the system is very generous.

And therefore, the generosity criterion in the Code of Positive Trolls can’t disassociate really generous people from those who are just archetyping as generous. And so then the second element is right, ethical discipline. And again, if you don’t have any information about Zoltani, you think, well, she’s in good faith.

She’s accepted Putin as a dictator and he’s done war crimes. And President Zelensky is no friend of the working class. Like, who knows if that’s true or not, if you don’t know anything about President Zelensky. And if you don’t know anything about Zoltanian, you think, well, maybe she’s right. Maybe that’s ethically disciplined.

And so then we go to the fourth criterion, which is mana, which is energy. What’s the energy in what she’s saying? And if you don’t have a concept of looking for the man and the meme, then you might bother to do that. Most of us listening here, we have a sense of what sounds right.

We can smell tankydom because we’ve had so much practice. Our training set is millions of memes that have passed us on the timeline since the 24th. of February 2022. And so that training set has enabled us to scent. And what I’m trying to do with Distant Folklore as an analytical method is to drill

down into how am I detecting? What is the smell of tankydom? What is the smell of pro-Russian-ness? Because they disguise it all the time. Obviously, if it’s coming from RT today, you can... you know it’s Russian theme or Russian distant folklore, but it’s when it’s coming from Sultana or from some pro-Palestine activists or from

the most unexpected people, from your mother or your child or your best friend. Mokker is often described and the interaction she has with her her friend, her best friend who comes to moan about migrants. And imminent in that, if you’ve got these words that I’m trying to communicate like manner,

so the energy of what Mokras’ friend is talking about is about migration. She’s been... listening to all this reform stuff. And sadly, the BBC is always repeating it. Everyone’s always repeating it. But underlying all of that are different layers of whether it’s the money that funds GB News,

which came from these guys who made their money in Russia in the early noughties from oil. via Malta or whether it’s Farage getting money from RT or Nathan Gill, the reform leader in Wales who was convicted and is about to be sentenced for exchanging money for speaking in the European Parliament.

There you can see these genetic, these causal connections with Russia and that’s great. But many of us suspected it when we would hear how say Nathan Gill or Farage or others are talking Russian talking points. But it does really help every now and again if someone is outed as actually taking Pootler’s shilling, as it were,

and you get those calls because then it’s much easier to explain to low information people like perhaps Marcus’s friend or my friend’s who it’s hard to explain these things to. So with the manner, we’re looking for... So when we don’t know that there’s a conviction and we don’t know there’s an actual connection,

we don’t know the source of the meme, all we have to go on is the meme itself. This is what I’m trying to teach and inculcate myself and disaggregate the quick... instinctual, intuitional intuition that many of us have now for when we hear certain memes and certain tanky-esque words. So for me it’s a four-step process.

I scan for the manna, I try and find what is the energy inside this. I’m identifying its layers here. So Sultana archetyping as working class friend, Z is no friend of the working class. Slightly cynically putting in that, of course, Putin is a dictator and has done more crimes,

but then somehow equating that with President Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class. And this fits this species of... of meme which basically is justifying genocide in Ukraine by some failure in virtue of President Zelensky, the president or Ukrainians, which of course is the most famous one was the Ukrainians are Nazis, therefore just kill them all.

And so many people fell for this. So you scan for the manor, you’re looking for the manor, you’re looking for it. in any meme, you’re identifying its layers. So there’s lots of different layers to even this very simple, of course, Putin is a dictator and has done war crimes. But Z is no friend of the working class.

Layers there are on the one hand that’s great, she sees that he’s a dictator and he’s done war crimes, but does she know about Lisa? Does she know about that poor babushka and her goats? Does she know about the toddler, the human safari? And all of these, does she know anything about Isium?

Does she remember what went on and all these things? So this isn’t just war crimes, this is 250,000 of them and Hundreds, if not thousands, were done today in crimes against humanity, which are very serious. Does she know? So there’s lots of layers to what she’s saying,

even when she says Zelensky is no friend of the working class. When I hear, there can be a certain tone in which they say that, and it’s not very respectful. Usually, even when I’m writing, I did go through a stage of saying Z, because that was how he... His party had the sound Z from his name.

But now usually I say President Zelensky mainly because I would hear reflected from the right in America and from people like Zoltan who know nothing about President Zelensky and have no sympathy for him or for Ukraine. There’s a certain sense of contempt. That’s it. So there’s layers. There’s lots of different layers in it.

And then to characterize it. So what is it on balance? Is it positive, negative or neutral? In this case, Ukraine is supporting Ukraine is the metric. And then you make a call. So scan for the mana, identify its layers, characterize it. make a call and this is what we do intuitively a million times a day as we’re

scanning our timeline deciding whether or not to read on something. And so then when I talk about contagion and this aspect of the law of sympathetic magic And so the formal definition of the laws of synthetic magic are, here I’m quoting, they are descriptions of a consistent pattern of beliefs,

thoughts and practices observed across a wide range of traditional cultures. Their widespread occurrence suggests that they may constitute laws of human thought. So that’s the view from anthropology, from philosophy, and of what these laws of sympathetic magic are that they may constitute laws of human thought.

As I’ve said before I can’t go that far but what I can say is I spend my time looking for laws of Indo-European people like me whose minds, whose native language is an Indo-European language and there’s certain commonalities between all of us who have our minds formed in here and it’s these commonalities which Russian disinformation

can hack and take advantage of. And so while 19th and early 20th century philosophers can talk about the laws of sympathetic magic because they were looking in the colonies for them. They were looking at what they considered to be primitive peoples and they were trying to discern how they think and how they think differently from civilized people.

But when I encountered this body of work, I realized, ah, this is very similar to what we have in disinformation sphere where you have these very strange ideas. When you first encounter them, you are disgusted by them and they seem very strange. And then

You go away to a desert island for six months and you come back and everyone believes them. Like Brexit being a perfect one or Donald, Donald’s takeover of the US Republican Party. So we have all of these different journeys, mental journeys, which we have gone on ourselves from disgust to casually accepting something.

And when Russian disinformationists or disinfolklorists or MAGA or Brexit or reform or in any of our countries take us on these journeys purposefully and manipulate our manner, they pulate our manner, they shake it up, up, up. that that process of changing our attitudes, our intentions, our moods, and our motivations, sometimes it happens naturally,

but that’s not really what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about people who are deliberately manipulated, like Sultana, by these people, these Russia-adjacent leftists in Paris at this conference. And I’m not making any judgment that she is trying to manipulate others. She may well just be an archetypal useful idiot. So we see these processes going on.

And so one of the main, the three laws of sympathetic magic are contagion, similarity, and opposites. And there’s really only two which are contagion and similarity. And opposites, the law of opposites, is part of the law of similarity. And contagion, which is the medium. So you have a source of contagion.

You have RT today, which is pumping out a meme. And that meme itself, once it leaves the source, is the contagion. And there’s something in it, a manner, an energy, which then... gets assimilated into a target. So if we’re talking humans, it’s going into their brain, it’s going into our brain.

And so you have this three-step model of it. And contagion is really what I mean by manna. and energy. It is something that passes between us and so the meme itself obviously is going between us but it’s actually something in it which is the contagion and it’s that word mana which I use for that.

And then the law of similarity really helped me understand this strange phenomenon that, so for instance, that somehow the fact that President Zelenskyy is a native Russian language speaking Ukrainian, who is part of the Ukrainian Jewish community, somehow with enough amplification, this demonstrates to certain minds that of course he’s a Nazi.

And again, it’s so absurd, but there is this strange effect in our brains that we will believe opposites if there’s some sort of similarity in it. And I’ve been trying to understand how the Russians achieve this and Donald does it as well, where the The completely anti-intuitive thing that vaccines cause the harm, not the virus.

Even though we know the virus, we know rationally, we know scientifically. Hundreds of 400,000 scientific papers show the different aspects of the harm of the virus. And billions of people have taken the vaccine. And only a tiny number of them have been harmed by the vaccine, whereas billions of people have been harmed by imbibing this horrible virus.

But somehow people in certain minds can be convinced because virus vaccine are similar, that they can be... that they are associated. And so the laws and this exploration as part of cultural psychology, which is the discipline it’s become a part of now, were very interesting to me. And this idea of magical thinking,

which was always seen as negative, and I first encountered in the context of Brexit, Brexiters, and particularly this group of nerdy wells in the English parliament called the European Research Group, who actually never did any research was the joke, but they were no joke because they were on our airwaves the whole time for ages.

And they were magical thinkers par excellence. Oh, we’ll leave the European Union, our biggest market, and we’ll become richer. That’s magical thinking. And when you look into the literature, when I started to look at it, I saw that, oh, this is often a stage in children’s development before they get cause and effect right. Whereas now,

as mentioned in a previous episode, magical thinking isn’t seen as so negative because It’s a way of innovation, really, basically. So you innovate because you think magically, because you think you can put this together. The stuff that Alex Ferguson fella is working, or another Alex Ferguson, all that drone stuff, or Richard, the way they’re innovating,

there’s probably a lot of magical thinking there. But it’s working, which is... which is good and so this word magic i think is worth just looking into because it appears a lot we’ve recently seen that movie the magus in the in the kremlin the magus um and this um the sound the the aj sound in it um

was associated in the Greeks in early 5th century BC with singing a wailing song of grief. So the tales of woe which Mockers is so brilliant at recounting, they are really They are magic, they are the original meaning of magic. As far back we’ve written records,

this is the first time this verb which is the element in magic appears. So to sing a wailing song of Greek a Greek playwright then uses the words in the Persians to describe songs here I’m quoting that call upon the souls of the dead to appear to the living so that that

that’s what Russia does that is you know we had we used to always have May 9th and I attended a few of them in Ukraine where everyone holds up the What do they call it? The Immortal Regiment. Is the owner here? No. The Immortal Regiment. So this is about calling the souls of the dead.

When Pootle is talking about the great Patrick Roar, that’s what he’s doing. And then you have in this other play, one of the very early uses of this word ghost, which goes into magic, is in this play, this guy called, I don’t know anything about him, but he’s called Hippolytus.

And he’s called a ghost by his father when he attempts to control him through clever speech. So this was getting to... Where I first became interested in what I learned was called war magic, which is propaganda, which was used by the fifth Dalai Lama in Tibet.

And basically it became known by their enemies that the fifth Dalai Lama was doing all of these esoteric esoteric spells on the enemy and it wasn’t so much the effect of the esoteric spells themselves which caused their enemy to be defeated but they panicked when they heard that he was doing it.

So it’s this use of war magic as propaganda and this is like when Russia tells us what it’s going to do and people get really scared of the nuclear stuff. That is prima facie war magic in exactly the way that I learned about the concept and got. um particularly interested in it.

So I just mentioned that to say that that’s why I was particularly tuned into um to thinking about to looking at what magic is rather than um this uh like I suppose every country has them but there’s this guy Paul Daniels who was very famous in

England in in the 1970s and 1980s as a magician or all of those illusionists, but essentially if we take the distant folklore perspective and look at what Donald does, what Putler does, but also what President Zelensky does as examples of magic. then again we need a way of distinguishing between Pootler and Donald and President Zelensky.

And I’ll finish up today on this piece which I wrote a year before I... I came up with the word distant folklore in March 2022. Let’s compare Magi. How are Putin and President Zelensky’s magical powers doing comparatively? Ukraine hasn’t even started its counteroffensive yet. This is mid-March 2022. Putin’s chefs heading into the cauldron of soup.

Seeing Russia’s occupier administrators shut up shop in Melitopol, Hirsdn and Tokmak. Russian soldiers are just drunk. and Putin has a sole tank left up his arsenal. Oh, okay, this is a framing of it from the summer of 2022. So basically, Putin and President Zelensky are both lawyers as a magi. Putin, Nordic troll, is a 20th century magi.

By contrast, President Zelensky created his magi-like skills by creating the former USSR’s most successful independent TV company. President Zelensky mines emotions in his audience and runs them through the full spectrum of emotions just with a few words. So that is classic meaning of magic going back to this where the father is... is calling his son a ghost.

And actually ghost originates from this ghost as well, from magic, same route, because he attempts to control them through his clever speech. And that is what Russia does through its propaganda and its disinformation. But it is also what President Zelenskyy does. But the second element in the Code of Roswell Trails, which is right and ethical discipline.

And I was posed this question by scouts recently, which was, well, how do you determine whether something is proper sort of in war? And for me, the ethical discipline, what’s right is defined by international law, by the Geneva Conventions. And none of us, I think,

or most of us wouldn’t approve of any willful flouting of the Geneva Conventions, which are There were some preceding 1949, but the great body of them came in after the war with the Nazis. And so that’s what sets the ethical discipline. And that’s why President Zelensky, quite apart from the fact that he’s a better troll than Pukler,

because we see again and again, the same old stories got the stuff coming out this week from I mean, their lines, that was all he could come up with in America, that stuff, which we’ve heard a million times before. Whereas President Zelensky, I think he’s been on TV every night. He’s done that.

He does his thing from his iPhone every night. And every night it’s different and has something different. And sometimes he does these really inspiring things which help all of us, keep all of us motivated. So that kind of innovation, that’s the kind of innovation you need if you’re going to build the USSR’s most

successful independent TV production company and be one of the most successful actors and a household name in Russia even, before 2013. When he, I think in December 2013, he pulled out of Moscow and left. they left. And this kind of look at how you can affect people’s emotions is precisely what

we’re doing when we’re looking at disinformation and propaganda. And I’ll leave it there for now, but just quickly end up with the the idea that which I saw it somewhere else, but I’m quite interested by it, which is just this idea that the left, that Sultana can somehow bring about peace in Ukraine by disarming Ukraine.

This is a perfect example of how the law of similarity and the law of opposites operates. It’s such a bonkers idea. It makes no sense. You just have to think about it for three seconds. Ukraine gives up its arms and then peace will come. But the emotion, the calmness that comes over us when we hear, oh, peace,

this is a recipe for peace. We’ll just stop arming them. And I hear it from friends as well, who are probably equally well-educated and intelligent as Zoltan and they’ve fallen for the troll. And it’s very hard to break them out of it. But that is our challenge. And I’ll leave it at that for now.

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