Disinfolklore is Russia using First Person View Drones on human prey to train its drone pilots.
Then the Russian state publishes the footage of these murders, from the perspective of the First Person view drone pilots as they close in on their human prey.
This is archetypal Disinfolklore: create the event (in this case murder), then publicise it using different memes and means of storytelling. Russia’s only in Ukraine to create social media content, which it uses to troll its own population and America’s leaders into perpetuating Ukraine’s annihilation. Disinfolklore always has a purpose. Infolklore (such as this podcast), by contrast, has an opposite purpose.
After detailed investigations into 200 of the 2,800 murders of civilians by Russia using First Person View drones in Kherson, the UN Commission of Inquiry has determined these are Crimes Against Humanity.
The UN Commission of Inquiry based in Vienna has issued a report on the human safaris in Kherson that all of us are aware of, which have been going on since July 2024, and it has established that these are crimes against humanity. And part of the the indictment of Russia and those participating in the prosecution of these crimes against humanity, interesting to use the word prosecution there, is that Russia, the Russian state is sharing these videos of their human safaris of the 140 people they’ve murdered using first-person view drones. The commission of inquiry determines that because they are first-person view drones, the operators of these drones are hunting individuals, chasing them,
and watching as they murder them, and then sharing these on what I call the distant folklore apparatus, which is Telegram, X, Facebook, Instagram, and now, sadly, the White House press room. These videos themselves are a perfect example of dissent folklore. They breach all ethical guidelines, which is the second.
I have six criteria to determine whether or not the story constitutes dissent folklore, second of which is right or ethical discipline. Obviously, it’s morally wrong to engage in human safaris. There’s no law. anywhere which allows this, moral or otherwise. But now we have a determination by a UN commission specifically established by 184
UN member states to inquire into Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine. And it determines that these are crimes against humanity and there’s no a greater crime in the human family than crimes against humanity. And so therefore, the breach of the second element in the Code of Positive Trolls, which I use to determine what is distant folklore,
how to distinguish between a unit of distant folklore and a unit of folklore, or any other kind of story or narrative form, But now we have this determination. So that’s a perfect example of distant folklore. Much of what is on Telegram, and of course Telegram is in Russian combat propaganda, in Russian military strategy,
you have this concept of information confrontation in which the informational units and the environment are engaged in a confrontation. And here we have Telegram specifically established by the Russian state in order to communicate distant folklore into the inner minds of humanity and very successfully doing it, is acting in concert with its military apparatus in Kherson.
So it’s not just killing these people, it is spreading the stories, spreading the images of these people being murdered as part of its plan to to dominate the inner minds of humanity and create terror, not just in the minds of the people of Hearson, and this is not me, this is the inquiry,
but inside the minds of humanity as people gradually become aware that this is what’s going on. So that’s a good example of what dysin folklore is in actual. What helped me see this pattern, this is what I really do, I hunt for patterns and data. And I assimilate, as many of us do, who participate in X,
because X, as we now know from the third report on foreign information manipulation and interference by the European Union, which was released. I highly recommend to anyone. to read along with the first two reports, which was published a couple of weeks ago. X is where on a data set,
I think it was over 40,000 FIMI instances of FIMI that were collected by the European Union. X was involved in 86% of them. So this is where we all are. And I know many of us have ethical dilemmas about should we be here, should we not?
And most of us are also part of Blue Sky and other places. But the fight is here. The examples are here of whether it’s I saw Maid Marian Simonian tweeting again in her folksy, her folksy distant folklore way where she does this a lot, where she tells these stories as indeed does Donald.
they tell these stories of frankly horrifying things. This is going to your question, James, uh, really horrifying things. Uh, like for instance, Don, the way Donald communicated, and I think it was March, 2024, that if, uh, that if the head of a major NATO country said to him, um, We can’t pay for our NATO membership.
Would you protect us? And he said, I’d say, you know, to do whatever the hell they want with you. And then this this unit of information was then reported by CNN as as a fact that Donald had. had told this head of state that America wouldn’t protect him.
But we’re not clear whether this ever, ever happened, but it was reported as a fact by CNN. And so you see these folksy stories get taken up. Simone, tonight, she’s talking about how people in the offices, and these terms really interest me, and they made me, I’ve seen them for years now. And if it’s a pattern,
which is what, along with the horror of what they’re saying, if it’s a pattern that made me suspicious something, something methodical was going on here, which is what I’ve used this folklore to explain and to interpret. She says, oh, people in the offices in Moscow are saying that if Germany gives their weapons to Ukraine, that they will,
Ukraine won’t be able to do anything with them without Germany’s help. Therefore, Germany is complicit. And so we’ll have to strike Berlin. And so this is a classic piece of distant folklore. There’s a distancing piece. uh in the narrative form it’s presented as a folksy story people in the offices of
moscow as if she’s she’s just been uh and the image in our head is she’s she’s just heard this gossip uh and she said this before when she’s spoken the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in June 2022, many of us will remember this here,
where she said people in Moscow are saying that all our hope is in the famine. And then she interprets what these folksy people are supposedly saying. And she’s sitting beside the head of state. She’s sitting beside John C. Putin himself. on the days at St. Petersburg Economic Forum, dressed in green,
which is why I call her made Marion Simonian like a reverse Robin Hood. And this is an aspect of the distant folklore analytical method that we can use these folklore archetypes to interpret those who are themselves using these folksy archetypes to combat them.
And she said, all our hope, the people in Moscow are saying all our hope is in the famine. And what they mean by that is, this is her saying that she understands what the folk, what the ordinary folk in Moscow are saying. They are saying that there will be famine in Africa and the migrants will come to
Europe and then the European Union will release the sanctions because it’s impossible for us not to be friends. So this is the folksy banter of the schoolyard. This is you speaking, your seven-year-old child speaking to their seven-year-old friend, best friend, and they’ve had an argument. It’s impossible not to be friends.
But this isn’t a micro chat in a schoolyard. It’s a conversation sitting beside the head of state of a country at war, which is planning to famine millions of people in Africa, in Africa, a madcap attempt, which would really only, you’d only see it in literature in Don Quixote or in some folktale.
So the madcap plan to win in Ukraine is to starve millions of Africans. That will provoke the Europeans into lifting the sanctions. And then Russia will become friends with Europe and Ukraine will be abandoned. So the way she tells the story, it’s very solid Russian strategy, but it’s told in a folksy way.
And it’s absolutely horrifying when you analyze what it’s saying. but it passes most people by. It enters their inner minds as indeed does this stuff archetyping the former president of Russia as drunk. So many of us will have seen many sensible people tweeting today the content of the
former president of Russia’s tweet once again threatening WW3 if something happens. I think it’s related to the Germans. And so these are kind of folktale archetypes, folks and stories which communicate really horrifying things when you parse the data. And it’s a pattern that they use. And it’s really effective because people like us share these because they provoke
something in us, in our emotions. And even if we think we’re harming the former president by characterizing them, by archetyping them as drunk, we’re still repeating the meme. And this horrifyingness is slyly communicated and the energy is continued and it’s pinging around the world. Thankfully, now, today, as many of us will know, because we’re tuned into this,
we see great advance in our political leadership over what we have experienced since February 2022. But this method of communication has had the impact on President Biden’s policy, don’t poke the bear, is the distant folklore meme, probably the most successful one ever, that actually impacts on foreign policy. It stopped America properly helping Ukraine.
And international relations itself, the entire discourse is full of these... metaphors and distant folklore, don’t poke the bear being one, but distant folklore means that are represented as being a means of communicating foreign policy and strategy affecting the lives and deaths of millions of people. Whereas in fact,
These strategies are only communicated by means of these means and through these means. And so what I have spotted, which as far as I’m aware, no one else’s or no other writers have really noticed is this continuity across multiple narrative forms, discourses. It’s obvious in anthropology or in folklore studies or in psychology, in Jungian psychology,
when they’re referencing myths and archetypes and storytelling. But the same dynamic is at place inside international relations discourse inside the speeches up until recently of many of our leading politicians. And obviously everything Donald says, he speaks this in folklore fluently. It’s these folksy stories from the Jan 6th anthem of the Jan 6th insurrectionists
organized by the current head of the FBI. the songs which were used in his rallies, which many of us, the talk, the folksy way of speaking about Alphonse Capone, the archetyping of Melania as Al Capone’s wife, using, wearing this, the clothes, haute couture clothes made by Ukrainian fashion designers in LA, DressX, who supply haute couture clothes
interpretations of comic book, chic comic book aesthetics for people like Elon Musk and Melania Trump who want to archetype themselves as characters in our info space by referencing through their clothes superheroes or characters from folklore, from folktale, from our contemporary folktale. So that’s kind of a sample of the
the scale of what I believe I’ve identified with distant folklore in this narrative form. But to answer your question, it’s basic. So I took the idea of archetypes from, I’m a Buddhist, from Tibetan Buddhism, where the entire practice is about embedding archetypes in our minds and very scary images of the Lord of Death, Yama.
And what I noticed in Jung’s work, which he takes it, he says he took the idea of archetypes from St. Augustine. So again, it’s the similar idea of trying to embed these tropes. I use the term, so for me, the fundamental metaphor is troll, fundamental unit of information. That’s another term I use units of information or me.
So those three for me are synonymous and I use them interchangeably. Uh, so, uh, I’m very happy to use the word meme, visual, audible. It’s an informational unit of any size. It could be a whole book or it could be just a flash of a color in my conception. And archetypal identities can be attached in my mind.
I suppose, philosophical anthropology for want of a grand term, but we’re among anthropologists here. In my philosophical anthropology, the archetypes can be identified with these means. And so for Jung, he he didn’t have access to the same, for instance, archaeology or linguistics and ancient DNA that we had. So when Jung was writing about Tibetan Buddhism,
he wrote the introduction to the second edition of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was found by Evans Vence, who wrote his PhD thesis at Oxford on fairy tales in WBH’s work, and who was a follower of Madame Lavatsky, who’s from Dnipro in eastern Ukraine. And Madame Lavatsky created the religion of theosophy.
which fused ancient Egypt and ancient Tibetan and made up a lot of stuff. But she would have picked up a lot of the stuff there from Ukraine. But what we know, but that Carl Jung couldn’t know, is that what he considered to be universal and part of the collective unconscious of humanity in this way,
which has received a lot of criticism, actually... All the examples he gives are from Indo-European languages and religions. He did not know this then. He didn’t really understand, and many people still don’t understand, Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, because it was transmitted from the Vedic into the Sanskrit into the Tibetan,
and now it’s coming back preserved in Tibetan and non-Indo-European language. But basically, its content is in Indo-European. So in all of my work, I am only ever talking about archetypes that work on Indo-European structured minds, the minds of those whose language one, whose native tongue is an Indo-European language. So that’s the only claim I’m making.
I’m not talking about collective unconsciousness of humanity. But what I can say from my own experience of watching and observing and experiencing propaganda from the first moments on that archetypal bridge in eastern Ukraine, where I spent three years in a forest, is that I perceive the world through archetypes and that when I read information,
that contains what I call archetypal identities, characters, so Ukraine can be archetyped as a weak woman. Putin does this. He did this when he spoke four days before the invasion, and he said, the full-scale invasion, he said, like it or not, take it my beauty.
So what he was saying to Ukraine as international lawyers, notice I’m also a lawyer by training, They interpreted this as they didn’t use the word archetyping, but they intuitively understood it as archetyping. They said what Putin was there was doing was he was representing Ukraine as a corpse.
And Putin got this particular phrase, which means a lot to Russians. because it featured, it’s a song lyric. So songs are very much part of the beginning of folklore, which led to the foundation of nation states, the German, first unified German state, first Irish, modern Irish state, the first Greek state, modern Greek state.
These are all the products of purposeful campaigns based around mythology and folklore to establish a unified identity that helped create community that resisted occupation. When the Herder in 1777 launched the German folklore, folk song movement and inspired Goethe And the brothers Grimm, who all of us will remember as children,
to collect folktales and inspired Wagner then and led to the first German, unified German state 90 years later. They set out purposefully to collect common culture in the form of stories. The same in Ireland. The Irish Cultural Revival, the first president of Ireland, was a folklore collector. And he, among others, created this sense. which was true,
empirically true, but we didn’t, Irish people didn’t understand it until this 30-year campaign revived Celtic culture as a distinct culture from the Germanic-English occupier. So Germany under occupation in 1777 by the French, French generals actually living in Goethe’s house in Frankfurt, which I visited, very different kind of occupation to the one we’re all aware of.
Same thing in Greece against the Ottoman Empire. What they did was they collected these stories to to create a sense of community. And this is what I realized the Russians were doing and what MAGA is doing. So it’s creating these arch in-jokes. If you’ve listened, and I’m sure you have, James and Wendy,
you’ve listened to any of Donald’s campaign speeches where he’s talking about Hannibal Lecter, again, a fictional character, using an archetypal character in our modern culture that people of a certain age will understand. So people who are today between probably the ages of 50 and 70 will remember Hannibal Lecter as a film character.
And so what Donald is doing is he’s not linking into any archetypes that that are embedded in all of humanity, in my humble opinion. He is ripping off the archetypes of which the cognition of a certain subset of Indo-Europeans at a certain moment in a certain culture are aware of. Hannibal Lecter in that case,
Alphonse Capone for obvious reasons, the man who was found guilty of 34 felony counts, and and of acts tantamount to, I won’t mention a horrible word, on EJ and Carol. So Donald is counter-archetyping, which is what I try to do as well when I call him Duncy Putin or Druity Don.
But what I believe they’re trying to do and successfully doing is, and this ties in to my understanding of deep Indo-European religion, the Lord of Death is one of the primary, primal, primordial archetypes inside Indo-European’s cognition, whether it’s Jesus Christ, whether it’s represented as Jesus Christ or Yama in Hindu religion and Vedic before it and in Buddhism,
Odin, Woden’s Day, Wednesday, Odin, Lord of Death. These are all self-sacrificing first monarchs. Basically, I think what they’re doing effectively is saying, and this resurrection of Stalin is saying, I control your death. This is what Donald is doing with whether it’s vaccines or anti-vaccines or all of these terrible policies that lead to people’s deaths.
The same thing with Putin and Stalin. They’re saying, we control the time of your death. This is a a very old, ancient, tried and tested formula for exertion, psychological control over people. And I guess this is partly connected also to the drone safaris.
What the Harrison, this is obviously, we see this as a harbinger of what is to come. And they can do this through various means. There’s almost infinite stories that can be used to communicate these fears into people’s inner minds. And that’s what I believe they’re at.
Watch this great documentary by Zarina Zabrisky:
https://khersonhumansafari.com/#card-6ewvucrvz5dt2uy
