What I’m trying to do is also communicate a form of literacy. I learned to see archetypes in data and in stories in 2016, in Russia-occupied eastern Ukraine, in a story I’ve told before. I’ve spent the last 10 years unpacking that insight into what I call the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, whose main exposition is on the disinfolklore.eu website, where we have the 12-tool way. For people who want a bit more detail, they’ll look in there, they’ll see all the origins — it’s about a million and a half words, divided into about two and a half thousand short passages, purposefully like that so that it’s very accessible. I also publish on disinfolklore.net, decodingtrolls.net, and powerofmana.net. Those three projects’ Substacks you can subscribe to, and they all meld into one.
I’m currently building — well, I’ve completed this week — the building of the architecture of a training set to fine-tune an open-weights LLM, large language model, locally. That’s very exciting. The architecture is based on the 12-tool way, and based on the contents of disinfolklore.eu.
The Don’t Poke the Bear Meme: AFD and Russian Information Projection
The first thing I wanted to talk about today was really because it’s kind of in the news. Many of you have heard me talk about the most successful Disinfolklore meme ever, which is “don’t poke the bear.” It’s probably obvious to people, when I get your eye in, that this is Disinfolklore, because it’s about the bear, it’s from fairy tales, it’s from folk tales.
This week we saw Russia projecting that meme, that piece of Disinfolklore, into our information space, through the mainstream of the German information space, through a political party which has been funded by the Russians. The AFD may have been founded in a virtuous way, although it was founded to deal with migrants — and the entire Syrian migrant crisis was on purpose provoked by Russia accelerating its carpet bombing in Syria in September 2015, when it wanted a bit more leverage at the so-called mythical negotiation table.
That had a lot of concatenating effects, including Law and Justice being elected on an anti-migrant Polish nationalist agenda in Poland, Orbán consolidating his position, Brexit being done, and Merkel famously allowing in one million Syrian migrants to give them a path to citizenship. I’m sure they’re contributing greatly to German society and the German economy now, so it’s not all bad, and amazing lives have been changed by it. However, AFD consolidated its power out of this, out of this othering, and we see it projecting this “don’t poke the bear” troll.
On its surface, it’s a piece of folk wisdom. It sounds reasonable. It sounds cautious. It sounds like the kind of thing a thoughtful person might say to counsel restraint: don’t provoke Russia, don’t escalate.
The Mana in the Meme: Russia as Bear
Don’t poke the bear — attend to the mana. In my understanding, the mana is the energy, the charge in the meme. What is the energy imminent in this meme? First, the mantra: look for the mana in the meme, which is one of the 12 tools.
First, the bear. Russia is a bear — not a government, not a collection of decision-makers, not a bureaucracy with budgets, logistics and internal politics. A bear: a force of nature, unchallengeable, primordial, amoral in the way that nature is amoral. You do not blame the bear for mauling you. You blame yourself for getting too close. The archetype is the wild, the untameable, the power that cannot be reasoned with but only accommodated. This is not analysis — it’s mythology. Its function is to strip Russia of agency and responsibility simultaneously. The bear does not choose to attack; it is provoked. The causality is reversed. The victim is the author of their own destruction.
The Poke: Infinitely Elastic Provocation
Second, the poke. What constitutes poking? In practice, everything Ukraine does to assert its sovereignty is poking. Joining NATO? Poking. Joining the EU? Poking. Speaking Ukrainian? Poking. Existing? Poking.
The concept is infinitely elastic. It expands to encompass any action by any party that Russia finds inconvenient. Because the bear is a force of nature, the pokee has no legitimate grievance. You do not file a complaint against a thunderstorm. You take shelter. The implicit instruction of “don’t poke the bear” is: submit.
The Don’t: A Command
Third, the “don’t.” This is a command. Not a suggestion. Not an analysis. Not an invitation to consider multiple perspectives. A command addressed to a potential victim, instructing them to modify their behaviour to avoid provoking their own destruction. The entire moral weight of the meme rests on the victim. The aggressor, the bear, has no moral weight at all. It simply is.
The Charge: Pure Mana
This is pure mana. The factual content of the phrase is zero. There’s no claim to fact-check. There’s no argument to rebut. There’s only a charge. Notice the RG in “charge,” the same RG in “energy.” It’s the same RG in “reign” and in “right” — this is the second most important cryptotype, which I write about.
There’s only a charge. A dense package of archetypal energy — again, the RGE in “energy,” “right,” “reign,” “regency,” “regiment” — that, once received, restructures the recipient’s perception of the conflict. Russia becomes nature. Ukraine becomes the provocateur. The West becomes the foolish hiker who ignored the warning signs. All of this happens below the threshold of conscious evaluation, in the half-second between hearing the phrase and feeling its truth in your gut.
Naming as Disarmament
The mana tool — look for the mana in the meme — asks you to notice this, to slow down, to feel the charge, and then to name it. Naming is the beginning of disarmament, real disarmament. Once you can say “this meme encodes the archetype of the untameable wild, and deploys it to invert the moral relationship between aggressor and victim,” the mana loses its grip. Not entirely, not permanently — mana is resilient. Naming it creates a gap, a space between the charge and your response. In that gap, adjudication becomes possible. You can decide whether or not to share the meme. You can decide whether or not to support AFD. You can make a decision to step back and stop yourself becoming emotionally moved by this, or scared.
847 Instances in the Luhansk Archive
I found 847 instances of bear-related metaphors in the 10,000-item foundational corpus of the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, which is what I call the Luhansk Archive — this collection of propaganda items that I collected while in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, and hand-labelled according to the archetypal imminences within it. Not all of these 847 instances were “don’t poke the bear” specifically, but they all drew on the same archetypal reservoir: Russia as elemental force, Ukraine as irritant, the West as naive interloper in a drama it does not understand.
The consistency was remarkable. It was not the consistency of a coordinated campaign — though coordination was certainly part of it — but the consistency of a deep cultural archetype being activated and amplified across thousands of individual acts of communication, which reached over a million ears almost every day.
This is what makes Disinfolklore so difficult to counter, or even to perceive if you’re caught up in fact-checking. It’s not imposed from the outside. It resonates with something already present in the cultural substratum. The mana was already there. The propagandist merely increases the volume. The mana has been collecting its energy and its charge for 6,000 years, from the first Indo-Europeans who stood on the edge of forests on the steppe in ancient Ukraine, to those who returned to tell stories of the elemental bear. That is the mana charge. That’s when the mana charge in this particular meme began collecting. This week we saw AFD activating it inside the minds of all of us, unbeknownst to us. Perhaps they don’t even know what they’re doing, but they received their orders and they followed them.
Unpacking the AFD Statement: The Twelve Signatures
Let’s look at what it means when AFD said that, by helping Ukraine with its attack on Russia, Germany was provoking Russia and making an attack on Germany more likely. That was communicated through this meme of “don’t poke the bear.”
1. Inner / Outer Realm Sleight of Hand
The first aspect of it is inner/outer realm sleight of hand. As many of you will know, inner/outer realm switching, othering — what Donald does when he others migrants, or women, or Iranians, or trans, or whatever. This is in-realm and out-realm switching. I call it the witch switch — switching scapegoats. It had this geographical positioning for me on the bridge in eastern Ukraine, on Stanytsia Luhanska, where, depending on where you stood, the inner realm of Russia-occupied Luhansk was being protected from people like me and outsiders and Ukrainians by the Russians, by the merciful sovereign.
Inner realm equals the Germans — that’s her constituency, even though she lives in Switzerland. Outer realm: the bear, Russia, framed as predator. Ukraine, the actor actually defending itself, has disappeared from the analytical frame entirely.
This deletion of the victim from the analytical space is itself a recurring signature. Some of you will remember I wrote a piece a few weeks ago on Palantir and Maven — all of this hand-wringing by certain people in the American chain of command about the advent of automated targeting — and Ukraine was completely absent from this. It turned out the only AI involved in this was a decision about which targets to take; humans were involved in pressing the button. Whereas Ukraine is dealing with this issue on a technical level hundreds, if not over a thousand, times a day, deciding when to let the human take over in the descent of a drone.
We see this signature, this mana signature. It’s actually in absence — when Ukraine is not part of the conversation. This week we saw Russia again trying to promote the troll that Europe doesn’t have a chief negotiator already, but they don’t like Kaja Kallas because she was born in the Soviet Union, she understands them. They suggest all these bizarre, other bizarro suggestions. The mana, the energy in there is: Ukraine doesn’t matter. Ukraine is an empty vessel. This is a deal to be done by the adults at the table. That’s the essential meaning of it. That deletion of the victim, we see so much of the time. Most of us are very hyper-aware to that.
2. Agency Inversion
Second thing: agency inversion. Germany helping Ukraine drone-bomb Russia makes Germany the active party. Ukraine becomes the receiver of help rather than the attacked party defending itself. The original aggressor, Russia, is reframed as the passive recipient of aggression. A three-step agency reversal. It’s very powerful — just in five words, that’s basically the effect of what they’re doing.
3. War Magic Operation
Third, it’s a war magic operation. I did that series of talks before Christmas on sympathetic magic — how the law of contagion (which are mental aspects of the mentality of, well, anthropologists claim all humans — I’ll go as far as saying all Indo-European humans) — the law of contagion, the law of similarity, and the law of difference. The war magic is: when Alice Weidel, whatever her name is, talks about “don’t poke the bear,” then millions of minds suddenly get this fear that they’re going to be annihilated, and that they should stop helping Ukraine. It moves them.
War magic operation: making Germans insecure. Declaring Germans insecure performatively. This manufactures the insecurity, like “Make America Great Again.” America was great. It didn’t need people going around with “Make America” on their hat — which was actually promoting the troll that America is not great, and was not great. Basically, these are tricks.
It’s like so-called pickup artists. Their opener is to neg their potential victim, to make them insecure and vulnerable, so that they can fill their emotionally charged mind with ideas and memes which aren’t in their interests. This is the same substrate-summoning mechanism that Buchanan’s Cultural War speech enacted in 1992 at the Republican National Convention. Pat Buchanan declared there was a cultural war between transnational elites, cosmopolitan elites, and traditionalist values. A generation of academics parsed that and looked into it, and discovered and determined beyond all reasonable doubt that there was no such division. However, by declaring there was a cultural war, the statement became the act. This is the same with this German person — or rather, the Swiss politician modelling herself as a German politician. She is basically inferring to Germans that they’re going to be attacked by Russia for helping Ukraine defend itself.
4. The Axis of Misogyny Coalition Tell
AFD is documented by me as being part of what I call the Axis of Misogyny. I don’t talk about the axis of authoritarianism — I don’t think that’s very insightful. I talk about the Axis of Misogyny. When have you ever seen China have a female leader? How many female leaders are there in Iran? I think one minister is a female leader. How many proper professional kinds of women do you see around the new Prime Minister of Hungary? Zillions. He’s surrounded by effective people, competent-looking people — as indeed was President Biden, and all good leaders today. You never see real women with real power around Donald, or around authoritarians, and the same thing with Putler around them.
AFD is a documented Axis of Misogyny Coalition member. Authoritarian groups now model themselves in the modern way by getting women into positions of power, but those women are promoting authoritarian rhetoric. There’s no difference in their rhetoric or in their modes of decision-making between them and authoritarian males — essentially the Putin–Buchanan trans-civilisational adoption pattern, which is the Cultural War Declaration.
In December 2013, Pat Buchanan wrote a piece. For those who don’t know, Pat Buchanan advises Donald Trump to this day. He was caught up in Watergate for his famous Dividing Democrats memo. Then in 1992 he declared this cultural war. Whenever you hear the term “culture war,” he is the originator of this strategy — the strategy of dividing societies and communities by declaring what are, in fact, human rights to be merely matters of choice or culture. This is all part of the strategy to destroy the post-World War II legal and social order. You say that human rights, protected by law, are just a cultural norm of the West rather than universal.
That was Hersch Lauterpacht, the Ukrainian international lawyer, and his book The Rights of Man, 1945, who taught in my law school as well. He managed to convince everyone that human rights should be protected as a matter of law, universally — not a cultural issue. This was the really clever strategy that is copied, a model copied by the so-called far right — because they are usually sinister, they are usually left — around the world. This predicts that AFD will deploy “don’t poke the bear” specifically because their coalition partner’s continued ability to wage war benefits from Western non-intervention. The Disinfolklore framework can flag this as a coalition signature, not just an individual statement.
Basically, you excuse the sexual crimes by blaming the victim. On a personal level, we’ve seen many authoritarians do that. That extends to geopolitics — you can make predictions about the kinds of victim-blaming, blaming Ukraine for wearing a short skirt, for just existing, that will carry through into policies.
5. Stealth Genocide Enabler and the Doubly Inverted Merciful Sovereign
I’ve talked before about Stealth Genocide — this idea of changing the identities of Ukrainians from the inside out using Disinfolklore, unbeknownst to them and not in the open. By doing that, you eradicate their culture and make them susceptible to being sent off on meat assaults. Refusing Ukraine self-defence enables continued Russian atrocity production.
AFD positions itself as the Merciful Sovereign for Germans, while structurally enabling the Merciless Sovereign act against Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians. You’ll remember I’ve spoken the last two weeks — you won’t remember last week because you didn’t hear it, but I did post it on my Substack, disinfolklore.net, if you’re interested to hear last week’s talk.
Last week I talked about the drone attack on the mother and the maiden — her daughter — with the mother trying to protect her as they hid in a park in Kramatorsk by a tree, evading a Russian drone. Putler modelled himself as the merciful sovereign by invading Ukraine to save native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians from what he was characterising as the merciless sovereign based in Kiev. In the moment we see the drone hunting this mother and the maiden — the mother being someone who probably was a native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainian in Kramatorsk, maybe even an IDP there from further east — in that moment you see this is the supposed merciful sovereign, who came and sent his forces into Ukraine to save them, and his drone is now hunting the very people he sent to save. In that very moment, he transformed, transmogrified in our minds, if we are attentive enough, into the merciless sovereign.
That is the doubly inverted merciful sovereign nesting. It is the deepest detection signal here, because AFD is “protecting” German people by creating more Mariupol drama theatres.
6. The World War II Restart Signature
The sixth element is the World War II restart signature. Germany ratified the UN Charter precisely because the previous regime initiated World War II alongside the Russians. AFD’s framing argues against the very legal apparatus Germany committed itself to upholding after 1945. When we see senior American officials meeting AFD officials, or Elmo promoting AFD — we know their project is to destroy the post-World War II legal and social order, not least because they are guilty of the war crimes. Certainly the commander-in-chief is, and the defence secretary, and those below him in the chain of command, involved in multiple extrajudicial murders in the Caribbean, and also in Iran, and who knows — actually it seems in Mexico as well.
AFD is joined with all of them. The Axis of Misogyny is also united in their wanting to destroy the International Criminal Court, for instance. I don’t know if it’s confirmed, but we heard that Donald attempted to form a coalition with China, with Xi — or with Eleven — the other day, to destroy the International Criminal Court. AFD and Russian state framing are convergent on dismantling Article 51 of the UN Charter — the inherent right to self-defence as one of the factors of sovereignty, which Ukraine has.
7. Drone-Bomb Verbal Conversion
Seven: drone-bomb verbal conversion. “Bombing” — rather than “targeting military infrastructure, refineries, supply lines” — verbally converts Ukrainian lawful self-defence into something morally indistinguishable from aggression. Article 51’s inherent right of self-defence is rhetorically erased.
8. The Outer Realm Mask Signature
Eight: the outer realm mask signature. Germany is Indo-European Germanic substratum, Indo-European culture. Russia is Indo-European Slavic substratum — sister branches. AFD is reactivating Germanic-versus-Slavic othering. This reactivates exactly the deep cultural template Germany formally committed to never reactivating after 1945.
The mask is performing distance from a substratum Germany is in fact cognate to. It’s claiming that Russia is a bear, is an alien. Then it is invoking these rivalries deep in the psyches of Germans and Slavs, not least from the Second World War, where the Germans treated Slavs as slaves — inverting this and drawing into people’s consciousness, as they go to look through their timeline, all of these ancient rivalries and worries about going into the forest or crossing the river.
9. Reflexive Control: Conditioned Response
Nine: reflexive control — which was the subject of that series of five talks I gave. Reflexive control: conditioned response. Russia has spent years training Western publics to internalise the “we should not be Russia’s enemy” logic. The AFD leader is performing the reflexively conditioned response. I say this is a very generous interpretation on my part, if I don’t mind saying so myself. She is performing the reflexively conditioned response the training was designed to produce. She is the operation’s output, not its independent originator. She should be lecturing her community into not poking the bear, because that’s what she — who is particularly receptive to this messaging — has been conditioned to say.
10. The Bear Retaliates If Poked
Ten: the bear retaliates if poked. Sustained by fear, not by demonstrated retaliation. Russia has not actually retaliated proportionally against Germany for past arms supplies. The archetype’s life depends on continued fear, not continued evidence.
I share Iona’s pain, which she expressed today, just hearing Putler threatening us again with nuclear annihilation, Tomahawks — which seems to be, which I presume now means it’s on the cards. It means somehow Russia knows that, as part of these drone deals which probably will never come, because they’re such rubbish negotiators now in Washington, Tomahawks might be on the menu. I do share Iona’s pain, because — God — it still goes on. They haven’t retaliated proportionately to the Kursk invasion, or to these attacks in Moscow. They’re trying to pretend it hasn’t happened, which is very funny for most of us watching it.
The archetype’s life depends on continued fear, not continued evidence. The AFD leader’s statement sustains the fear archetype. She’s transmitting the fear archetype under the guise of this folksy wisdom. That makes future Russian aggression rhetorically permissible and more likely.
11. The Temporal Stratification Check
Eleven. The antidote is basically the temporal — what I call the temporal — the time-related stratification check. The framing of the bear requires forgetting Mariupol, Bucha, Izyum, Kharkiv. The framing’s coherence depends on amnesia. That’s also what she’s doing. She’s putting a spell on us to forget Mariupol, Bucha, Izyum, Irpin — all of these places which will haunt us, and haunt the Russians, and haunt Ukrainians, and haunt humanity until the end of time. The framework’s insight tool — my tool, in my framework — surfaces what’s been disappeared from the temporal record by reminding us of this.
12. Bear Archetype Reinforcement
Twelve: the bear archetype reinforcement. The AFD leader is reinforcing Russia’s preferred self-archetype. It’s a raid on cryptotypes — the meanings, the semantic signalling systems which I have identified as operating imminent in folklore, obviously, but also in Disinfolklore. “Don’t poke the bear” is so mana-rich with all of these aspects that I’ve mentioned.
Finally, anyone amplifying this AFD framing is transmitting Disinfolklore. Anyone sharing the speech without careful framing is at risk of transmitting Disinfolklore. Certainly those who report it straight are just one person removed from being an information warfare operative.
The Provocation Mirror: Reflexive Control in the Luhansk Corpus
I was going to go back to — because it’s so important — this reflexive control, which I spoke about over those five speeches, and what I call the provocation logic cycle. “Don’t poke the bear” is imminent in that. It is this really complicated idea, which is so common in our information space from the Russians — that’s why I go on about it so much.
There’s a recurring sentence machine in Russia’s propaganda from occupied Luhansk that I want to take apart for you now. It’s one of the deepest structures in the Russian Disinfolklore apparatus. I call it the provocation mirror. In my corpus of 10,000 propaganda items, 184 items are tagged with the bare formula — not “the bear,” the bare formula, i.e. the naked formula — “provocation.” The underlying logic is in hundreds more.
Zolote Checkpoint and the Four-Step Sentence Machine
Here’s the core. 31st of March 2016, lug-info.com: “Kiev has opened Zolote Checkpoint in order to blame LPR in violating the Minsk Agreement. Kiev’s opening of Zolote Crossing Point in the area of Pervomaisk has a provocative aim and could be used to accuse LPR of breaking the Minsk Agreements.”
For those who don’t know, Zolote was at the contact line closest to the area where I lived for three years, from 2015 to 2018, in Severodonetsk. Our teams used to go there, and there was a whole thing about “let’s get the checkpoint open,” and it’s opened. It’s basically a mirror image of what Russian borders specialise in everywhere — all across the former Soviet Union — what they specialise in, I’ve come to realise: whether it’s in Georgia or in Ukraine, different parts of Ukraine, is creating obstacles at these intermission points, interaction points, on rivers.
Let me read it again: Kiev has opened Zolote Checkpoint in order to blame the Luhansk Folk’s Republic for violating the Minsk Agreement.
One of the signatures I noticed early on of Disinfolklore — and of Russian information warfare — is this: in the absence of everything else, if you just don’t have the brainpower in a particular moment to work out what’s going on with this kind of thing, when you see the complexity of it and your brain starts going “what are they saying?” — that in itself is the signature. You’re being trolled. I just say that, but I am going to unpack it.
I’ll read it again. Kiev — they’re saying “Kiev,” not “Kyiv” — Kiev has opened Zolote Checkpoint. Remember, this is an interaction zone, where on one side you have a community, on the other side you have a community, and those communities were able to interact freely before February 2014. Which reminds me, actually — James — the Little Green Men. The European Court of Human Rights determined that the occupation began in February 2014, which was the moment the Little Green Men, the polite people — the folkloric characters who were very important to my detection of Disinfolklore as an analytical method, as Russia’s means of brainwashing us. Of course: Little Green Men, green, Robin Hood, the polite people, like little fairies — these very disarming descriptions of these genocidal invaders by Putler and all around him, turning them into a bit of a joke. That began in February 2014. I’m sure today is an anniversary of something as well.
“Kiev has opened Zolote Checkpoint in order to blame LFR” — I call them Luhansk Folks Republic — “in violating the Minsk Agreement.” A checkpoint is a civilian facility. It lets pensioners cross. It saves lives. Ukraine, grammatically, opened a humanitarian crossing — which the Russians had closed — and Morochko’s statement frames the opening as a provocation. This is the provocation mirror. It’s a four-step sentence machine.
Step 1: The victim, Ukraine, takes a defensive or humanitarian action.
Step 2: Russia labels the action a provocation.
Step 3: Russia warns that if anything bad happens, it will be Ukraine’s fault because of the provocation.
Step 4: When Russia itself subsequently attacks, Russia claims it was responding to the provocation.
I’ve catalogued hundreds of these in my corpus. A Ukrainian checkpoint opens? Provocation. A Ukrainian pension paid? Provocation. An OSCE monitor like me visits? Provocation. A NATO exercise happens 600 km away? Provocation. A Ukrainian election campaign advertises? Provocation. A Minsk negotiator speaks? Provocation. Every act by Ukraine, no matter how benign, can be folded into the sentence machine as provocation.
The Word “Provocation” as Signal
Often the signal for this is this term “provocation,” which I noticed so frequently on the bridge speaking to the occupiers and to Ukrainian soldiers. I’ve spent 10 years unpacking, examining this, and collecting examples. I’ve got hundreds of them from the normal media as well, where provocations are asserted. Usually, the word “provocation” will be involved in it.
You, now becoming more literate in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method: whenever you hear that word, you can search for this little module in your brain and remember this mantra. The person accusing the other of the provocation — that accusation is the attack. When you don’t have the wavelength or the energy to think it through in the moment, just think: this person is talking about a provocation — i.e. Germany helping Ukraine, and Ukraine defending itself by sending drones into Russia. The person trolling about the provocation, they are the attacker. That’s hard to see. They’re operating in stealth, and they’re operating as if they have this great concern for the German people. Of course, if they had great concern for the German people, they would ensure that Germany arms Ukraine properly to go and take Crimea back and expel the Russians, so the Russians can’t do this again. It’s designed to disguise the fact that they are actually attacking us, and injecting this meme into our information space.
That’s just a little saw to help you cut through it in the moment. These are really complicated things, and in the complexity they can smuggle all sorts of trolls in. Pick 100 people in a room and each of us is going to focus on different phrases. This three-sentence news item from 2016 is so complex that, if you had a room of 100 people, you would have almost 50 different ways of confusion and interpretation of it. That’s why it’s so clever, and why it in itself constitutes an attack.
The Abusive Spouse Logic
It’s the same logic used by the abusive spouse: “Look what you made me do. If you had not burned the dinner, I’d not have to hit you.” The dinner was the provocation. Russian military doctrine calls this reflexive control: creating conditions in which the enemy’s only available actions are all framed in advance as aggression. The victim loses the ability to act innocently or lawfully. Every movement is already marked. That is also the function of AFD. They’re marking that movement. They’re closing it off. They’re saying: if you help Ukraine, that will lead to an attack on Russia. Some people will be moved by that.
Why does it work? Because it parasitises a genuine human capacity — the capacity to recognise provocations. Real provocations do exist. Bar fights start with them. My cat provokes me into feeding them. Duels start with them. Wars start with them. We’re all trained to watch for the first move. Russian Disinfolklore hijacks this training by defining the first move as whatever Ukraine does next.
The provocation cycle always begins with Ukraine’s actions, or the West’s actions. If they were proper historians, they would go back to actually who invaded Ukraine. You’re so confused and immobilised mentally by someone accusing Ukraine of provoking them, when all you are doing is just trying to look nice for yourself or for your friends. Russia has pre-claimed the position of responder, no matter what happens.
The Counter: Refusing the Mirror
The counter is to refuse the mirror. When you see the word “provocation” — you don’t always see it, but it’s a start — you can sense its energy. I’m trying to train a computer, a neural network, to detect these archetypes in data, these imminences. Obviously the keyword “provocation” is very easy to spot, but thankfully the large language models now are so powerful that they can spot archetypes and imminences in data. It’s a really interesting process I’m going through at the moment, to train them to see it.
When you do — let’s just stick with keywords — when you see the word “provocation” in a Russian-sourced report or from AFD, ask: who is the actual first mover in the causal chain that produced the moment of alleged provocation? In Luhansk, Russia invaded in February 2014. Every Ukrainian “provocation” since is a branch of that tree. Any genuine provocation analysis must begin at the root of that tree, not at one of its late leaves. Name the root. Keep naming it. Each naming breaks the mirror.
I’ll leave it at that for this week. Out.
Lexicon’s Question: Trito and the Indo-European Myth
The Trito myth, which I’ve spoken about before, is the most attested story in Indo-European culture — attested in Celtic, Iranian, Vedic, early Indian, Germanic — in practically every tradition. Usually, often, using the name Trito. In that archetypal story, the Trito loses his cattle, he restores his cattle with the intercession of Sky Father, and then makes the first sacrifice. Trito is the third man, after Manu and Yama — the third man who establishes the right of sacrifice as a contract with Sky Father, and then our cultures live in that way. That’s the archetypal imminence in the story.
You were just saying, Lexicon, that the hero is Trita. One of my insights, which I write about, is that both the serpent (or the dragon — sometimes it’s the dragon but usually it’s the serpent) and Trita claim that they’re restoring rightful sovereignty, or rightful control over the community’s capital or cattle. The word “capital” emanates etymologically from “cattle,” as does “chapter” — I was interested to know — as does “captain.” Both sides model as Trita.
Donald and Putler model as Trita: the heroes on the bridge, saving the community, restoring, “making America great again,” restoring to Russia its rightful new territories. We have the post-World War II legal order to determine who is truly Trita. In the case of Ukraine, President Zelensky is Trita, and Ukrainians are. They are fighting to restore their sovereignty, security, and control.
Trita Always Wins
The good news for Ukraine is — and we all have this kind of idea in our heads as well, and it doesn’t just come from Bollywood or Disney, the happy ending — Trita always wins, the rightful Trita always wins. The sound “right,” “writ,” is in Trita. It’s in the middle, as it is in “territorial integrity” and “right,” and both “integrity” and “territory.” These are deep codes encoded into us, and Trita always wins.
That is what differentiates most of us, apart from the data. We have been sure since day one that Ukraine will win. It will be victorious. There’s no way the serpent is going to succeed here. We have been clear that Ukraine is Trita. Others have been trying to promote the troll that Putler is rescuing Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians from the monster, or from the serpent — or that Donald is saving America from these outer realm migrants, the Mexicans, and all of that malarkey.
I’m pretty clear they will end up — they will have to account for their crimes in the end anyway. I’m even more sure of that. That story’s in there.
The Bully and His Lunch Money
I feel your pain, Lexicon, because when I first worked this out I thought all I had to say to a friend of mine — who would say to me that if we help Ukraine they’re going to nuke us — I thought all I had to do is explain to him: if the bully asks you — I love the way Chuck Pfarrer is always going on about the bully and his school money, or his lunch money — that’s it. If you give him his lunch money one day, he’s going to keep on coming back for it. If you allow the bully to —
As I also learned once when I was on a board of directors, in this nightmare situation, I was trying to defend what was right, against one person who was trying to promote what was not right, what was sinister, what was left. No one else really supported me. I remember one wise counsellor telling me afterwards: in a group of people, most people will just keep their heads down. They won’t put their heads above the parapet. That’s the kind of realpolitik, the kind of knowledge about psychology, that AFD and others are relying on when they say this.
The Eurobarometer and Solidarity for Ukraine
The good news is, I saw this polling — the Eurobarometer polling — you may have seen it. Support for Ukraine across the European Union is solid as a rock. I think the figure in Ireland I looked at was something like only nine percent of people thought that Russia was right, was Trita. That is despite all of the propaganda for years.
As we see — and it pains all of us, particularly because of the kinds of personalities we have — they’re not doing everything they could do. I’ll be humble and say: I’m not doing everything I could do. I’m trying to do work in the information space. Most people won’t help. They’ll cheer Trita on, but they’ll basically be doing deals with the serpent on the side until — as Will always assures us, and I think hopefully it’s coming true at the moment — when people see that Ukraine’s a winner, then they’ll all pile on.
That’s how I would parse what you said, Lexicon. I remember you were learning about the Ukrainian folkloric monsters and stuff when you were in Lviv, so that resonance is there as well. Out.
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