Using Drones Against Migrants
Disinfolklore VIII
Disinfolklore, by contrast to pure entertainment that also uses stories to manipulate our emotions, often conceals its comparable artificiality.
Disinfolklore is a wolf in sheep’s clothing that uses wolves in sheep’s clothing to smuggle emotions into our minds which it then seeks to use to manipulate us into inaction or kinds of actions that benefit the Disinfolklorist’s programme, rather than ours, or our community’s interests.
We are told in an authoritative voice, say, as an item on the news about a “caravan” of Outer Realm immigrants heading towards our borders - implicit in this is the threat to our Inner Realm’s sovereignty, security, and sustainability which those Outer Realm immigrants pose.
Reporting breathlessly switches between aerial film of hundreds of bedraggled refugees and talking heads speaking about the potential harm to our community’s sovereignty, security, or sustainability if we do not repel them. And abhorrent Disinfolklorists dehumanise a pregnant member of the so-called caravan by saying:
“If she is putting her child’s health at risk, why should you care if we bomb the convoy? Only an Outer Realm woman would do this. If we let such people into our Inner Realm, they will adulterate our culture with such sick morality.”
The meaning of such rhetoric is precisely to situate the humans in the caravan, inside our minds, as Outer Realm non-humans whom it is emotionally easy to target for inhumane behaviour. Sadly, this kind of Disinfolklore is all too common these days.
See for example this dehumanising troll from a former national newspaper editor in England:
One recent book claimed that a Trump White House immigration advisor suggested a drone strike on a migrant boat supposedly heading to the United States[1].
In this case the author of that book may, if the story is not true, themself be engaging in Disinfolklore: they may be wanting to trigger in us the consumer of the fable a feeling of disgust against the person supposedly suggesting the drone strike.
Or their intended audience may be those who would welcome such a drone strike, so their story may be intended for that audience.
Then because of whichever feeling we experience when we hear this story, we respond by disliking the person alleged to have suggested the drone strike or we support Trump (who appointed the supposed drone strike proposer) ever more intensively.
In 2023 two senior Republican members of the United States Congress introduced a bill proposing to allow the United States to bomb Mexico. This is how one of the representatives who introduced the Bill justifies it:
““The cartels are war [sic] with us – poisoning more than 80,000 Americans with fentanyl every year, creating a crisis at our border, and turning Mexico into a failed narco-state,” Rep. Crenshaw said. “It’s time we directly target them. My legislation will put us at war with the cartels by authorizing the use of military force against the cartels. We cannot allow heavily armed and deadly cartels to destabilize Mexico and import people and drugs into the United States. We must start treating them like ISIS – because that is who they are.””[2]
Mention of the “border” which in concrete reality marks the boundary between the United States and Mexico also conjures into being, inside our minds, the interface between the Inner and Outer Realm.
“Intrinsic to all Otherworld entrances is the idea of the borderlands, the edges where two ways of being interpenetrate each other to form liminal space. Such borderland places where water touches the land, times of dawn and twilight, dense primeval forests, sacred mounds, caves, and deep waters, all belong to the gods.”
“Borders” between Inner and Outer Realm in Disinfolklore are so commonly referenced as soon as you hear any politician or rhetorician talking about “borders” be on the alert for Disinfolklore. It should trigger our Incoming Troll Radar.
Merely by speaking of borders, wannabe sovereigns are asserting their power. We think of the border they are speaking of a boundary crossing (like the bridge as Stanitsia Luhanska) as the kind of physical location we might have encountered as we go between two states. This helps populists disguise what they really mean when they speak about borders.
In fact, by, in modern democracies, talking about controlling borders in such inhumane ways as forcing would-be pregnant immigrants to drown or threatening to drone-bomb the vessels carrying them, is a boundary transgression. It’s a boundary transgression merely by speaking of such matters (where the boundaries are established by the post- World War Two legal order according to which the right to seek asylum is set in stone). And it is, by invading your mind, inciting you and your Mana to collude and promote the boundary transgression itself. This appeals to a certain constituency and appals another constituency. And, importantly, it also flicks a switch in our minds.
Continued:
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/stephen-miller-donald-trump-immigrants-1234778491/
[2] https://crenshaw.house.gov/2023/1/reps-crenshaw-and-waltz-introduce-aumf-targeting-mexican-drug-cartels
First in series:
Counter Disinfolklore
For orientation purposes: This is the VIII episode of Chapter Two of Disinfolklore - a new analytical method for parsing Disinformation:
