Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Disinfolklore?
Færytale Beginning X: Counter Disinfolklore ~ Controlling War Magic
Perhaps I was predisposed to associate scenes in Arcadian rural Central Europe with folklore.
Until this unasked-for war against Ukraine came to visit, the biosphere reserve which surrounded the bridge at Stanitsia Luhanska was as idyllic a place as you are likely to find on Lugh or Donn’s earth.
It was an archetypical Locus Amoenus (“Pleasant Spot”) that, like Virgil’s Calypso or the scene-setting for Plato’s Phaedras contained trees and shade, grassy meadows, running water, songbirds, and cool breezes.
The original Elysian field in ancient Greek lore had been physically located in what today is called Ukraine.
The land of the Hyperboreans to which the God Apollo, son of Greece’s supreme God, Zeus Pater, commuted on a pair of swans from Mount Olympus lay along the Black and Azov Sea coast of ancient Ukraine, an area I would get to know very well after my three years on that bridge.
Before the Russian invasion, this narrow and forgotten thoroughfare that ran to and from the bridge had divided only peaceful meadow steppe, woods and riverbanks overhung by willows. Trolling and fly fishers baited prey in the Donets, a river known since antiquity as running close to the edge of Europe’s border with Asia.
Such halcyon scenery would have been a worthy inspiration for the backdrops of any Christmas season pantomime, Tolstoy village story, Brothers’ Grimm folktale, or traditional Disney amusement park experience. Except that, wherever you zoomed in, you would have seen signs warning of landmines, soldiers carrying guns, and heroic mothers pretending to their children, as they navigated narrow paths around the munitions strewn about everywhere, that everything was completely normal.
Nothing in its existence since its last walk-on part in world history during the second world war had hinted that this one-and-a-half-kilometre long stretch of no-man’s land / grey zone would again host two of the greatest armies the world has ever known.
Maybe it was inevitable that I would be the first to notice the patterns of Disinfolklore swimming in the mesmerizing ocean of Disinformation that began to lap against all our lives from 2015 onwards.
Much of the high art I loved had folkloric echoes.
The composer Wagner, like most classical composers, had mined deep folk melodies that had been hummed for millennia for their great works. My late mother had read Tolstoy’s “Village Tales” to me when I was a child. It was one of her favourite books.
I read “Crime and Punishment” at law school. Raskolnikov was, like the Nordic Russian troll monarch Putin Disinfolklore character of our era, an ingenue dunce of a Saint Petersburg law student. He, like Putin, staked everything on getting away with murdering women, who may or may not be personifications of the Goddess Europa.
As a post-graduate student at Georgetown University, I had studied Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov.” Following a familiar folkloric pattern, three brothers representing different stereotypes vie with one another for the inheritance of their wicked father, who one of them kills. Ivan Karamazov is yet another stereotypical Russian dunce masquerading as a “Deep Thinker.” Ivan metaphorically tortures himself (and debauches his holy brother Alyosha’s saintly mind) with his obsessive messianic parsing of the apparent contradictions between ideas he had encountered as a student in “enlightened” western Europe and Russia’s values inculcated in him by his family’s slaves.
As filtered through such literary renditions of folklore-like stories about the wickedness of (Russian) human nature, I was ever aware that the Ukrainian controlled land running north of my bridge stretching as far as the west of Ireland contained all that was bright and good in European civilisation. Yet, beyond the southern end of the bridge, lay Moscow-occupied land, shrouded in mediaeval darkness, as far as the coast of Japan.
The folkloric resonances of Russia’s “Little Green Men” 2014 invasion of Ukraine had erupted into my mind’s eye even before my seven-year tour of duty as a peacekeeping diplomat in eastern Ukraine (2015 – 2022) had begun.
In March 2014 when I first heard a tale of unmarked Russian soldiers posing as “Polite Folk” and “Little Green Men” occupying Ukraine’s Crimea, I knew immediately which side of the law Russia’s act of aggression rested.
I was, above all, an international lawyer trained at Cambridge University! No amount of propaganda, disinformation or what I now call Russian Disinfolklore could conceal the overriding truth that Russia had invaded Ukraine!
I recall my immediate thought when I heard of the invasion (just as soon as I had located Crimea on a map) - If this unlawful military occupation stands, the entire post-World War Two legal order will fall apart.
Note here my hubris! Bookmark this!
My claim to be immune to Disinfolklore.
We will return to how such self-professed immunity is frequently an indicator of susceptibility to Disinfolklore (pride comes before a fall, and all that).
None of the Ukrainians living in occupied Ukraine who had been subjected to eight years of Russian Disinfolklore-induced brainwashing would believe that they had been manipulated.
In their minds it was their fellow Ukrainians in free Ukraine who had been manipulated.
In February 2023 Associated Press printed transcripts of intercepted phone calls between Russian occupying soldiers in Bucha and their mothers:
“They blame the United States & recite conspiracy theories pushed by Russian state media. But Maxim and his mother believe it’s the Ukrainians who are deluded by fake news and propaganda, not them.”
This belief of Maxim and his mother illustrates a central problem that Counter Disinfolklore resolves for the first time: How do we know who is right here? How can we assess and decide whether it is the Ukrainians, as Maxim and his mother believe, who are brainwashed by Disinfolklore or, as most westerners would believe, Maxim, his mother, and those living under the cloak of Russian Disinfolklore who are hypnotised by nonsense?
Continued:
Continued from:
For orientation purposes: this is where we are now:
First in series: