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Decoding Trolls
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Decoding Trolls decodes the meanings inside memes. Decoding Trolls sees any emotion-moving activity of body, speech, or mind as trolling. Trolling others' emotions is what we do as sentient beings. The point is to control it, through getting how it works.
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Archetyping Bad Faith
Feb 700:51:30Tap to summarizeThere’s a key core module in the disinfolklore analytical method which is what I call the Code of Positive Trolls. It has six elements. The second element is ethical discipline. The first element is generosity.When a generous person—or when M’ockers is telling a story, what I might call Infolklore, on Volya 4 Ukraine radio space on X Spaces or Spotify —this is ethically disciplined, in the sense that it’s true. They’re not misleading us. As we all know, those of us who listen to M’ockers, she’s very careful about what she believes and what she lets be said. It’s ethically disciplined.The standard is set by international law, ultimately, from my perspective. Territorial integrity is sacrosanct. Laws against discrimination on the grounds of certain protected characteristics, the Genocide Convention—one of the most agreed-to conventions in human culture—and a whole plethora of legal instruments which are the expressions of ethical standards. I use that standard, the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls, to distinguish between Infolklore and Disinfolklore.On the fly, when you’re in your real life and dealing with people—you’re doing a deal, you’re talking about drones, you’re trying to get components, you’re a teacher in school with students firing stuff at you and you’re just trying to work out what’s going on—is this person in good faith? The first element of the Code of Positive Trolls, which I find particularly useful, is generosity. If I’m picking up genuine real generosity in the other, then I know it’s probably not intentional misdirection. It’s probably infolklore, not disinfolklore. When you pick up a lack of generosity in, say, Donald or others, then you can brand it disinfolklore.Archetyping Bad FaithThat’s the span between trying to decide in your immediate life whether this is true or not. The definitional disinfolklore is anything Donald says, anything MAGA says. Obviously, until you’ve archetyped them as bad, as not in good faith, you might be confused by little instances. Whereas now we know practically everything he says is bad, yet we still fall for the trolls.I was watching someone today who always talks about the Ukraine war and the battlefield. They justifiably go off on one and complain about this thing I’ve just spoken about—I skipped over it because I didn’t need to hear them say it as well—where Donald talks about the week and the ceasefire and all that stuff. Then the next story they’re talking about is Donald and the Indian oil deal. We have to try and maintain our consistency between these two manifestations of Donald. If you’ve archetyped him as bad and in bad faith and a con man, then when I find myself falling for one of his trolls—tomorrow he may say, oh, I’m thinking about sending the Tomahawks to Ukraine—we just have to resist falling for this.We know that everything he says basically is disinfolklore. We don’t know that with other people in our lives, and we’ve all probably experienced situations where you gradually discover someone you relied on and liked and thought was actually in good faith is really spinning lies or tricking you. Then you realise that everything they’ve said is probably what I would call disinfolklore, because it’s not ethically disciplined. It was untrue, it was falsities, it was manipulative—not manipulative in a positive way.Infolklore Versus Disinfolklore: The M’ockers ExampleAs Bill Terrier says on Volya4Ukraine Radio, the stories which M.ockers is telling are manipulative—stories on multiple layers. The way she tells them, however, the way she frames them, transforms them into infolklore. When she’s telling a tale of woe of some Ruschist mil-blogger who has published a story on Telegram to manipulate people in Russia into sending him money, or like Gherkin forever trying to persuade Russia’s government to do a full mobilisation—that is definitive disinfolklore, and these are the kinds of stories she’s telling. We can talk about those stories in a conscious way that transforms them into infolklore. We’re certainly manipulating each other by telling these stories, yet we’re not doing it with mean intent. We’re doing it out of generosity—a bit of light relief in the midst of the pain. We’re also raising money. I noted Wendy’s matching in An Accidental Ukrainian, which I very much appreciate.Re-Archetyping and the Kennedy CenterWe are moving towards an answer to a question posed by Scouts and indeed raised by Ioana about what is the truth. What James alluded to is that the truth, in inverted commas, is at risk of being defined by Donald and Donald’s attempts to re-archetype the Kennedy Center and indeed annihilate Kennedy, this hero of his youth that he wishes to destroy. It’s not enough to have RFK Jr. absolutely annihilate the Kennedys from the inside. I note all of the Kennedys’ letters and warnings to Congress not to allow their father, their uncle, their cousin, their brother to become health secretary.I’m a little bit more optimistic, however. It was a Ukrainian on the series of Ukrainian TV stations that I just recently discovered—and I know Lexicon has as well—broadcasting in English or AI English. There was a Ukrainian academic at an American university I saw this week. He was very certain, and it lodged a nice germ in my mind about how temporary all of this is.Of course, as James alluded to, it may not become temporary. This may be this attempt to re-archetype reality and turn the world upside down, to turn falsehood into truth for the usurper—the literal and metaphorical usurper Donald. January 6th, whatever happened in the 2016 and 2024 elections with Russian help—the usurper is attempting to turn the world upside down.The Reformation ParallelI’ve alluded to this before. I studied in great detail the early transmission of ideas in the early German Reformation, 1518 to 1530, and the world turned upside down. Sebastian Brant’s late fifteenth-century book, The Ship of Fools, played a really big part in the re-archetyping of the Pope as Antichrist and the use of memes and cartoons to re-archetype the church in a certain way, done by the leaders, the oligarchs. They succeeded in some ways, yet the Catholic Church is still around and there still is truth—there’s truth in all of our lives. I’m quite optimistic. At the moment we’re in the endgame.I do note the Kennedy Center and what’s going on there. For those who don’t know: he inexplicably tried to fire the board almost immediately upon getting into office. They resisted. In the end, like a steamroller, he got rid of them. Then he attempted unlawfully to rename it the Trump Kennedy Center. He got all his patsies in there—basically the spouses of all his Epstein-connected cabinet members and lawyers and various people are on the board. He controls the board and performers. This Kennedy Center, as I understand it—correct me if I’m wrong, Wendy or James—was established by an Act of Congress to memorialise and commemorate JFK. That’s its sole purpose. It washed its face and made a surplus of something like $40 million last year. Already Donald has tanked it, as he’s tanked absolutely everything he’s ever been involved in.I do believe underpinning all of this, along with RFK, and all his other motivations, is this idea of annihilating this golden boy of his youth that perhaps someone he hated in his life talked about. He just wants to annihilate all that is good. I don’t believe he’ll succeed. I don’t believe any of them will succeed at this in the end. The end is coming near.6,000 Years of Indo-European TruthPart of my confidence in that actually is my perspective from 6,000 years of Indo-European history and the triumph of right and truth. It’s in our language, it’s in our words, in almost every sentence. The repeated attempts, as memorialised in stories about the devil or the snake or whatever, in every culture going back literally for 6,000 years that we have records for—it’s embedded in our language. The word in Hindi and early Indian languages for snake is nāgī. It means negative. This is what Donald and the devil and Satan and Putler and all of these horrific oligarchs, whom the Epstein system has given us a window into, are trying to do. They are the neg, they are the anti—yet I don’t believe they’ll triumph. We’ve got Ukraine, we’ve got President Zelensky, and we’ve got the truth on our side. We’ve got the disinfolklore analytical method and the disinfolklore perspective.Disinfolklore’s Building BlocksI was first going to go through just a couple of the tools—very easy snack bites—then go back to the Battling Archetypes aspect, these twelve tools, which is more longue durée work I’ve been doing for the last few weeks.Are You New to Disinfolklore?If you’re new to disinfolklore—actually, that’s a bit of a trick question, because if you live in an information-rich environment today, you’re already steeped in disinfolklore. You just couldn’t notice it until I coined the term to describe how strategically targeted memes affecting our attitudes, motivations, intentions, and moods pass through our incoming troll radars to transform our identities in unseen ways.Now I’ve named it disinfolklore—just as the writers in the Book of Genesis named things and have Adam and God naming things—you can get your eye in and begin to move forward. Be more mindful about how strategically we are being manipulated by disinfolklore masquerading as news, gossip, advice, both in your online and in your real-life lives.I see news as a province of folklore, as is disinfolklore. Disinfolklore describes stories, however delivered, that communicate meanness with a view...
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Podcast and Pensées 128:
Jan 2600:32:06Tap to summarizeIt pops up as a perennial troll: you’re in the countryside, something strange happens, and it’s attributed to a troll appearing and interceding. Trolls perform the same function as angels or leprechauns or banshees or Baba Yaga or rusalky. It’s all the same — every Indo-European culture has these substitutes for energy, to explain things.On Minsk: I’ve talked before about how my Disinfolklore Analytical Method allows us to look at any form. One takeaway from a lot of my work at the moment is to try not to treat these as organic or accidental emanations — just as seeing Elon in the White House archetyping himself with his son as the dark hero, Batman and Robin, is trying to affect our moods. Seeing these elements as part of a system might prevent us reacting to them as if they’re individual artefacts and moments in our lives. They’re very much part of what I would see as the coup or insurrection which, according to both the Georgia and federal indictments, began within the first moments that Donald Trump disputed the results of the 2020 election. The racketeering charge in the federal indictment tells us it’s a whole system, not just one moment. That perspective is essentially what I do in my work — selling perspectives on the quotidian, the daily elements, to help us understand ourselves, where we’re fitting in, how we’re affecting the culture.Our culture — which most of us have chosen to engage with on X — that’s our main entry point, our main power: to affect people’s timelines. We know how we’re affected by information we see. That’s why we’re part of this Volya community, because we think there’s power in communicating this understanding. What we can do is see this as part of the system and become Disinfolklore-literate: look for what I call Archetypal Disinfolklore, look for what they’re trying to archetype themselves as, how they’re trying to manipulate us, and then find ways of explaining and sharing this comprehension.I’d quickly reference the Tulsi Gabbard issue because it ties into what we talked about last week. I’m trying to give tools that help us discern the mana in the meme — the energy in the memes we encounter each day as we scroll, interact with our culture, and create our culture. Axios reported that Tulsi Gabbard is prepared to submit her resignation if Donald authorises entering the Israel–Iran war. There was also credible reporting that she was excluded from a meeting to discuss the impending war. From that, I deduced she is — as most of us know — recognised as being part of the Russian influence network, and they were trying to keep her out of that meeting. Her preparedness to resign over the Israel–Iran war complements my analysis of what is going on.What’s particularly interesting is that because of what we know about Russia’s economy — because we listen to Mokrushyna and Prints every day and Absurdistan — we almost uniquely as a community have a detailed idea of Russia’s economic state, its dependence on oil exports, and its dependence on Iran for weaponry since it was first reported in October 2022, when Iran was denying providing Russia with weapons and drones. Up until then, we didn’t know which way Iran would swing.I have this fixed flagpole in my mind: Russia does not want the United States to enter the war in Iran. Therefore, anyone who is suddenly out of character against this war — Tulsi Gabbard being one — we can use this as a good litmus test to know if they’re in Russia’s influence, whether paid or otherwise. It’s very particularly interesting to see which way Donald goes in the end. On one hand, he’s suddenly become like a Messiah to these patrician neocons who always thought of him as a clown, and now he’s offering them what they’ve dreamed about since 1979: bombing Iran back to the Stone Age. On the other hand, the MAGA element — Bannon and company, who’ve been leading the charge against Ukraine, which again is a litmus test for where these people’s loyalties lie.In this context, I look back at Gabbard’s video — the aesthetics, the Soviet-era aesthetics, the argument about World War III which we as a community understand. A highly educated, brilliant American friend contacted me and used this World War III meme. Whatever media she’s consuming is promoting it, and we’re very familiar with it from here.On the archetyping idea: this gave me the concept of re-archetyping World War III. I read a few pieces this week, which some of you will have seen, on what war looks like now — using what all of us have learned from watching how drone warfare has evolved, listening very carefully to Alan and Chuck Pfarrer and others. All of us have learned a lot about warfare, and because most of us didn’t know much beforehand, we’ve perhaps been more open to the new rules. I saw Trent Telenko’s post yesterday setting out the range of Shahed drones, which I don’t think any of us would be confident about defending against. We’ve seen how they’ve evolved and how Ukraine has countered almost every obstacle, but the Shahed drones are an absolute problem for the world.I found some of my early tweets on Shahed drones. In 2023, a drone attack was four Shaheds. Now we’ve got 400 a night, two nights of 400-plus. When you see that Iran has Shahed drones within range of Central Europe, according to Trent Telenko’s map, you become less gung-ho. If you’ve archetyped in your mind that the US Army is the biggest and best in the world, and you’ve been reading Telenko’s posts — he integrates these daily lessons and batters them against his existing archetypes about force power and defence. He’s constantly lobbying for hardened shelters for stealth bombers. But I’m also looking at what’s happening in Kherson.The Shahed drones and Iran aren’t really on the minds of most people in the normal world — they tune in to Ukraine every now and again. As far as I can see, they’re not really on the minds of the neocons pushing for war in Iran either. I’m waiting to see Dick Cheney visiting the White House after all Donald did to his daughter. That story is very interesting — they’ve been paying for this war for decades.Someone like Trent Telenko is re-archetyping his ideas of what’s necessary to defend, constantly updating according to the latest data. Others aren’t doing this — many pushing for war, and on the other side, people either paid or accidentally under Russian influence who want to stop the Iran war at all costs. I wrote about how we need to outline this. My tweets are proper interventions worthy of being printed in journals, because I don’t see responses from the so-called experts. It’s exactly what we saw with the Iraq war — it’s all right to bomb a place back to the Stone Age, but what happens on day two?Now, what happens on day two is pretty obvious to me. One scenario I’d be considering: many of us will remember when Kherson was liberated — those wonderful days, many of us were on Volya Radio that day — and we expected blowback, but it didn’t really come for another year. The UN Commission of Inquiry report we discussed in the first week of this show: that drone war starts in July 2023, after Kherson was liberated in September 2022. It took a while, then they started with one or two drones. Today we saw 30 people injured, hunted by drones. Drone warfare — drones launched almost every day from Enerhodar Nuclear Power Plant, which is my long-term litmus test for whether people really understand World War III as anything other than a mantra that provokes archetypal images of this 1980s view of ashes and the whole world turned to ashes.Tulsi Gabbard’s video depicted that — in words and images. Mokrushyna has talked very well about this, and I remember seeing videos on the BBC in the early 1980s about nuclear winters. When the World War III signifier is trotted out, the archetypal identity provoked in minds of people of a certain age is precisely what Gabbard was articulating. It was so clumsy with the Soviet imagery. That tells me, in light of this new data, even more strongly that the Russians are behind her, and that they don’t want this war. She obviously saw it coming and thought to put out this quite cryptic video at the potential cost of her job, according to her orders.But the idea of re-archetyping World War III — which this has all provoked in my mind — is precisely about drone warfare. The scenario we’ve seen in Kherson and other cities, now with fibre-optic drones: what happened with the pro-Palestine movement which grew up suddenly after October 7th on university campuses across the world — I foresee a so-called peace movement, an armed peace movement. The model would be the Vietnam War: an insurrection masquerading as a peace movement, injected into a society constantly divided by Chinese TikTok. The NRA and their guns would be nothing against drones. Today’s means of blowback are much more significant than with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.The knowledge we have enables us to re-archetype our ideas of what blowback might look like if Donald enters the war. The only hope, ironically, that he won’t carpet-bomb Iran is Putin and the Russians — everything I see tells me they definitely don’t want this. They don’t want Iran bombed because of their dependence on Iran to get oil to market. Everything I’m seeing through Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson and Dugin — all these clans, paid or unpaid influencers, are suddenly coming out against war. All of them were probably pro-Iraq war. That’s where re-archetyping comes in.The other thing I wanted to talk about, connected to re-archetyping and Archetypal Disinfolklore — it’s the first tool in my Twelve Tools. Arsenal, Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy.Letters to Ukraine — the horror on all levels. I worked with mothers of missing soldiers in eastern Ukraine for four years, almost every week. I met these mothers to talk about their missing s...
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Podcast & Pensées 127: Russia’s Antisemitic Agitprop. Mental Hygiene and Visual Images.
Jan 1600:58:04Tap to summarizeFirst thing I wanted to talk about, which is something I noticed on my Twitter about five days ago. I first noticed I was getting a lot of pictures of David Bowie and the Rolling Stones. Never really liked the Rolling Stones. Really loved David Bowie from the age of about eight onwards. And that got me thinking, why am I getting this stuff on Twitter?And then I realized, ah, for some reason, I had cut off images. There was a setting in Twitter which I used as part of my incoming troll radar to block images. And so I would never see images on my Twitter feed, just text. And suddenly that disappeared. And then I looked for the setting and the setting had disappeared. And then I Googled it and I discovered two days before I worked this out, because I was wondering why am I, what is different about this experience? And what is different is I’m getting two channels of information and I’m used to only getting one channel of information on Twitter, which is just text.I would click sometimes on images to look at them if I wanted. But basically, it was my only way of controlling what was going into my mind, into my brain. And they got rid of the setting inside the app which is obviously very annoying because clearly there’s an intelligence behind this and what the intelligence behind this is trying to do is involuntarily feed us with visual memes which can have a greater impact on imprinting on our mind and printing archetypes on our mind. And so obviously that’s very annoying that I as the consumer who actually pay because it’s my main medium for initial writing.And the algorithm trolls me and I troll it and it inspires it. I’ve trained the algorithm so that it hits me with my for you feed is, every now and again there’s a bit of a change but it’s basically exactly how I, I’m pretty happy with it the way it is especially if I can cut out the images. And because of that, I pay for it. And it’s extremely annoying to have my experience determined in this way. That’s one thing, because I think of it as a violation of my right as a consumer or to have the experience that I want. And then I think also, what’s behind it? Why is the intelligence behind the algorithm trying to feed me images which I don’t want to see. It should be no skin off their nose. And it’s very annoying.So I worked out a solution for this, which I now have. I have quite a few different types of browsers on my phone, which I use for different applications. I use the DuckDuckGo browser now for YouTube stuff. It’s particularly well optimized for that and it doesn’t keep any of the cookies and I generally don’t have to sign in. And so, for instance, I was watching the great Chuck Pfarrer and Alan Brewer today on YouTube through DuckDuckGo.But now for Twitter, I am fighting my instinct, which is to always go for the app, but I now go for the, it’s on Firefox, and that cuts out the images. Unfortunately, it still has video, but it’s easy for me to scan through there. And I’ve been doing this now for about five days. So I just say that in the context of incoming troll radar, how do I control the information coming into my brain, coming into my mind, because we’re all dealing with so much of it. And the visual, the image element of it is something I can do without because I work in text mostly. I always add images to my writing and I consider myself mainly a writer, but I do use different forms of media. So I just suggest that if other people have found this lack of a setting, that’s my practical solution to it. And so far it’s working quite well.China and Russia: Territorial AmbitionsI noticed a tweet by Jay and Keeve the other day where he, Jay was referring to this. We’re seeing this story appearing more and more about the China coming in to take a bite out of China, taking a bite out of Russia. And I think it was actually mentioned on Times Radio today, which generally I don’t listen to, but I have started. They were interviewing William Taylor, who was the US ambassador to Ukraine in the late 90s and then the charge d’affaires after an acting ambassador after Donald and Lev Parnas and co got rid of Maria Jovanovich who I met in Dnipro once and who was really amazing really engaged with the granular aspect of what was going on in Ukraine. And so I listened to that interview. And even on that, which is quite mainstream, they’re referring to this idea that China is now talking about taking parts of Russia.And I think maybe it was even Genesis Man raised it today on their show about how there’s a game, there’s actually a game now in China developed, which is, you know, which part of Russia do you want? So I can really get behind that. But Jay and Keeve made a point which I agreed with because when I first heard about this latest round of scary stories about China, not scary from our perspective, but scary for the Russians taking parts of Russia in this latest round. It was about two months ago by Constantine inside Russia. And as some of you will know, I have a slightly love-hate relationship with him because I am suspicious of him. Despite that I found I find him engaging some of the time and and and a good source of information and again going back to the incoming troll radar and one of the algorithm one of the parts of my algorithm which which I work on is if I find myself wondering about the authenticity of some account then the fact of me wondering about the authenticity, I now use as an indicator that probably I should be ultra careful with them.And so I’m very careful about Constantine in Russia, inside Russia. However, he, about two months ago, he featured as one of his news stories on his show about how the Chinese media was running these stories about China getting ready to take parts of Russia. And I thought to myself, because I am slightly suspicious for a number of reasons, and we can talk about that again. Because of that, I was wondering, why is he telling us this? And what is the perspective? And my hypothesis was, this is a Russian operation attempting to scare us with the idea that China’s going to come in and take a bite out of Russia. So this is Russia trying to put itself in the place of the West and basically say, you know, we’re protecting, we’re keeping parts of China inside the white supremacist European envelope.And we’re doing you all a service. And if you don’t give us what we want, then China’s going to come and take in a bite of Russia. Now, of course, and Jay and Keev, seem to come to this conclusion as well. Now, if it is true that there is this game which is approved in China, and any of us who know Russia very well and Russians very well understand they are, it is their primordial fear is of China, not of Europe. And so it’s completely plausible that China itself is generating some of these stories. But it’s equally plausible that Russia, in their madness, think that they’re going to somehow scare us into sacrificing Ukraine because we don’t want China to take Yakutia. And so I just wanted to raise, yeah, so I suppose I start from the, I want to avoid being automatically manipulated, having my manner pulated, moved up and down in such a way that I can’t control it.Mental Hygiene and Visual ImagesVisual images have such a powerful impact on our consciousness that there’s many things you can’t unsee. And so if anyone writes trigger warning or they say, oh, this is awful, and then they kind of show it to you, like if I scan in the text and I see that I never click, you know, click on it. I remember, for instance, when the Christchurch shooting, that shooter in Christchurch, I remember I was working in Dnipro and going to a meeting in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast with a colleague, a Turkish colleague, Turkish Canadian colleague, and all the way there, he was watching this first-person shooter video. And then I had another Kazakh colleague who, when we got back to the office, he said, oh, yeah, I was watching it as well. And then the next day, my Kazakh colleague said, I’m being haunted by this imagery of this thing, and I was watching it. And I was like, why did you watch it?And so obviously that’s a more extreme case than a lot of the stuff that’s coming across our feed. I don’t need to see it to understand that someone else has seen it, like Chuck Pfarrer, for instance. I’m pretty sure he watches a lot of this stuff. I know, for instance, Denys Davidof, who I find to be a good source. I go through stages with him. He watches all of the videos. And I trust his judgment on the granular, the tactical level. If he says to me, this group of Russians were unalived, as he nicely puts it, I don’t need to see this imagery myself. So it’s about mental hygiene and and it’s an intrinsic part of the Disinfolklore analytical method. And the code of positive trolls is this idea which I have to try and, if we’re operating in this space, as all of us are, we’ve made an active choice to remain with Twitter despite everything. And I’m sure not a week goes by when we don’t think, why am I doing this to myself?But since we have chosen to dance with the devil, that doesn’t mean that we have to take everything on board. And I just found cutting out the images didn’t affect my Twitter experience in any negative way. And it was a good shorthand way of modulating what was going into my mind and moderating what was going into my mind. And when I was googling it I saw that it was a big thing when this was brought in to get rid of media previews in 2013 and then somehow so it’s been there for like 12 years and now suddenly it just disappears, which is very very annoying.I just raise it here because, as I say, your incoming troll radar, whether it’s from your best friend sharing imagery from the Gaza Strip or Instagram or indeed from Ukraine, because obviously one of the reasons Russia does these horrific attacks ...
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Podcast & Pensées 126: Complicité between Disinfolklore and Staged Events
Jan 1100:58:38Tap to summarizeI was going to start with reasons to be grateful, because as you know, one of the four aspects of the model in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method for noticing how information — what I call Disinfolklore, or Infolklore — affects us and changes us is through our moods. Moods, attitudes, intentions and motivations: these are the aspects of our consciousness, our identities, our beingness, which are impacted. A good piece of Disinfolklore will affect all four. Attitudes and moods are more long-duration elements — of course moods can be immediate as well, but in terms of feeling happy or sad over a six-month period, Disinfolklore and indeed Infolklore can affect us greatly.When I talk about Infolklore, I mean really what Mokrushyna, for instance, talks about. Mokrushyna and Genesis Man’s partnership, for me on a day like today, buoyed me up, transformed my mood, made me happy. I love the way Mokrushyna tells the stories. The same story which is Disinfolklore when published on Telegram by the Rashists can be Infolklore when told with Mokrushyna’s mocking tone, drawing attention to elements we all recognise because we’ve been on this journey since February 24th, 2022, and some of us for longer.Not all news is necessarily Infolklore or Disinfolklore. Part of my self-appointed job, my little contribution to helping us navigate the current age, is to characterise some of it as Disinfolklore, some as Infolklore, and to communicate how I do this in my head using evolving criteria. When news affects our mood and/or our attitude and/or our intentions and/or our motivations, then it’s definitely in the realm of folklore or Disinfolklore.Reasons to be grateful today, given everything going on. Ukraine is, technically speaking, handing Russia’s arse to them. If we imagine everything happening — Venezuela, Greenland, everything in America — and we think of having this ogre in the back of our minds with Wagner, this storied mythological force able to fly in anywhere and do anything, we think of Russia having its four million tanks, the entire output of the Soviet Union. And then we see that Ukraine is handing Russia’s arse to it. Whatever happens from this moment forth, so much of that mythos and materiel is gone that it’s laughable when Russia is put in the same category as China, the United States, or the European Union militarily.People’s algorithms, their data-resistant archetypes, their data-susceptible archetypes — if they are changing, they’re updating in real time according to these stories, which could be Disinfolklore or Infolklore. Whether it’s Kupiansk, where Putler announced it had been taken, and now it’s clear not only was it not taken but Ukraine retook it and cleared out most of the Rashists. Pokrovsk, obviously under pressure, but from what we can see it seems to be holding, and we see videos of Russia’s annihilation there. These elements of a story have a capacity, when amplified enough, to transform archetypal identities in people’s minds. Ukraine handing Russia’s arse to it every day is a wonderful thing.Russian Arctic incompetence — absolutely wonderful. Mokrushyna was talking about it today. We hear this idea of a deal between the United States, Russia and China to divide up the world, and Russia’s propagandists are promoting it. But really, the guys around Donald — they’re not charity people. They’re hard-nosed. If they sense weakness, they pounce. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you can hold your own and pretend you’re rich enough in the country club, in Mar-a-Lago, you can be one of the gang. But if your Arctic seaports are falling apart and you don’t have any ships and your piers are crumbling — even Donald, whatever tie he has with the Rashists, will look at that and think, “Well, I was going to divide the world up, but...” That pressure is going on. Good to see.None of us — particularly those who made the decision to speak out after February 24th, 2022 — are scared of Russia. There may come the knock on the door, but none of it is in any way as bad as what every single Ukrainian faces every night when they fall asleep, if they can fall asleep. We’re not scared of Russia anymore. A whole decade’s worth of popular culture promoted this idea of Russia as a giant, a massive bear that had to be feared and negotiated with in a quiet voice. But because of what we’ve seen since February 24th, 2022, we’re not scared anymore. When we hear Disinfolklore about Greenland, about NATO collapsing, we can be grateful this isn’t happening when we still feared Russia as somehow equal to us. We have Ukraine and its strength and power.We have the 800 billion euros, which went almost without a blink — agreed last weekend in Kyiv with the national security advisors. 800 billion euros up to 2030 is a lot of cash. Ireland back in the day was getting sort of 10–11 billion over the whole course of a budgetary cycle and built all its motorways for that. An amazing reason to be grateful.Russian air defence — it’s now mainstream that it’s absolutely rubbish, because of whatever went on in Venezuela and Caracas the other day.We have the Epstein Act of Congress, which came out of nowhere. A miracle. We have a lot of work to do on that front, but it’s there. Every redaction, every lack of publication is now a breach of the law. It’s not enough, but it’s there. No one anticipated it. Chuck Schumer’s finest moment.German, UK and French leadership, and many other leaders. We could have terrible leaders in those countries. We could still have Scholz, for instance. Imagine all the stuff we went through for the first two years of this nightmare with Scholz. Now we’ve got a proper German leader.Ukraine will soon have its Gripen, its Griffins. Information wars are devastating Russia — all that stuff about Putler’s palace has gone into the mainstream. Donald kind of making fun of them. Story after story going into the minds of people who are interested in geopolitics but don’t pay attention at our level. Russia can’t take advantage of any of this.We see this mental routine: “Putin must be really happy about this,” these Putin-understanders who articulate their mood through this rhetorical method. Perhaps he is — who knows, who cares. Think about how annoyed they must be that they don’t have any power left and everyone can see it, while Donald is doing all of this. That brings me enormous joy. If they had only waited for the full-scale invasion a year or two, had a bit of patience, they could have had everything. Now they’ve lost everything because they didn’t wait. When Russia could be at the moment of its greatest strength, had they not had their arses handed to them by Ukraine — there’s no real substantive advantage I can see. The Arctic ports are a perfect example.I wanted to start with that positive thing because I should be practising Infolklore as well, trying to positive-troll us using proper, truthful, genuine reasons, not deception, and being ethically disciplined. There are many reasons to be grateful.In 2018, when Russia seized two Ukrainian naval vessels off the coast of occupied Crimea, it caused a big crisis in the Sea of Azov. I was sent down to establish the OSCE’s monitoring model based in Berdiansk. Most Ukrainians of a certain age will remember this moment — another horrific humiliation. Whatever’s going on in the Atlantic right now — again, reasons to be cheerful. Medvedev, on the day of the raid, actually wrote that he wants the Americans to kidnap President Zelensky on Russia’s behalf. As Will characterises it, this is peak Absurdistan: the Russians justify their entire war based on a mythological coup which, if there was any coup, was executed by Paul Manafort, who’s still Donald’s adviser. And now Medvedev is admitting the Russians are so useless they can’t mount a raid and actually wants the Americans to do what they can’t. Peak Absurdistan. Let’s count our blessings.What I noticed in eastern Ukraine was that the Russians used stories to create community. On the south bank of the Donets River, in Russia-occupied Luhansk, through this othering process, they convinced Ukrainians that they are Russians. Then they convinced them that the other wants to cross the river and kill them, and that their only protector is Russia — who is in fact their captor. Classic coercive control. You can understand it on a micro level: most coercive control relationships with a violent element are male to female. When Putin speaks, when individual Russians speak — in their family where the man is beating the wife — that’s a coercive control relationship. From the micro to the macro, the entire system inside Russia-occupied Luhansk, which I watched from the inside out by crossing into there every day for three years, collecting and analysing the media — what I now call Disinfolklore — this idea of coercive control: “If I’m not beating you, someone else is going to beat you harder, so you better stick with me.”We saw that appalling headline yesterday in the *Washington Post* about Rubio saying America is going to use coercion in Venezuela, and in Greenland too. Coercive control, the use of fear, the use of ultraviolence to get their way. At the time, I didn’t know what they were up to. I could see something was really odd — the rhetoric in thousands of stories every day. But I didn’t know the objective. After the full-scale invasion, I realised: the game was to convince them they’re Russian, that they should fight for Russia, that they must participate in these meat assaults against their fellow Ukrainians.Today, Russia uses Telegram to create community. What I noticed was that community identity is wholly formed through storytelling. This is the method, the means they use in this fake state — Russia-occupied Luhansk People’s Republic, or the Luhansk Folks Republic.The modern nation state was create...
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Podcast & Pensées 125
Dec 2600:18:41Tap to summarizeThe document dump. It reminds me of another aspect of my past, where I worked for this New York law firm called Fishbein Badillo Wagner Harding, which was closely associated with Giuliani and Herman Badillo, who was one of the first Hispanic council members in New York City. We also worked for Donald Trump. The case I was involved in — before I went to Cambridge to study law, so I was a paralegal — was a Bear Stearns matter, where Epstein worked as well. This was obviously long before Bear Stearns exploded, but when Bear Stearns exploded, I was not surprised.It occurred to me today as I was listening about the document dump: the chaos of these files is a catastrophe for Donald and everyone. There are tens of millions of documents. We have enough documents now to know there are tens of millions more to come. But from the perspective of a lawyer, you have — I’ll say infinity as a metaphor — infinity of different ways to charge particular criminals. Well, you don’t — there’s a set of different ways for any particular set of facts. You develop a theory, take a view on the most solid charges, and if the person is guilty of huge numbers of crimes, you try to take the most solid one.Any of us who followed the Stormy Daniels case from the first time Michael Cohen was charged and jailed — it was done on illegal funding of the election, because the payment to Stormy Daniels should have been registered. That was the most solid case they could make. Donald was unindicted co-conspirator number one. But then it was dismissed, and when it came back, it turned into a business records fraud case.By analogy, you can see the clearest case against Putler. He’s entitled to sovereign immunity because these are acts done as head of state. But because international law — this principle which sadly the current US regime and Putler and all the paleo-masculinist conservatives want to get rid of — holds that international law has primacy over domestic or municipal law, certain crimes cut through that immunity. The stealing of children under the Geneva Conventions is a really clear-cut crime. And the idiot has admitted to it. He is just as idiotic as Donald in the sense that if you were their lawyer, you’d constantly have your head in your hands, because they keep admitting to crimes from which they’re not immune. He has admitted on television to stealing these children, as has Lvova-Belova. The Council of Europe has established the tribunal to try Russia for the crime of aggression, and Putler and all the leadership will be responsible for that. They’ve committed so many crimes — the genocide case is going through, tortuous and complicated, and will go on for years. And the Compensation Commission was signed last week in The Hague.This is where Ukrainians will be able to claim compensation. And again, this goes back to Putler understanding what awaits him and Russia, and why they will never relent. There’s no chance, as far as I can see, unless the European Union gets catapulted into a Disinfolklore universe — which I don’t see happening at the moment, thankfully. When I made my Munich speech, I wasn’t sure. It was the same day President Zelensky was speaking in Munich, and J.D. Vance spoke the next day or perhaps that day as well. It wasn’t clear to me how things would go after the White House visit. The typical pattern would have been everyone trying to assuage the Americans and selling out Ukraine — that’s what had happened since 2014. But that didn’t happen.You see this huge pincer movement, like a lobster claw, against Russia — notwithstanding Ukraine’s execution of justice by blowing up long-term assets. Yes, it would be great to see him charged for absolutely everything, but this crime is serious enough that the key would be thrown away, and it’s the easiest to prove — he’s admitted it. They could convince even extremely conservative judges.Why hasn’t it happened? Unfortunately — I won’t go into too much detail for personal reasons — but I think five judges at the ICC are now sanctioned by the United States, including the chief prosecutor. I’m hoping that now Europe has to say to America: sorry, we’ve helped you for decades, but now it’s over. The chief prosecutor is accused of something which I suspect he didn’t do. We see this coalition between the United States, Israel and Russia trying to destroy the International Criminal Court — the apex of the system established after World War II. It was almost unimaginable that the ICC would be established before the Rome Statute was founded, around the turn of the century. Now Israel, the United States and Russia together are trying to destroy it through all sorts of disgusting means. I suspect the court is under great pressure, but the warrants for Putler’s arrest, and indeed Netanyahu’s, are still alive. The case against Russia is much stronger. I’d say it’s the best, the easiest chance of a conviction — getting a warrant against a sitting president is really, really almost impossible, but we’re seeing justice being rigged every day. That’s my explanation from a lawyerly perspective. I recognise the frustration that we don’t see a massive charge sheet and constant pressure.I’ll also mention the European Court of Human Rights case, which is the definitive history for as long as our civilisation lasts. That 600-page judgment will stand as the definitive history of Russia’s war of annihilation against Ukraine, starting in February 2014. It settles as a matter of law and fact basically everything about the war in Ukraine, and it should be the last word. I wish we lived in a world where that judgment — those 600 pages and all the decisions about when the occupation started, the destruction of all freedom of religion in Ukraine by the Russians, the murder of people, the Disinfolklore crimes in Russia-occupied Ukraine, the killing of journalists and people like Victoria Amelina and Victoria Roshchyna — formed the framework, the mental frame for humanity. But alas.One of the ideas I’m pretty clear on this week is what I call the zero-sum war. Putler and President Zelensky understand this is a zero-sum war. Whichever side loses will, as the Manchu Qing dynasty or the Hittites did, completely disappear from history. The Hittite is the first attested Indo-European language. The Hittite empire lasted from about 1500 BCE to 1100 BCE. They signed the first treaty we have in international law. I’m about to visit Mitanni, where the Mitanni empire was, which I’m really excited about. The Treaty of Mitanni between the Hittites and the Mitanni — the Mitanni themselves were Semitic-language-speaking people, but they worshipped Indo-European gods. We know this because in the Treaty of Mitanni the guarantor is Teshub the storm god — I’ve just named my new kitten Teshub — but also Indo-European gods like Indra, in charge of the sovereignty element, and various others.Today we see the same dynamic. Most of us are pretty convinced the Ukrainians aren’t going to accept another Budapest Memorandum-type arrangement. But everyone’s talking about who will guarantee, who will protect the treaty. In the Treaty of Mitanni, 1500 BCE, you have the god Mitrashil — who is Mitra, the god of juridical law — and the god Indra, who embodies both the legal and magical aspects of sovereignty. And then the gods Nasatya, the horse-born divine twins. We’re scratching around looking for guarantors of peace, and this is where it began in 1500 BCE.By the zero-sum war I mean this idea — which we see in the *Financial Times*, which just continues to get rolled and trolled — that Putler is unknowing and misled by all around him. This is such a childish fantasy that I’ll never listen to any serious commentator who argues it as the sole explanation. We have to bank on Putler having a clear-eyed idea of what is going on. He knows, as far as I can see, because he understands all of Russia’s crimes. He pretends not to, and Russians pretend not to in their Disinfolklore, but they understand what they did in Bucha. They knew they were planning to blame Bucha on Ukrainian Nazis and then invite the Germans and the EU to see — “Look what the Ukrainians did, our war is justified.” They know all of their crimes. They pretend they’ve forgotten, but they understand. And because they know all of their crimes, they know what Ukraine is going to do to avenge them. This is why I call it a zero-sum war. This is my governing concept, and has been for a long time, even more so now during this peace process.If you think Putler doesn’t know about this, then you’re falling for the old-fashioned “good tsar, bad boyar” troll — which we laugh at when we see those videos of Russian citizens appealing to him as if he gives a damn. Therefore, Putler’s dominant strategy is to continue the war as long as possible to save himself. He’s talked about Russia’s ethnos — that we Europeans just want to destroy his ethnos.A slight bit of trolling from me, but I think it’s positive trolling: I saw this about the Manchu Qing dynasty, which ruled China for about 400 years until around 1911. Today it’s virtually impossible to find anyone in China who self-identifies as Manchu. It just disappeared — a dynasty and an ethnos, an ethnicity. People identified as it, and it vanished. So what I say to, as Chuck Pfarrer might put it, our Russian listening guests — though I doubt we have any — don’t worry about your ethnos disappearing, because the Chinese have a very gentle way of disappearing ethnos, and you won’t even notice it.Like Putin, Putler may not know whether Russia is occupying Kupiansk, for instance. But he knows that Kupiansk is a thousand kilometres east of Kyiv. And he wants Kyiv. He doesn’t want Kupiansk. So while the minutiae of the occupation may escape him, he knows the entire war is a complete and utter disaster. Ukrainians know it too — Anne of Odessa, among other sourc...
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Podcast | Pensées 124
Dec 2000:26:22Tap to summarizeIn the Autumn of 2019, I was trying to understand of what Don’s power/Mana consisted. I wanted to understand in order to counter how Don Disinfolklore used Twitter to roil humanity’s minds into believing trolls like the Hunter Biden troll or Pizzagate Conspiracy.At the time I was a diplomat in eastern Ukraine- I could see how Donald’s trolling even then had real world effects on the battlefield.So of all the gateway concepts to Master/Magister, I chose “trolls and trolling.”Then, when I formed the hypothesis in the note below about Trolls, Trolling and energy exchange, I became @DecodingTrolls to test the hypothesis and to troll others into perceiving how we become part of the problem when, unthinkingly / unknowingly, we perpetuate others’ trolls, like, for example the idea that Europe and Ukraine are “weak,” in whichever guise such trolls are conveyed.As emptywheel notes below, trolling and Don’s motivated trolls are CENTRAL to his mana/power. And the key/core/dominant determining troll that yields/yielded Don’s power was about pedophilia (cf. PizzaGate troll that recruited many MAGA adherents to their Magus Donald due to the disgust it engendered, unjustifiably, about his main rival Hillary in the minds of those who fell for the PizzaGate troll).This is why the public cover up through ‘redaction’ of the Epstein files goes to the core of Don’s Mana/power.“The very trolls that Donald Trump has relied on since 2016, people like Jack Bysiobieck, people like Benny Johnson, people like Charlie Kirk while he was still alive….There’s this whole group of trolls and they have been instrumental to Donald Trump’s ability to grab attention and refocus it somewhere else…In other words, these people, so long as social media, so long as Twitter is viable, they have been able to swamp the public’s fear with Trump’s b******t and in the process drown out other things.‘A new report by Reuters uncovered that in the first half of this year alone, President Trump’s family has raked in more than $800 million from sales of crypto assets. This on top of potentially billions more in unrealized on paper gains.’Now, much of this cash has been coming in from foreign sources, which doesn’t come as a surprise when we factor in.So they are an instrumental tool to Donald Trump, to his ability to be able to be always the center of tension, but ensure that it’s the kind of, you know, ensure that he can direct the attention where he wants it to be.‘Mr. President, why wait for Congress to release the Epstein files? Why not just do it now?’Donald: ‘I think you are a terrible reporter. You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter.’Those trolls, that troll in the effort, is fundamentally tied to conspiracy theories about pedophilia.Fake worrying about pretend pedophiles is an easy way[…]…He relies on these trolls. These trolls rely on conspiracy theories about pedophilia. He installs these trolls as the FBI director and deputy director, and he’s stuffed.And then when he tries to make it go away in July, he can’t, those trolls at first, even the Psobe act…What happened is that he threatened those same trolls, the same trolls his power utterly lies on, and they stopped chasing Epstein. But by that point, it has this weight and salience throughout the MAGAbase…[Don’s chief of staff Wiles is] the same woman who’s telling us there’s no ‘there there’s inside the Epstein files, is also telling us it’s not central to Donald Trump’s power, which not only was it up to the moment in July when he tries to shut it all down, but if you look at what has happened since July, if you look at the way effectively Democrats plus Tom Massey plus Marjorie Taylor Greene have been able to take the speaker’s gavel away from Mike Johnson over and over and over again, it is fundamental to his power right now. “ [From Ball of Thread: Young Playboys Gone Wiles, 19 Dec 2025This material may be protected by copyright.]⚡️Trolls are energy (Mana) that only moves when we share them.Then, we become the troll.The informational unit (Troll) consumes us as it instrumentalises us to keep it in motion.Like a virus hacking our mind, the troll uses us to keep their troll moving.Ruschia’s Nordic troll monarch Putler is very successful at provoking us into doing his mental work.We are the petrol fuelling the troll, even when we disagree with its content.That’s the point of trolls like Nigel Porridge, in fact. Their oligarch backers pay to promote their trolls. Then, by reacting and perpetuating the trolls, we fuel and energise that which we think we’re opposing.We become the Useful I***** of Useful I******.One solution I’ve found if I must talk about Nigel Porridge or the Chef Wanger Nazi, the Chef of Disinfolklore, of the Chief Sorcerer Putler is to corrupt their monikers.⚡️Biden Resolved Perennial Plight of the Sorcerer - Can Starmer?Two aging Sorcerers: Deva Biden vs. Asura / Danava Dæmon Donald. Fighting for power (Mana) / Sovereignty over our world. Both Sorcerers know their mantic powers (Mana) fade further and further with every dawn. Both have apprentices. How can they know the right moment to empower their apprentice? How can they be certain that, once empowered with all their Magus Master Monarch’s Magic, the Apprentice won’t destroy their Master/Magister?How can the Magister/Master immunise themself against treachery by their Minister/Apprentice, should they stand down?The Plight of the Sorcerer from the first moment Indo-European patriarchal Monarchy began in eastern Ukraine.The complication is always some variation of: What if I convey my Mana to my Apprentice Magus, and then they use my own Mana against me? How do I immunise myself from my ambitious minister/apprentice?Sorcerer Donald tried to solve his plight, by hanging his Apprentice Magus Pence (out to dry) on Jan 6.“Pence’s former counsel, told the panel that Pence refused to get into the vehicle after being evacuated from the Capitol, raising concerns that the driver would have taken him to a secure location & thus prevent him from certifying the electoral results.” Then Sorcerer Donald was convinced by Sorcerer Thiel and Musk to take on their Apprentice Magus Vance, in return for immunity, and $1b+ - a true Devils’ bargain: Yet, of course, Donald doesn’t trust Vance. A dæmon recognises other dæmon’s and their apprentices from 1,000 paces. Donald, once again, like a folktale ingenue has made the same mistake: his apprentice, he’s sure, will betray him.By contrast, Sorcerer Biden chose his apprentice from good stock. Apprentice Magus Harris was as loyal as Magus Pence had been to Sorcerer Donald. Wise Sorcerer Biden, unlike Sorcerer Donald, knew the right time to pass on the Right to her. And it is done.Contrast too how Sorcerer Putler dealt with his Apprentice Magus the Chef of Disinfolklore Prighozin himself: England’s anti-mask pro-Covid Sovereign gave his mother Long Covid:She dies. He gets Sovereignty over all the English as a result.Shakespeare loved a good succession battle. Brown agreed a devil’s bargain with Blair, lost his soul over Iraq, then lost Mana (power) almost as soon as he managed to get rid of Blair. Ségolène Royal and Francois Hollande, similarly, destroyed each other. Starmer, current UK PM’s popularity’s in minus figures (manifestly unfairly in my humble opinion). Yet, Ed Miliband his predecessor’s popularity among party members is above 40%. Can Starmer effect a transfer of the crown, before his unpopularity leaves the way open for pro-Russia “Reform” party? This remains to be seen. Ireland’s former prime minister Leo Vradaker, similarly, was unpopular. He surrendered power / mana to one of his deputies, who then did well in the subsequent general election.On and on, back as far as Indo-European culture’s first empire the Hittites, we have seen issues with Magisters unwilling to surrender power/mana. After 500 years, around 1,200 BCE Hittite destroyed itself over how to pass on power (Mana).Resolving the Plight of the Sorcerer is THE trickiest magical trick any Indo-European sovereign faces. Doing so is, perhaps, President Biden’s greatest achievement. ⚡️State of Donald’s Mana - Post Kamala Update.Donald’s power / Mana depends 100% on his value to America’s top 20 oligarchs. Only value is Donald’s electability.Donald’s *x’aranah / Mana is a creation of our media space controlled as it is by 20 oligarchs.Once Donald’s chance of election affects these supporters, Donald falls to earth, as Ancient Iran’s Lord of Death Yima did.In Iran’s ancient Avesta it is said of the Lord of Death Yima (who corresponds to Odin in Germanic cultures - for whom our Wednesday is named - and Donn in pre-Christian Ancient Ireland): “For a long time Yima holds the ‘sovereign empire over all the lands,’ and his reign, of untold prosperity, is protected by the *x’aranah / Mana / fake polling data, those marks of divine election which guarantees and expresses the legitimacy of a king. But one day he commits a sin. According to the single passage that mentions it in the remaining Avesta, the sin is lying: Donald’s extraordinary prosperity, Yast 19,33 says emphatically, lasted until ‘he lied,’ until he ‘began to think the lying word, contrary to truth.’”Etymologically “truth” corresponds to what “is. That which exists, is positive and not illusory.”“Rtá” is opposed to “drúh” in the ancient Indian Vedic language. “Arta” is opposed to “druj” in the ancient ...
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Podcast | Pensées 123
Dec 1100:52:46Tap to summarizeArchetyping is a very important aspect of Disinfolklore as an analytical method. And archetypal Disinfolklore literacy is the first tool in the Disinfolklore Analytical Methods handbook. So you won’t be surprised to find that I’m starting today with MAGA archetyping Ukraine and Europe as weak.The US is trying to archetype Europe as weak, yet it’s led by a guy who can’t stop sleeping. We had this fantastic photo of Rubio looking over at Donald and seeing that he was basically asleep at this press conference. Weak. MAGA followers like Donald archetype Ukraine as weak and Russia as strong. Meanwhile, Ukraine deals with 7,000 tactical Russian drones and 600 strategic Russian drones daily while attacking Russia with similar quantities in ways which America, NATO collectively, nor any NATO country individually, between 1945 and today, could ever do. Now America is trying to archetype Europe as weak — in the same way that Russia archetypes Ukraine and Europe as weak, in their view, as a woman.We remember Putler referring to this hard rock song from the Soviet era, by a band called Red Mould, on February 20th, 2022: “Sleeping Beauty in a coffin — I went up and effed her.” As the New Lines Institute noted in its first genocide report, this was evidence of genocidal intent because it was archetyping — they didn’t use the word archetype — Ukraine as a woman, as a corpse, and as the victim of necrophiliac rape. What America is now doing to Europe is what Russia has been doing to Europe and to Ukraine. They’re attempting this through the National Security Strategy, but also through figures like Jamie Dimon, a well-named chap, who referred to Europe as a weak continent. It’s this strongman-versus-weak dialectic, which Ruth Ben-Ghiat has been brilliant at helping us see through.The implication of this archetyping is that 27 individual EU states acting unilaterally would somehow be strong. Of course they don’t think that, because we’ve heard today the long version of the National Security Strategy in which several countries — Hungary, Italy, and a couple of others, and I don’t think Italy will be happy to be part of this — will be privileged by American attention, while all the other European countries will be consigned to the gulag, basically.The shame of allying with child-stealing Russia, which can’t even protect itself, and China run by another weakling. The stance of a jealous spouse who won’t let their wife speak to other males. Weak. How they’re archetyping Europe is that they don’t want individual European countries to talk to anyone else.Today we see reported in the *Washington Post* by David Ignatius, who I’ve never paid any attention to. I instantly archetyped him in my mind from seeing him. I have a subscription to the *Washington Post*, so I see him there all the time: “I’ll answer all your questions on Ukraine.” I’ve never been tempted for a second to dive in. And boy, was my intuition confirmed today when I see his breathless reporting, clearly from inside Donald’s gangster Russian-mafia circles, about their breathless chutzpah of a deal where they think for a second that Ukraine will surrender Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant to the Russians and let the Americans oversee it, as if that’s some sort of sweetener.After the thousands of people who have been murdered, raped, kidnapped by Russia using ZNPP and Enerhodar — and I was the environmental security focal point for the OSCE for Zaporizhzhia, I covered Enerhodar, I met Mayor Orlov — some of us might remember him pleading with the international community in early March as Enerhodar’s native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainian residents tried to stop the might of the Russian army by erecting roadblocks. I’ve felt the Enerhodar occupation quite personally — obviously not even a millionth as much as the people there, the Ukrainians. But just the idea that these criminals, these gangsters would come in and offer Russia ZNPP — it’s absolutely preposterous. It would only happen in another universe. And obviously, given my framing of Disinfolklore, where I talk about in my Munich speech last February — which is the second part of today’s episode — how my fear was that the United States and Donald and Russia would collude to project all of us into the kind of Disinfolklore universe that I saw Russia projecting Ukrainians into in Russia-occupied Luhansk, when I worked and lived and travelled there daily between 2015 and 2018. This is my overarching interpretation of what we see now going on with this ridiculous peace process.The Ignatius article today — apart from the chutzpah of thinking Ukraine is going to give up the largest nuclear power plant in Europe — they think the European Union is going to admit Ukraine next year because America says it, or that the European Union is going to give up this money so that Russia can reconstitute itself. A Marshall Plan for Russia.I first tweeted about this troll in November 2022, when so-called Russian liberals — the so-called Russian opposition — let it be known that they wanted a Marshall Plan for Russia. That was on the 23rd of November 2022. I often talk in Disinfolklore, and in the analytical method, about characters. So we have this character of a Marshall Plan for Russia. They obviously believe in this, and now Donald and his criminal gangster mafia cronies have taken this troll and are now trying to use it to troll Europe and Ukraine into paying Russia for its destruction.As I mentioned last week, the European Parliament’s recent very stiff resolution against Donald’s and Russia’s 28-point plan rightly calls upon Russia to repay all the material and immaterial harm and damage. These are legal terms: the material damage — the 500 billion in infrastructure damage and counting — but then the trillions, I calculate back of the envelope, in trauma and inconvenience and death. It’s called quantum in law. You look at when someone has suffered a tort, when an individual has suffered a wrong, and 42 million Ukrainians have suffered a tort, and each of them has an individual claim for compensation.Quite apart from anything else, what they are trying to do with this breathless reporting by this clown Ignatius — who clearly has no genuine expertise, who holds himself up as an expert on Ukraine but is now so seduced by his access to Donald’s entourage that he can breathlessly report this stuff as if it’s normal — when we have these laws and very fixed ideas of wrong, when we have the European Court of Human Rights judgment establishing Russia’s culpability, the Council of Europe chamber established to try Russia for the crime of aggression. We have the legal basis for Russia’s culpability and financial liability. And then we have Donald and his cronies trying to create this Disinfolklore universe where up is archetyped as down, where it’s a bit like the First World War — “right and wrong on both sides” — whereas of course this war is like the Second World War.I always remember going to my old Cambridge college, going into the chapel. We were shown the book commemorating all of the college members who died during the First War, as they refer to it. And there are German names there — the German aristocracy would send their children to be educated at Cambridge, even back in those days. Then the person showing me around showed me the condolences book for the Second War and pointed out that there are no German names in it. Not that there weren’t German college members who died, but they fought on the other side. As they said, the Second War was a different kind of war. As indeed is this one.What Donald and this entire saga we’ve been going through, quite apart from everything else, is an attempt to re-archetype this war as something akin to the First World War — right on both sides. And the chutzpah of them taking this call by the so-called Russian opposition — we can trace this meme from the 23rd of November 2022 when I first picked it up. We can trace it from there through into the Kremlin, because of course the so-called opposition are just surrogates and proxies to air preposterous ideas, like Russia gets its Marshall Plan. Which of course it got during the Second World War, and then again after 1991. And then it goes from the Kremlin straight into the Russian-mafia-adjacent coterie of people like Kushner. Who is this guy? It’s just preposterous that the greatest community of human beings ever assembled in the history of humanity — America — should be led by this group of ne’er-do-wells. But my job is to help elucidate what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.The Marshall Plan element is one character, but I also talk about trolls as characters — following them through stories and memes, tracing their trajectories, just as we would in a fairy tale or Netflix series or a great novel. We get to know these characters and their characteristics so that when they pop up again in a later scene or a later episode of Disinfolklore, we recognise them immediately. This is a skill we all have from listening to Volya Radio — from listening to Mokrushyna’s stories. She has a fantastic memory for these characters which pop up again.The other perennial character in Russian Disinfolklore since the beginning of the war is trying to archetype its full-scale invasion as somehow akin to Korea. The Korea scenario has popped up again and again. I’ve written about it quite a few times. It initially appeared very early in the war when it became clear that what Russia was trying to do was divide Ukraine into two — it wanted the left bank of the Dnipro River. It didn’t really care about legal ownership of the right bank; it was quite happy to let it be. The story Russia was planting this aim through was by talking about what it called the Korea scenario.In March 2022, I wrote about it, where Budanov first revealed that the Korea scenario for Ukr...
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Podcast | Pensées 122
Dec 600:02:44Tap to summarize⚡️US declares war against European Values.United States’s newly published National Security Strategy is a declaration of war against those of us fighting to retain the post-World War Two legal and social orders.When America states that it wants to “restore Europe’s civilisational confidence” Donald’s apparatchiks mean: we want Hand Maid’s Tale Europe. We want the human rights architecture to be disassembled. Our 1930’s archetype of Masculinity must be privileged over societies where discrimination against humans on certain protected grounds (sex, sexual preference, political views, national origins,…) is outlawed.The United States has decided to “reestablish” “strategic stability” with Russia, which seeks to kill millions of Europeans. Having murdered around 2m people since its full-scale invasion and forcibly transferred more than 700,000 Ukrainian children into Russia, the credibility of Russia’s threats against us is high. More sinister than that is the capture of US national security strategy by those inside America who wish to promote Russia’s political proxies inside Europe. Far Right and far left political forces in Europe operate with Russian funding and know-how. In Romania MAGA “data analytics” guy Brad Parscale boasted of helping Russia’s proxy to capture a NATO state, just before Romanian intelligence services published documents demonstrating Georgescu was cheating. That time the Romanian government and its Supreme Court cancelled the election. However, now America, in coalition with China (through its brainwashing TikTok) and Russia (together with its brainwashing Telegram Disinfolklore propagation App) are claiming, as a matter of National Security Strategy, the duty to “cultivate resistance” inside democratic European states to Europe’s priorities of maintaining and retaining the post-World War Two legal orders. The credibility of these threats by America is bolstered by information this week that US is lobbying bilaterally European states to oppose loaning Ukraine €100b so it can accelerate its destruction of the Ruschist Nazi state.Ultimately what this schizophrenic National Security Strategy is attempting to do is to embed, intensify and promote the troll that Europe is a basket case. It’s precisely the same immanence in Russian and Chinese anti-Western propaganda: archetype Europe and Ukraine as helpless. Sadly, many inside Europe adopt this archetype and promote it. The solution is for Europe to act in concert as it it did against the United Kingdom’s three-year campaign to separate Ireland from its EU allies during the UK’s Brexit saga. English ministers were dispatched by Cameron, May and Johnson governments to every EU member state repeatedly to importune them to abandon Ireland. The EU remained and remain united against such external enemies. Now as Joseph Borel, former EU high commissioner for Foreign Affairs recently opined “America is no longer our ally,” this situation must be more widely recognised.In some ways the United States now is simply continuing its policy of rescuing Russia from its own funks. Ukraine is the only obstacle. As it exhausts Russia’s army and continues, daily, to destroy every part of Russia’s manufacturing and fossil fuel infrastructure inside Russia, Ukraine has an opportunity to destroy the Russia state. It’s an opportunity which must not be missed. 5-6 sovereign states instead of the current so-called Russian Federation must be our endgame. America’s policy today - to save Russia- is an echo of Bush’s “chicken Kyiv” speech when he visited Kyiv to implore Ukraine to stay within the Soviet Union. Biden and Obama too did everything in their power to help Russia when it occupied Ukraine. For example Ukraine was about to kill thousands of the retreating Russian troops from Kherson in September 2022. According to Bob Woodward’s reporting Biden prevented this because he was afraid of “WWIII.” Because of this weakness Russia was able to regroup and continue to kill thousands of innocent Ukrainians. So the new National Security Strategy is in some ways a continuation of US foreign policy. However today Ukraine and Europe has agency and capability. Both Europe and Ukraine must preserve our freedom so that when America wakes up from this MAGA nightmare, there is at least one island in our world free of the Hand Maid’s Tale world of perpetual war that Donald, China, Iran, Russia and the other Acis of Misogyny powers are trying to enmesh us in.⚡️“Russian mafia Russian and NYC chapters meet in Miami to cos-play Yalta.” No country is safe - Israel, America, Russia itself,… when ‘territorial integrity’ is no longer protected. Ukraine must take back the Kuban and China Inner Mongolian, Czechia, Lithuania, Germany and Poland can share Konigsberg, and deport its Russians to China.⚡️The Styx and idea of rivers being associated with the after life in Indo-European cultures originated on the shores of the Dnipro. In Mykailivka in Zaporizhzhia.The essence in all Indo-European religions of the passage into the afterlife has been deduced by distilling all known early Indo-European religious texts. Bruce Lincoln, an American specialist in Indo-European religion, achieved this remarkable feat and set it out:“The picture that emerges is as follows. On the way to the otherworld, souls of the dead had to cross a river, the waters of which washed away all of their memories. These memories were not destroyed, however, but were carried by the river’s water to a spring, where they bubbled up and were drunk by certain highly favored individuals, who became inspired and infused with supernatural wisdom as a result of the drink.”Given what we now know about how Indo-European language and religion originated in the area affected by the explosion of the dam by the Russians, it’s now possible to assert with a reasonable degree of certainty that an idea that later evolved into other Indo-European cultures’ descendant religions - Greek, Iran, India, for example - was first formulated by Sredni Stog-Yamna humans in this area of the Dniepr river.⚡️Russia-USA’s ridiculous offer to UkrainePutler: “If it costs me 2m Russian soldiers to occupy temporarily a few more villages in eastern Ukraine, I’ll do it.”USA: “Ukraine: don’t make Putler expend 2m Ruschists. Capitulate!”Ukraine: “Bring it on. 2m fewer Ruschists is a win.”⚡️What Ukraine victory looks like?Written extensively on this issue: How this war ends? From the perspective of one of the few foreigners to live inside Russia’s brutal, brain-hacking, murderous and mad occupation of Luhansk. I worked there as a diplomat 2015-2018. Even I did not anticipate Bucha.Besides, wars are won on the battlefield. Russia, having lost on the battlefield, as of early March 2022, has ONLY been playing since for people like @BorisJohnson and @nfergus to persuade Ukrainians to accept occupation in exchange for a mythical peace. 2014-2022 we had the Minsk Accords, which it was my job to monitor the implementation of: on the ground. Many nights I documented many thousands of murderous ceasefire violations by Russia in Stanitsia Luhanska. No-one cared in the international community to support Ukraine properly.So today Ukraine will end Russian economy and provoke the continuation of the 1990 collapse of the Russian empire. With strikes on oil refineries in remote republics Ukraine is initiating the carbon copy process that led to Belarus SSR, Ukraine SSR and Russian SSR dissolve the USSR - so as sovereigns they could enter into gas and oil deals to keep their people alive.TimothyDSnyder SPlokhy and HrytsakYaroslav explain patiently to nfergus why Findlandisation/sacrifice of Ukrainian lands will not yield peace:September 13, 2025, Victor Pinchuk Foundation and Yalta European Strategy (YES) held a discussion “What Will Historians Consider a Ukrainian Victory?”https://www.youtu.be/5JxKRAl6kJw⚡️ In the Fairy Tale, Trump and Ruschia always triumph.Notice the similarity in structure?That’s Disinfolklore. An illusion. Doesn’t correspond to reality. It’s promoted by Disinfolklore. Now, start reassessing ALL such “inevitabilities” (Ruschia always wins, Trump gets away with everything).Such “inevitabilities” are deliberate Disinfolklore injected through repetition into our minds by those wishing to hack our consent.⚡️Biden’s Counter Disinfolklore.Likens Donald’s campaign to a “Made Up novel.” @POTUS says Donald’s moniker for those convicted of Jam 6 crimes “hostages” is like “a Bad Færy Tale.” @JoeBiden intuitively gets what I teach in Disinfolklore.net Authoritarians use certain tropes to induce the emotion of fear into the minds of their traumatised and cowering supporters. Donald, like all authoritarians, is a master at Disinfolklore.Think of how the abused child grows up to abuse their spouse. They get caught up in a cycle of abuse. Stockholm Syndrome. Donald, emotionally abused as a child, through linguistic violence, delivered through Disinfolklore (stories that create in the minds of its consumers the emotion of fear), abuses his supporters. Constantly.They are aroused by the care Donald invests into making them tremble. Project 2025 and Donald’s Unified Reich are Disinfolklore, par excellence.Masquerading as dry policy, Donald enfears his abuse hungry supporters with their tales of what he will do to us all if he gets a chance.Their aim is to arouse submission in Donald’s abuse-hungry supporters. This is how MAGA works.@POTUS emphasises Donald’s rambling about a fictional horror figure Hannibal Lecter. Note how Donald’s Disinfolklore clumsily and purposefully mobi...
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Podcast | Pensées 121
Nov 2700:37:05Tap to summarizeI’ve been occupied with the 28-point plan all week and this saga. A lot of what I’ve written is about that. Basically, the first intimation I had of the capitulation plan was on the 11th of November, when a journalist wrote in the *Kyiv Post* that the United States was attempting to remove the reference to territorial integrity from the annual UN resolution condemning Russia’s occupation, invasion and aggression against Ukraine. That was an ominous sign. The moment I saw this capitulation plan, I thought of that report.I first wrote about it on the 21st of November: “Russia’s Escalations in Europe — Scenarios and How Witkoff’s Capitulation Plan Will Backfire.” One: attempt by hitting Ukraine’s allies to intimidate them into even subtle changes of behaviour towards Ukraine. Two: desperately trying to goad a NATO country into attacking Russia back. Like a dead cat on a table, this could be Russia’s only forlorn hope to somehow get something positive out of its current predicament.I was wondering, as many of us have been, what Russia hopes to achieve by attacking NATO countries and sending drones in. I do have this sense that the unwillingness of Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and other countries to respond aggressively is partly a function of the lack of American support under both the former and current president for NATO. But I also have a strong intuition that they are allowing Russia to exhaust itself, to create these kinetic attacks — and that the purpose of this lack of response, which frustrates all of us and especially Ukrainians, is to allow Russia, in the way you might a toddler, to just play out its aggression. Meanwhile, the main game is arming Ukraine. I saw this week that Norway’s response to the 28-point capitulation plan was to front-load a billion euros in planned arms deliveries to Ukraine.I’m leaning towards this idea that desperately trying to goad a NATO country into attacking Russia back is what Russia is up to. Like a dead cat on the table, Russia wants to distract us — as it did after Crimea by occupying parts of Luhansk and Donetsk, trying to spur revolts around the rest of Ukraine, then escalating in Syria. We’ve seen this pattern again and again. When Russia hit that LNG carrier on the Danube, that was a big sign — and nothing really seemed to happen in response.I then wrote: “Donald’s Russian mafia controllers’ latest attempt to goad Ukraine into surrender, at a moment when there are 15 dead Russian soldiers for every Ukrainian casualty in Pokrovsk. Likely it will backfire. It will help bolster President Zelensky when he says no for the nth time since 2019 to Russia’s attempt to troll the West into forcing Ukraine’s capitulation. Meanwhile, the project to dissolve Russia into four to five sovereign states continues.”I noticed, as some of us might have, this kind of briefing against Umerov, the former defence minister and head of the security council. This journalist who wasn’t on my radar — a lot of people seem to rate her — Kathleen Dombos, extraordinary name. She was briefing about Umerov and Yermak. It struck me that just because we support Ukraine doesn’t mean every journalist covering it understands what’s happening. If one thing we’ve seen this week, it’s that a lot of journalists I’ve never heard of are part of the White House press room and are probably very esteemed in their professions, but that doesn’t mean they know anything about Ukraine or have any understanding of what all of us have been monitoring so closely since the 24th of February 2022 — and which many of us have been monitoring since February 2014, when Russia first invaded.This kind of breathless reporting of things which you and I, having followed this very closely and having listened to Mokrushyna or Will or Wendy or others each day, understand is just a new cycle of the same old stuff — that’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed. It seemed to me that someone, probably a faction within the American administration, was trying to weaken Ukraine by getting rid of Umerov and Yermak. Yermak in particular has been on this rodeo since November 2019 and is the best person for the role. Because of Rubio’s status as national security advisor, Yermak can meet him directly as his interlocutor, which is very helpful.I just noticed that undercurrent. I think all of us on Volya Radio do our best not to intervene in Ukrainian internal politics, because just because we support Ukraine 100% doesn’t mean we’ve earned the right to intervene in whatever’s happening internally. But I’ll be watching the campaign against Umerov and Yermak quite closely.Donald is at his weakest. He can still choose to go all in on Ukraine. He lost the Epstein files vote, with his own party turning against him for the first time this presidency. Then this month’s election defeats — the NYC mayor, Virginia, across the board wins for the Democrat Party, Pennsylvania school boards — mark the beginning of the end for a physically depleting Donald.Since then, we’ve seen him announce he was going to introduce a bill to restore parts of Obamacare. But Congress members, as soon as they heard, threatened mass resignation. The bill was pulled. The reason they threatened mass resignation — something we haven’t seen over the cutting of USAID or ICE or anything else — was because they hadn’t been consulted and they’re sick of being treated like slaves. The White House handling of Congress has weakened Donald considerably. Because of this weakness, he’s allowed Russia to come out with this ridiculousness of the 28-point plan.Then there’s the fact that Russia’s central bank printed 1.65% of Russia’s GDP equivalent in new rubles last week — the Bank of Russia is the source for that. To put it in context, the United States printed about 20% of GDP during COVID and an equivalent amount during the financial crisis. Russia is at 1.65% of GDP — and of course that GDP denominator is probably a lie from 2023, so the real figure is likely higher. We’ve got a little way to go, but the trajectory is clear. I think that’s what explains this haste with the plan.I was quite happy with this one: “Donald’s Thanksgiving Turkey.” Americans are mad at Donald for two and a half thousand appearances in the Epstein files. Ukraine needs to give Donald a Thanksgiving turkey. Crazy reasoning from Donald’s people. Thankfully, nothing is going to happen over Thanksgiving. This is the same pattern we’ve seen again and again.I thought Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation was a significant bellwether. Now these threats by Congress members en masse to resign their seats and give the Democrats a majority underpin my immediate reaction to her resignation: she is archetyping herself for a run for the presidency. She and Steve Bannon — who I believe is her controller, her puppeteer, the person who gives her her lines — he clearly sees her as a vehicle to propel him to the presidency. According to Michael Wolff, Epstein’s biographer, Steve Bannon sees himself as presidential material. Maybe he sees MTG as a better vehicle. But in any case, that was a harbinger for what we’ve subsequently seen with the other Congress members.All of this feeds into interpreting what Donald is up to. His chances of success in forcing Ukraine into surrender or withholding intelligence support are in proportion to his power fading.A lot of people are questioning what’s going on inside the administration. When I was studying intellectual history at Georgetown University as a postgraduate, I had this amazing teacher, Hisham Sharabi — one of the great Arab intellectuals, Palestinian intellectuals of the twentieth century. He ran the full gamut from helping the PLO in the armed struggle, to teaching Bill Clinton at Georgetown, to being celebrated at the time of the Oslo Accords and given credit for helping Clinton put that deal together. By the end of his life, Sharabi was against the Oslo Accords. He taught me intellectual history and was a great scholar and writer.The gender aspect — my ability to perceive that Russia conceives of Ukraine as a woman and to look for that language in Putler’s speeches — comes from Sharabi. When Putler used that phrase on the 20th of February 2022, citing this song “Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin” by Red Mould, a Soviet-era hard rock band — “I did a horrid thing to her and she was dead, and I said to her: take it, my beauty” — international lawyers saw this as an expression of the intention to commit genocide against Ukraine and the perception of Ukraine as a dead woman, a corpse.My ability to see this comes from a great book Sharabi wrote called *A Theory of Neopatriarchy*, in which he tried to explain why the Arab world’s worship of the father was the reason it hadn’t developed along democratic lines. He introduced me to Frantz Fanon, the great intellectual who wrote *Black Skin, White Masks*. The idea is that we constantly get fooled by identities. Georgian Dream archetypes itself as nationalists, but in fact they’re Russians. Confused American commentators don’t understand what’s going on. Do they think Witkoff is stupid? No — he’s Russian mafia adjacent. You just have the Russian mafia negotiating with itself. All of these real-estate millionaires, now billionaires — Donald, Kushner, Witkoff — these are all Russian mafia adjacent people, and the Russian mafia situation is just an internal negotiation.Fanon’s masterpiece describes the strategy white-supremacist colonialists use: conceal the white-supremacist occupiers by coercing Black Africans to impose the settlers’ will. Similarly, Russia gets Americans to act as a veneer for its imperialist advances into the American mind. Russia’s Brighton Beach, New York real-estate mafia — Donald, Epstein, Kushner, Witkoff — running America. American foreign policy being directed by the Russian mafia. It’s that simple.Then we’ve seen the...
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Podcast | Pensées 120
Nov 600:10:34Tap to summarizeMinsk is one of these characters I’ve been watching very closely. The Disinfolklore analytical method enables us to feel free. It prompts us to look for archetypal characters in the data — characters which aren’t typical. It’s not always Kellogg. Sometimes it’s Ukraine, the country itself. Ukraine archetypes as David or Goliath. Russia archetypes itself, switching between David and Goliath — on the one hand, “everyone’s ganging up on us, let me into the G8”; on the other, “we’re the mighty second army.” The power of this as an analytical tool comes to the fore when we recognise, for instance, that Kellogg is going to Minsk.I bet you Kellogg doesn’t know what I’m talking about here. He doesn’t understand why he is going to Minsk. The reason he’s going to Minsk, I believe, using the Disinfolklore analytical method, is to push this perennial troll about Minsk into the information space again.For me, Minsk is a living character. A living being. I was in eastern Ukraine on the day Minsk II was signed in mid-February 2015, and my job immediately changed. Under Minsk II, Russia and Ukraine agreed to withdraw their weapons systems a sufficient distance from the line of contact, which in the area I was in ran along the middle of the Donets River in eastern Ukraine, in Luhansk Oblast. Artillery had to move more than 30 kilometres away on each side. Myself and my colleagues from the OSCE — our job was to monitor the withdrawal and then, over the coming years, to ensure it was maintained.For instance, Russian occupiers on the Luhansk side, the Russian-occupied side of the river, used to go home in their tanks for lunch. We went through this whole debate about whether this was a breach of Minsk. Then we found out they were just going home for their lunch in the tank. So it was less than 30 kilometres, but we let it go. When there were breaches of Minsk, I had to certify them in a legal sense. These were then reported. Sometimes I certified thousands of breaches of the ceasefire.Minsk for me is a living character. It’s the difference between knowing a famous person because you’ve seen all their films or read the character in a book, and actually living in the same house as that famous character. That’s why I particularly tune in to the dynamic meaning of Minsk in Russian Disinfolklore. That’s why I tuned in immediately when I saw Kellogg was going to Minsk.My working assumption — and no data has displaced this yet — is that what Russia really wants is Minsk III. I archetype Minsk III as actually the agreement which was then breached between Duncy Putler and the Chef of Disinfolklore himself, Prigozhin, brokered on the day of the coup — the agreement that Prigozhin gets to go to Belarus and disappear, and they’ll fake the aeroplane crash. So that’s Minsk III. I then wrote about Minsk IV. What I’m trying to do in my small way is re-archetype Minsk, because what Russia really wants is the contact line to be frozen as is, faking in the tiny advances they’ve made since February 2022.I heard today that Donald in Canada was again pushing for Crimea to be recognised as Russian. This is what they’re fixed on. This is why I call Duncy Putler the village idiot, the village dunce. They fix on these things and they want their Minsk. We even saw the head of the OSCE in Moscow a few months ago — I wrote about it at the time. Russia denied there would be OSCE monitors, which told me Russia actually wants them. But of course, in the era of drone warfare, the job I did would be absolutely impossible today.The 30-kilometre withdrawal zone either side of the contact line for artillery, tanks and different weapons systems according to their range — that’s a really quaint, old-fashioned way of maintaining a ceasefire or a peace. Now you have drones which no one can see, which radars can’t detect and can’t stop, as we see with the Shahed drones. Monitoring a ceasefire would be absolutely impossible. Someone flies a drone — that should be a breach of the ceasefire.But that doesn’t mean Russia isn’t still madly trying to push Minsk as a concept, as an idea. James, you mentioned someone in President Zelensky’s team said there will be no Minsk. I recall it from that meeting in Indonesia where Ukraine set out its 10-point peace plan. The first point is: there will be no Minsk III. Ukraine cannot say this enough. It has said it a thousand times. Thankfully, all of our leaders are now on board with this — apart from one, sadly, who is indulging the Russians. And that is the purpose of Kellogg going to Minsk.Publicly, Russia says it can press on and keep going forever. But what it really wants is to stabilise the front lines and rerun this whole Minsk III troll — where you had five years after the Minsk agreements, in December 2019, President Zelensky in Paris at that very memorable, important meeting with Macron, Merkel and Putin. Russia just wants to replay the same tune again and again.I don’t think Kellogg would understand this. Paul Manafort might — he is probably the liaison between the oligarchs, Putin and Donald’s team. He may understand why they’re pushing Minsk. But as far as Kellogg goes — he’s the one who said “we need to hit the mule to teach the lesson.” He’s just like a mule, a dumb mule, who is probably doing this without understanding it. He still thinks people are listening to what he is doing in the peace process.I didn’t pick up any vibes from Merz or Meloni or any of them suggesting otherwise. If we look at the body language from Meloni — some epic photographs from Canada. There’s no one pushing for Minsk III now. I think all of our leaders have been convinced of what I knew immediately: that after the full-scale invasion, you would never have another Minsk. This war goes on to the end, until Russia leaves the whole of Ukraine — if that’s in a hundred years or in a few weeks. All of us are working for it to be in a few weeks or a month or two. But there will be no Minsk III.It’s not technically possible. Belarus entered the war. We remember this. It is a party to this war. Ukraine remembers this. Ukraine would be fully within its rights — and may well do this — to take out all of the Russian matériel and troops supposedly assembling in Belarus. The idea of Lukashenko playing coy and innocent — he is very much party to this war and sanctioned as such. Ukraine is perfectly within its rights, as Will has pointed out, to strike sites in Belarus.That’s why I believe Kellogg is going to Minsk. It’s an embassy on behalf of Russia, and it’s mainly to feed the information space. We’re going to see Minsk for the next week or so. It’s supposed to provoke in people’s minds this halcyon moment where we had a ceasefire and people stopped dying — and Russia was able to get on with brainwashing the people in the areas it occupied, disassembling all the factories, licking its wounds.As an American, it astonishes me that the people around that great country — the greatest country there’s ever been — can be laid so low as to have Kellogg unknowingly going merely to serve as a prompt for a Disinfolklore character, “Minsk,” in our information space. That’s really what I want to talk about today.⚡️Russia’s Core Competency? Industrialisation of suicide-bomber creation.Sculpting Suicide Bombers out of ordinary humans used to be an artisan trade. Russia learned it from Assad’s father, who perfected the art.Every day since March 2023 1000+ Russian soldiers, knowing they will be killed, have executed assaults in Ukraine which are doomed to fail.How does Russia get ordinary humans to participate?We have seen thousands of videos of such assaults, ghosts crossing no-man’s land turned to dust by Ukrainian drones.We’ve read hundreds of first-hand accounts like this one: “A Russian soldier fighting in Chasiv Yar says that new recruits sent to the front die almost immediately, with his own unit taking over 90% casualties. The fields are strewn with rotting corpses. To avoid having to pay compensation to relatives, collecting IDs is banned…”Drugs, of course help. Yet, it’s the systems inside Russia’s army which have enabled Russia to turn artisan workshop-created suicide bombers of Isis, Hamas, and Al Quada into a mass production industry. At every point in the assembly line between recruitment and death on a hopeless meat assault in Ukraine Russia’s corruption system propels recruits forward towards their inevitable death.You go to buy eggs for your dinner in Russia. You wake up, still drunk, on a train to Ukraine. In a stupor you’ve signed a mobilisation contract.Multiple Russians have already pocketed segments of your sign-on bonus. At training you’ll die unless you bribe the Sargent. You’ll starve unless you bribe the cook. On the way to the front, you’ll freeze, unless you bribe someone else for a blanket. You’ll be put in the carriage with the ex-prisoner convicted of cannibalism. The list of iterations and market opportunities for Russia’s army of parasites is endless. Guilty of corruption? Pay your way out of jail with the corruption proceeds by spending the rest of the war in a boarding house in Berdyansk. At the position you’re tied to a tree as a sacrifice to a Baba Yaga drone until you hand over your money card to the commander… Eventually you end up in a video like this:Be warned though, this system is not an accident. It’s Russia’s core competency.⚡️How NATO can prepare for today’s wars.Probably the only way militaries will innovate commensurate with challenge facing them is if, as I still maintain might well yet happen, Ukraine, Poland, maybe Türkiye,Baltic, states, aided by Finland, Scandinavians and Nordics will eject Russia from 100% of Ukraine. Way things are going (currently) US ...
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