Riot, and the surf One more word, then. Riot. The dictionaries send it to the Old French riote, a quarrel, and stop. Read it by its sound, and the straight sound, R-t-, sits on the face of the word for tumult. Keep that in mind too. Continued from here: Now imagine you wanted to hack minds today. Would you invent a sound-meaning bundle like M-N- and N-M-, or Tr- and R-t-? Would you then try to hardwire it into humanity? You could not. It took six thousand years for this pattern to be embedded, and for someone like me to go hunting for why I keep seeing the same sound-meanings in so many languages across all that time, and why contemporary vocabulary is still full of it. Or would you, having noticed it without really understanding it, riff off it? Would you call your social media network Truth Social? You would be surfing it. And here is the surf. Tr- is turning. R-t- is righting. Create the chaos, which is the turning. Then purport to solve it, which is the righting. The riot is the turning. The strong man who says I will lock every rioter up, the strong woman who says it, is the righting. The weak man who says it suddenly becomes strong in the minds of those who hear him. The chaos is his opportunity to model himself as strength, as power, as energy, as the rightful ruler. I will lock the far left up. That is the righting. They are turning. I am the righting. And because the hand that offers the righting was behind the turning, the righting is his to offer. The oldest shape of the trick, Tr- in trick, from druj, is the damsel in distress. russian Disinfolklorists love the motif. I have written about it very often. The hero needs a damsel. Donald says Ukraine is in distress. You need me to save you. If there is no damsel in distress, you distress one. You withdraw the means of defence, the Patriot missiles, Starshield. You deny it. Then you lie about it. You confuse everyone, because you are trying to make the damsel desire you and need you. Then you ride in to the rescue, and in Ukraine’s case you try to hand the damsel away. The Nazis turned, then righted The Nazis came to power exactly the way MAGA came to power, and exactly the way the National Rally in France, and the AfD, think they are going to come to power. For three years before 1933 the Nazi storm troopers, Tr- in troopers, fought on the streets of German cities. For the same three years the Party, R-t- in Party, campaigned as the one force that could end the fighting in the streets. The violence they created provoked the need for righting. This is the oldest trick in the book. You turn, then you right. Because they were behind the violence, they were the ones who could right it. Within a day of the Reichstag fire, Reich again, on 27 February 1933, the decree suspending civil liberties was signed. We hear the same tune, the same trope, the same troll from the National Rally in France. They will suspend rights because shopkeepers need to be protected. Which is true, of course. But they are itching to suspend the rights. We fell for the troll in Germany in the 1930s. We will not fall for it this time. I will see to that, and all of us listeners, it is our job to see to that, to help people understand it. Turning, righting. See too my Lulaverse and the Principles of Infolklore episode: russia carpet bombed Syria from 2015 to provoke the refugees. Their arrival entrenched Law and Justice in Poland, Brexit in England, Le Pen in France, Orbán in Hungary. Provoke the violence, then pose as the remedy. Provoke the refugees, then exploit their misery for your own political ends. On 6 January 2021 a crowd was turned against the seat of the American legislature. The man who turned it ran four years later on law and order. Turning, righting. MAGA, russia, Rubio, Trump, turning. Ukraine, righting. Hold the two words. What happened in France Here is what happened, as the French press and the interior ministry have reported it so far. The movement began in September. It started with a teachers’ strike in Créteil on 17 September and student marches over the state of the schools. It grew into a movement over the cost of living. On 13 October Jordan Bardella, the president of Le Pen’s party, spoke from Madrid. With these authoritarians it is always a family business, a nephew or a son-in-law, it is full of archetypes, like a mafia family. He called for an immediate end to the protests and for tougher penalties against minors. On Saturday 17 October the marches went nationwide. The interior ministry counted 550,000 people on the streets. The unions said 800,000. By evening the marches had turned, in Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Limoges and elsewhere. Masked young men smashed shop windows and looted. Unmasked young men did it too. Town halls and police stations were attacked. The town hall of Limoges was set on fire. The prefecture for Marseille’s department counted more than 30,000 looters in one day. One demonstrator died north of Paris, of a heart attack. RIP. On Sunday 18 October looting resumed around the Place de la République. An undeclared call to assemble there at two in the afternoon had gone round social media, on TikTok, run by China. That evening, two hours before President Macron addressed the nation, Le Pen spoke. She pre-empted him. “A crise de confiance.” “A threat to democracy.” Macron is “without credibility or authority.” R-t- in authority. She blamed the far left, of course she did, and the president. Bardella, after visiting a Paris police station, said, “Order no longer exists in France today,” and that France was humiliated. You provoke the distress. You neg the victim into feeling vulnerable. Then you pose as the saviour. It is the oldest trick in the book, and it is what is happening in our news and in our politics. You do the turning. You say order no longer exists in France, and people think, oh mon Dieu, I need right. Then you pose as the Right. Turning and right. France was humiliated. No, it was not. France has an independent nuclear deterrent, thank God, deliverable on land, sea and air, independent of any other country. It has an amazing car industry. It has the most amazing art and cities and beautiful places and ideas. Yes, it has underfunded its education. Yes, young people there have a genuinely held grievance. But these ghouls, the russian ghouls, the russians funding the National Front and the National Rally, these ghouls talking down one of the greatest national cultures in our human family, are just exploiting the chaos. They are turning the turning into more turning, so that they can purport to right it. And who has confidence they would right anything, when they are so unright as to exploit a moment of national turning for their own political ends? On the night of Monday 19 October curfews came into force in Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux and Nice. By Tuesday the interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, had 2,513 people in custody and 67 in prison. He said this. “You couldn’t look shopkeepers in the eye after hundreds of shops have been looted and say we hadn’t lost control.” The government blamed looters and ultra-left militants and named the far-left party, La France Insoumise. Le Pen’s party meets in congress this week, and there she launches her campaign for the presidential election of April 2027. One academic quoted in the press called the weekend a Christmas present for her party. Turning, then righting. The riot on Saturday. The party of order on Sunday. Read that sequence again with the two words in your ear. The russian hand: what is on the record Now the russian hand. Here the Code of Positive Trolls I write under asks for care about what is claimed. Nobody in France has yet shown Moscow’s hand in the organisation of the violence. Viginum, the French state’s watchdog for foreign digital interference, found only minimal foreign influence in the mobilisation before 17 October. What is on the record is this. A French assessment dated 18 October found that the pro-Kremlin network called Matryoshka p… Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe
