Battling Archetypes

Decoding Trolls
Decoding Trolls
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Decoding Trolls's "Battling Archetypes" podcast applies the Twelve Tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method (see Disinfolklore.eu) to the folklore-like structures hiding inside modern propaganda, memes, and geopolitics. Each episode decodes how Russia, MAGA, and other Disinfolklorists archetype reality. Infolklore, by contrast, is a first-order creative practice: the active, conscious, Code of Positive Trolls-observant deployment of folklore-like archetypes in the service of generosity, right, patience, creative Mana, focus, and insight. This channel helps us learn to see the immanence of Infolklore and Disinfolklore in our information streams. www.disinfolklore.net

  1. 2d ago

    Podcast | Federov and Ukraine's Disinfolklore Channel

    Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

    Podcast | Federov and Ukraine's Disinfolklore Channel

  2. 3d ago

    Podcast | Outflank Dugin. Don't Rebut (episode 1)

    I am going to start two new miniseries today. The first one goes back to what I call the Luhansk Corpus. That is the ten thousand propaganda items from Russia-occupied Luhansk 2015-2018 (the empirical grounding of the Disinfolklore analytical method). These are relatively pithy pieces, though each a part of an entire system of seeing, which can applied and mobilised against any Disinfolklore galaxy, such as MAGA, Iran, Ruschia, Italy, wherever. I am going to read three today. Then I will start another new series: Outflank Dugin. Don’t Rebut. Outflanking enemies in the information war - the battle to free our minds from manipulative Disinfolklore-borne brain-washing memes. That is one of the main tactics I deploy. It’s why, for example, I go as far back and deeply into the past 6,000 years of Indo-European culture as possible. When arch manipulators like Modi, Putler, Donald or Dugin (or even local characters in our own lives deploy mysticism and superstition to gain power, one way to understand what they’re doing and to defeat them is: Outflank. Don’t Rebut. This new series gives everyone the tools to do this. 1. The Word That Wasn’t There I am talking about a word that was not there in the context of Russia-occupied Ukraine. I would like us also to think about the word that was never there while Muscovy was occupying most of Europe after 1945. It is the same phenomenon. Many people did not see it in the context of Russia-occupied Luhansk. They also did not see it in the context of that massive military occupation of Czechoslovakia, Poland and all the rest of it between 1945 and 1990. And I include myself in that, until relatively recently. For eight years, the most important word about Russia’s war in Luhansk was missing from almost everyone’s mouth. The word is occupation. It was missing from occupiers and Ukrainians alike. This episode teaches us to read the silence. The thing that is not said is sometimes the operation. Here is a strange way to catch a disinformation operation. Do not listen for the loudest word. Listen for the word that should be there and is not. The setting is Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine, from 2014 to 2018. These are the years before the full-scale invasion. Russia has taken a chunk of the region and stood up a fake country there. It is the so-called Luhansk Folk’s Republic, the LFR. I spent time on the contact line at the Stanytsia Luhanska bridge, doing monitoring work for the OSCE. That is the European security body that oversaw the so-called ceasefire. I read thousands of items of propaganda during those years. The thing I want us to notice is what nobody was saying. Listen to the occupier’s own outlet, the Lugansk Information Centre, in February 2017. The LFR, it reports, “demands”. Demands. It demands “coexistence with central authorities, Kiev, as it calls it, on a contractual basis. This means the power to conclude contracts.” Read that again. Notice the word that is not in it. Two parties. A contract. Coexistence. This is the vocabulary of one state talking to another. It is not the vocabulary of an occupier and the people under its boot. Or here is the same outlet in 2016, on the LFR’s so-called border guards. They patrol 274 kilometres of the so-called border with Russia. A border. A state has borders. A fake republic is dressing itself every single day in the costume of a country. That is the operation’s foundational move. It works by what it leaves out. Say republic. Say border. Say minister, parliament, ten thousand times. Never once say occupation. And the missing word starts to feel like it was never true. Now here is the part that should stop us. The other side left the word out too. Look at how Ukraine’s own news agency, Ukrinform, described the fighting in January 2018. “Events in the anti-terrorist operation, the ATO, zone.” The ATO, the anti-terrorist operation, was the official Ukrainian name for the war for years. For all the years I was in Ukraine. Think about what that name quietly does. It frames a foreign invasion and occupation as a counter-terrorism problem. It becomes something a country handles inside its own borders, against criminals. It is a true description of a real fight. But it is not the sentence. The sentence is: a foreign army is occupying our land. The word still is not there. You can watch the word arrive in slow motion. In 2017, the phrase “temporarily occupied territories” starts creeping into the Ukrainian wires. In 2018, Ukraine renames the war from the ATO to the JFO, the Joint Forces Operation. Still an operation. Still not repelling an occupier. If you measured across the whole archive of ten thousand propaganda items, the occupier’s outlets called it an occupation almost never. Under four per cent. And the Ukrainian side climbs from about three per cent at the start to a third by 2018. The word everyone now uses without thinking was, at the time, the word almost no one reached for. I will give you the cleanest measurement I have. It is myself. I studied international law at Cambridge. I did monitoring work on that very contact line. And I did not call them occupiers. Not in my own head, until the tanks rolled in 2022. I was inside the frame they built. That is not a confession. It is data. If the frame can hold a stranger who has read law and stood at the bridge, it is a very good frame. In my framework, I would call this Disinfolklore. It is folklore-like storytelling built to capture you rather than shelter you. Usually we hunt it by the characters it deploys. The Nazi bogeyman. The merciful sovereign. The saintly grandmother at the checkpoint. Those are loud. This one is silent. The archetype here is not even a character at all. It is a shape with a hole in the middle. Like a shell hole in a fairy-tale kindergarten, of the kind Victoria Amelina wrote about. So let me give us the tool, because it is a small one and we can carry it everywhere. Call it reading the absence. When we meet any account of a contested thing, a war, a firing, a closed factory, a vanished neighbour, let us not only weigh the words that are present. Ask the quieter question. What word would honest description put here, and is it missing? Who benefits from its absence? A border instead of a front line? An operation instead of an invasion? A republic instead of a seizure? Here is what seeing it gives us. It is the only reason any of this matters. Once you can hear the missing word, you cannot unhear it. The silence stops being neutral. It starts pointing, at every turn, on every side, to the thing someone needed you not to name. The frame only works while the word stays gone. The moment you supply it yourself, the operation is over. It took us collectively eight years and a full-scale invasion to say occupation out loud. We do not have to wait that long next time. We can learn to hear the hole in the sentence and put the word back ourselves. I think about the reporting this week on Venezuela, and the occupation by the United States of Venezuela. 2. The Republic of Liturgy This piece is about how a fake state’s ordinary rituals made occupation feel like the weather. A parade. A foreign minister. A children’s hospital transfer. And it is about what naming the liturgy hands back to us. Here is a small thing that could stop us. In the spring of 2017, an outlet called the Lugansk Information Centre put out a notice that the OSCE would be coming to a parade. The Lugansk Information Centre is the in-house news agency of Russia’s fake republic in eastern Ukraine. The OSCE is the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. In those years it ran an unarmed special monitoring mission along the front line. The observers were people like me, whose whole job was to watch and report neutrally. Here is what the fake republic’s spokesperson, Lieutenant Colonel Andrey Marochko, said about them on the 10th of April 2017. “They said that they will monitor the event.” The event was a Victory Day parade. It is the most sacred date in the Soviet calendar, the 9th of May. It was staged in occupied Luhansk by an entity that does not exist in international law. And the monitors allegedly agreed to come and watch. I want us to see how ordinary that is. It is not dramatic. It is not a battle. A parade, with observers RSVPing. That is the whole trick of this episode. This is about archetypal Disinfolklore. It is disinformation that works the way folklore works, by archetype and repetition rather than by argument. An archetype is just a familiar character, or a familiar shape, that a story slots into without us noticing. The one we are reading today I call the fake-state liturgy. Liturgy means the ritual you repeat. The parade. The holiday. The ministry doing its dull rounds. The tell, the thing that gives it away, is not the lie. The tell is the boredom. The fake state performs competent, tender, normal government. Watch it perform diplomacy. In February 2017, the same outlet quoted the republic’s acting foreign minister, Natalia Nikonorova, talking to the Russian news agency TASS. In her words, she spoke of “coexistence with central authorities, Kiev, as they call it, on a contractual basis.” A foreign minister of a thing that is not a country, conducting foreign affairs on the record, in the register of any chancellery in Europe. You read it and your eyes slide right past it, because it sounds exactly like statecraft. Watch it perform care, which is the most disarming face of all. An LFR-controlled newspaper in occupied Stakhanov reported, in April 2016, that the LFR Ministry of Health had transferred sick children for treatment. Stakhanov is not the town’s name. Kadiivka is its proper name. Now, those children are probably real, and we should want sick children to be treated. But notice the sentence is doing two things at once. It is moving children, and it is conferring existence. A Ministry of Health did this. R

  3. Jul 9

    Podcast | Metanoia or the Reboot?

    This is the last episode of my mini-series on Larysa Yakubova’s The Beast from the Abyss. The first episode: For the past five episodes I’ve walked us all down into the dark where most of us live all day when we’re in Ukraine mode, and tonight, you’ll be happy to know, I’m going to walk you back up. This, of course, reflects the archetypal presence of the beast from the abyss that Larysa Yakubova — from the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, an expert on the Holodomor — it reflects the imagery and the archetypes that she uses. I’m Decoding Trolls. I write on disinfolklore.eu, disinfolklore.net, and decodingtrolls.net, where you can subscribe, and powerofmana.net — and also on X, as Disinfolklore and as Decoding Trolls. Here’s the claim in this final episode. The beast is not answered with a better argument. It is answered with a truer image. Some of you who follow my work will understand why I’m so attracted to Larysa Yakubova’s Ruschism: The Beast from the Abyss — because she works in archetypes. Episode 2: It is answered with a truer image, and this is also what I try to do in my work consciously, and what many other people, like Mockers, and many of you, do also unconsciously — in the sense that it’s not a purposeful strategy — when you’re talking about Infolklore. The whole turn of the series, and the whole turn of Larysa Yakubova’s book, is to answer the beast from the abyss with a truer image. Don’t reflect the image it produces. Don’t share memes that have photos of the people you are critiquing, because that’s how we keep these memes alive; that’s how we reward these Ruschists with amplification. The small part we can play in stopping the spread is this: if we must share the image, if we must share the meme, if we must share the idea, then we can cross it out — like I do, I scrub it out in red, if I need to, so that you hardly see anything of it — but I also try to offer opposite images, Infolklore. She spends 300 pages of Ruschism: The Beast from the Abyss naming a horror with a forensic patience that would frighten us, and then, on the last pages, she does something the Ruschist apparatus can never do. She does not merely refute the nightmare. She replaces it. She holds up a different picture of the world and says: this one is true, and the other one is a costume worn over an abyss. Episode 3: Behistun: Arta and the Druge Many of you will know, in many of these broadcasts, I’ve spoken about the truth. I’ve spoken about Darius, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, 600 BCE, and his inscriptions on the Behistun Rock in Iran, where he talks about how he engaged against the usurpers — the druge, the Lie; druge, dragon; the Lie. We see today Donald tweeting and speaking against the inheritors of Darius’s great empire in Iran — the mad mullahs of Iran, whom Donald archetyped as liars. We see, from the rocks at Behistun in 600 BCE, where the truth — Arta — is archetyped as the rightful power, the rightful sovereign, the rightful speech, against druge, the Lie. Larysa Yakubova, as does President Zelensky, gets this intuitively as well. She holds up a different picture of the world to that of the Ruschists, and says this one is true, and the other one is a costume worn over an abyss. Adjudicating the Claim to Right The most common thing I get from people is: oh, but the Russians say this. I say: yes, but then we have to adjudicate it. That is a claim to right, and therefore we adjudicate that claim to right. When it comes to occupied Ukraine, they are the usurpers, they are the dragon, they are the serpent, they are the beast entering another people’s land — and whatever they claim is a lie is the druge. We adjudicate. It’s not ‘both sides’; both sides are not equal. Both sides have a claim to right, and then we adjudicate which is the correct claim to right, and we use the post-World War II legal order to determine that. In defence of Ancient Ukraine: Once we have that as a means of adjudication — and I use it in the Code of Positive Trolls; it’s completely integrated into the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, but it also works on the micro level and on the macro level — once you have that, you have the Refugee Convention, the Genocide Convention, the laws of war, the Convention on Civil and Political Rights, where countries commit to removing discrimination on the grounds of sex or political views or other protected criteria. Tool 6, Generosity, and the Grave-Diggers The move she makes, Larysa Yakubova, is covered by Tool 6 in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, the 12-tool way — and Tool 6 is generosity. She’s been generous to the beast from the abyss. The move the whole series has been climbing towards is re-archetyping, which, as you know, is part of the 12 tools on disinfolklore.eu. The product of re-archetyping reality is Infolklore. It’s what Mockers does intuitively every day on her show, and Will too — both really fluently and excellently. By the end of this, I want us to think of Larysa Yakubova not only as a diagnostician of the beast from the abyss, but as one of its grave-diggers — her own word. The act of grave-digging she performs, and all of us who listen to Volya all the time, and participate, and who host — we are digging the grave of Ruschism. Larysa performs an act of re-archetyping so complete that it leaves the Ruschist apparatus with nothing to stand on. First, though, her condition — because she’ll not let us climb out of the abyss on cheap terms, and neither will any of us. Her Condition: Call Things by Their Names Larysa Yakubova offers hope, but it is a stern hope, and we have to earn the right to it. Her condition for escape from the abyss — for the Ruschists — is the same condition this whole mini-series has been built on, and it’s the same first move the Disinfolklore framework teaches: you must call things by their names. Once you recognise the Mana, the energy in a thing, in a phenomenon, in a meme, then you call it by its proper name. You adjudicate. You call it by its proper name. The Ruschists call whatever Mana they produce by its improper name. The Moon, the Menses and the Maternal Clock: I want to be precise about what she promises and what she refuses to promise. She does not promise rescue for the Ruschists — they’re beyond rescue. She does not promise that naming the evil dissolves it. What she offers, in her own grim arithmetic — in paraphrase, but the shape of it — is this: calling things by their true name buys only a meagre chance for at least someone to find their way out of what she calls, again in paraphrase, the mirror hall of perfected evil, which is where the Ruschists are living. It’s a meagre chance for at least someone out of a hall of mirrors. The Meagre Chance and the Mirror Hall of Perfected Evil This is not sentimental. She is a scholar of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, writing under the salvoes that interrupt her writing and her research, because she’s been bombed. They’re trying to kill her; they’re trying to murder her. The beast has come out from the abyss and is launching missiles and Geran drones to kill her. She will not sell us a happy ending. She’ll sell us a door — narrow, half-open, with no guarantee on the far side, but a door. Here she says: here is what the Ruschist apparatus wants us to believe instead. Notice it is the exact opposite of her condition. The Ruschist apparatus wants us to believe that names don’t matter, that it’s all just narratives. How many of us have heard this? How many of us have heard ourselves saying this, or thinking this? Even if we haven’t heard of postmodernism, we’re imbued with it; it’s imminent, it’s in the air. Someone like Donald Trump would never have read a book on postmodernism in his life, and yet he manifests it in almost every sentence he speaks. Names don’t matter; it’s all just narratives; it’s all just framing; one side’s terrorist is another side’s freedom fighter; who’s to say? “Names Don’t Matter”: The Bridge Troll of Meaning Register the Mana in that move before you register the argument. It is fatigue dressed as sophistication. The feeling it installs is: why bother, it’s all spin anyway. Name the archetype underneath, and the voltage halves. This is the bridge troll of meaning itself — the keeper of the threshold who charges us our own clarity as the toll for being allowed to feel worldly. Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it true? No. The claim that names are arbitrary is itself the most useful lie the beast tells, because the thing you cannot name is a thing you cannot resist. Is it generous? No. It robs the target of the one instrument that costs nothing and cannot be confiscated. The relativism that says naming is naive is itself Disinfolklore — the apparatus protecting its own camouflage. Larysa Yakubova’s whole book is the refusal of that toll. She names, and in naming she does the first thing the Code of Positive Trolls asks of us. She gets her eye in, and she’ll not look away. Metanoia and the Reboot Here is where Larysa Yakubova gets sterner still, and where she saves us from the earliest, easiest mistake of all — the mistake of mistaking a costume change for a transformation. She draws a hard line between two kinds of change. Remember, she’s writing in 2023, before this peace-process nonsense. A costume-change peace — ‘I want peace’ — a costume change, but underneath it, no change. She uses her own word for a real one: metanoia. Again, an MN word — not the Greek of the seminary by accident; she means it precisely. Metanoia, in her usage, is a root-and-branch change of mind and of values. How do we denazify the Ruschists? How do we denazify the 90 million people left living in the Ruschist Federation? A root-and-branch change of mind and of values — a turning so deep that the pe

  4. Jul 2

    Podcast | The Golem and the Grand Inquisitor

    It’s a reflecting pool. So we’re talking about accusation in a mirror which is Donald’s main tactic as well (just as we were talking about before) using an arch in the ceremonial axis of the Republic to install, archly, an archetype of right (which is in fact the opposite of right, an insurrection). So the structure of these - the magnetism of the - words reveal everything really. I marvel and find it astonishing that we can be going through this complete saga over the reflecting pool. If you described it to anyone even a year ago they would not believe you. 10 years ago they would not believe you. That this is going on is a marvel to be sure. We the people are installed inside this disinfolklore galaxy where the script and the stage is right there. The words reveal it, every sentence. Without these revealing words - Monarch, arch, ballroom,… the archetype could not be installed. The monarch installing the monarch with all this gold, visiting Versailles and all of this stuff. This is kind of what I was talking about before, which Surkov talks about. Part of the act, part of the stage play is to reveal it and in there is the supreme act of manipulation. I happen to believe from my work on Dugin and on Surkov and on Donald that the the playing of the monarch archetype is part of the stage play. In order to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes over what is actually happening, which is more closer, not to a monarchy, but an oikarchy. Where you have the directors and a whole group of oligarchs rinsing the Muni out of our Community, rinsing the Mana, the energy, the money out of our community. The clothes it is wearing are the clothes of Donald playing the monarch. And the reflecting pool, the triumphal arch, these are all parts of this stage play. It fits this same pattern, the symbolism of knocking down the east wing and installing a ballroom, a monarchical ballroom. Underneath it is the Mafia state. Concealed by waffle about the czar and Donald’s tweets about wanting to be a monarch. The phrase, “you couldn’t make it up,” doesn’t apply because it is disinfolklore. It is made up. The disinfolklore galaxy is a purposefully created instrument. It’s a disinfolklore galaxy made up of these ingredients, which are so obvious. They’re obvious on the level of linguistics, language and symbolism to the simplest minds. Because everyone - the simplest minds- read fairy tales with ballrooms, mirrors, arches, inner/outer realm switching. Yet the archetypes are being installed in every story about the reflecting pool and these arrests and they have these real world impacts which are changing people’s lives… We fight on. Poland and Ukraine: The Shape of the Strategy The shape of what is happening now between Poland and Ukraine fits exactly the pattern Vladislav Surkov himself talks about. I spoke about this before in the context of Ukrainian historian, Tetiana Boryak’s work. The Ruschists’ strategy is to take archetypes of national consciousness, invest new meanings into them, and create divisions in society using this tactic. MAGA; Brexit; what we saw with Law and Justice in Poland after it was elected, initially in the wake of Russia’s carpet-bombing of Syria from September 2015; the Fidesz Party in Hungary; entities in Ireland, and all over the place. It’s devilishly difficult to spot, because it’s wrapped, always, in every jurisdiction, in patriotic sentiment. And by its very definition, this strategy — and it is a strategy rather than a tactic, because it’s one of the main means Russia uses, again, in Surkov’s own words, because the Russians can’t help themselves articulating this, which is part of the thrill and part of their creation of power — is to wrap itself in patriotic clothes, in whatever’s to hand. They just don’t care whether you’re in Poland, with this history between Ukraine and Poland; in Ireland, between Britain and Ireland; or MAGA, Make America Great Again, between liberals and conservatives. They’ll just take this division everywhere. The shape of this — as indeed the shape of the truck protesters in Poland that we all remember, and all the rest of it — has this same shape of the Russian strategy. That’s how I see it. We did have this miracle where Duda, the former Polish president who presented President Zelensky with the award, continued the government policy that had been established under Solidarity when they took over in the early 90s: the two-track policy of defending Poland’s patriotic and national interests publicly, but in private doing everything they could to promote and give Ukraine opportunities to anchor itself in the minds of the German leadership and the great powers as an independent state. We all remember Bush’s Chicken Kyiv speech as a marker in the ground — that it wasn’t inevitable that people would accept the inevitability of Ukraine becoming a sovereign and independent state. So we’re lucky we have someone as sophisticated as Sikorski, who, as I’ve mentioned, understood — he was in the Maidan in February 2014, negotiating a truce between the demonstrators and Yanukovych’s government, which thankfully failed when Yanukovych fled, with Manafort there. We’re lucky we have him there, and Donald Tusk, and hopefully everything will die down. The Golem and the Grand Inquisitor I was going to continue with Larysa Yakubova’s The Beast from the Abyss. Last week I had just told you about how she was describing the use of this arcane, esoteric Ruschist so-called philosopher who was resurrected by the mafia regime in Russia in the 1990s. So the title of this is The Golem and the Grand Inquisitor. I’m Decoding Trolls. I write mostly on Twitter as Disinfolklore, Decoding Trolls, but also on disinfolklore.eu, decodingtrolls.net, powerofmana.net, and disinfolklore.net, where you can subscribe. The title of the book Larysa Yakubova wrote is Rashism: The Beast from the Abyss. She’s a member of the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine, and this book was published by them in 2023. Now go past the title to the doctrine, where Yakubova stops being a critic and becomes a coroner. What did the Ruschist apparatus actually buy when it bought Ilyin? Not subtlety. Strip the prose, and you find one idea worn smooth by handling: the absolute, sacralised, all-powerful state, to which the human being owes everything and may demand nothing. Yakubova has a figure for this — again, her argument. She reads Ilyin as the apologist of the golem: the worshipper of the man-made monster, the giant of clay animated to serve its makers that instead devours them. And she reads the moral posture beneath it as that of the grand inquisitor: the one who takes freedom away for people’s own salvation, certain they are happier without the burden of choosing, and who will burn them to keep them safe. The Brothers Karamazov and the Third Rome This week I wrote a post about the fraternal brotherliness of the Soviet archetype, which was used to shoehorn Ukraine and Belarus into a union with the Soviet Union, and was made manifest even in families, where it was all about brotherhood — and this is just an archetype. I referenced The Brothers Karamazov, where, for some of us who have read it — I’m assuming not everyone here has — there are basically three brothers, like three folkloric brothers. One of the brothers, Ivan Karamazov, received some of his education in the West and comes back to Russia and finds it really difficult to reconcile his Western ideas with his Eastern ones, with the ideology of the deep folk. They have a brother, the saintly Alyosha, who is the representation of Russia’s Third Rome troll — its idea of itself as the Third Rome, as some sort of really spiritual, ascetic state, which obviously most of us today would find laughable. Ivan wants to disabuse Alyosha of his saintliness and of his belief in the good. So Ivan tells him this story, which is the Grand Inquisitor episode, which some of us actually might have read. I read it as a postgrad at Georgetown, as part of my intellectual history. In it, basically, a Jesus figure comes back, and he’s gathering all his followers, and eventually he is arrested; and just before he is executed, he meets and has this conversation with the Grand Inquisitor, who is, in effect, Pontius Pilate. So that’s the literary reference here — in which the Grand Inquisitor says: well, what did you think was going to happen? Did you think we were going to welcome you with flowers? Look what you’re doing out there. The people love you. But you’re promising them an idealism that just doesn’t work in this world. And you were told not to come back to us. And now you’ve come back, and the inevitable will happen. And this will always happen when you and your idealism come back to us. So that, as an archetype inside the Ruschist consciousness, as voiced by Dostoevsky in such great art, is still immanent in the monarchist, in the czarist approach to governance and their idea of themselves. This is one of the reasons I decided to feature Larysa Yakubova’s book, because it’s so brilliant and everyone should be reading it. They shouldn’t be reading people like Mark Galeotti, or all of these Russian journalists who go to Moscow for 10 years and then write a book — escape from Moscow, and how Putin hates them, and all of that nonsense. They should be reading Ukrainians, as all of us spend time doing, because Ukrainians were part of Russia — as we understood the Soviet Union to be — until 1991, and they understand what makes Russia tick on a really deep archetypal level. If you want to understand what to do about Russia, and what Russia is, Larysa Yakubova is the person to read — not these people in RAND, or former central bankers working for think tanks in the US. Because Yakubova understands, like me and my insights about Disinfolklore, that if you really want to mine h

  5. Jun 25

    Podcast | In Defence of "Ancient Ukraine"

    We say ancient Greece and ancient Egypt without a flicker, and we call a Bronze Age culture in Kazakhstan the first Aryans — every one of them a modern name thrown back over a people who never bore it. The homeland of the whole Indo-European family is the Dnipro Valley. So, by the rule we already use for everyone else, there is an ancient Ukraine. To withhold the name is not scholarly caution. It is a double standard. And there is a war behind it. Say ancient Greece, and nothing in you objects. Say ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, ancient China — all of them slide past without a snag. Now say ancient Ukraine, and for a great many people, something catches: a small resistance, a raised eyebrow, sometimes a flat correction. “But Ukraine is a modern country.” That catch — not the linguistics, not the archaeology, just the catch itself — is what this is about. Because of all the things worth defending about this work, the plainest is the right to use two ordinary words. Part of what people feel here is simply correct. Modern Ukraine is a modern state. Its present borders, its flag, its seat at the United Nations are 20th-century phenomena. The herders who lived in the Dnipro Valley 5,500 years ago did not call themselves Ukrainians. They did not know the word, and could not have pointed to a country on a map that did not exist. All of that is true. But notice that every word of it is just as true of ancient Egypt. The people who raised the pyramids did not call themselves Egyptians. That is a Greek word, Aigyptos, laid on them long after. And the people who live in Egypt today are, for the most part, Arabic-speaking Muslims, whose language and faith and much of their ancestry arrived more than a thousand years after the last pharaoh — about as discontinuous from the pyramid builders as a population on its own soil can be. By that same standard, ancient Egypt should be an outrage. But it troubles nobody. It troubles no one because everyone already understands, without being told, what an anachronistic name is for. Ancient Egypt does not claim that the modern nation descends in an unbroken line from the pharaohs. It names the ancient people of that land using the land’s modern moniker, because the land’s modern moniker is the handle we have. Ancient Britain does the same. The modern English are largely descendants of Anglo-Saxon incomers, not the people who raised Stonehenge, nor the Celts — the Pretani tribe — who, after being eradicated by the Romans, then the Germanics, and then the Normans, survive as a rump in Brittany in France and in Cymru, which is Wales, in the west of the country. No one accuses a book on ancient Britain of bad faith. Ancient Greece names the Hellenes, who never called themselves Greeks at all; Graeci is a Roman’s word for them. Every single one of these is a modern label thrown backward over a people who never wore it. Naming a People by a Country They Would Reach a Thousand Years Later In fact, we go much further than naming the ancient people of a land by that land’s modern name. We routinely name an ancient people by the modern name of a different land — one their descendants would reach only a thousand years later. Consider the Sintashta culture, dug out of the steppe of what is now Kazakhstan. When the Sintashta graves were discovered about 20 or 30 years ago, deep inside them were the exact copy of burial customs and funereal feasts that had been written down in the Rig Veda in India around 1100 BCE. Archaeologists and experts had assumed that these burial practices and funereal ceremonies, written down in the Rig Veda from around 1200 to 1100 BCE, had been invented. And then we find, thousands of kilometres away, the exact facsimile of them from 2000 BCE. Every account you will read calls these people the first Aryans, or Indo-Iranians, and the names are borrowed wholesale from India and Iran — lands the Sintashta themselves never saw. Remember, 2000 BCE; but their customs do not appear in India, or we have no evidence of them appearing in India, for another 900 years. Iran and Aryan as identities did not exist in their time. They arose, as I have noted elsewhere, from a religious reform by Zoroaster that came along long after the Sintashta culture had risen and passed. Zarathustra — Zoroaster — is about 1400 BCE, so about 500 years between the Sintashta and when the Zoroastrian reforms came in and the whole idea of the Arya, meaning the centre of a community, arose. From the Sintashta’s own standpoint, there was no Iran, no India, no Veda; it was 2000 BCE, no Zoroaster — only the grass and the chariot and the horse. But we call them Aryans anyway, reading the rich later record of their descendants — the Vedic hymns, the Zoroastrian fire — back into a preliterate people who would have found every one of those words meaningless. It is, in my own phrase for it, anachronistic yet defensible. And it is defensible: the back-propagation is sound because the descent is real. We have the archaeogenetic evidence of it. We have the archaeological evidence of it. And we now have the textual evidence. “The first Aryans” for the Sintashta is the loose kind: it names the people of one place by the later name of a country their great-great-great-grandchildren’s grandchildren would build somewhere else. We accept the loose kind without a murmur. Ancient Ukraine only ever asks for the tight kind — the easier, safer, more literal move. If we grant the harder courtesy to the steppe of Kazakhstan while refusing the easier one to the steppe of Ukraine, that is not a principle. It’s a preference dressed as a principle. If the naming rule is the same for everyone, why does ancient Ukraine alone catch the throat? The Catch Is a Lag, Not a Position The reason is not about Ukraine at all. It’s about us, and what we happen to have read. We grant the back-propagated name confidence, evidently, wherever a dense later record makes the deep past feel anchored. Egypt has its monuments and its hieroglyphs; Greece its Homer; Rome its libraries; India and Iran their scriptures. The Dnipro homeland left no writing, and the knowledge that it is the homeland is genuinely recent. It arrived in force only with the archaeogenetics revolution after 2015, when the reading of ancient DNA — together with the linguistics, the archaeology, the comparative mythology, and the isotopes, the strontium locked in ancient teeth that tells us where a person grew up — converged on a single answer. So the hesitation over ancient Ukraine is not a considered position. It’s a lag. The moniker has not yet caught up with the evidence. Most of us still carry the mental map we were handed in school. That map is out of date, and the correction is not a fringe claim. Multidisciplinary scholars have known since 2015 that all Indo-European language, religion, and culture — all living Indo-European languages, from Ireland to India — go back to the Yamnaya of the Dnipro Valley around 3600 BCE: the herders of Mykhailivka, from whom the ancient DNA now traces every living branch of the family. And I note — two days ago the Russians destroyed a Russian colonial-era mansion which I visited in a village near Mykolaiv, on the right bank of the Dnipro. Some of you might have seen the pictures of it. Another war crime by Russia. But anyway. I’m with the linguist Don Ringe, author of the definitive study on the origins of the Germanic languages, including English, on the location. In 2006 he wrote that it was the rivers and valleys of Ukraine that made the most sense; and then in the new edition, 2017, he said the evidence strongly points there. Nikitin et al.’s Nature paper, which I’ve spoken about before, from the 5th of February 2025, establishes beyond all reasonable doubt that the Yamnaya, and Mykhailivka village on the right bank of the Dnipro, was the centre of the Yamnaya community from whom all living Indo-European languages emanate. Steinmeier, the Nebra Sky Disc, and “Southern Russia” So what kept the answer from being heard for so long was not the absence of evidence. Some of you might remember, around the beginning of the war, I tweeted a lot about Steinmeier, who is currently German president. On my way back from Ukraine — I left Ukraine on the 29th of January 2022 with my cat, and we drove over the border into Poland, anticipating the invasion — I visited an amazing place called Halle in Germany, because I wanted to see the Nebra Sky Disc there. They have this most amazing museum in Halle, which I stopped in on my way back from Ukraine, and the exhibition catalogue had an introduction by Steinmeier. The exhibition I’d gone to see was about the Corded Ware culture from this part of Germany. And Steinmeier — who had spent eight years trying to troll Ukraine into accepting the Steinmeier formula, which was allowing Russia’s so-called elections in Donetsk and Luhansk in exchange for a later promise to give Ukraine back control of its borders — Steinmeier, who clearly had engaged with Ukraine, like myself, a lot, was still referring to this area of Ukraine as southern Russia in this catalogue. That gives you an idea of what I now call the data-resistant archetype of the Potemkin State: that they could not refer to the homeland as just steppe ancestry, or Pontic-Caspian steppe, or southern Russia. They couldn’t see it as being Ukraine — as having just the same status as ancient Greece, or any of these other cultures I mentioned. Ukraine Is Not One More Culture — It Is the Source Here’s the part the catch hides, because it stops people at the threshold. Ukraine is not one more ancient culture among many asking to join the club. It’s the source. Greece, Rome, the Germanic North, the Celtic West, the Indo-Iranian East — the papers in all of my work in Finding Manuland trace them one by one, based on PACA, peer-reviewed, gold-standard archaeogenetic, isoto

  6. Jun 18

    Podcast | The Lie as Binding Agent, the Pickup Artist, Their God Is War, and the Vanished Koshchei

    I am going to continue today the series on The Beast from the Abyss, this brilliant book by a renowned Ukrainian historian. Last week, you may remember, I got to her chapter on the deep folk — which is the moniker that the Russist former deputy prime minister of Russia, Vladislav Surkov, used. He used this term, deep folk, to describe, highly ironically, the Russians, and Larysa is basically parsing this troll into its parts and making a play on the words. Previous episode: The title of the book is The Beast from the Abyss, and she draws the parallel between the abyss and the deep folk — the emptiness of the so-called deep folk of Russia. The Lie That Holds the Room Together So you have a manufactured folk defined by a manufactured enemy. Now the question Yakubova spends her hardest pages on: what holds it all together? Real people are bound by 10,000 real things — language, kin, a song your grandmother sang, the shape of a particular hill. What binds a people drained of all of those? This is very apt, because those of us who were listening to Will earlier today heard him answer a question by Ming about when he expects the collapse to come — which many are cataloguing at the moment, including Beefeater. Yakubova’s answer — Larysa Yakubova’s answer — is the most unsettling part of her whole book, The Beast from the Abyss. The binding agent is the lie itself. Not one lie: the lie as an atmosphere, all-pervading, the medium everyone swims in in Russia and no one is expected to believe. Everyone knows the official story is false. Everyone knows everyone else knows, and repeats it anyway. Knowingly, together, in public, that shared knowing repetition becomes the bond. You’re not asked to believe the lie. You’re asked to repeat it. This produces what Yakubova, citing the sociologists she draws on, names as the terminal symptom: a mass so hollowed out that it denies its own subjecthood, gives up, voluntarily, being the author of its own acts. Sit with what that means. To deny your own subjecthood is to give up being an author of your own acts. “I didn’t decide. I’m not responsible. I just flow where the people flow.” It’s the abdication of the self as the price of admission. True selflessness. “None of This Is On Me”: The Distributed Tyrant Here is what the Russist apparatus wants us to think. None of this is on me. I’m a small person in a vast river. I didn’t start the war. I don’t make policy. I just live here. Judge the Kremlin, not me. Register the mana. It is relief — the narcotic relief of laying down the weight of being a moral agent. No guilt, because no agency. No shame, because no choice. It feels like innocence to the Russist. It is the most dangerous counterfeit the Russist apparatus makes, because it counterfeits the very faculty you’d need in order to refuse it. Name the archetype. This is the merciless sovereign in a mask. Not the tyrant on the dais, but the tyrant distributed — smeared so thinly across 40 million shrugging shoulders that no single shoulder feels the weight. Coercive control’s masterpiece is not the dictator who commands. It’s the population that has agreed, together, to stop being able to say no, and to call that condition peace. Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it patient? No. It depends on never stopping to think. The river only carries you while you don’t plant your feet. Is it true? Is it right? No. The deepest lie is here, because “I have no subjecthood” is the one statement that refutes itself. Only a subject can disown its subjecthood. Is it generous? No. It’s the refusal to extend reality to anyone, oneself included. This is Disinfolklore, and it’s the engine room. Everything else runs on this drained, knowing, lie-bound consent. The Other Half: Yakubova’s Real Deep Folk Now the other half — because without it, everything I’ve said curdles into the very thing my Disinfolklore framework exists to refuse: a story that paints a whole people as monsters. Yakubova — Professor Larysa Yakubova of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, NAS — she does not do that, and neither do I. Because Yakubova has a deep folk of her own, a real one, and she sets it deliberately against the manufactured one, edge for edge, so you can see exactly what the counterfeit is a counterfeit of. She points to the Greeks of Mariupol, the Rumeika-speaking communities who had lived on that coast for centuries — in her account, a unique people carrying a vanishing language, a thread of real human particularity the war was actively erasing. And she points to the village folk, the ordinary unarmed people who, in the first days of the full invasion, walked out into the roads in front of Russian armoured columns and, by nothing but standing there as a real person in a real place, made the machine stop. No weapons. Just subjecthood planted in the road. Feel the difference in the mana. Feel it in the energy, in the charge of those actions, because it is total. The manufactured deep folk gives you belonging without a self. The real deep folk gives you a self that belongs — rooted, specific, named: a grandmother’s actual language and an actual hill. This is the mother and the maiden in her true register — not weaponised grief for bogus children performed for cameras, but the genuine article: the rooted folk who protect what is real with their bodies and their presence. The babushka in the road is not denying her subjecthood. She is spending it — staking the whole weight of one real person against 40 tons of steel. That is the exact inverse of the drained mass. And it is why the war is underneath everything: a war over Tool 4 in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, which you’ll see at disinfolklore.eu, where the 12 tools are. A war over who gets counted as a real us, and who gets painted into the outer dark. Tool 4 is inner/outer realm switching: inner realm occupied Luhansk defining itself against the outer-realm monsters across the Donets River, the Ukrainians. Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it true? Yes — Yakubova’s real folk is made of particular, checkable, rooted things: a language with a name and a people with a coast. Is it generous? Yes. The woman in the road treats even the boy in the tank turret as someone who might still choose. Is it patient? Yes. Rootedness is the most patient thing there is; it was there before the column and intends to be there after. This is in-folklore — the genuine folk energy the counterfeit was built to imitate and replace. The Hinge: A Forgery of a Folk That is the hinge of Yakubova’s whole argument, and of this episode. The Russian deep folk is not the opposite of a folk. It is a forgery of one — a real human substrate drained of its content and refilled with a manufactured enemy, until the measureless emptiness can be pointed at Mariupol and feel like destiny. The Beast from the Abyss is Larysa Yakubova’s name for what crawls out when you do that to a people. The abyss is not somewhere else. The abyss is what’s left in a folk after the self has been surgically removed by Disinfolklore. Here’s the single thing I want to carry through in this part of the episode. When we hear the comfortable story — ah, it’s just the regime, the people are hostages — hold it up to the light the way Larysa Yakubova does. Some are hostages, yes: the real folk. The Mariupol Greeks and the woman in the road are the regime’s victims. But the manufactured mass that performs the lie and denies its own subjecthood — that one is not a hostage. It is, in her account, the machine itself. The co-author. The manufactured consensus is not a by-product of the Russian central apparatus. It is the apparatus — the engine that turns a whole country into a weapon. This is why Larysa Yakubova warns that the West missed the birth of its ontological enemy by seeing Ukraine through — and I quote — “the eyes of the Kremlin.” Look through the apparatus’s own eyes and you see the deep folk the way Surkov wanted you to: eternal, humble, real, mystical, soulful. And you miss the surgery that made it. The recognition carries its own antidote — the one hopeful thing in this dark chapter of her book. If the disease is the denial of subjecthood — I am not responsible, I just flow — then the cure is the restoration of subjecthood. The babushka in the road has already shown you what that looks like: one real person planting her feet, refusing to flow, becoming again an author of her own acts. That the way out exists at all is the promise I’ll redeem in the final episode of this miniseries. The machine is not eternal. A drained people can be refilled. But that is the end of the road, and we’re not there yet. In the next part I’ll go to the altar — because a manufactured folk needs a manufactured god to bow to, and the god the apparatus installed has a face, and a liturgy, and a single commandment. Their god is war. An Experiment: The Method Handed to a Teenager But first, I’d like to try a little experiment. This week a friend spoke to me — two friends, actually — about their children, and they were wondering how they can explain to them, how to make them more resilient to, basically, pickup artists. That’s my translation of how they put it. I thought about it for a bit, and then I thought: maybe I can make the Disinfolklore Analytical Method help them. The method I worked on was built, obviously, to read state propaganda — Russian bridge trolls, troll farms, presidents trolling each other online. So here’s a test of whether it’s actually powerful rather than merely clever. Does the same machinery work on a problem in your daughter’s or son’s life? It does. And watching it transfer is the whole demonstration. The archetype is prior to the domain. The instrument that reads a Kremlin meme reads a charming stranger at a party, because both are

  7. Jun 11

    Podcast | The Beast from the Abyss

    The Sovereign Writes His Enemy a Letter This week, the President of Ukraine did something a head of state almost never does. He sat down and wrote his enemy a letter — an open letter to Vladimir Putin, published in English on the official website, for the whole world and, more to the point, for all of Russia to read. Here on Decoding Trolls — I’m Decoding Trolls, I work mainly online at disinfolklore.eu, and also disinfolklore.net, decodingtrolls.net, and powerofmana.net, which are three interwoven projects, but my main body of work is on disinfolklore.eu — I spend most of my time pulling apart the dark folklore the Kremlin pumps into the world. Tonight I want to do something I don’t do that often: I want to hold a piece of Infolklore up to the light. This letter is a near-perfect specimen of Infolklore, and it teaches us more about how the Code of Positive Trolls actually works than a month of theory. Let’s get our eyes in. The Mocker Takes the Podium I reference M’ockers on purpose here, because Mockers, like me, decided on her moniker before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and through all of her work each day on Volya Radio she mainstreams the act of the mocker. As I am programming my neural network algorithm, the Mocker and the mocking tone has become actually very engineering-relevant — because if you can detect the mocking tone, which frontier models can do, then you can distinguish Infolklore, from Disinfolklore which is never humorous but does mock, on the basis of the rightness of what it’s mocking. M’ockers on X, for instance, will always be mocking aspects of Russian society which are not right. President Zelensky — as a lawyer, and as a comedian, and as an actor, as an honest actor. He is the most honest acting head of state there is in the world today, whereas Putler pretends he acts as sovereign on behalf of the siloviki and doesn’t admit that he is an actor — but he is an actor. President Zelensky, as all public figures do — they do act in a dramatic sense, but also in the sense of fulfilling their functions — there’s no hiding the fact that he is at heart an actor, an artist, and a true artist, and a great artist, perhaps one of the greatest artists ever, as we see with his career spanning Servant of the People and now taking care of global security. The first thing the letter does is mock. Listen to the register. Ukraine’s long-range drones, he said, “paid a visit to the opening of your forum in St Petersburg.” “Paid a visit” — over a thousand kilometres, to crash the showpiece economic forum — and he calls it a social call. Longtime listeners know the figure I mean: the Mocker, the positive troll who reads the enemy’s spell aloud, names it, and turns it inside out. The Russian propaganda machine spends fortunes staging a forum to project a serene, prosperous, unbothered Russia. One ironic sentence and a drone, and the stage set is punctured — by the artist, by the Comedian. Mockery Welded to Verifiable Fact Here’s the discipline, and this is the whole game. Mockery on its own is cheap. Grievance dressed up as wit is exactly what the other side does — that ressentiment-soaked sneering we decoded in Putin’s Astana press conference last week. What makes this mockery Infolklore and not just noise is that it is welded to a verifiable fact. “We have video confirmation of every one of your losses,” he writes. These are not empty claims. The Mocker who earns his place doesn’t vent. He surfaces, frames, and outflanks — with the receipts. “This War Is Your Personal Choice” Then comes the move which I want you, and all of us, to tattoo on our brains. “Whatever you may say about NATO, geopolitics, or the Russian language, this war is your personal choice. A war without a real cause.” Stop. That is the Counter Disinfolklore in a single breath. For 12 years the apparatus has wrapped this war in costume after costume — denazification, encirclement, protecting Russian speakers, defending traditional values — and President Zelensky declines every costume at once and names the naked act. The cosy great-power deal cooked up in Alaska — Baked Alaska, anyone? — “Ukrainian and European issues are not decided in Anchorage.” Every time, he strips the mask and names the act. Picking the Lock on the Tsar’s Channel Now the part that makes the letter genuinely radical — and here’s a thought I owe to a conversation I had this week. I was on The Eastern Border podcast of Kristaps in Latvia on Saturday. We did a two-and-a-half-hour session which was really fascinating and a really great conversation — I implore you to listen to it, and also listen to The Eastern Border; I look forward to his episodes every week. He did recently a really interesting one on food quality in Russia — he and his wife dug very deeply into the phytosanitary rules and the quality of food there. As we know from listening to Mockers talk about the butter, and the meat glue in the butter and suchlike — you should really avoid that stuff. But anyway, that’s an aside. A ruler’s deepest power isn’t tanks. It’s the monopoly on speaking to his own people. The Tsar decides what Russians are told, what they’re allowed to want, who gets to define their interests. That channel — ruler to ruled — is supposed to be his and his alone. Putler’s alone. This letter picks the lock on that channel. Read who it’s actually talking to. “They do not like our drones. They do not like gasoline shortages. They do not like your endless war.” That’s not addressed to Putler. That’s addressed over his head, to Russians — telling them what they want, what their ruler costs them, and that “the majority of Russians would respond positively to peace. And you know it.” A foreign president standing in the Kremlin’s own living room, talking past the host to the family. That’s why this is more than just a clever letter. It’s a usurpation. Not a march on Moscow — a letter that quietly annexes the one thing a Tsar can’t afford to lose: the trust of the people he claims to speak for. Wounding the Prideful Sovereign It’s engineered to wound a very specific target. Think about who Putler has to be. He is cast, by the men who put him there, in the role of the prideful sovereign: serene, eternal, untouchable, the fake strongman who never tires. The whole performance runs on pride. So look where the letter aims. “Age is beginning to take its toll.” The mutiny: “June 23rd will mark another anniversary of Prigozhin’s mutiny, and silence will not erase this fact from history.” “Your own officials, businessmen, propagandists look at you with obvious fatigue.” Here he is piercing the heart of Abramovich — who, we subsequently found out, was in Kyiv. So now the Russist siloviki will be thinking Abramovich was moaning to President Zelensky, while they met, about the fatigue. When President Zelensky mentions the businessmen, he is driving a dagger right into the heart of the coalition that keeps this war going. “The first ruler of Russia ever to go begging to Pyongyang.” President Zelensky mentions North Korea — which the Russists made a joke of until two years ago, when they started importing their men to try and liberate their own territory of Kursk. “Fully dependent, for the first time in Russian history, on Beijing.” These aren’t insults thrown out at random. They are purposive trolls, each one a needle into the armour of the performance, placed by someone who knows exactly how the prideful sovereign is wired. You don’t roil the state with these lines — you roil the actor playing the state. Refusing Fake Virtue: Mana and Name in Sync Here’s where a lot of pro-Ukrainian content fails the Code, and this letter doesn’t. It would have been easy to drape the whole thing in halo light. He doesn’t. “It is not as if we in Ukraine are concerned about the fate of Russian soldiers,” President Zelensky writes flatly. “But I do care about Ukrainians.” No pretence of caring about everyone. No fake universal compassion. He even tells you the brutal exchange ratio — one Ukrainian for five or six dead Russians — and says it still matters, because these are my people. That refusal to fake virtue is the tell of the real thing. Mana and name in sync. The letter says what it is: an adversary’s hand extended honestly, with the receipts on the table and concrete offers attached. A full ceasefire. An all-for-all prisoner exchange. The return of the stolen children. That’s not a propaganda artefact. That’s Infolklore. Because I won’t sell you a fairy tale, one honest flag: this is a weapon. A beautifully made weapon, but a weapon all the same. It’s built to corner a man. The line “we can work towards that fatigue” sails close to the wind. The casualty numbers are Ukraine’s own, and they flatter Ukraine. But here is the difference that the Code of Positive Trolls is built to catch: every one of those claims is falsifiable. You can check a drone strike. You can count losses. You can verify a returned child. That is the opposite of Disinfolklore. So that’s the lesson. The same tool — mockery — that the Kremlin uses to poison, this letter uses to heal: to surface a lie, name it, and outflank it. Same instrument, opposite hands. The Code is what tells them apart. And the deepest move of all wasn’t a drone or a number. It was a man standing in his enemy’s house, turning to his enemy’s own people and saying: I think you want peace, and I think you know it. And he is the man who can deliver them peace. That’s not just answering propaganda. That’s picking the lock on the throne. Glory to the truth-tellers. Putler’s Reply: The Man Who Won’t Say the Name So I wanted to talk then about Putler’s response. Obviously, they found it a bit rude. I find it a bit rude when they plant mines between the dead

  8. Jun 4

    Podcast | Tyrant Performing the ‘Reasonable Man’

    I’ve called this the Reasonable Man. This is about Putler’s Astana press conference on the 29th of May 2026. I watched it, and I was amazed by Putler’s reasonableness. I noticed this faintly weary man who really only wants the facts established and the books balanced, who lends money rather than gifting it, who speaks openly and honestly, who keeps saying “I say this without irony.” I caught myself, somewhere about the 20-minute mark, beginning to relax — and that is the moment to name. https://www.powerofmana.net/p/the-moon-the-menses-and-the-maternal Tonight’s anchor is Tool One of the 12-tool analytical method called the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, at disinfolklore.eu, which I, Decoding Trolls, am elaborating on over these podcasts and over all of my life for the past three years. The single hardest archetype to see is the one that arrives dressed as your friend. All of us will have experience of this, especially in conversations about Ukraine. Shaw’s Test: Reasonable vs Unreasonable There is an irony in my title that an erudite colleague of mine in eastern Ukraine would savour. He once called me, only half-mockingly, an unreasonable man — in Bernard Shaw’s sense: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to herself, and therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person.” My sin, in his telling, was a habit of asking my superiors the questions that undermined their authority. Totally innocent questions on my part. Hold on to that, because it turns out to be the whole method. The tyrant performs the reasonable man — adapted, accommodating, asking only for facts. The antidote is the unreasonable person: the troll radar that refuses to adapt to the costume and keeps asking the question the calm was built to stop. Here is the claim of this piece, stated up front the way I state everything. The performance of the reasonable man is the costume the merciless sovereign wears to the press conference. The wolf in sheep’s clothing — the sheep’s clothing of the reasonable man. The calm is not the opposite of the threat. The calm is the delivery system for the threat. By the end, I’m going to show you that Duncey Putler obligingly names his own method out loud, in his own words, and then dares us not to notice. In everything I do as Decoding Trolls, everything is proofed against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it generous? Is it true? Is it right? Is it patient? I name the archetype, because once you can see the archetype operating, you cannot unsee it. Recognition halves the mana. The Drone in Galați: Accusation in a Mirror Let me begin. The drone he had only heard about. A journalist from TASS opens with the news of the hour. A drone has come down on a residential building in Galați, in Romania, a NATO member. Europe says it’s Russia. Why didn’t they shoot it down? Watch what Putin does. He does not answer. He performs not knowing. This is a trick many of us who watch Donald closely have noticed him also perform. Putler said: “I only just learned, before walking into this hall, that some event occurred with a supposedly ours drone. If you’d be so kind as to repeat it for me, I say this without jokes, without irony.” Then he demands proof and dismisses the accuser: “Frau von der Leyen wasn’t in Romania. She didn’t examine the wreckage.” Then the pivot, the real move: “We know Ukrainian drones have flown into Finland, into Poland, into the Baltics. The first reaction was always, oh, the Russians are coming. Then it turned out they were Ukrainian. Blown off course.” Here’s what the apparatus — the Russian apparatus, which has cast Putin in the role of sovereign — wants us to think. Putin is the only calm adult in the room. The Europeans are hysterics, shouting before the forensics are in. It was probably a stray Ukrainian drone anyway. Register the mana first: the feeling before the thought, the energy, the disarming calm. A man so unbothered, so reasonable, asking only for evidence. That feeling is the costume. Name the archetype underneath it and the voltage halves. This is accusation in a mirror — the oldest move in the combat propaganda playbook, where you perform the violation and then, before anyone can prove it, hand the violation to your victim. Proof it against the Code. Is it true? The honest answer, “we don’t yet know,” would survive. Putler doesn’t stay there. He says no one can name the origin until an examination is done, and in the very same breath he supplies the answer. Is it generous? No. It calls the bereaved hysterical. This is Disinfolklore. It violates the Code of Positive Trolls. Standing on the Ground: Romania’s 28 Breaches The counter is the ground that the apparatus needs us not to stand on. Romania says Russian drones have breached its airspace 28 times since Moscow began bombing Ukraine’s Danube ports. The Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, did not reach for forensics. He said Russia’s reckless behaviour is a danger to us all, and that the Alliance stands ready to defend every inch of allied territory. I noticed both the United States and NATO archetyped it as reckless behaviour — which I know from criminal law is: either you were reckless, or you did the act intentionally. By archetyping the act as reckless, they are giving Russia a get-out. No matter. The keeper of the open account does not need an autopsy on every single drone when the pattern is 28 breaches deep. The question is never “can you prove this one?” It is: who has been flying into NATO airspace for three years? The Bridge Troll Dressed as Friendship: Armenia Some of you will remember the bridge troll, the archetype from the beginning of my work on the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska between 2015 and 2017. He went on with this press conference to talk about what I now see is the archetype of a tollgate. The tollgate dressed as friendship — the obstacle to be overcome, the exchange between you and he. This is where you have to keep your guard highest, because the next move is delivered as love. He went on at length about Armenia, giving Armenia advice about the cost of moving towards the European Union. I won’t dwell on it, but I will dwell on its meaning. The mana here, the energy, is not fear. It’s something warmer and more dangerous. It’s gratitude. You’re positioned to thank Moscow for its honesty. Name the archetype and the warmth curdles. This is the bridge troll, the keeper of the threshold who sets the toll for passage, fused with coercive control. I’ve stood on the literal version of that bridge at Stanytsia and watched armed men decide who crosses. The toll schedule is the threat — and note the tell Putin volunteers unprompted: “the crisis in Ukraine began with attempts to join the EU.” That is not analysis. That is: look what happened to the last neighbour who tried the other road. It’s a threat. I’ve written before about how we — not we, because we are — we must get better at recognising Russian threats, because they are masked through reasonable men acting as the toll keeper. Proof it. Is it patient? No — he’s demanding Armenia makes a choice “as early as possible,” before the bill can be weighed. It’s manufactured urgency. It’s inevitability farming. Urgency — whether it’s someone socially engineering your ID or your data, or in geopolitics — is always the red flag the Code is built to catch. Is it generous? No. The entire world’s weight is loaded onto a small economy and dependency is dressed as benevolence. Is it true? The 14 percent of GDP reduction is real, because Russia controls every lever in it. This is Disinfolklore, again delivered by the reasonable man. The Mother and the Maiden: Starobilsk Converted to Kyiv Some of you will also remember the mother and the maiden archetype, which I look at as being the base for most Disinfolklore. The centre of gravity of the whole performance of Putin in this press conference in Kazakhstan, the most engineered to switch off your judgement by switching on your grief. Asked about his strikes on Kyiv, Putler turns the question into an indictment of Ukraine and of the journalists in front of him. Again, another trick we see Donald do. “Our strike too was in response for their crimes against children in Starobilsk. Our strike on the Kyiv region. They deliberately killed our children.” Is this mass media? No. It’s the means of mass dumbing-down. It’s brilliant — a terrible, stupid little pun. Mass media becomes the means of mass stupefaction. It does three things at once: it grieves, it accuses, and it pre-discredits anyone who might check. What the apparatus wants us to think: Ukraine murders Russian children, Russia’s strikes on Kyiv are righteous revenge, and any outlet that doesn’t lead with the dead children is a lie machine. Feel the mana, because it’s overwhelming by design. Protective fury — the oldest and most weaponisable charge in the whole folk store. This is the mother-and-the-maiden’s grief and the martyred commanders. It must be avenged. Fused and loaded. I will name the archetype precisely. It is the merciless sovereign performing the grief of the very people he targets, laid over an accusation in a mirror: the documented mass killer of civilians performing mourning in order to license the next strike. I’m going to be more careful here about what the apparatus is, not less, because the method has to work the same no matter who is pointing it — or it’s worth nothing. So here is exactly what I claim. We’ve all seen the TV programmes from Russian TV demonstrating the Rubicon unit were operating out of this facility. Ukraine denies hitting the dormitory, calling the Russian account manipulation. A local resident told Reuters the site was a former base hit first by rockets. Reuters was not able independently to verify anythin

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Decoding Trolls's "Battling Archetypes" podcast applies the Twelve Tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method (see Disinfolklore.eu) to the folklore-like structures hiding inside modern propaganda, memes, and geopolitics. Each episode decodes how Russia, MAGA, and other Disinfolklorists archetype reality. Infolklore, by contrast, is a first-order creative practice: the active, conscious, Code of Positive Trolls-observant deployment of folklore-like archetypes in the service of generosity, right, patience, creative Mana, focus, and insight. This channel helps us learn to see the immanence of Infolklore and Disinfolklore in our information streams. www.disinfolklore.net

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