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
