First 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 Ambitions
I 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 Images
Visual 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 is to create this disaster porn and to impact an imprint on our minds. So one of our ways of fighting it is to resist it. Now, obviously, normal people who don’t spend all day long scanning Twitter and trying to learn all the, they may not need this kind of prophylactic, you know what I mean? This incoming troll radar. And I have nothing against images per se. It’s just there’s certain things you can’t, I’m sure we’ve all seen things we can’t unsee. And I want to try and maintain some semblance of control over what goes into my mind.
US-Russia Spheres of Influence Deals
And so the thing about Donald’s national security officer, Fiona Hill’s 2019 thesis that Russia wanted to offer the US, Venezuela in exchange for Ukraine. Dave Troy, whose work I respect a lot, he was pushing this a lot. And it was good that he brought this into our minds, but it sounded plausible to me like a typical grandiose rushist master plan. But since 2019, Russia’s lost whatever, 1.4 million soldiers. It’s taken, what is it, 0.7% of Ukraine in 2025 at a cost of 400,000 of its soldiers. And it’s still 1,000 kilometers east of Kiev and probably won’t ever even take Pokrovsk.
So the Russians no longer have the power and leverage for deals like this. Yet we do see the archetype of Russia as a great power is a phantom limb. It’s still in our information space. That we see, for instance, Donald talking about how China and Russia are going to take Greenland unless he does. And what we need to obviously do is, which most of us have done, all of us have done probably, I should think, update our data-resistant archetypes of a Potomacan state so that Russia isn’t even part of it. So it’s one thing for Dave Troy to draw attention to this 2019 spheres of influence deal. But it’s another thing to not point out that this is six years later and Russia is not what it used to be.
I think it’s a really important saw as something to cut through a lot of the stuff in the information space, especially being promoted by people like this guy Gideon Rachman and the FT that I mentioned last week, they haven’t updated their data-resistant archetype of Russia to take account of the absolute disasters it’s undergoing.
Now, I do note a lot of these when I watch this Times radio and these more mainstream, these more mainstream media shows, that they seem to have got the point now that Russia’s basically absolutely hopeless. It just doesn’t, as Chuck Pfarrer and Alan have been pointing out to us, they just don’t seem to have neither the strategy, the tactics, or the force power to do anything.
So what I would prefer, and I tried to do this with Dave Troy, but he generally has his replies closed, was to try and modulate it. I think it’s fair enough to talk about the 2019 Fiona Hill’s testimony, very important testimony. It does us a disservice unless you constantly remind people who may not be paying that much attention to the granularity of the battlefield. It does us a disservice if you don’t remind people that we are changed as a result of the war, but Russia has changed and it’s lost the capacity. And again, Donald and the billionaires around him, they’re not charity people. Nobody gets a free lunch. And hopefully we’re seeing Donald realizing that he has the power. Now he’ll invoke Putla and Russia and China when he’s talking about this mad idea of Greenland. But it seems clear, and it could change tomorrow, that he’s finally got the point that Russia is basically pretty useless. So I would have preferred if Dave Troy had emphasised how this is 2019, but now it’s different.
Defending Against Donald’s Disinfolklore
Then the first line of defence against Donald’s Disinfolklore shtick is basically that, that understanding that Don’s Disinfolklore universe has taken over their minds. And this is what I’ve warned of in Munich in February 2025. So we see this bill introduced into the Congress to conquer Greenland, but now I see there’s an alternative bill. But there’s certainly people who are in brainwashing mode. And starting a war over Greenland is only a quick mental step away from them. War inside NATO is now a definite possibility.
The othering of Europeans in Europe is another mental trick, which I mentioned last week, that I think it’s the same trick that has been done on cities, which Donald is now, he’s now, as I understand it, he’s sent in ICE and the border force. He realized he doesn’t need to send in the National Guard into cities. He can send in ICE and the border force. And this feeds into, again, the complicity between the activities of these people and the Disinfolklore which is created of them, which is published in Fox News. I note there are some great counter Disinfolklore operations going on, whether it’s Midas Touch or Status Coup, who are doing some great recording of these events.
We’ve got to protect our minds from the madness that Don is transmitting into our minds goes back to something we talked about ages ages before where the the sharing of memes, oh, look at Donald’s latest ridiculous meme, and then you share it, you know, him archetyping himself as the Pope or something like that. Because you want to highlight its ridiculousness. You’re actually doing MAGA’s job there, just as you’re doing Russia’s job if we’re showing the terror and the horror in a careless way, in an automatic way where we just respond emotionally.
We’re like, and I do every now and again, I do share some grim things because it’s important to remind people, like the stories about Lisa and her mother and Vinytsia and these terrible events. If it’s a Ukrainian voice, particularly a female voice who has made the decision to share this, then sometimes I will share it as well because I, not because I agree with it, but because they’ve made this choice. They want the world to be aware of it. I have a tiny little bit of power to amplify it. So that is our first line of defense - protecting our minds from this madness, whether it’s memes that are involuntarily being thrown into our mind because the intelligence behind Twitter has decided that we shouldn’t have the freedom to decide what images we see.
Russia’s Antisemitic Agitprop
I wanted to just quote something which I came across in this great report, which I might deal with in a few weeks when I finish going through the fundamentals and the Disinfolklore and the battling archetypes part, which is a report that was published by a Polish think tank called Capturing Minds and Reshaping the World. I haven’t processed it all into my brain, but one thing which jumped out at me was this, and I wanted to bring this to all of our attention. This, I called it, I titled it Russia’s Antisemitic agitprop.
So again, it’s the complicity between creating the events and then the Disinfolklore. So the report is going back into the documentation and how the, how we got to this point in the Russian Disinfolklore apparatus where it creates the events, it creates the marches, the parades, it facilitates October 7th, then knowing that there is a deep antisemitic strand that many of us are unconscious or unaware of until we subject ourselves to being educated about it. Then they use these events to provoke responses and to cause chaos in all our countries. This is going on in Ireland, in England, in Spain, in many, and in France, in many different countries, this one antisemitic vector that Russia is doing so much to bring to the fore.
So it interested me to see this documentation from January 1959. So here I’m quoting:
“the establishment of a new separate unit called Department D in Russian operational jargon, Desa Disinformation, within the first chief directorate of KGB intelligence in January 1959, marked the beginning of a systemic approach to these operations.”
Initially, Department D consisted of around 50 officers who engaged in both verbal and operational disinformation. The unit’s first mission was to discredit West Germany as a neo-Nazi state, 1959. As part of this effort, East German agents were sent to desecrate Jewish graves, paint anti-Semitic slogans on synagogues, shops and the offices of Jewish organizations and to incite local residents to carry out similar actions. Within a year, by 1960, the West German government recorded 833 anti-Semitic acts, which exposed it to international condemnation and tarnished its image in the eyes of global opinion.”
This is something which Ireland is going through at the moment. Spain in Catalonia, they’re going through this at the moment. And France. So these are international patterns which fit in with the operational art of the Russians.
Andropov, who was head of the KGB before he became General Secretary, he signed off in 1964, personally, on the painting of Nazi symbols in New York City and in America.
When I was in Dnipro from about 2021 to 2022, swastikas started appearing around the city. I immediately intuited this was false, this was not real. It was what the Russians might call a provocation because it just felt wrong in the sense that it wasn’t an organic event. Since then, Rolling Stone then in March 2022 did a great story. I got in touch with the author and told them about the Dnipro issue which in turn led to a wonderful Rolling Stone piece on the resistance, resilience and patriotism of Dnipro’s Jewish community members. Yet Rolling Stone’s initial piece was about how a Russia-connected Ukrainian oligarch was paying people to paint swastikas in Ukraine.
So if you have family members or friends who aren’t aware that this is what Russia does, then… To put it in a positive way - when you become aware of the deep history of this particular vector of Russian Disinfolklore creation and a means to plug into deep archetypes in many of our minds that we’re not even aware of. We find it difficult to surface them because if anyone accuses you of being antisemitic, it immediately creates a defensive response. You may never have read the working definition on antisemitism.
But when you do, as I had cause to do after an event in Britain where the former head of the Labour Party had, and basically, and his leadership came out to attack a documentary, which was done a brilliant, very, from my perspective, brilliant documentary by Panorama, which got the people, there was a lot of accusations of antisemitism justified under his leadership. And thousands, tens of thousands of complaints were made. And so they set up a mechanism under public pressure, the UK Labour Party, to go through all of these complaints. And it turned out the six or seven party, young party faithful who had been given the job of sorting through all these complaints eventually realized that the leadership and the party was stopping them from investigating properly.
And they sang like canaries to this BBC Panorama documentary. And it was a very important moment for me because up until that point, I had always thought, oh, this is just the establishment being against this guy Corbyn. And these accusations of anti-Semitism aren’t correct. But then when I saw this BBC Panorama documentary, and heard the testimony from really, really true Labour Party activists, people like me. I worked for the Irish Labour Party in the Irish Parliament for a while, so I recognised them as genuine people, and they came to the conclusion that something really iffy, not only disorganised, but but not pleasant at all, was going on to stymie the anti-Semitism claim.
And then the UK Labour Party at the time, which is something we’re going through in New York City at the moment with Mamdami, and it disappoints me. But I haven’t taken the time to look into it quite deeply where he abolished the international or the working definition of antisemitism and decided to define it himself. And this is exactly what the UK Labour Party under Corbyn did. And because of that, I ended up reading it and it really taught me something and helped me see through the Russian agitprop, as I call it, into that.
So that’s why I found it quite interesting to see this. This goes back to 1959. And this is, as we see the Russians do on the battlefield, continuing the same strategy again and again. They took Kup’yansk, then they lost Kup’yansk in September 2020. Now they’re trying to take it again. They’re doing the same with Liman, hearing Alan and Chuck Pfarrer. Talk about it today. Again, Lyman, it seems to be safe now again. And that was the city which I went through every time I left Severodonetsk, so very close to my heart. But there is this kind of repetition that the Russians keep on doing. And we see this evidence in our information space from the antisemitic point of view.
These campaigns, which are tearing many of our communities apart - and I’m not saying in any way shape or form that we don’t all have to work this through ourselves in our own brains and stuff - but if you know that these are Russian paid operatives painting swastikas in rural Ireland on on the ground then it does enrich your analysis of what’s going on. So that’s why I think it’s worthwhile bringing to attention what’s going on with the Russian method.
International Law and Territorial Integrity
International law is not what you think it is. I studied it at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. It’s not international law that prevents the subversion of territorial integrity. It’s the memory that before sovereignty, security and territorial integrity were protected as a matter of law, hundreds of millions of humans were sacrificed on the altar of mobile borders. Those who, without having studied international law, opine on its irrelevance and obsolescence, well, fate has some surprises in store for you. Snarky arch social media commentary won’t protect you from mass graves. The joke’s now on you.
The cases that define borders and much of the content of international law are from the South American continent. Your children and community’s children are about to learn some hard and avoidable lessons. When territorial integrity is threatened by Donald or Putler or Xi and you cheer, you will deserve your fate. Those of us willing to die to defend territorial integrity as a principle, as a matter of law, and as the bedrock convention necessary in human communities committed to peaceful coexistence also have some surprises in store for you. You have been warned.
And obviously that’s not really addressed to anyone listening here, but to the people who were opining, oh, international law doesn’t matter anymore.
The Macron Cyberbullying Judgment and Free Speech
I wanted also to highlight the Macron cyber bullying judgment from two weeks ago, because it’s obviously very important for Disinfolklore. And especially listening today and seeing some of these videos that Status Coup are creating of the ICE operations, particularly in Minneapolis, where basically the groups of civil society activists are making it really uncomfortable for ICE to be there by exercising their First Amendment rights to basically say whatever they want to do, say and they shout using whistles. And Donald and his Homeland Security person have basically responded by saying, well, if you’re shouting at an ICE person, then you’re disrespecting them and they have the right to shoot you.
And so the vacuity, the cynicism of promoting a particular idea of free speech, which is one of the main organising fictions by the political right, moaning about the lack of free speech, archetyping Europe as a bastion of non-free speech, while at the same time those very same people are enabling heavily armed individuals to shoot unarmed civilians who are merely exercising their right to free speech.
So in the current moment, this is a great reminder, a daily reminder of how cynical the idea of free speech is being used, how cynically it is being used by the so-called or the self-declared right.
And so the Macron cyberbullying judgment, the war on free speech, the dividing lines. So the American far-right agitators now in control of the US government want us to believe freedom of speech always meant total freedom to commit speech crimes. However, this is a very recent meaning of free speech when you go into the literature. So we know, for instance, it was never legal to shout fire in a crowded theatre when there was no fire.
However, this absolutist idea of free speech is a relatively recent phenomenon and is a particularly provincial idea of free speech. However, it has taken hold in the minds of people. So people feel quite apologetic if they’re introducing moderation rules, for instance, on the internet. And since 1980 and the beginning of computer-based social media, I have catalogued over 45,000 articles on our collective attempts to prevent internet-based trolling criminals from gaining immunity from prosecution authorities for their crimes.
So if you incite violence as a troll online, that is a crime just as much as it would be if you’re inciting violence in real life. However, when people like the people who own this app talk about free speech and try to use Europe’s attempt to exercise control and sovereignty over the use of internet-based platforms to commit crimes in their jurisdictions. And they’re then archetyped as being anti-free speech.
I mean, for example, from 2007 onwards, I charted the rise of Facebook funeral trolling in Australia, England, America and elsewhere. Online anonymous, spontaneous trolls defacing memorial pages established by mourning families with hateful threats. The first conviction was in Australia and where today a social media ban for children is being piloted and a similar law is planned for the UK. The free-for-all enabled by those perverting the meaning of free speech that has enabled Russia and MAGA to use US-Russia Telegram and Chinese TikTok, internet, social media to subvert our democracies is not inevitable.
We have the power to resist, provided we’re clear-eyed about what is at stake and how far the far right will go to destroy our freedom with their phony free speech advocacy. Ne’er-do-wells, like some English listeners will know this character perhaps, like Toby Jones in England, who created this NGO called the Free Speech Union, basically to promote this troll that you can’t say anything these days, or America’s new national security strategy. They have the capacity to destroy our communities in the name of protecting a narrow and recent view of free speech.
So today, the United States government sanctions European Union officials who implement laws ensuring well-governed free speech on and offline which have been passed by the European Union’s 450 million population institutions. Americans and the far right everywhere have been trolled into thinking their rights are transgressed when they are prosecuted for engaging in behaviour online, which would be unlawful if engaged in real life. Threats of violence, assaults, sexual harassment and worse.
So the main content in Jack Smith’s Jan 6th federal indictment was Donald inciting violence, using speech to incite violence. So it’s hardly surprising then when Donald himself promotes the idea of free speech. But it has never been legal to commit crimes. And you don’t have freedom of speech. I mean, every crime basically will always involve speech and therefore we always will have some forms of speech which judges and juries and grand juries can determine whether it’s legal or not.
So this idea that free speech is something absolute is not only ridiculous in the light of this license to shoot people blowing whistles in the face of ICE agents, but it’s also ridiculous in the light of hundreds of years of jurisprudence. And in 2008, as social media was going mainstream, Facebook memorial page trolling was a niche operation. And you can see this as I’ve gone through all of the data using the Dow Jones Factiva database of tens of thousands of media sources. And you can see the rise of this from about 2008 onwards. And I have the documents on it. And it was the major piece of research which I did when I created the decoding trolls and positive trolling in February 2020.
Today, however, what had been a niche operation, Facebook memorial trolling, today it governs geopolitics. When Donald uses online platforms to threaten violence against Denmark, Donald is breaching European Union law. He’s also breaching the UN charter by the threat of the use of force. However, this is now normalized, but it is still a breach of the law. And if we can just keep this in mind, it will help us. It’s our first line of defense.
Russia, MAGA, Modi in India, Xi, Iran, they spend billions subverting our communities by injecting bile into our minds, which if done personally, person to person in real life, would be prosecuted and eliminated immediately. So the judgment in the Brigitte Macron cyberbullying case is very welcome. I celebrate that she and Emmanuel Macron, their courage in subjecting themselves to the pain of that trial, for all of our sakes. Because its significance is they want us to think that there’s no way to police speech and moderate it and that they can do whatever they want to do to our communities.
However, cases like this and what Australia has done and what they’ve done in England with the age. And I believe it’s been considered in the European Union as well. I remember Ursula von der Leyen, who I think has six or seven children, saying, I will never accept that a foreign media company will decide what my child sees. And I wonder, will the European Union react to this image? It’s very niche. Maybe I’m the only person in the world who’s even noticed they’ve gotten rid of this media previews thing. But I’d love to see action taken on that.
Surrendering to free speech zealots is a luxury of our brittle, sovereign, secure, and prosperous communities can no longer afford. Brexit and MAGA’s rise demonstrate how subversion of governance of free speech is how autocracy and the axis of misogyny win power and begin and sustain kinetic wars. So that’s what’s at stake. I wanted to mention that.
**Russian Liberal Narratives and Responsibility**
I did have one further, one last thing, which actually came up from Natalka from Ukraine. I think she’s Canadian. Is she American? But anyway, as we all know, she does amazing work. And she brought forth this testimony this week from a guy called Nikolin, who I hadn’t heard about before, but a Russian political analyst, a so-called liberal. And in it, he argues basically, so the bit which interests me about this is mainly his use of the term archetypes.
So I’ll go straight to that. So basically, he is arguing that Russia did not mean, it didn’t intend to create, to basically brainwash the entire, the whole of Russia. So he’s saying, he’s saying, so this is the guy, Nikolin, and he said, I’ve often come across the view that all the propaganda over the past decade targeting Russians and their dehumanization was the result of a cunning plan coming out of secret Kremlin laboratories and institutes. I must respectfully disagree with this. Fortunately, with some basis, as someone who is somewhat familiar with the murky waters of propaganda.
So then he goes on to argue that it’s a more apt analogy. So he’s trying to argue that
“this wasn’t planned. A more apt analogy would be a descent down a dark staircase. A hand feels along the wall. And so basically, he then says, there’s no strategy, only a stubborn desire to keep going downward because it’s easier that way. And then he argues that then the path became path-dependent, inevitable.
Perhaps the initial goal was to atomize and break society into atoms. They did that. Next, to confuse its consciousness with external enemies. They did that. To dig from the depths of public consciousness, archetypes of greatness, imperialism, and hatred of outsiders. They did that. But all of this was not for the sake of February 24th, but it was to solve the immediate problems of the distant, now forgotten years of 2010 and 2012.
Then Ukraine conveniently falls into the role of external bogeyman. And in the process of it being torn apart by propaganda…”
So basically, I have an intuitive counter-reaction to this. I mean, I’m very interested that he uses the term archetypes because we also have the testimony from Surkov, the former deputy prime minister of Russia, where he says
“Russia began to produce meanings itself and went on in information counter-offensive. And he, he transfers the concept of mental matrix archetypes of our national consciousness to the sphere of foreign policy.”
This goes again into what Russia is doing in our communities, say with antisemitism or particular, particular campaigns which is running to divide our society, where it’s going into antisemitic, the antisemitic archetypes are perennial trolls in our many of our minds until we do the mental work to get rid of them and we learn the methods. And so Russia can go into any culture, basically, and promote these archetypes. So Russia wasn’t only doing it to itself. It was and is doing it in other countries.
But I also react against his idea. I mean, in some respects, he’s right. But on the other hand, my testimony and the value of my work, in Disinfolklore and the collection which I made from early 2015 onwards of vast troves of the Disinfolklore apparatus inside Russia-occupied Ukraine belies his account that this was accidental. Because from the very first moment they were using these othering tropes to create inside Russia-occupied Ukraine a sense of identity, that they were Russian and subvert their identities. And this is from 2015 onwards, whereas he’s talking about this as if it was an accidental emanation and not a considered strategy.
Now of course my belief is they tested the methods and perfected them in Russia occupied Ukraine, in occupied, temporarily occupied Crimea, temporarily occupied Donetsk and Luhansk. And then using what they learned there, they switched over to, brought it back to Russia, the empire striking back in a way, and did it to themselves. And individuals from Putler down have all ended up brainwashing themselves. I sense there’s some kind of nitpicking in this guy, Andrei Nikolin, who’s trying to absolve Russia of its responsibility in creating this brainwashing apparatus and this perfecting method, which again, in the case of MAGA, I don’t think it’s an accident.
I’ve written before using the first-hand testimony from Chris Wylie, who was in the room. He and Steve Bannon conceived of MAGA. They conceived of how to create this movement and they executed that plan and and this is where we’ve ended up. And I don’t think Steve Bannon would complain about where we’ve ended up today. Perhaps he’d wanted to all move a bit more quickly.
So I do react against this idea of absolving responsibility by this Russian liberal thinking that it was just an accident because of what we have seen during the full-scale invasion and the use of meat assaults affecting the people living in Russia-occupied Ukraine whose identities were subverted with scientific brilliance. So that’s all I kind of had on my writing. That’s taken a whole hour, so maybe other people want to speak or have some questions or out.
It’s that energy of the persecution syndrome that I’m not responsible. I can see it in Konstantin inside Russia when he did his thing about, he featured in, Dugin apparently wrote about him because I think Constantine had done a thing about how rubbish the Russian army is. And then Dugin responded for this. And then, and then he did a show on how this makes him feel.
And yeah, obviously, it’d be a bit of a nightmare to be featured in, you know, for one of these people to take notice of the small guy. Obviously, Constantini is a half a million followers. He’s much less small than I am, for instance. But there is just this, but again, it’s a trait perhaps that all of us are susceptible to. We have to do a lot of mind work to overcome this idea of persecution syndrome. And we see so much of this in The Tales of Woe, for instance, that mockers will read or whatever, that it’s hard not to assume that this is a kind of a it’s a cultural trait among the russians but of course it’s in a particular authoritarian personality type we see it in Donald as well I mean god how how many positive signals do you need from the universe to just become a nice happy person.
You know, Donald has had so many amazing things happen and yet he still feels he’s hard done by. So we do see this kind of this habit. But when I see that energy in people, whether it’s in my own private life or in real life, in real life rather than virtual life, but also online, now that I notice it and I’m looking for that energy, I am a bit suspicious of it. And it is a bit too convenient when you hear it from one of these Russian so-called liberals. It’s a nice story that this stuff just happened accidentally, but either they’re really naive or they’re trying to pull the wool over our eyes. And it’s part of this campaign to say, oh, look, it’s not the Russian people, it’s just Putler who are responsible for this. It’s not the ordinary Russians. We’ve just been brainwashed.
