Jeffrey Sachs was in my mind because he was this kind of devil from the early 90s when he was responsible for the shock therapy or whatever.But I hadn’t encountered him in reference to Ukraine until I was on this holiday on the Turkish Riviera last summer, the summer of 2024. A really close friend of mine who, like that English MP Zultana, has no sympathy for Ukraine yet has loads of sympathy for the plight of Palestinians…
I said to him, look, you’re really lucky because I’m one of the few people…
I’ve spoken to more local elected officials in Ukraine. Well, I’ll put it this way, there’s probably not that many Westerners who have spoken to as many as I have.
I spent four years of my life every working day. Going into the villages and the hromadas they’re called, the decentralized, former Soviets, which are decentralized, and speaking - because that was my kind of level as a very low level diplomat and a member of the international community I discovered I could get meetings with these village heads who had been elected under this amazing decentralization plan which Ukraine had introduced on the 1st of April 2014 and President Poroshenko did amazing work with it and so did President Zelensky.
Eventually power was decentralized to these villages which had been former Soviets which had never had any power. They used to have to go to the district councils to get money to change a light bulb and all the elections were fixed. All these communities were designed around the communal farm. Up until relatively recently, many of the people there didn’t have a passport. They couldn’t even leave their villages without people’s permission. Suddenly this new process comes in and you have these amazing leaders, male and female, in Dnipropetrovsk. Zaporozhzhe and Kirivohrad was my area of operation. In Dniproetrovsk, half of these people of the Hromada leaders were women. I went to each of them and just, you know, asked them “what made you decentralise?” It was a voluntary process. They would bring me around these amazing schools. The European standard schools that have been funded by the European Union, by the Ukrainian government and by USAID.
It’s an amazing story of decentralization of power, of governance reform, which is virtually impossible in most of our countries because there’s so many vested interests. Ireland, for instance, still has the same governance structure it had when it was ruled by England. It’s just impossible to change.
So it really impressed me that in Ukraine, in the midst of a war, over the course of five years, they rammed through this really democratic process that people like Zultana know nothing about. Yet, it is probably why the left -and there’s many people in the English left who full-throatedly - support Ukraine and have been over there a lot.
Anyone who looks into Ukrainian governance will be really impressed by what they do. Local communities keep 50% of their taxes.
So I’m saying to my friend, “Look, this is my experience. So I can tell you there’s no Nazis in Ukraine. I can tell you they will fight to the last person. I can tell you these are the areas which are now horrifically and brutally occupied. Villages that were thriving that I visited which are now ashes and people the Russians have vaporised. I met the leaders there. Some of them are dead now. Some of them are in Russian jails, tortured every day and others are just waiting, biding their time to come back in, after victory.
I think every day of the people I met in schools there, the older people who gave us gifts and bread. Who are in these places which the Russians have been brutally occupying.
I said this to my friend… Then he quotes Jeffrey Sachs to me. I said, “Who is Jeffrey Sachs? I don’t even know if he’s been to Ukraine. And somehow you believe him over me. Your friend who you’ve known for many years. For decades. That has always stuck in my mind as a really, I often think about it. Whenever I hear about Jeffrey Sachs, I think about it.
I think of what kind of algorithm is serving this stuff up to my friend. That he is watching this nonsense from Jeffrey Sachs. Talking about things he knows nothing about, as a paid Russian and Chinese Communist Party and UAE propagandist.
Why is he believing Jeffrey Sachs over me? This is the essential question in the Disinfolklore Galaxy we are becoming enmeshed in. I used to think that when I set out on this path in 2018 to try and understand the magic, of what does Donald’s trolling magic consist? How did he get his authority to troll and roil our emotions at scale? How did he troll people so successfully?
I thought it was just a matter of getting the truth in there. You know, I wrote my first things online in 2019. Up to that point, I was completely invisible. Now I realize it’s about amplification. It’s about bot networks.
It’s about the motivation, the financial motivations of these people. In a way, it isn’t really. Because all of us, we spend most of every day on Ukraine. None of us is earning any money from it. So it’s not even about motivation uh financial motivation so it’s about amplification and bot networks. Obviously someone like him uh he’s lost his soul a long time ago. Like Donald he has no shame so the shame of the Italian Senator calling Sachs out like that won’t make him skulk away. Because he’s not operating in good faith. He’s not Right. He’s not looking at the Code of Positive Trolls to proof the memes emanating from his lying mind. He knows what he is saying is a lie. He knows how much money he’s got from China and from UAE or from wherever else to do this. It’s part of this whole system of Disinfolklore propagators. I saw what he’s got seven bookings around Italy, like, who’s doing that?
No-one’s doing that for you, Wendy, or for me, or for other people. There’s a whole system. There’s a whole network, paid financial network behind it. Of Russians. Of the oligarchs who he helped enrich and... whatever his motivation. So I guess we’ll still see him popping up again and again. It’s always a bit annoying when we have people like Will Thiel who know a lot more than he does. People like me who know a lot more in a provincial, regional way on governance in Ukraine. Like why is no one platforming us? I suppose we just have to keep on trucking. It was great to see him publicised in that way. I’m glad to see it. I guess he’ll still keep selling his wares. I mean, we see these people, like we just see like Putin, we see the war itself as a complete disaster repeating again and again and again. So he’ll probably continue doing that.
Ukraine, you’re wondering how much detail do I go into? Like today was a very exciting day for all of us - gas storage, train lines, multiple oil storage areas, S-300 radar systems, transformers,.. All across Russia, Ukraine was blasting war-related infrastructure to pieces. For decades during the Cold War little American suburban children went to bed dreaming of destroying Russia. Now it is being done by Ukraine. I still haven’t really got a read on all that was done. It was wonderful. I wondered, “Should I talk to people I meet today about that?” In the end, I didn’t bother.
I’m always usually quite happy when I do try as gently or as astutely or as skillfully as I can manage, as unemotionally challenge people. I often think about this conversation I had in Turkey that time about Jeffrey Sachs. I’m glad I had it. I’m glad I challenged my friend.
I don’t know if it changed any, if I changed my friend. I hope so. More likely than not they don’t even remember the conversation and are still being brainwashed by the YouTube algorithm Russia is gaming to serve up endless Russian propaganda and Disinfolklore to such innocent minds.
So yeah, we do need to challenge Disinfolklore. To find skillful ways. Emotionally resonant ways. Clever means. Different ways all the time, different voices. Not to go on about it. Skillful means to try and convince people. Definitely call out the lies. When we have knowledge that the person is doing it, it’s a good example of that. I suppose the real lesson is that these TV presenters not doing it. We see this in America a lot at the moment, which is terrible.
Volume and frequency. Yes. That definitely is one of the... Let’s take the Jeffrey Sachs thing. He’s not on my mind at all. When I look at YouTube, when I look at Information Warfare Initiative stuff, I clean all my cookies. So I just get the things up there. But clearly, like my friend, he’s probably got six years of Vatnik stuff brainwashing him in his cookies.
With the senator calling out Jeffrey Sachs yeah I remember scanning my timeline that morning. You just suddenly see this thing. I know that’s going to be the issue of the day. So then I try and come up with a product of it.
Also we see these repetitive patterns, which many of us, because we’re tuned into the Ukrainian information space, particularly coming from Russia, because they just come up with the same lines again. It’s on a calendar, like an outlook calendar.
Six months now, we have to go for peace negotiations again.
Yeah, let’s accuse Zelensky of buying a castle in God knows where.
Or should we say Italy or America this time?
So that repetition, volume, frequency. Then you see the same energy in it. It’ll always be Zelensky buying something. So the energy is corruption in it. But it won’t always be a castle in Italy. Sometimes it’s California. I think he was buying a ranch today. Of course, that also works the other way. It convinces people that it’s true. For us who are deliberately trying to look out for it and not to fall for trolls, when I see something repeated like that, volume and frequency, I’m then suspicious.
So it will get me to look at it a bit closer. We online now are making the news ourselves. Trying ourselves to make it as engaging as possible by sharing interesting things. By creating interesting things. Different voices. Different colors and humour. That’s a very positive thing which never existed before.
So we are fighting, so we don’t... So I think collective pat on the back. And what Volya Radio does with M’ockers or Will and all of you, Genesis Man, and Midwest Fellow, and yourself, Wendy, and Iaona, of course, and Jenni, and everyone is doing, is countering this in our own way. We’re creating spaces that never existed before when we used to have to rely on people like Jeffrey Sachs or the Talking Head who was on the weekly, you know, current affairs show in whichever village or country or town we lived in.
So I think that is quite wonderful. It’s also part of the problem. But at least we have a voice. We’re not just shouting at the TV. We’re actually... Yeah, we’re not shouting at the TV. We are the TV. That’s it. We are the TV.
So one of the things I’ve spoken about before is Character. So you see the Character in memes and tropes. So it’s not just the individuals or characters that we think about film. We see these tropes coming up again and again. Victoria Newland one and all of that. Part of the really annoying thing is when people like my friend who was talking about Sachs start talking about this conspiracy, when you know the truth, which was... Sikorsky, who’s now obviously a hero and has learned from the experience, he had negotiated with Klitschko.
He and Klitschko had persuaded, had trolled the Maidan demonstrators into surrendering and allowing Yanukovych to continue. It was only that Yanukovych did a runner that that deal fell. The idea that the Americans and the American establishment wanted the demonstrators to take over. I mean, it just betrays a worrying, especially when it’s coming from people like Zultana or people who should know better, a worrying lack of understanding of the Character immanent in our governance structures, our leadership and our leaders. The last thing they wanted was a revolution. So this idea of the Victoria Nuland passing out these really cheap sweets and Maidan demonstrators being shot at and killed think, oh great I was just about to surrender to Ruschism. But now this American has given me a cookie, you know, I’ll go the whole way and destroy Russia now.
Anyone who’s been to Ukraine will know Yulia Timoshenko’s supermarket chain ATP. You buy the biscuits Nuland was giving out by the weight. That’s what she was giving out. It’s just, anyone repeating this betrays a worrying lack of understanding of the character of people in our political establishment. They did not want this to be going. They’ve done everything they can since the time General Electric built Zaporozhzhia Dam in the 1930s as part of Stalin’s five-year plan. They’ve done everything they can to give Russia respect. To keep it keep it alive. The idea that they would have, you know, done this coup thing. Of course, it’s the people accusing the CIA and Victoria Nuland of doing what they in their conventional world would never have done are the very ones who were creating the coup by hiring Paul Manafort, a Republican strategist who’s now advising Donald. You know, we may see Donald pursuing a coup in Ukraine again, as he every now and again, he talks about President Zelensky’s legitimacy.
So yeah, onwards, frequency and repetition. We see the same things coming up again and again and again. On one level, it’s maddening. On another, it’s hilarious. On yet another, it’s just really worrying that people who supposedly know something about geopolitics think that the world works that way.
They’ve just read too many of that guy from MIT’s stories [Chomsky] about CIA coups and all that, and not enough about Michael Weiss stuff on GRU and Russian coups. They have a completely cartoonish Disinfolklore stoked and forged and formed understanding of the character of our very conservative governance structures. It’s definitely a bit annoying!
