Episode Details

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 beas