Episode Details

The European Union today released its highly anticipated — well, highly anticipated by the likes of me — fourth report on threats on what it calls FIMI, which is a rather unwieldy phrase. It’s not unanalogous to Disinfolklore, but FIMI stands for Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference. The “foreign” in this context means the threat is coming from outside the European Union, which for good, understandable political reasons and constitutional and mandate reasons, the European Union of course doesn’t want to get involved in intra-European Union created Disinfolklore or disinformation.

The fourth report which came out today — I just wanted to talk about it in the context of the Disinfolklore analytical method. I’ve talked before about the three previous reports. The first report was published three years ago and it provided a brand new analytical framework and common language through which European Union and non-European Union states could speak about the threat to their national security which Russia, China, and indeed Iran — those three are the main foreign forces that these reports are dealing with — pose.

It provided a common framework and a common language to talk about something which was new. From outside of the structure, the word “disinformation” was really operationalised from inside Russia. We have evidence from KGB manuals from the 1960s and 1970s of them using the term disinformation. Therefore, if you’re trying to solve a problem or talk about a problem or come up with tools to deal with a problem that has been created by the Russians, then if you subject yourselves to using the vocabulary and language and tools which the Russians themselves have forged, there is only a limited area for you to operate within.

By contrast, if — as I have done with Disinfolklore — you invent a new portmanteau and you elaborate a whole set and analytical method, as I have done through the Twelve Tool Way on disinfolklore.eu, and through my writings, which many of you have been thankfully reading and interacting with since I created the portmanteau in February 2023 — but after thinking and thinking about what Disinfolklore means as an analytical method and also as a narrative form that I first noticed in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018.

It’s now ten years I’ve been thinking and elaborating and writing about this problem, but I’ve only had the term Disinfolklore for the past three years. It was quite liberating to come up with this word. I had from time to time tried to look for a new language in new terms because I recognised from early on in 2015 that what I was witnessing inside Russia-occupied Luhansk was something new and therefore it required a new vocabulary to describe the whole system of information fields, matrices, thick enmeshing matrices — the kind which we’re now experiencing, for instance, in relation to this Iran war.

The Colonisation of Thought

Even people who haven’t paid much attention to MAGA and who have no idea really of QAnon and what MAGA has been doing since 2015 to create this enmeshing, identity-creating mess inside people’s minds — now, if you are contemplating whether to fill your car with petrol or diesel, or you’re thinking, gosh, am I going to have gas? All the gas in my country comes from Qatar and they’re not going to be able to get this gas to the island of Britain or wherever else you might live. Where am I going to get my hot water? How am I going to drive my factory?

That kind of colonisation of our thoughts is a direct line from Donald’s — on the one hand, the war is over; on the other hand, I’m having fun, I’m blowing things up. He is projecting outwards through the medium of Disinfolklore into our minds, into humanity’s minds, this completely enmeshing, confusing mess of nightmarish rhetoric.

That is precisely what I had noticed the Russians were doing inside Russia-occupied Ukraine. I didn’t know at the ti