Episode Details

This is episode six of going through the battling archetypes and essential tools in the Disinfolklore analytical method. Some of you may remember last week I talked about Donald archetyping himself as mad, and my archetyping of my experience on the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska as something folkloric, and that leading to an accidental insight which in turn led to my discovery of Disinfolklore.

Today I wanted to keep going. Inside Russia-occupied Ukraine, in occupied Luhansk, where I crossed into every day from government-controlled Ukraine, on a journey I would take from now-occupied Severodonetsk — about 150 kilometres on terrible roads, but really beautiful landscape all the way — from my hotel, the Hotel Mir, “Peace,” which had been bombed in 2014 in Severodonetsk. Last time I saw photographs of it, like many places I stayed in Ukraine, it’s now in ruins.

I lived in the Mir Hotel for a year, and then I moved into a beautiful house with a swimming pool and underfloor heating in Severodonetsk. Now that house itself — it’s not quite a ruin, but it has been looted. The family I lived with sent me photographs of the house recently, and I can now determine when places have been looted repeatedly. Walls are missing.

At the time, Severodonetsk was a bit of a haven. Gradually, as I was there from February 2015 onwards, as I got my eye into what for me was the first former Soviet city — it was a real Soviet city, the largest producer of ammonium in the former Soviet Union, that was its speciality, and it looked very like Soviet cities — but gradually it became more colourful. People became richer. Avocados appeared in the supermarket, as did hummus. Now those supermarkets are in ruins.

Severodonetsk’s best days — depending on one’s viewpoint — may have been in the Soviet era, or I would claim that its best days were during the years I was there, up until 2022, as it experienced being the de facto capital of Luhansk.

Each day, going to Stanytsia Luhanska was like passing into another world through this long journey along very rough roads, which we got to know extremely well because I did it five days a week for three years. Crossing into that bridge was like crossing into a matrix. Inside Russia-occupied Ukraine was a matrix — and here I’m using the matrix from the movie as a metaphor rather than an actual place.

Russia’s archetyping system inside Russia-occupied Ukraine consisted of hundreds of media outlets intermeshed with coercive force, coercive control, and so-called institutions which did not actually mediate reality. All of these means — the media outlets, the coercive force, the coercive control, and these fake institutions which only existed on paper in the media outlets — I mentioned this last week, how for the first few months I was reading stories about how the Russian occupiers were establishing a central bank and courts and a parliament and all these normal foundational institutions. But they were fake. They only existed on paper. Took me a few months to realise that.

None of these means really mediated reality. They forged reality. I use the word “forged” there as a double entendre — in the sense that they forged it like you might forge a horseshoe in a forge, hammering it away, putting it in the fire, taking it out, hammering it away. And forged in the sense of forgeries, art forgeries, fake reality — which is the essence of the Disinfolklore metaphor, the Disinfolklore insight that I had.

I didn’t then understand what the Russians were doing. I didn’t understand their objective. At the time, March 2015, the Council of the European Union — the supreme governments’ part of the European Union, as distinct from the European Commission’s civil servants and the European Parliament’s directly elected parliamentarians — the Council of the European Union at the end of March mentioned disinformation for the first time. So at the time, there wasn’t really a vibe of disinformatio