Episode Details

Rearchetype “acts of war” as “hybrid warfare” or “Active Measures.” Then, get the most knowing people in your chosen enemies’ chains-of-command to take on that Archetyping.

While they earnestly, sincerely, confused and proudly model their knowingness (by explaining to others the intricacies of Russia’s own re-Archetyping of actual “War” with euphemisms) Russia continues its war by all means.

The delicious irony is that by subverting the signifier (War) that properly describes Russia’s attacks on our countries and implementing a new meaning (Hybrid War), Russia is proving that it is at war against us.

Concealing its war against us from Russia’s chosen enemies’ perception IS an instrument of contemporary warfare. It’s the very definition of Mental War which that now is 3/4s of War.

We all think we’d recognise a genocide or war, yet our mental models of war that’s forged through films about Napoleon or this or that kinetic battle in World War Two have not caught up with how war today manifests.

Here we see the full power of Russia’s Archeytypal Disinfolklore. It contaminates the very concepts we need to communicate war and threats and invasion. That is, it substitutes “hybrid warfare” for war. Then we see events on the ground we would otherwise characterise as “armed attacks” as “not war.” Note too how cleverest most strategic thinkers in our security architecture earnestly fall for this troll. Archetypal Disinfolklore literacy can help us perceive the Mana/energy inside such euphemisms and instruments of war.

Today I wanted to go right back to where we were at the beginning. This is our 26th episode — for those who are counting, and even for those who aren’t, it’s still our 26th episode.

Disinfolklore is an analytical method with 12 tools. The second six tools are basically the Code of Positive Trolls, which I’ve talked about. The very first tool — some might remember — is called Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy. I haven’t talked about that for a while, so I wanted to go back to basics.

To understand what I mean by archetypes, understanding what NAFO does is a perfect example of what I call counter-archetyping. Firstly, individuals archetype themselves with a nom de guerre, or in the form of a visual meme as a dog, and the endless creativity and self-expression involved in choosing one’s avatar — the NAFO avatar is in itself really charming, beautiful, lovely, agreeable, kind, not egotistical, humbly joyous. Some of us remember many people’s avatars and the way they’ve archetyped themselves.

But what NAFO does itself is an act of counter-archetyping. The 100,000 or maybe more people who spontaneously self-identified from May 2022 onwards into this amazing decentralised organisation of pro-Ukraine supporters — it de-archetypes, if you like, what the Russians tried to do.

The foundational meme, from the late NAFO Fellas — very sad that he passed before the liberation of Crimea. His engagement with the archetypal nasty Russian ambassador based in Vienna, where he summed up what Russia’s casus belli was, along the lines of, from memory: “So basically, a few Russian-language speakers in Ukraine were being discriminated against, and you decided to go in and kill everyone.” And as we all remember, the ambassador — the actual ambassador, archetypal villain — responds very negatively: “You pronounce this nonsense, not me.”

That is the foundational meme of NAFO. What it does is undermine the normal play of things. You have an actual ambassador, a country’s ambassador — this is probably one of the lows in any Russian ambassador’s time in Vienna — and he engages with a cartoon dog, with a guy in America, and he loses the engagement.

As an act of counter-archetyping, that’s quite typical. There have been millions, probably hundreds of millions of attempts to counter-archetype. We see it all over our timelines. Any time a Russian diplomat or figure attempts to re-a