Episode Details

Today I wanted to talk about the continuation of what we had spoken about before. This involves a few different ingredients in the analytical theory that I invented, which is called Disinfolklore. Disinfolklore is both an analytical theory and a way of seeing. It’s a description of a new form of narrative. It’s also a way of cutting through Russian disinformation, in particular in the context of the Ukraine war. However, it is an aspect of our culture which can be used in different contexts.

As ever, I thought I would quickly go through some of the things I wrote this week.

I wrote earlier in the week — which is quite apt today because I see a couple were arrested and charged by the Polish police, one or both of whom are associated in some respects with the Navalny opposition campaign. I don’t think it’s going to be very surprising to many of us who operate in the Ukrainian information space. It would have been a surprise to me a couple of years ago. I don’t think it would have been a surprise to many Central Europeans a couple of years ago, but it certainly is no surprise to me today.

I’ve written a lot on the so-called Russian opposition and the mechanism which Russia, and really all trolls and con people, use — which is to establish trust. In the context of the Russian opposition, they generally persecute them, torture them, kill their family members, put them in jail. And then our political leaders spend very scarce political capital getting them released. This dance goes on constantly.

We saw a variety of so-called Russian oppositionists being warned not to go to Russia. And if they go to Russia, they’ll be killed or imprisoned. Lo and behold, they go to Russia and they are killed and imprisoned. And then our leaders swap KGB people in our prisons for KGB Russian oppositionists. I just find the whole thing absolutely maddening — that we can’t see through this, or that many of our leaders can’t see through this.

I’ve referred to these Russian oppositionists as a perennial Russian opposition Disinfolklore character, because the Russian secret police has been using the same tactics for 150 years to break up groups.

I wrote a piece on “Russians Panic About Their Ethnos Disappearing.” I hadn’t actually come across this word “ethnos” until about a year ago, when Putler himself was doing one of his characteristic grievance-mining trolls, trying to explain why Russia had to attack Ukraine — that if they didn’t do it first, NATO and Ukraine would attack them. Putler was saying: “I don’t even know if such ethnos as the Russian people can be preserved as it is today.” That’s supposed to scare people.

But actually, as Russia disintegrates into five or six sovereign states over the coming months, Russians worrying about their ethnos disappearing ought to be reassured — and here I am concern-trolling — that China assimilated the Manchu so successfully that today it’s hard to find anyone in China who identifies as Manchu, even though the Manchu Qing dynasty ruled China from 1644 to 1912. Similarly, the so-called Russian ethnos will be subsumed into Chinese identity quite quickly. So Russians have no need to worry about that. Staying warm and fed this winter — now that’s something to worry about.

It often is a tragedy when particular minority groups in the human community disappear. But only about 194 of them, if we take the nation-states recognised as nation-states, of the thousands — probably tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands perhaps — of identifiable human cultures have existed over the past 10,000 years. The Russians have had a good run of it. They had 300 years. And honestly, if they go the way of the Manchu and are subsumed by the Chinese, I don’t think they’ll find many tears in the pro-Ukraine information space. I’d like to run this campaign, which I started here. I don’t know whether it’s going to catch fire, but we’ll see.

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