Episode Details

It's 1942. You live by the railway. You see the trains travelling to Auschwitz.

Would you know you're witnessing genocide?

Between 2015 and 2018, working in eastern Ukraine as a diplomat, I witnessed a stealthily prepared and executed genocide. Even though I had studied the holocaust. Read much of its literature. It was not for several years after leaving that place, after the full-scale invasion, that I realised what I had seen and participated in.

Disinfolklore as a topic of study is my response to the attempt to understand how I missed what Russia was doing through its brain-washing operations in Russia-occupied Ukraine: preparing Ukrainians to kill or be killed by Ukrainians.

Disinfolklore can be used to conceal through stealth a genocide. Disinfolklore also can be used to conjure into being either a mythical or actual genocide. This is the importance of learning to see Disinfolklore and of integrating the Disinfolklore Analytjical Method into our every day thinking.

This is the Mana of Russian Disinfolklore. It's about borders, inner outer realm. Let's protect the inner realm of England from the outer realm Syrians. They're males. They're dark. They're going to come in. And Russia, as we know, for instance, carpet bombed Syria in the autumn of 2015. So it's a totally integrated product.

They create the refugee crisis, one million migrants to North Macedonia, and then they either fund directly, or say in the case of in Poland, where you have very antithetical government to Russism and see through it all, but they still benefited from the 2015 refugee crisis. But for the Russians, it's all tied into what I call the stealth genocide, which is now we see it. in plain sight, those of us who are tuned into what's going on in Ukraine. But the preparatory moment to it was from 2015 and to 2022. And I had a ringside seat to it.

And despite all my vaunted education, I never, I didn't realize it. I didn't realize I was in a genocide. And I liken it to this, I use this example. a lot where I say you know it's 1942 at the end of your garden there's a railway track and you see the cattle cars going by on the way to Auschwitz you know you're witnessing genocide of course you don't you're just seeing a moment in it um and we look we were i was always scanning for these signs in ukraine 2015-2022 never imagined i was i was part of it i was participant that's just a precursor.

so i happened to have been i studied international cambridge university which is famous for international law and i was inside what I now understand was a genocide. I've studied, I've read Primo Levi, I studied the Holocaust, I went to Auschwitz and Dachau and different places. I'm a great scholar of the Holocaust.

And yet I found myself inside a genocide for three years, ground zero of a genocide and I never realised I was in it. In fact, I didn't realise it until I marked the moment on X at Decoding Trolls on the 1st of March 2022 and I realized, oh my God, this is what they were doing. They were preparing all the time and how they did this in this amazing information space that was literally like I liken it to an IKEA kit that was brought from Moscow into Russia occupied territories and it's unpacked some of it looks really clumsy it's it's like newspapers it's letters it's um radio stations it's uh online you know 30 different online broadcasts it's television that looks production values that looks like it's cnn to really um soviet um stuff which jonathan you'll remember from your time in in russia just really old-fashioned gray gray man and all of this to my eyes when i was there from early 2015 was this is mad, I don't understand what they're doing, but imminent in it, the Mana of all of this was to create this, and this is again where folklore comes in, and particularly in our culture, where they were creating this inner and outer realm.

So we remember from these child stories, you know, the k