Episode Details

I first noticed the Disinfolklore Universe now spreading through our neural networks, like triffids rewilding the garden of Eden, when it was in a more primitive form. In 2016, I was a diplomat posted to eastern Ukraine. Russia’s army, cosplaying as Little Green Men, Polite Folk and Odin-worshipping soldiers from the Nazi inspired “Wagner” corps, had occupied part of Ukraine in 2014. My job was to establish the facts in relation to security incidents related to Russia’s Disinfolklore-justified military occupation of part of Ukraine.

One Saturday, my manager phoned me from inside the Russia-occupied and Russia-designated “Luhansk Folk’s Republic” (LFR). According to him, a “doctor” in LFR had walked into the MGB (Russian occupiers’ “internal security service” – so-named to conjure up the folk memory of the Stalin-era forerunner of the KGB: MGB). The Walk-In said his “common law wife and her underage daughter,” located in the non-Russia-occupied part of Luhansk province (where I was that day), were about to be “cut into pieces” by a Ukrainian “Nazi.” He tasked me with checking on the two damsels in distress.

Something, intuitively, sounded artificial about the linguistic formula “common law wife and her underage daughter.” Working in that Steppe-land Locus Amœnus, I had already realised that I perceived part of reality through cognitive lenses (archetypes) that had entered my mind as a small child from folktale-inspired stories. Here, Russian Disinfolklorists were leaning into this aspect of Indo-Europeans’ cognition and riffing off what Karl Jung suggested are the primordial archetypal identities of the Mother and the Maiden. The perfectly pitched troll for a specific emotional reaction in protective males who would undergo any ordeal to rescue from an ogre such damsels in distress stirred my suspicion; triggering what I now call my “Incoming Troll Radar.” This book is to help you learn the tools I use as a professional Disinfolklore identifier and interpreter. So that you learn to counteract the Disinfolklore Universe descending upon humanity, like a curse. Honing our Incoming Troll Radars to identify trolls which have the potential to affect us in manipulative ways before we allow these trolls into our Inner Minds is the first tool in our Archetypal Disinfolklore arsenal.

Tool 1 - Incoming Troll Radar

So let’s call our Incoming Troll Radar “Tool 1”! Later we’ll learn of what our Incoming and Outgoing Troll Radars consist – their elements - and how they work (clue: it’s all about the Code of Positive Trolls - Tool 4 in any aspiring Counter Disinfolklorist’s tool box). By the end of this book, you’ll be a fluent Counter Disinfolklorist, like me. So expect a bit of repetition which is a feature in Disin/folklore, and any good teaching material.

The “cut into pieces” aspect of the threat facing the two damsels in distress also seemed off. Such primeval savagery outside Russia-occupied Ukraine only existed inside story-borne artefacts of Russia’s Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatus (which it was, in the manner of a nineteenth century Antiquarian folk-tale collector, my job to gather together, analyse and parse into patterns that helped us understand the security threats facing us on the front-line). Later I discovered the primordial foundation myths in several Indo-European cultural traditions involved universes being created out of bodies cut into pieces. It is not clear if the Russian manufacturers of Disinfolklore items like this tale about the Mother and the Maiden are consciously reaching back into millennia of Indo-European tropes and trolls, or if, as is much more likely, they’re just following instructions in their Combat Propaganda - the name Russians give for what I call Disinfolklore – manuals.

Tool 2 – Our “Look for the Mana in the Meme!” mantra

In Archetypal Disinfolklore, we don’t care too much about the intention (mens rea) of the purveyors of Disinfolklore, we focus main