The Volya Radio Interview ~ Part One ~ Archetypes

Today, the fabric of every aspect of our lives – our values, our work, our health, whether we believe vaccines work, that Global Warming is happening or that it can be mitigated, even the bond market- is permeated with story-borne artefacts (Disinfolklore) of an attempt to support authoritarian cultures. What I call ‘Disinfolklore’ is being pumped constantly into our inner minds through the Make America Great Again (MAGA), Russian State and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatus that includes X, Telegram, Fox News, TikTok and even, now, the White House press team. Once Disinfolklore has infected our minds with expertly designed and targeted emotionally resonant communicable trolls, we also act as perpetuators of Disinfolklore. We repeat these trolls to others. Often unknowingly, we become Servant Disinfolklorists of the Russian State, MAGA and CCP cultural revolutions. If we are to confront and solve the problems that Disinfolklore and its diabolical siblings - disinformation, misinformation and other forms of propaganda - are causing inside our communities, we must first acknowledge that we are part of the problem…

I work on the intersection of anthropology, archaeology, psychology, and various different other disciplines. All of them inform my work. I worked in Ukraine between 2015 and 2022. For three years of that time I worked on a bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska which divided Russia-occupied Luhansk from government-controlled Ukraine.

It was there I basically experienced what would become what I now understand as being a Disinfolklore Universe, a Disinfolklore Galaxy that Russia created inside Russia-occupied Ukraine. Now I fear, and I see the signs, the indications, that what Russia did there and inside Russia itself is now spreading across the entire world. It’s linking into the MAGA Disinfolklore Galaxy, and to a lesser extent for the time being, the Chinese Communist Party Disinfolklore Galaxy. So I see us being enmeshed in this entire system of basically trolling and trolls of untruth, of Disinfolklore, communicated through stories coming from the White House, coming from all of these voices we see. And that is what motivates my work: to try and help us see this Disinfolklore Universe, these Disinfolklore Galaxies that we are being enmeshed in. Ukraine is central, absolutely central to it, as everyone in this space understands.

Ukraine has been on the avant-garde of this war since 2015. And thankfully, now most people who have power understand this, and it’s a crucial battle space, the information space around Ukraine. And Volya Radio is doing a fantastic job every day, trying to bring to light the stories often containing Disinfolklore. So this afternoon, the UN Commission of Inquiry based in Vienna has issued a report on the human safaris in Kherson that all of us are aware of, which have been going on since July 2024, and it has established that these are crimes against humanity. And part of the indictment of Russia and those participating in the prosecution of these crimes against humanity — interesting to use the word prosecution there — is that the Russian state is sharing these videos of their human safaris, of the 140 people they’ve murdered using first-person-view drones. The Commission of Inquiry determines that because they are first-person-view drones, the operators of these drones are hunting individuals, chasing them and watching as they murder them, and then sharing these on what I call the Disinfolklore apparatus, which is Telegram, X, Facebook, Instagram. And now, sadly, the White House press room. And so these videos themselves are a perfect example of Disinfolklore.

They breach all ethical guidelines, which is the second — I have six criteria to determine whether or not a story constitutes Disinfolklore, the second of which is right or ethical discipline. Obviously, it’s morally wrong to engage in human safaris. There’s no law anywhere which allows this, moral or otherwise. But now we have a determination by a UN commission specifically established by 184 UN member states to inquire into Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine, and it determines that these are crimes against humanity, and there’s no greater crime in the human family than crimes against humanity. And so therefore, the breach of the second element in the Code of Positive Trolls, which I use to determine what is Disinfolklore — how to distinguish between a unit of Disinfolklore and a unit of folklore, or any other kind of story or narrative form — but now we have this determination. So that’s a perfect example of Disinfolklore.

Much of what is on Telegram — and of course Telegram is, in Russian combat propaganda, in Russian military strategy, you have this concept of information confrontation in which the informational units and the environment are engaged in a confrontation — and here we have Telegram specifically established by the Russian state in order to communicate Disinfolklore into the inner minds of humanity. And very successfully doing it. It is acting in concert with its military apparatus in Kherson. So it’s not just killing these people. It is spreading the stories, spreading the images of these people being murdered, as part of its plan to dominate the inner minds of humanity and create terror, not just in the minds of the people of Kherson — and this is not me, this is the inquiry — but inside the minds of humanity as people gradually become aware that this is what’s going on. So that’s a good example of what Disinfolklore is in actuality.

Part of what helped me see this pattern — this is what I really do, I hunt for patterns in data, and I assimilate, as many of us do who participate in X — and X, as we now know from the third report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference by the European Union, which was released — I highly recommend anyone to read it along with the first two reports, which was published a couple of weeks ago — X is where, on a dataset, I think it was over 40,000 FIMI instances, instances of FIMI that were collected by the European Union, X was involved in 86% of them. So this is where we all are. And I know many of us have ethical dilemmas about should we be here, should we not. And most of us are also part of Bluesky and other places. But the fight is here and the examples are here.

Whether it’s — I saw Maid Marian Simonyan tweeting again in her folksy, her folksy Disinfolklore way where she does this a lot, where she tells these stories, as indeed does Donald — they tell these stories of frankly horrifying things. This is going to your question, James, really horrifying things. Like for instance, the way Donald communicated in, I think it was March 2024, that if the head of a major NATO country said to him, “We can’t pay for our NATO membership. Would you protect us?” And he said, “I’d say let them do whatever the hell they want with you.” And then this unit of information was then reported by CNN as a fact that Donald had told this head of state that America wouldn’t protect him. But we’re not clear whether this ever happened, but it was reported as a fact by CNN. And so you see these folksy stories get taken up.

Simonyan tonight, she’s talking about how people in the offices — and these terms really interest me, and they made me — I’ve seen them for years now. And it’s a pattern which is what, along with the horror of what they’re saying, it’s a pattern that made me suspicious something methodical was going on here, which is what I do: use folklore to explain and to interpret. She says, “Oh, people in the offices in Moscow are saying that if Germany gives their weapons to Ukraine, that Ukraine won’t be able to do anything with them without Germany’s help. Therefore, Germany is complicit. And so we’ll have to strike Berlin.” And so this is a classic piece of Disinfolklore. There’s a distancing in the narrative form. It’s presented as a folksy story. “People in the offices of Moscow” — as if she’s just heard this gossip.

And she’s said this before when she spoke at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in June 2022. Many of us will remember this, where she said, “People in Moscow are saying that all our hope is in the famine.” And then she interprets what these folksy people are supposedly saying. And she’s sitting beside the head of state. She’s sitting beside Duncy Putin himself on the dais at St. Petersburg Economic Forum, dressed in green, which is why I call her Maid Marian Simonyan, like a reverse Robin Hood. And this is an aspect of the Disinfolklore analytical method: that we can use these folklore archetypes to interpret those who are themselves using these folksy archetypes, to combat them.

And she said, “The people in Moscow are saying all our hope is in the famine.” And what they mean by that is — this is her saying that she understands what the folk, what the ordinary folk in Moscow are saying — they are saying that there will be famine in Africa and the migrants will come to Europe. And then the European Union will release the sanctions because “it’s impossible for us not to be friends.” So this is the folksy banter, the schoolyard. This is your seven-year-old child speaking to their seven-year-old best friend and they’ve had an argument: “It’s impossible not to be friends.” But this isn’t a micro chat in a schoolyard. It’s a conversation sitting beside the head of state of a country at war, which is planning to famine millions of people in Africa in a madcap attempt which you’d really only see in literature, in Don Quixote or in some folktale. So the madcap plan to win in Ukraine is to starve millions of Africans. That will provoke the Europeans into lifting the sanctions. And then Russia will become friends with Europe and Ukraine will be abandoned. So the way she tells the story — it’s very solid Russian strategy, but it’s told in a folksy way. And it’s absolutely horrifying when you analyse what it’s saying, but it passes most people by.

It enters their inner minds, as indeed does this stuff, archetyping the former president of Russia as drunk. So many of us would have seen many sensible people tweeting today the content of the former president of Russia’s tweet, once again threatening World War Three if something happens. I think it’s related to the Germans. And so these are kind of folktale archetypes, folksy stories, which communicate really horrifying things when you parse the data. And it’s a pattern that they use. And it’s really effective because people like us share these because they provoke something in us, in our emotions. And even if we think we’re harming the former president by characterising them, by archetyping them as drunk, we’re still repeating the meme. And this horrifyingness is slyly communicated and the energy is continued and it’s pinging around the world.

Thankfully, now, today, as many of us will know because we’re tuned into this, we see great advances in our political leadership over what we have experienced since February 2022. But this method of communication has had an impact on President Biden’s policy. “Don’t poke the bear” is a Disinfolklore meme, probably the most successful one ever, that actually impacts on foreign policy. It stopped America properly helping Ukraine. And international relations itself, the entire discourse, is full of these metaphors and Disinfolklore — “don’t poke the bear” being one — but Disinfolklore memes that are represented as being a means of communicating foreign policy and strategy affecting the lives and deaths of millions of people. Whereas in fact, these strategies are only communicated by means of these memes and through these memes. And so what I have spotted, which as far as I’m aware no other writers have really noticed, is this continuity across multiple narrative forms, discourses. It’s obvious in anthropology or in folklore studies or in psychology, in Jungian psychology, when they’re referencing myths and archetypes and storytelling. But the same dynamic is at play inside international relations discourse, inside the speeches — up until recently — of many of our leading politicians. And obviously everything Donald says. He speaks in folklore fluently.

It’s these folksy stories, from the January 6th anthem of the January 6th insurrectionists, organised by the current head of the FBI, the songs which were used in his rallies, the folksy way of speaking about Alphonse Capone, the archetyping of Melania as Al Capone’s wife, using, wearing haute couture clothes made by Ukrainian fashion designers in LA — Dress X — who supply haute couture interpretations of comic book chic, comic book aesthetics for people like Elon Musk and Melania Trump who want to archetype themselves as characters in our info space by referencing through their clothes superheroes or characters from folklore, from folktale, from our contemporary folktale. So that’s kind of a sample of the scale of what I believe I’ve identified with Disinfolklore in this narrative form. But to answer your question, at basic, it’s a narrative form which, as far as I know, I’m the first person to spot.

So I took the idea of archetypes from — I’m a Buddhist — from Tibetan Buddhism, where the entire practice is about embedding archetypes in our minds, and very scary images of the Lord of Death, Yama. And what I noticed in Jung’s work — he says he took the idea of archetypes from St. Augustine. So again, it’s the similar idea of trying to embed these tropes. I use the term — so for me, the fundamental metaphor and archetype is the fundamental unit of information. That’s another term I use: units of information, or meme. So those three for me are synonymous. And I use them interchangeably. So I’m very happy to use the word meme — visual, audible. It’s an informational unit of any size. It could be a whole book or it could be just a flash of a colour in my conception.

And archetypal identities can be attached, in my mind. I suppose, philosophical anthropology for want of a grand term — but we’re among anthropologists here. In my philosophical anthropology, the archetypes can be identified with these memes. And so for Jung, he didn’t have access to the same, for instance, archaeology or linguistics and ancient DNA that we have. So when Jung was writing about Tibetan Buddhism, he wrote the introduction to the second edition of *The Tibetan Book of the Dead*, which was found by Evans-Wentz, who wrote his PhD thesis at Oxford on fairy tales in W.B. Yeats’s work, and who was a follower of Madame Blavatsky, who’s from Dnipro in eastern Ukraine. And Madame Blavatsky created the religion of Theosophy, which fused ancient Egypt and ancient Tibet and made up a lot of stuff. But she would have picked up a lot of the stuff there from Ukraine.

But what we know, but that Carl Jung couldn’t know, is that what he considered to be universal and part of the collective unconscious of humanity — in this way which has received a lot of criticism — actually, all the examples he gives are from Indo-European languages and religions. He did not know this then. He didn’t really understand, and many people still don’t understand, Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, because it was transmitted from the Vedic into the Sanskrit, into the Tibetan, and now it’s coming back preserved in Tibetan, a non-Indo-European language. But basically its content is an Indo-European religion.

So in all of my work, I am only ever talking about archetypes that work on Indo-European-structured minds: the minds of those whose native tongue is an Indo-European language. So that’s the only claim I’m making. I’m not talking about collective unconsciousness of humanity. But what I can say from my own experience of watching and observing and experiencing propaganda from the first moments on that archetypal bridge in eastern Ukraine, where I spent three years in a forest, is that I perceive the world through archetypes. And that when I read information that contains what I call archetypal identities — characters — so Ukraine can be archetyped as a weak woman. Putin does this. He did this when he spoke four days before the full-scale invasion. He said, “Like it or not, take it, my beauty.”

So what he was saying to Ukraine — as international lawyers, I’m also a lawyer by training — they interpreted this. They didn’t use the word archetyping, but they intuitively understood it as archetyping. They said what Putin was doing was representing Ukraine as a corpse. And Putin got this particular phrase, which means a lot to Russians, because it features as song lyrics. So songs are very much part of the beginning of folklore, which led to the foundation of nation states — the first unified German state, the first modern Irish state, the first modern Greek state. These are all the products of purposeful campaigns based around mythology and folklore to establish a unified identity that helped create community that resisted occupation.

When Herder in 1777 launched the German folksong movement and inspired Goethe and the Brothers Grimm — who all of us will remember as children — to collect folktales, and inspired Wagner, and led to the first unified German state ninety years later, they set out purposefully to collect common culture in the form of stories. The same in Ireland. The Irish Cultural Revival — the first president of Ireland was a folklore collector. And he, among others, created this sense, which was true, empirically true, but Irish people didn’t understand it until this thirty-year campaign revived Celtic culture as a distinct culture from the Germanic-English occupier. So Germany under occupation in 1777 by the French — French generals actually living in Goethe’s house in Frankfurt, which I visited — a very different kind of occupation to the one we’re all aware of. Same thing in Greece against the Ottoman Empire.

And what they did was they collected these stories to create a sense of community. And this is what I realised the Russians were doing and what MAGA is doing. So it’s creating these archetypal in-jokes. If you’ve listened — and I’m sure you have, James and Wendy — you’ve listened to any of Donald’s campaign speeches where he’s talking about Hannibal Lecter, again, a fictional character, using an archetypal character in our modern culture that people of a certain age will understand. So people who are today between probably the ages of 50 and 70 will remember Hannibal Lecter as a film character.

And so what Donald is doing is he’s not linking into any archetypes that are embedded in all of humanity, in my humble opinion. He is ripping off the archetypes of which the cognition of a certain subset of Indo-Europeans at a certain moment in a certain culture are aware of — Hannibal Lecter in that case, Alphonse Capone for obvious reasons. The man who was found guilty of 34 felony counts, and of acts tantamount to — well, I won’t mention a horrible word — on E. Jean Carroll.

So Donald is counter-archetyping, which is what I try to do as well when I call him Duncy Putin or Druidy Don. But what I believe they’re trying to do, and successfully doing, and this ties in to my understanding of deep Indo-European religion — the Lord of Death is one of the primordial archetypes inside Indo-European cognition, whether it’s represented as Jesus Christ, or Yama in Hindu religion and Vedic before it and in Buddhism. Odin — Wednesday, Woden’s Day — Odin, Lord of Death. And these are all self-sacrificing first monarchs.

And basically, I think what they’re doing effectively is saying — and this resurrection of Stalin is saying — “I control your death.” This is what Donald is doing with whether it’s vaccines or anti-vaccines, all of these terrible policies that lead to people’s deaths. And the same thing with Putin and Stalin. They’re saying, “We control the time of your death.” And this is a very old, ancient, tried and tested formula for exerting psychological control over people. And I guess this is partly connected also to the drone safaris. Obviously, we see this as a harbinger of what is to come. And they can do this through various means. There’s almost infinite stories that can be used to communicate these fears into people’s inner minds. And that’s what I believe they’re at.

My favourite subject. And it all begins in Kherson and Mykhailivka village in Zaporizhzhis - that zone, whether it’s the UN Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes in Ukraine or the Yamnaya community, who — a relatively small number of individuals — created the language, the linguistic structures, the words we use almost in every sentence, the religions, the solar immanence in many Indo-European religions. I would characterise Christianity as an Indo-European religion, and Buddhism. Created by this community, which just in itself is amazing, absolutely amazing, because most of us grow up with a mental model of Greece, Rome, maybe ancient Egypt before Greece, and then our cultures. And it turns out this is not true.

Greek — well, Italic culture — Italic and Celtic languages, as far as we know, formed inside a mixture of the Yamnaya community from this area in Kherson, Mykolaiv Oblast, right around the river where Russia and Ukraine — this has been an intersection point, an interaction point for millennia. Out of an interaction between migrating Yamnaya from there after 2500 BCE westwards, near Odesa, just east of Odesa, and the community of people there. Linguists and archaeologists have suspected, many of them have suspected this for decades.

And Jung refers — the reason why Jung explains why he believes that these archetypes are part of the collective unconscious of humanity is he just can’t understand how else they could have come from, where else they could have come from. And Jung talks about “the wildest migration theories,” which now we know, since the 2015 ancient DNA revolution as it’s known in the literature, are scientific facts. So the scientific fact of the genetic content of people from India to Ireland, whose genetic ancestry comes from what they call “the steppe” — what I call ancient Ukrainian.

And so for me, a lot of my work is about re-archetyping Ukraine inside the mental models of humanity, because I realised, as many of us did, there was some problem that people had, whether it was the former German policy or the policy of many of our governments. They were all perceiving — and perhaps many of us did this as well before we became aware about Ukraine and its importance, not only in our current moment, but its importance over time — that Russia was managing, by controlling, by monopolising the myth of Russia’s superiority, archetyping Ukraine as “not a real country.” Every time Duncy Putin speaks, he’s re-archetyping Russia as this great power. And many of us and many of our friends perhaps still perceive Russia’s culture as somehow justifying its genocide in Ukraine — Dostoevsky or ballet. And I’m a great fan of those writers because I think they’re very insightful and very helpful to us.

So I realised that basically, from the very beginning of the full-scale invasion, without really understanding it as being archetyping at the time, I realised that my mission was to try and at least campaign for parity of esteem between Ukraine and other modern nation states which have won the monopoly, by fair means or foul. Certain communities of people after World War Two had managed to become UN members, including Ukraine, which was a founding member of the United Nations, signed the UN Charter in 1945.

But then as I dug into it more deeply and followed this path from when I was in eastern Ukraine, I accidentally discovered the Yamnaya when some property developers were destroying this extraordinary structure in a posh suburb of Dnipro. And it made the front page of the New York Times and all of the local people were protesting. And so I went, in my capacity as a monitor, to monitor the security situation — I went there to try and discover what was going on. And what I discovered was these property developers had destroyed a Yamnaya burial mound in which was buried the local monarch and various other people throughout the millennia, including the last person to be buried in there was the head of the collective farm, believe it or not, in like 1932. So, delusions of grandeur there, and continuity.

And underneath this mound, when they destroyed it, was found a stone circle which was created by one of the major ingredient cultures in the Yamnaya. And through that, I began to — from a position of extreme scepticism — accept that we could trace the linguistic journey of certain people carrying not just a language, not just the words, the vocabulary, the sounds and meanings which we use today. There’s about a thousand sounds and meanings in what we call Proto-Indo-European, or what I call ancient Ukrainian, which is the language spoken by the Yamnaya between 4100 BCE and 2500 BCE. And I recognise I’m throwing out these dates. For me, it’s really charted territory; for most people, our history kind of begins maybe around 1000 BCE with the first King David in the Bible or whatever.

But again, what I’m trying to do, and part of my mission, is to re-archetype our mental models — our idea of not just Ukraine and humanity, our human history and our European history and Ukrainians’ position in it — but to create these new structures and these frameworks. Because that’s what Disinfolklore and disinformation does. It creates frameworks, untruthful frameworks, in our minds. People inside MAGA, in the MAGA Disinfolklore Galaxy, they have all these in-jokes. They know all about these different things which you and I wouldn’t know about. And this is how it works, as I understand. This is how Russian disinformation is so successful. Because it’s not a question of people’s intelligence or their education or anything like that. It’s about how people’s minds are changed.

So I’m quite upfront about this when I outline these histories and all of this stuff. The ancient DNA studies are published in *Nature* and *Science*, the preeminent scientific journals that stay away from anything that’s in any way unkosher or not backed up. Feel free to follow up on anything to do with the Indo-European thing, because it’s key to my mission to re-archetype the idea of Ukraine in people’s minds, but also it’s the key to understanding how archetyping works, I believe, in our minds, in Indo-European minds.

Yes, the bat. We all remember those pictures of Druidy Don — I called him Druidy Don because he’s kind of truthy, Druidy, as in the class of intellectuals in ancient Celtic society. So I call — Don is the Lord of Death in ancient Celtic culture who, according to Irish mythology, which was first written down around 1100 AD in the Common Era, but through the language dates from earlier, is about the Indo-European invasions of the island of Ireland. And Ireland’s pre-Christian Lord of Death was Don. And obviously you have the Dnieper River, you have the Don River, the Dniester — I think it’s Lower Don from the perspective if you’re looking at them from Crimea — and then you’ve got the Danube. So you’ve got these DN sounds associated with rivers, which were the embodiments of deities.

And Druidy Donald — you’ve got Donald and Druidy Don. So you see Druidy Don and Batman and Robin basically archetyping themselves as Batman and Robin, Elon in the White House dressed in black. So using again comic book haute couture, darkness. These are very — like, once you get your eye into what they’re doing and how they are archetyping, it seems quite clumsy sometimes, but it works quite well at the subconscious level, as of course Jung knew. And they clearly know what they’re doing because it’s not an accident that Melania was dressed by Dress X, two Ukrainian fashion designers from LA who tapped into this market. It’s not an accident that Donald was talking about Alphonse Capone just the other day again. But he did it at every one of his campaigns. So they very much know what they’re doing. They know it works in the moment. And they’re tapping into these archetypes.

Yes, the owls. I’m always impressed with General — I can’t remember his exact title — but General Budanov’s owl behind him. And I link that to Sumerian imagery and archetyping, where the owl — Lilith, I think. And we have many images across pre-Indo-European civilisation of owls. So they’re extremely adept at generating archetypes and at working on that plane.

And long before I worked out my portmanteau, Disinfolklore, when I look back at my writing since the war and even before the war — but my public writing has only, like Ukraine, only been since the full-scale invasion, because I worked as a diplomat and I couldn’t write about Ukraine when I was working there.

But President Zelensky — obviously, as I wrote this piece at the end of March 2022, “Let’s Compare Trolls,” where I set — Duncy Putin, as I call him now, and he’s Duncy because he’s like a folklore idiot. He’s the idiot. He’s the town fool. He’s like Raskolnikov in *Crime and Punishment*, kills two women to see if he can get away with it. And then it’s just the stupidest thing ever. He’s been tortured by it.

And this is Duncy Putin, the master strategist, who just wakes up each day — we see this archetypal character. Istanbul Peace Talks. They’re really pushing this. They’ve been pushing this. I spotted its emergence in mid-March 2022 — Istanbul Peace Talks — in an article in the *Financial Times*. And for people who are really tuned in to what had been going on in Ukraine as I was since 2014, even what was reported then in mid-March 2022 in the *Financial Times* — that Ukraine would capitulate — it was just so, not only even apart from the fact that most of us, or some of us, could already see that Russia’s invasion was a disaster within the first week of it. I’m on record as saying on the 1st of March 2022, “Russia has done a reverse Napoleon,” because I saw the communication and logistics difficulties it was having with that massive convoy, and the Russian units were complaining that they couldn’t connect with each other. So I likened it to doing the opposite of what Napoleon had done. Napoleon obviously invaded Russia, and here was Russia invading Ukraine. But it’s a reverse Napoleon in the sense that it shared the problem of having the logistics.

And all Ukraine had to do, which is what it’s doing on the longue durée, all it just has to do is keep drawing them in and letting them waste their logistics, waste their resources, which is exactly what the mythology embedded in *War and Peace* tells us of Marshal Kutuzov, the famous Russian general who resisted all attempts to make battle against Napoleon, kept on withdrawing, and everyone — the Tsar and everyone — said, “Come on, you must face them.” And he basically tried his best to avoid battle, and then the winter came.

And so President Zelensky is a master archetyper. I actually found footage of him archetyping himself as Napoleon in one of his programmes long before the war, which is wonderful. He’s just got this massive hat on. And so I juxtapose that with that great meme some of us will remember, when President Macron finally came to his senses. It was President Macron’s idea of Ukraine as this little brother of Russia, Germany’s idea of Ukraine as — well, actually, our debt, we owe our debt to Russia, not to Ukraine, for killing, what was it, eight million Ukrainians. But when I saw President Macron make that speech — well, he first did it in an interview in mid-February 2024, where he basically went all in, and then he made that amazing speech — and then the Macronian memes came out with a Napoleon hat.

So you asked the question: what do I think about the owls and the Batman and the bats in the FSB? Yeah, Ukraine is working on that plane and it is blessed to have President Zelensky, who operates — it was his job. He didn’t just — it’s like second nature to him. He operates on this symbolic plane in such a successful way. He and his writer, his wife who’s a writer, and his friends from Kryvyi Rih, which is a city I know really well. I actually used to visit the apartment block he grew up in quite a lot because there was a CSO, a civil society organisation, I did a lot of work with in Kryvyi Rih. And so I really understand this in a deep sense, where he comes from.

And when you hear MAGA people talk about Zelensky, or if I’m in England and in the shires and people are saying to me, “What do you think about Zelensky?” — I know that they’re talking about a character they read about in the newspaper who has been relentlessly archetyped as somehow unconnected to the, what was it, 64% of the people who elected him directly. More — a bigger mandate than probably any democratically elected leader in a free and fair election in world history. It’s literally at that scale. And now, thankfully, we see him — he’s up to, what, 72% or whatever in those polls.

So there is this war, and this is actually where I’m operating on this level, and all of us are, unknowingly. But this is where the war will be won and lost. And General Budanov and President Zelensky get this and have from the very beginning. It is a war of symbols. If Ukraine can archetype itself as a winner, it will get the means it needs to succeed. If Russia manages to archetype Ukraine as part of Russia, as a loser, then no one will help Ukraine. And that is the level at which the war — so we have these two battlefronts. We have the kinetic battlespace where Ukraine is doing extremely well. And then we have this war of symbols.

And you ask, what can we do about it? So what Volya Radio does, what Mockers does, and Yeni and Joanna — I see you all there — what you do every day at Kurdistan, what Wills at Kurdistan does, and these stories that Mockers tells from Chris Owicki and these people — because the archetype of Russia is this great culture, which many of us were embedded in. And I know I’ve had this conversation a lot with Ming as well. He, like me, has read a lot of great Russian literature. And we’ve fallen for that trail. We’ve imbibed it. And we’ve been drunk on its beauty and the amazingness of it. But then when you pull the — when the stage, when you realise that actually it’s just a stage play — the Potemkin metaphor is just so beautiful, so wonderful.

Because what you’re doing is de-archetyping Russia as this great culture. And Natalia Ukrainka’s work does this really well. So that’s really important work and we need to continue doing this and getting it into people’s minds. I mean, whenever — I obviously can’t really talk about many of the things I hear from, say, Mockers or from Chris Owicki or whatever in normal, polite society, because people literally won’t believe it. And yet, all of us have this kind of understanding of the absurdism, the lack of toilets, just the mad stuff they come up with to get people to sign a contract, which doesn’t mean anything, because you can’t coerce someone into signing a contract. It’s like what you do. Again, it goes back to Duncy Putin. It’s one of the first things you learn in contract law: if there’s coercion. And yet every day we’re reading about these crazy folktale-like tricks of getting people to sign the contract, torturing them. And then suddenly they sign the contract and they can be magically sent back to the front line where they’re killed within 24 hours. And it’s absolutely insane stuff. It’s no way to run an empire covering one-sixth of the world’s surface. It’s comical. It’s absurd. It’s extraordinary stuff.

But they used to have this programme in England called *Eurotrash*, where they basically — it seemed to be based on bizarre things that happened in Japan in the 1980s. We need to continue doing that about Russia. Because — and this is the great work — say that we see people trying to explain to Donald that Russia’s economy is tiny. It’s the size of Chile’s. This is not — if you’re going to sacrifice America to something, don’t sacrifice it to Russia. This is just rubbish on every level. And obviously all of our countries can be archetyped as rubbish, but we’re not committing genocide and doing these horrific crimes.

So that’s what we can do. But the War of Symbols: General Budanov and President Zelensky and many of the people around them are operating on that level. And it’s beautiful to watch. And it’s part of the evidence that I parse to work out what’s going on. And I do have these twelve tools which I use and which I’m proselytising that we should be able to use in our ordinary conversations and ordinary daily lives to help us see through this and get the lenses of what I call the lenses of Disinfolklore.

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