Podcast | Plagued by Information Bombs and Actor Sovereigns’ Costumes

I thought we’d start off with a bit of plague. That’s a joke. We’re actually going to start with a bit of Disinfolklore about a plague. A non-existent plague, in my humble opinion. We’re going to look at the plague story as a story, as an item of Disinfolklore, which is what all this is about.

A story, not a pathogen

It’s been a very busy week.

In the first week of October a story went around the world. A laboratory in Siberia. A worker taken ill. A test tube, perhaps. Very graphic. All of us can remember test tubes from school. I’d be surprised if they even use test tubes these days.

Pneumonia, as someone quipped. Let’s just hope Donald doesn’t work out there’s a P in pneumonia. We’ll never hear the end of it. That’s a play on his Democrats thing, and the B at the end of dumb. If he finds out there’s a P at the beginning of pneumonia, perhaps plague, he will never stop plaguing us with his pneumonic plays on words.

Two hundred people under observation. A hospital closed. All units of Disinfolklore. Then a denial, another unit of Disinfolklore. Then a second case, reported. Another unit of Disinfolklore. Then a cover-up, alleged. Another unit of Disinfolklore.

Then all the anti-vaxxers, who suddenly seem to care. They didn’t care about Covid. In fact they thought Covid was a conspiracy. Now they are tweeting like crazy about a plague. A non-existent plague, that is.

Within three days the President of the United States had offered russia help. I predicted that a couple of days before it happened. Structurally, this struck me as an alibi. russia built it to provoke exactly this kind of reaction from friendly countries. He said he’d call Putler about it.

So this episode is not really about bacteria. I don’t do epidemiology here. I don’t do fact-checking. That’s not what Disinfolklore is about.

Look at the wording of the people whose job is to be careful. The State Department is “monitoring the situation”. The CDC is monitoring “reports”. The World Health Organisation is following up on “the reported death”, and asking for clarity on “media reports” of a second case.

Appeal for volunteers!

The main reviewer of a submitted draft journal article I have co-authored requested that I find human coders to see if the findings of archetypes in stories can be replicated.

If you’re willing to help on this please send me an email (dutiful-raffles0r@icloud.com), message, dm me on X, or comment here and I’ll send you a link. Above is a screenshot of the web app I’ve created for this purpose.

It’s quite a simple task: the App (see screenshot above) shows you items of Disinfolklore from Russia-occupied Ukraine.

Then it asks if you see any specific archetypes in the short story extracts. If you don’t see any, you just tick ‘None!” And whichever you see you just tick them. Will take about two hours and then you save it/download it.

It would mean a lot to me and my co-author as this is the last remaining issue to address with the paper on Disinfolklore!

All anyone outside has is reports.

Yet my timeline is full of doctors opining on every dimension of this as if it were real. People are expressing concern for the non-existent dead lab technician. They argue over whether she was eighteen or twenty-three. Pictures are sent around. The people who don’t believe the story do the same thing, sending round pictures of this very russian-looking person in Siberia.

But all anyone outside has is reports. Those of us who have spent the last three or four years in the Ukrainian information space have been through cycles like this many times. The scale of this troll is pretty big.

So the unit of analysis here is the story. It’s one piece of Disinfolklore, with many dimensions to it. Disinfolklore is folklore’s counterfeit. It takes the storyteller’s tools and uses them to put a meaning in our minds.

This episode asks how this one was detonated, what it is for, and why so many clever, educated, well-meaning people carried it for nothing. They’re not even being paid for it.

Three readings

I posted three readings of this story as it broke. Here they are as I wrote them.

The first, on the sixth of October: “Plague: What an information bomb! All those peeps who believe Covid wasn’t real falling for this troll.”

The second: “Russian Plague: Why this information warfare bomb now? The plague is not real. This is an example of Combat Propaganda. Russia wants back into the family of civilised nations: its message is: You need Russia. Cooperate. We must be friends. Look: if you’re friends then you can get information on the plague.” And maybe build a golf course and a Trump Tower in Siberia on the side.

And it goes on. The second main goal is to associate russia with plague in our minds.

For those of us who listen to all the russian Disinfolklore in the Ukraine information space, that association is easy. But the rest of the world needs to be convinced, constantly, that russia is the bear they should not poke. So this is a version of the Nuclear Apocalypse troll, which no longer works.

That is according to Gideon Rachman, who wrote in the FT this week. He wrote that russia’s nuclear apocalypse threats don’t seem to work any more. However, this is not a good thing, was perhaps his line. The bottom line is that the Nuclear Apocalypse troll no longer seems to work.

A secondary objective is to confirm for the security elite which runs russia how dumb the rest of the world is. “Even governments which know this is a troll must play along with it as it’s too hard/impossible to explain to their citizens that this Disinfolklore Galaxy wrought of the plague troll is NOT real.”

These are just my hypotheses about why on Earth russia might do this. I don’t know why. There are probably a hundred different reasons. But they’re certainly going with it. It’s playing out the way these things always play out, only on a global scale.

The third piece I wrote: “Plague: Ruschist Biolab troll. Distract from whatever else is going on: Look at us! Feel sorry for us! Help us! … Look away from Ukraine! Neatness of the tale is its tell.”

And at its end: “We fall for the troll and perpetuate it. We will believe opposites. … ‘Surrender to us or die’ is Ruschia’s perennial message.”

Three readings, one claim. The thing to analyse is the information bomb. It works whatever lies beneath it. That is what the rest of this piece shows.

The three laws

A hundred and fifty years ago the anthropologists Edward Tylor and James Frazer named the Laws of Sympathetic Magic. I did a five-episode series on the laws of sympathetic magic almost a year ago now.

Four decades of laboratory work by the psychologists Paul Rozin and Carol Nemeroff showed that educated, scientifically literate adults reason by these laws every day. Offer people a sweater and they will wear it. Tell them it once belonged to Hitler, laundered and sterilised, and most refuse.

“Once in contact, always in contact.” That’s one of the laws of sympathetic magic, the Law of Contagion. Things once in contact go on affecting each other, at any distance, forever. Think of the great love of your life. Your lost love.

Contagion is analogous to my word Mana. Mana is an energy passing between us. It passes in conversation, when we’re with people, and when we read their words on the page. Mana is my word for that energy. The scientists call it the Law of Contagion.

Then the Law of Similarity. The image equals the object. Like produces like. A thing that looks like another thing is felt to be it.

So people constantly mistake the Photoshopped images for the real thing. Donald. Putler on his horse with his bare chest, rather than a scared old man in the basement. I’m not quite sure how to describe Donald.

So this story feels a bit like Covid. My timeline filled with experts asking whether anyone else was reminded of February 2022, or 2020.

The third is the Law of Opposites. Reverse a sign and it carries its inverse charge, its Mana, its energy, through the same channel.

These laws don’t care whether a story is true. They work on the shape of a story. That is why an information bomb can be built out of reports alone.

Plague, the bear and the honey-knower

Say the word plague. What comes is not a bacterium. It is the Black Death. The cart, the pit, the end of the world. The word carries the charge of six centuries of European memory.

My own Cambridge college, Trinity Hall, was founded in 1350 to train lawyers. Most of the lawyers had died in the Black Death.

This is the same operation as “Don’t poke the bear“. The same operation as “We are going to nuke you if you don’t let us have our way”.

The old Slavic word for the bear was so feared that speakers stopped saying it. Instead they said medved’, the honey-knower. The real name was lost. The name was in contact with the thing, so the name was dangerous.

It’s a huge irony. Or rather it’s not irony, it’s harmony. One of the great war criminals of our age is named Medvedev, and another is Medvedchuk. Honey, both of them.

Medvedchuk was the Ukrainian member of parliament who first voiced the Ukraine biolabs troll in the Verkhovna Rada, on behalf of his masters in Moscow. And Medvedev, this week again, was threatening nuclear end days, nuclear holocaust, on everyone.

Medved’ means honey lover. So, bear. They are the epitome of “Don’t poke the bear”, and they do what they say they do. The name was in contact with the thing. Medved’, for honey, was in contact with the bear. So the name was dangerous.

Now put the word plague beside russia in every headline on Earth for a week. Everyone is going to Google it, and they will see the plague and russia.

Those of us fortunate enough to come from normal countries, or at least countries which are normal in our lifetime, will find this very odd. Most people live in the normal world. They aren’t in the Ukrainian information space. They haven’t learned what most of us have learned these past three or four years about russia, and about how the Law of Opposites works.

russia does things you would think nobody would go for. And yet somehow people, even people we know, seem to believe what they’re saying is true. Even though it’s the opposite. The russians are the Nazis, not the Ukrainians.

Sympathetic magic works on all of us

We see the Law of Opposites in action the whole time. In fact it is what first sent me to the books and the scholarship. Eventually I found this area of cultural psychology, the work on the laws of sympathetic magic by Paul Rozin, at Penn, and Carol Nemeroff.

They took the findings of the nineteenth century, of the people who had gone to Polynesia and discovered the word Mana there. That is a coincidence with the term I use. I don’t get my term Mana from the Polynesian use of it.

Those nineteenth-century scholars found all of these aspects of what they thought were primitive humans and human culture. The brilliance of Nemeroff and Rozin’s work is that they discovered, as I did intuitively, that the laws of sympathetic magic operate on all of us, all the time. Not just on so-called primitive people.

As far as I know, I’m the first person to apply the laws of sympathetic magic to information warfare. They really help explain how millions of highly educated people became convinced that the vaccine was causing the harm, not Covid.

We knew Covid. We knew the superantigen-like insert. We knew its furin cleavage site. We knew its mechanisms. We saw those hospital beds in Bologna. Some of us had people in our lives who suffered terribly from it, and suffer still.

Don’t get lost in the woods

This week I’ve been trying to tweet my truth out about this. I look at this story as a story. I don’t engage with the characters in it, or the denials, or the worries.

This is the same method as Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut. Don’t get lost in the woods, because that’s what it’s trying to do. It’ll suck you in.

Before you know it, you’re arguing over whether there was a second death. You’re earnestly discussing biosafety standards in russia. Surely, surely, in a biosafety laboratory they wouldn’t do this, and all of that malarkey. Before you know it, spreading the contagion is part of what you’re doing.

Obviously I am spreading the contagion too, by posting my pieces. I’m doing what little I can to bring attention to my perspective, which is that this is a story.

It’s a piece of Disinfolklore. It’s like a tale you heard from your grandmother. It’s not something to think of as real, with real consequences.

Even if you don’t believe that at first, I’m inviting you to think of it that way. Then when you read these units of news, you’ll have two perspectives on them.

One is the normal perspective. Oh gosh, I hope I don’t get the plague. Maybe I should wear a mask. Maybe I should cancel that winter holiday in Siberia. That kind of stuff.

The other sits inside brackets. Well, maybe this is just a story. Maybe it’s just an item of Disinfolklore. Maybe it’s just being published by the russians for some crazy reason.

I don’t understand why. I can postulate. There are probably thousands of reasons they came up with it. But it’s perfectly designed. So maybe it is just a story, and I’ll consider it as a story in the information space rather than something real.

So russia and the plague, once in contact, stay in contact. That’s the second main goal I named: to associate russia with plague in our minds.

Why would a state want that? Because it is the Nuclear Apocalypse troll, the end days, in a new coat. For years the meaning russia implanted was simple. Push us and the world ends.

Kursk, in August 2024, buried that troll on the fields where Ukraine crossed the line that was not supposed to be crossable. I saw reports this week, unconfirmed, that Ukraine had crossed into Kursk again. So, you know, the world hasn’t ended yet.

A troll that no longer frightens

A troll that no longer frightens has to be replaced. A plague does the same work. It says russia is the place the end of days comes from. Surrender or end days.

I’m not saying that piece in the FT two days ago was caused by this. But that piece by that FT journalist is a symptom. He’s really a follower. He picked it up from the ether. Finally, the stuff we’ve been watching in the Ukraine information space has reached the mainstream. All those threats against all of our countries. And this Gideon Rachman is writing about it.

So he is an indicator of an idea going round the houses. Normal people don’t spend all day talking about Ukraine, or thinking about Ukraine. They don’t watch Julia what’s-her-face and the rest on Solovyov, with russia threatening Britain, threatening Ireland, threatening America, threatening everyone with nuclear annihilation. Yet even a normal person has managed to pick this up.

The contagion runs the other way too. “Is anyone else having a January 2020 flashback right now?” wrote one account, under a CBS headline. A doctor’s post with fifty thousand views opened, “COVID-19 changed the world.” Another quoted a news site: “observers note resemblances to the conditions that some theorized preceded the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Covid is the strongest contagion source our generation has. It’s the archetype. It’s archetypal. russia knows that. It’s a trauma in russia’s psyche as well. Those of us who remember watching russia at the long table know it.

Archetypal literacy

So that is the archetype being provoked in our minds.

Again, the Disinfolklore analytical method. The first of the twelve tools is archetypal literacy. End days and plague are archetypes like this.

russia itself is an archetype. For those of us who have watched it so closely, it is a very complicated one. But Covid is a shared archetype, in most of our minds. With archetypal Disinfolklore literacy we can be alert to these when we see them.

Genuine Infolklore has archetypes going too. Spotting an archetype doesn’t mean what you see is Disinfolklore. It doesn’t mean it was planned. Nor were all the effects of the troll that do play out planned by those who began it.

Perhaps they weren’t that ambitious. Maybe it was a local thing, or a regional thing. Then other people jump on the bandwagon, like all those anti-vax people who suddenly really care about stuff. What’s his name? That guy, the InfoWars guy. He’s doing all-night podcasts on it. And I think he thought Covid was one huge conspiracy.

All of this was predictable, and I predicted it the moment I heard the story, though it took me a few days to think it through. Touch a new story to Covid, and the story takes on a new charge before a single fact is known.

Similarity: the neat tale

Neatness of the tale is its tell.

Look at its parts. A laboratory. An accident. A “pneumonia of unknown origin”. A quarantine. A denial. A cover-up, alleged. Each piece matches a piece of the Wuhan story we all carry.

The mind does not check a story like this. It recognises it. It’s full of archetypes that we recognise. The image equals the object. If it looks like the start of a pandemic, it is felt to be the start of a pandemic.

That is why the professionals reached for it so fast. One commentator noted the place was a weapons-lineage lab with the security service involved.

That was one of my hypotheses. russia wants to remind us that it has biolabs, that it is working on biological weapons.

Some of us have forgotten Salisbury and Novichok. We have forgotten all those grim, archetypally rich ways of imposing death on people. They became archetypal Disinfolklore in our information space, associated with russia. They pass the message: don’t mess with russia, don’t mess with russia, we will do these terrible things to you. This story reminds us.

So how do you get that into people’s minds? You invent a tale. You issue photographs of a russian settler, occupying the lands of the Yakuts in Siberia. Then doctors and clinicians in Virginia or California think, oh God, that could have been me.

And you’re like, no, it couldn’t be you. You don’t work in a mad country where they make biological weapons, probably without precautions. A country that would then exploit your death, if you even existed. You’re not the same. It’s not the same culture. But things that look alike sound alike.

So she’s called a scientist. Some people say she’s eighteen, some twenty-three. One picture of her like this, another like that. Is it AI? All of these questions are another sign of how this information bomb is released and communicated.

Another tweet found that a pandemic exercise had been run there years earlier, and wrote, “It’s weird how they run exercises before these outbreaks.” Every detail was read as a resemblance to something already feared. Nobody asked what the resemblance was for.

There is a person at the centre of it. A photograph went round of the young woman the reports name. Strangers grieved her. Others answered that she had probably worked on biological weapons and did not deserve their grief. Both camps were arguing about a character in a story.

That is the Law of Similarity at its sharpest. The photograph becomes the emblem of the tale, and the tale wears a real face.

Whatever happened in that laboratory, if it exists, the woman in the photograph has been drafted into a story she did not write. If she exists. She is made to carry its charge for millions of people who will never know anything else about her. They will forget this whole thing in a month or two, without ever knowing whether there was any truth in it.

Opposites: we will believe opposites

The third law of sympathetic magic.

“Is it? | is it not?” I wrote. “Ruschia needs just to win news cycles.” Like Donald. It’s just to win the news cycle. They know that three days later the people writing the news won’t remember. None of us will remember, because more abominable things will have happened two days later.

So it doesn’t matter what you win today’s news cycle with. It’s counterintuitive, but we will believe opposites. We will believe it’s the vaccine causing the harm, not the virus, whatever the scientific evidence, whatever the empirical evidence, whatever we see with our own eyes.

Watch the story feed on its own contradictions. Local reports said a test tube broke. The national health agency said “pneumonia of unknown etiology”, and no organism linked to her work. The head of a neighbouring republic said possibly plague. russia told the World Health Organisation no case of plague had been registered. Then came a second case, reported. Then “Russia accused of covering up plague outbreak.”

Each denial fed the story as well as each admission did. If the hospital was closed, that proved danger. If it was opened, that proved a cover-up.

A Harvard public health professor told CNN the response was “disproportionate to what would happen if a lab worker was exposed to plague. That’s the tell.” A sharp observation. But once again the story’s own features were read as evidence about a pathogen. They are evidence about a story, a piece of Disinfolklore.

This is the device I called the legitimacy gap in my episodes on the laws of sympathetic magic. The British Empire’s formula for Tibet, “Chinese suzerainty, Tibetan autonomy”, was built to mean neither and to be used both ways.

The plague story has two official positions, plague and not plague. Neither affirmed, both in use. We will believe opposites. That is the Law of Opposites.

Coercive power moves through the gap. Accountability needs to know which position the actor holds, and the gap exists so that nobody can.

The category error

So why do clever people, like us, fall for it?

I wrote in 2022 that we often make a category error when we see disinformation as merely words. The doctor, the epidemiologist and the news editor are trained to ask one question of a report. Is it true?

That’s the right question for a medical bulletin. It’s the wrong question for an information bomb, and for Disinfolklore. The bomb is built to make you check it. While you are checking, it does its work.

An epidemiologist posted, “I’m an epidemiologist. It’s time to be scared now.” She was not wrong to care. She was answering a story with the tools of her field. Her field has no box for Disinfolklore. It has no box for a story that exists to be answered. This story pulls her in as one of its communicators, one of its contagion-passers, by its very nature.

In an episode I’m going to do very soon, on Putler and his Valdai evening, this figure has a name. The earnest researcher goes into the woods to check the arch Disinfolklorist on the record, and comes out hypnotised.

Some of you might remember that early in the war I realised what was going on with Scholz, and even Macron, with Putler along the long desk. They were being hypnotised by absolute nonsense. By balderdash. Three hours of nonsense about dates and this grievance and that. You are left completely disorientated, and ready to accept any troll injected into your mind. This is what’s going on with this information bomb.

None of this is a fault in any of our characters. Especially not in all the medics who have popped up on our timelines. These are careful people doing careful work. They had no reason to look for this pattern, because their training has no word for it.

Disinfolklore is that word.

Then there’s the other half of the audience. “All those peeps who believe Covid wasn’t real falling for this troll.”

The people who spent four years telling us a real pandemic was a hoax met this story and believed every word. One said Covid was “a completely fabricated narrative”. In the same breath he took the plague story as fact, and used it to prove Covid was a lie. A famous broadcaster went live with “Russia Braces For Lab Leak Catastrophe”, to nearly half a million views.

We will believe opposites. Sceptic and believer alike end up carrying the same story. Both point at russia as the place where the world’s fate is decided.

Why now

Put the week back around the story.

On the first, second and third of October, for the first time in this war, russia struck the bridges of Kyiv over the Dnipro. Six strikes in three days. Three of the city’s six road bridges closed, in full or in part.

On the fifth and sixth of October, two merchant ships were sunk and a third set ablaze in the Black Sea economic zones of Romania and Bulgaria. Both are NATO members. At least two seafarers were killed. One ship was carrying Ukrainian corn.

On the sixth of October russian drones hit a hospital in central Kryvyi Rih. Thirteen people were killed and more than a hundred injured across Ukraine that day.

On the front, russia was losing ground. Ukraine’s Operation Vivaldi in the Lyman direction retook villages and took more than two hundred and fifty prisoners. It broke the northern jaw of the pincer russia had planned around the fortress cities of Donetsk oblast.

That is the week. The story the world talked about was a laboratory in Siberia. “Look at us! Feel sorry for us! Help us! … Look away from Ukraine!”

The alibi

Here is one of the parts that matters a lot.

On the first of October, at the Valdai Club, Putler said russia had tried to enter “the family of civilised peoples”, as he put it, and had been pushed out. Five days later the plague story offered a way back in. Cooperate. We must be friends.

Putler was, after all, the very first foreign leader to offer help to GWB after the Twin Towers fell. If you are friends, you can have all of the information.

The President of the United States took the offer. He said the United States was ready to help russia. He said he would call Putler about the plague. “I am. The pneumonia plague, if you call it. That’s a disease.”

A week in which russia sank ships off NATO coasts and bombed a hospital became, in the White House, another Disinfolklore meme. It became a week to model cooperation with Moscow over a germ.

That is what the information bomb buys. Not belief in plague. An alibi. A humane reason, which no reasonable citizen could object to, for a leader to sit at the table with the man bombing Kyiv’s bridges.

Every government that knows better must play along with this troll. It cannot tell its citizens what I’m telling you right now. The thing everyone is talking about is nonsense. It is a story built to be talked about. That’s the truth.

As you know, I worked as a ceasefire monitor in occupied Luhansk from 2015 to 2018. I saw this structure there every week. It ran from the small scale up to the macro scale, in a hundred local stories.

One of those stories led me to discover the Disinfolklore analytical method, and indeed the Disinfolklore narrative form. I maintain this is a narrative form. Once you know it you can see it in new data, and that is my case about this information bomb.

A shelling blamed on the other side. A disease rumour. A martyr with a face. Each was built to make the outside world argue about details while the real thing went on.

The plague story is the same structure. It’s only the biggest one yet.

How to hear the next one

So when the next one comes, ask different questions.

Not, is it true? Ask what it touches. Contagion. What does it look like? Similarity. What happens when it is denied? Opposites. Who gets to sit at a table because of it? And what has been happening in Ukraine this week?

russia creates content. Then through the firehose of falsehood it disguises its trolls in a million different Disinfolklore threads. We fall for the troll and perpetuate it. We need not do so.

“Surrender to us or die” is Ruschia’s perennial message. That Mana, that energy, is the contagion inside information bombs like this week’s.

What is at stake is whether we get wrapped up in what I called, in my Munich speech in February 2025, the Disinfolklore Galaxy. A Disinfolklore universe. The plague is just one more costume for this.

That’s all I have to say about that story. I’m aware that I don’t want to perpetuate it. But I do think I have one perspective worth bearing in mind.

Moscow, not Valdai

I’ll come back to the principles of Infolklore, and to Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut, in future weeks. But I’ve spent a lot of the past couple of weeks on Putler’s speech at Valdai.

On the first of October, in Moscow, a discussion club named after a lake it does not meet by received the President of the Ruschist Federation. He spoke for three and a half hours. The Kremlin published the transcript. It runs to 486 paragraphs and 20,716 words.

That transcript is one piece of Disinfolklore. One unit. One meme, twenty thousand words long.

Disinfolklore, as we know, is folklore’s counterfeit. It takes the storyteller’s tools and uses them to plant an enemy, a grievance and a lost land in our minds. It is a narrative voice. It is a way of injecting ideas into people’s heads. The Valdai evening is that voice at full length.

This is what the twelve tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method found in it. It’s not what russia experts found in it. That is the point.

What I don’t do

First, what I don’t do.

I don’t do psychology. I’m not giving you an insight into Putler’s mind. By accident it may be an insight into the mind of the Ruschist security state. But we have that already. We have had it for hundreds of years. So nothing in this evening at Valdai is new in that sense.

What is new is the material, and the patterns in it. Those patterns will be used in the next speech, by the next exhibitioner of the apparatus. Whether that’s Putler, or Dugin, or Simonyan, or any of them. The same patterns run through them all. That’s the reason to do it.

I don’t fact-check. The record on this war is done. The International Court of Justice has ruled. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled definitively, and we talked about that when the judgment came out. The General Assembly has voted many times. The International Criminal Court has issued its warrants.

There are over 250,000 crimes on the record, being investigated by Ukraine, and thousands of memes. Nobody needs a podcast to prove that russia invaded Ukraine unlawfully, or that it is a plague on humanity. That is done. QED, quod erat demonstrandum.

The trap is that the speech is built to make you check it.

My own first draft of this analysis fell into that trap. It went into the woods to fact-check Putler, paragraph by paragraph, and it came out hypnotised.

That is an archetype in its own right. The earnest researcher sets out to check the arch Disinfolklorist on the record, and ends up self-hypnotised by his nonsense. Every russia expert does this. Every AI does it, unless it’s told not to. You spend hours and millions of tokens checking things that don’t matter. While you’re checking, the voice is doing its work on you.

Parsing in real time

So what do we do instead, in the Disinfolklore universe? We parse the thing in real time.

The aim is that you, listening to the next speech from the next apparatchik of the apparatus, can hear it in the moment. Oh, this is what he’s doing here. Aha, he is repeating this. I understand why he’s repeating this. Ah, but that word has just moved.

He’s talking about russia here. But actually that’s a different russia from the russia of 1899 he was talking about. Now he means the russian Federation, whereas five minutes ago he meant the Soviet Union. That word, that meaning, has just moved.

It is a skill to see this in real time. It’s the skill I’ve been trying to teach myself, and that’s why I spent so long on this text.

The floor, counted

In the question session, Putler spoke 11,580 words out of 15,332. That is three quarters.

The moderator, who is the Valdai club’s own director of research, spoke 1,100 words. Some discussion. So, fifteen thousand to Putler and eleven hundred to the club’s own director of research.

Nineteen guests between them spoke another 2,600 words. Fourteen of the nineteen reach us through the Kremlin’s interpreter. Not one of the nineteen is from Ukraine. Ukrainian words reach the hall only in Putler’s report of them.

A discussion club, counted, is an audience for the king.

Think about the archetype of the monarch holding court. I think it’s what Donald does by those helicopters. You know, giving interviews beside those helicopters, so noisy. He’s holding court. These are his courtiers.

Before Putler has given anything, the moderator thanks him for finding the time to meet them. Then: “I think that from your position you see better.” That is what the moderator says to Putler.

The better view is conceded before a word is spoken. This is the monarch, given the better view. Every verdict that follows comes from a place the house has already granted. They have granted Putler the place of monarch, the wise man, the wise counsellor.

Putler answers, “Ladies and gentlemen! Colleagues!” Oh, how humble. A colleague among colleagues.

This is a court dressed as a symposium. The name keeps the symposium, a gathering by a lake in the provinces. The club’s first meeting was held by the lake, near Veliky Novgorod, and the venue has moved from year to year since. This year the place line says Moscow. The name supplies the discussion. The place supplies the throne room for the monarch.

I wrote in October 2022 that Duchamp showed us how mad it is that ordinary objects, gilded and placed in a gallery, transform into art. Bunker grandfather’s racism goes in. Serious pensées come out.

Valdai is the gallery. Putler says as much himself. He announces that his words will be studied by many hundreds or even thousands of experts, “your colleagues”. That includes me.

The reader is cast before the reading. I am cast as one of the experts studying his every word. How can I subvert this? Well, I’m doing it now. You are given your part. I am given mine in the first hour, and the part is the earnest researcher, writing everything down.

The costume

So the starting point is that Putler is an actor. He delivers lines on behalf of the Ruschist security state.

That state has existed in its totality for hundreds of years. It puts on a new costume, new clothes, every few decades. Tsar, commissar, general secretary, president. It’s always the same archetype underneath. Tonight the costume is the sovereign-president’s.

I said on the fourth of October that he is a ventriloquist, giving lines for the security services establishment. That is the whole thesis of Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut, the book I’m going through slowly with all of us over these weeks.

In my Future russia episode, half of which I delivered last week, I said Putler plays the role of the tsar, like an actor. I’m not using this as a metaphor. It is actually the perspective I have on him. If you hold it, or entertain it for a while, it helps you read the data differently. It can show you what is going on.

Putler is really just a puppet of the security state he serves. But he gives the image. Again, the Law of Similarity and the Law of Contagion. He gives the image of someone in charge, of a sovereign, and then people believe he is one.

Both are the same point. The man is the costume. I’m not saying Putler is wearing a costume. I’m saying he is the costume, for the Ruschist Nazi state.

Twice in the evening the costume, the disguise Putler is wearing, names what stands behind it.

Once in earnest, in the middle of the all-weapons answer about Kaliningrad: “And it is not about the surname of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief or the President of Russia.” The office speaks. Humble. The man does not matter. He says so.

And once as a joke, in the exchange on artificial intelligence: “I use the Administration of the President of the Ruschist Federation.” The moderator replies, “That is an absolutely indestructible force.” The hall laughs.

The costume, the mask, has just told the hall who writes the lines, and the hall has laughed. So it’s not just me saying Putler is an actor. Putler is playing the role of the sovereign. He says so himself, twice, in this one evening.

The assessor and the repeater

What parts does the costume play? Reading the words, it plays a small repertoire. This is what the Disinfolklore analytical method excavates. The two parts it plays most are the assessor and the repeater.

Those of us who study Indo-European linguistics will know this. So will anyone from Eastern Europe who knows a Bogdana or a Bogdan. In ancient Iranian, baga means the allocator.

The baga was the allocator of the house, the treasurer, if you like. The one who shares out the resources. The boss man. It was usually a man. Then the word was celestialised, and Baga became a god. Then it came back down to Earth in the names of the ruling class in Mongolia, the Bogd.

So the assessor is a very old role. It is a long-standing archetype in Indo-European culture and governance. And Putler played it to a T. The honest assessor, weighing up, like St Peter at the gates of heaven weighing your good karma with white stones and black.

The honest assessor is my own name for it. He presents his judgements as weighed and fair, and he regrets his own forecasts. “I would like to be mistaken in this assessment.” A forecast of war, as a regret.

The forecaster stands outside the wars he forecasts, and indeed causes. He is the innocent bystander at his own war. Those of us who study what Donald does, and his rhetorical tics, will see this in him too.

The repeater cites himself. Donald also cites himself the whole time. He says so-and-so said this. They are saying this, when they are not. He is the one saying it, but he projects his own saying through others, as a literary narrative device.

“I have spoken on this many times. I will say it once more all the same, in such a gathering.” About forty times in the evening Putler says “I repeat”, or “as I have said”, or “I have said this many times”. Perfect passive aggression.

The position feels old and settled because it is said to be. In August 2022 I called this hypnotise through repetition. It is old, and it works on the hall every time.

Then the smaller parts.

The one who will not say. “I will not name it all now.” The hall fills in the name, so the hall authors the charge.

The lawyer, “as lawyers say”. The man who reads the documents, “based only on the archive documents I have read”. The one who was there, “I remember well my discussions”. The plain speaker, “let us say it plainly”.

The reader of other people’s minds. He tells the hall what the West thinks, what the Europeans thought, what the Secretary-General of the United Nations thought, in his own voice, as Dostoevsky does in his novels. So the enemy testifies against itself, in his report.

None of these is a person. Each is a posture, and the postures are the costume’s. They are worth noticing, noting and learning, so that we begin to look for them.

The formulas to carry in the margin

These are the tells. Each can be heard in the moment. I give the russian word so that you can hear it next time.

Not we. In russian, ne my. Nine times in six paragraphs, and three times in one answer. The rule is laid down in the speech itself: “Where is the truth? The truth is that it was not we who wanted war or began it. War was begun against us.” When you hear “not we”, the next clause names the other side as the one who began.

Began. The verb comes 26 times in the evening, 24 of them in his own turns, and five of them in one paragraph about tankers. “The Kyiv authorities began to strike our tankers.” So the cycle of history begins. “We began to answer.” “And they started it.” Then the tell of tells, two sentences, one after the other: “We began striking.” “We did not start this.” When you hear “we began”, “we did not begin” is close by.

We threaten no one. Six paragraphs. Each time it stands within a few sentences of a threat. All the weapons at our country’s disposal. A mirror answer in every ocean. Europe’s arms plants. The firms taken under external management. “This is not intimidation, it is an answer to an attempt to intimidate us.”

Answer. In russian, otvet. Nine times in eight paragraphs, as the word for russia’s own act. In the speech the answers are mutual, “mutual harsh responses”, one side provoking and the other answering. By the questions the word has moved to one side. Whatever russia does is a reply.

Mirror. Zerkal’no, mirror-fashion. Three times, and a fourth in other words. And where is the mirror placed? “Where it is more advantageous for us.” A mirror that chooses its target is not a mirror.

Inevitable. Neizbezhno. Nine times in seven paragraphs. The new world order is inevitable. The use of all weapons is inevitable. The loss of the rest of Donetsk region is inevitable. The failure of the West’s curtain to protect people is inevitable. In March 2022 I called this inevitability-farming. Whatever is inevitable is what is being announced.

Finish breaking up. Dorazvalit’. Three times. The West wants “to finish breaking up the Russian Federation itself”. The little prefix do- means finish. It presupposes that something was broken up already. That something is the Soviet Union.

Who broke it up? Early in the speech the cause is “internal imbalances”. That concession is never repeated. By the first question it has become “Then the Soviet Union was broken up”. By somebody. The somebody has no name.

So-called. Three times, laid on the civilised. “So-called Western civilisation.” “The so-called system of civilised countries.” “The so-called civilised world.” The title is withdrawn from the West. The civilised act, “we negotiate”, is claimed for russia.

I will not. Six paragraphs. “I will not go into details.” What follows is the main thing, given without its particulars.

Everyone knows. Five paragraphs. It comes where the claim is largest and the source is thinnest. “Ukraine, I know and everyone knows it well, cannot exist on its own.” A neighbour’s statehood is denied by a voice with no source.

Regime. Four times in his own voice, for Ukraine’s government. It starts as the outcome of a coup, “an essentially unlawful regime”. It ends as a title, “the head of the regime”, used where a president’s would be.

As you said. Four times the hall hands his words back to him. The moderator does it twice. Two guests do it. The last of them is an American journalist who now works in russia: “As you said, two and a half times more territory.” His own figure, returned to him, on how much territory russia has captured in 2026. Putler had said it was two and a half, two and a half thousand square kilometres, I think. With “most military experts” attached.

A note. I’m not rebutting. I’m only outlining. I’m outflanking, not rebutting, and not getting lost in the weeds.

So we can carry all of these in the margin as we listen to the rest of the evening. Everything else in it hangs on them.

The threat delivered as its own denial

I said on the fourth of October that the entire speech is a threat. The cast is how the threat is carried.

Because the bear cub only answers, every threat arrives as an answer. Because the forest has no name, the threat has no addressee, and nobody is placed to answer it. Because the history has already made russia the one who never began, the threat is spoken in the grammar of the inevitable, never in the grammar of a choice.

So “We threaten no one” stands in neighbouring answers to “all the weapons at our country’s disposal”. The land comes as “must and will”. The loss of Donetsk comes as “inevitable”. The West’s curtain comes as a failure announced before the curtain is hung.

The purest form comes in an answer about Europe’s arms industry. “I am not saying that we tomorrow are going to strike.” And then: “But this is a threat.” Not tomorrow. But. That is the formula of the whole evening in four words. But this is a threat.

He also knows how the threat will be reported, just as they know how a plague story will be reported. So he labels the report before it is written. “Now they will pull this out and abuse it, exploit this thesis, the thesis that Russia threatens us with nuclear weapons.” That is the pre-emptive alibi. The threat stays on the record. Its reporting is discredited in advance.

Then Europe’s citizens are addressed over the heads of their governments. “The citizens of European countries must understand this clearly and distinguish our position from the position of certain current political leaders of their countries.”

I named that in March 2023. A attacks B. C is standing by. C is told that this is not about C, so long as C stays exactly where it is. It’s about neutralising the bystander.

The moderator hears it, and jokes that he now feels like an accomplice of the domestic political manipulations of European governments. The house plays along with its own casting.

Under all of this is one rule, laid down in the speech and drawn on by every later answer. The truth is who began, and it was never russia.

The innocent bear cub and the forest come next week.

Last week:

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