Podcast | Real Ukraine, Future russia, and Tools Three and Four

This week brings a little more of Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut, and a bit of the principles of Infolklore. It also brings the end of Future russia, Real Ukraine. Or, as I now call it, Real Ukraine, future russia, with a small r.

President Zelenskyy is playing a blinder

My view is that President Zelenskyy is playing a blinder, as the English would say. He has been dealt quite a bad hand over the last few weeks. We are going through one of those cycles we have all been through many times before.

He has flushed out Donald and Putler by offering this ceasefire. He knows, of course, it will never be taken up. So it is a safe offer. He also knows that no action he takes, or Ukraine takes, will help get aid from the United States and from Donald. So he models peacefulness and a wish to make a deal. It will not help with America. But it builds capital for after the midterms, and for the long term.

I see him trolling America, Donald and russia along. He knows well what Donald and the people around him do not seem to understand, or do not care to, because of whatever compromise is going on. The more you offer peace to the russians, the more they think you are weak. That goes for Donald too. So they think Ukraine and America are very weak. Constitutionally, peace is almost impossible for them. Remember Lavrov’s and Peskov’s words this week: no, we will not take a break. So it is very easy to troll the russians. Reflexive control works very well on this front.

I focus on the front. What may be happening east of the Donets River is a very important milestone in Ukraine’s battlefield success. The mid-range strikes go on. There are these Academy Award-winning strikes on the data centres, and now Sberbank’s, which is a beautiful hit.

When I was a diplomat in Dnipro, I went to see the board of PrivatBank when the state took it over. We talked about the vulnerability of data centres. It never crossed my mind, as I sat in that room with the then CEO of PrivatBank, that Ukraine would one day destroy Sberbank’s new data centre. Let’s hope to see more of those. That is what I focus on, rather than all the Starlink noise.

Real and future russia

Real and future russia is my new analytical lens. I use it to look at any national or nationalist movement. Such a movement may define itself by looking backwards. But it must mainly define itself by looking forwards.

In Ukraine’s case that means building a modern European state without corruption, along the lines the European Union models. It means a state brilliant at nurturing its children’s destinies, educating them properly, and turning out critically minded humans. It means looking away from the Soviet legacy.

That is a movement all countries must go through, in my humble opinion, in varying degrees and at various times.

Future russia, real russia, will be the russia around St Petersburg and Moscow, with a few forests around them and a population of perhaps 20 million. It has a good chance to be a good state. It has good universities, museums and human capital. It will have to pay its debts, as will all the other former Ruschist Federation countries.

But whenever we hear any russian, with a small r, speak about the past, mining grievance, Peter the Great, any of that nonsense, past glories in any disguise, we know it is old russia speaking. Historical russia. That person must be given no power and no entitlement to control of the information space or of economic resources. That should be a condition of any economic aid from the European Union, China or any other great power.

Talking about history and the past is a luxury. A country and a national culture can afford it when they are not murdering people by the million in pursuit of a historical goal that was untrue and never existed, instead of building a modern nation state.

An apparent contradiction

This is where I ended a couple of weeks ago. There may seem to be a contradiction here.

My main intellectual project, as many of you know, is to re-centre Ukraine in the story of humanity over the past 6,000 years: of Indo-European linguistic, cultural, religious and human development. Yet I also hold an absolute ban on entertaining any historical russia. The Bolshoi, the ballet, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, all of that imperialist nonsense, however wonderful some of the art is, and however derivative of Western European art in many cases.

Future russia is asked to leave its history alone and live on the map, within the borders it ends up with after its withdrawal from 100% of Ukraine. So why should Ukraine not do the same?

Because re-centring Ukraine is not a claim on anyone’s land. It is a claim on our attention. The difference between the two is the difference between the historical lens and the real lens.

Identity is wholly a function of stories

The narrow version of the project affords Ukraine what every sovereign culture already has.

Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 1

Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 2

Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 3

Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 4

Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 5

Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 6

In 1777 Johann Gottfried Herder asked where Germany’s Shakespeare was. As I have written, “The modern nation state was created after Herder’s 1777 plea to unite the 10 German tribes behind a set of stories (folklore or more accurately folksongs) typifying Germanness. The Brothers Grimm, Goethe and later Wagner answered that call. And 90 years later the first unified German state was created.”

Identity is wholly a function of stories. Some of you will remember that I came to this realisation in eastern Ukraine. russia understands it too. That is why it is so brilliant at Disinfolklore, and why Donald is. Disinfolklore also creates identity, by telling mean stories and injecting meanness into our minds. It creates just as strong a sense of identity as the positive stories do.

Think of Greece. We think of Athens and ancient Athens. But the first capital of modern Greece was not Athens. Choosing Athens was a way to attach some of that ancientness to the modern state of Greece, a wholly new, invented country, like Germany, like Switzerland, like Belgium.

And this week we saw Rubio, the complete ingénue, in front of the Acropolis, talking about Western civilisation, or values he learned as an undergraduate, probably when Huntington was all the rage. It was such an embarrassment.

Huntington took a whole set of Indo-European cultures and chose Islam as his main dividing line. Given what I have looked into of ancient Iran, and since it was ancient Iranian scholars who largely systematised Islam, I see Islam as an Indo-European religion, as I see Christianity. By making their war in Iran, they are doing what Huntington asked of them. But for him to stand before the Acropolis banging on about this is just so embarrassing.

If you saw any of his speech, he is probably the worst orator ever. He has absolutely no sense of pace, for such a portentous speech meant to lead into his presidential ambitions. That is, if he is not in The Hague, or in prison, guilty of war crimes.

My point is this. We know all about ancient Greek. But the modern Greek state is related to it only through stories, and by having its capital at Athens. It is the same with Germany, and with Italy, also a fairly recent state, from around 1870.

The collectors and the states they made

The same work made most of the states we now take for granted. “You see most European states alive today are a function of the national consciousness wrought from the folklore collectors’ work, inspired by Ossian, Herder and Brothers Grimm,” I wrote in November 2024. The Ossian tales turned out, in the end, to be faked. “States which had never existed before - Greece, Finland, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Belgium,.. were all created out of this work.”

All of us who take part in the national cultures of the states we belong to have won the lottery in many ways. Others have not. The Assyrians, the Kurds, the Palestinians. Tens of thousands of amazing cultures and peoples never made it.

Then there are the Manchu, who ruled China for centuries. Around 1911 they lost power in a revolution. Today you would be lucky to find more than a handful of people who identify as Manchu. Great cultures disappear all the time. They lose control of the states they ran. I believe this is what will happen to russia. It will be well deserved. They should not regret it or be afraid of it, because it has happened countless times before.

It does not involve mass death. It involves new memories. Take Vilnius. Polish schoolchildren still learn Pan Tadeusz, Mickiewicz’s poem that opens with Lithuania, and Vilnius was long thought of as a Polish city. But Vilnius is in Lithuania. Short of the Law and Justice party going in to take it back, nobody talks of this as a problem.

It is a perfectly normal development in human relations. So russians should not be afraid of their country disappearing in that way.

Ukraine is one of those states. Its songs and its poets, Taras Shevchenko first among them, made a nation of a people the empire called a province. As Timothy Snyder has written, “The earliest articulation of Ukrainian patriotism by russian subjects came from the left bank, from the new university at Kharkiv, in the 1820s and 1830s.” russia is relentlessly trying to destroy that city today.

In August 2022, as russia shelled Kharkiv, I wrote that by destroying the buildings of the university where the idea of modern Ukraine was born, Muscovy could not turn back time. It was too late.

From the first days of the full-scale invasion, my mission was, in the words I used later, “to campaign for parity of esteem between Ukraine and other modern nation states which have won the monopoly, by fair means or foul.” There are only around 190 of us with a protected nation state.

Ukraine was a founding member of the United Nations. It signed the Charter as a sovereign in 1945. On the eightieth anniversary of D-Day, in June 2024, I wrote of Ukraine taking its rightful place “on the basis of equality and parity of esteem” among the great European peoples who, in the post-war legal order, became “sovereign, secure and prosperous nation states.”

Positive nationalism

That is positive nationalism. The collectors of the nineteenth century were recording a culture that existed. As I put it in 2024, “the collection of folktale songs during 18th and 19th centuries was a good faith attempt to record actual existing culture”. It gave peoples a voice and, in the end, a state.

Its counterfeit came later, in Serbia and its poets in the early 1990s, and in russia, which inspired much of the genocide there. “Serbia and its controller Ruschia, however, inspired by such positive nationalism created a new genre - Disinfolklore.” Disinfolklore takes the collectors’ tools and uses them to plant a negative identity: an enemy, a grievance, a lost land that must be regained, even if it costs millions of souls, much blood and much treasure.

Ukraine today is positive nationalism at work. A whole society has mobilised against an unlawful invasion. Soldiers and medics. Drone makers in garages. Volunteers weaving camouflage nets. Teachers holding lessons underground in Kharkiv’s metro. Farmers clearing mines from their own fields to grow food to feed the world. It is exercising the right of self-defence that Article 51 of the UN Charter recognises. Its aim is not a lost province. It is not fighting to take Rostov or Bryansk.

As I said in March 2026, “Ukraine has one strategic goal in this war: to destroy russia’s capability to invade Ukraine again, permanently.”

That is what I mean when I say President Zelenskyy is trolling Donald and russia to their respective dooms. It is not good enough for russia to withdraw today, because it might survive as a state on its current borders. That is not the proper outcome of this war, unless russia becomes as contrite as Germany and Japan were. Germany went without half of its country for forty years as a mark of its penance. We see no sign of that among the Ruschists in control today.

There are many real russians. Garry Kasparov, Ilya Ponomarev, Sergei Sumlenny and a few others understand what I am saying in their bones. They are not yet a massive force. But as Lenin himself showed, you do not need a massive force to create a new state. You need a bit of luck, and Ukraine on your side.

Ukraine’s soldiers are dying for a free and sovereign Ukraine and its civilians, not for a map of lost provinces. A sovereign country does not wait to be rescued. Allies can help, and should help far more than they have. But they cannot be Ukraine’s state for it. Ukraine is doing the rest itself, with its own drones, its own long-range strikes and its own defence industry.

When positive nationalism reaches for history, it reaches for true history. It does not let history outweigh the present, or our idea of the future. It does not troll a people into breaking into other people’s lands and defying international law. Even true history does not decide how we see the present. It does not override the post-war legal order, or the protection of human rights and of our dignity as humans, which that order exists to secure.

That is the essence of positive nationalism, and of Real Ukraine. A real Ireland, for instance, faces the same questions, and so does England, in Scotland and Wales, and so do other great European countries. Some have achieved statehood. Others may yet, but only if they offer a positive vision of the future: modern European states whose only goal is the self-realisation of their people, in modern knowledge economies, using all the amazing things available to us today. Our ancestors literally died to secure them for us.

I said it plainly at the end of 2024: “What matters is the international rules-based order as established.”

That is the narrow version, and the limits of what it would mean for Ukraine. But it applies to any movement in any country that harks back to some great mythical past as a way of trolling its people, its voters or its subjects into wars for new territory.

Six thousand years

The wide version is my real project, the Finding Manuland project. Manuland is “an imaginary community radiating around the hub of the modern state of Ukraine and stretching from India to Ireland”. I gave it that name in the autumn of 2021, towards the end of my posting to Ukraine.

For three centuries Europe told itself a different story. The origin of its languages and its gods was placed in India, or in the German forests, or in Greece and Rome. Those mental models were built long before archaeogenetics, and in good faith. “The idea that Western culture was founded in ancient Greece or ancient Rome has been relentlessly promoted, and in good faith.” Ancient Greece is just one daughter of Indo-European culture, privileged because we have amazing written records.

Soviet archaeology added a layer of its own. It “managed to troll many linguists, archaeologists, archaeogeneticists, historians and Comparative Mythologists/ theologians into using formulae like ‘Steppe Ancestry,’ ‘Southern russia,’ or ‘Pontic Caspian Steppe’” for the Ukrainian homeland of Indo-European culture.

In early February 2022, days before the full-scale invasion, I visited the museum at Halle, home of the Nebra sky disc. Germany’s president, Steinmeier, had written the introduction to its exhibition guide. I wrote that year that, even after all his years on Ukraine, the guide spoke of the people who founded modern Germany as coming from “southern russia” instead of Ukraine. The ancient DNA now says where that story begins.

None of these amazing facts licenses modern Ukraine to anything, any more than Rome licenses modern Italy to anything. In April 2022, while France hesitated over Crimea, I made the point as a joke: perhaps Italy could retake Nice. It is basically Rome. Nice belonged to the Kingdom of Sardinia until 1860, when a referendum took it into France. Nobody in Rome thinks the Caesars give Italy a claim on Nice, or that Pericles gives Greece a claim on Sicily. The glory of the ancients belongs to all their descendants and to the land that raised them. It confers nothing on anyone’s army or anyone’s government today.

A Historical Ukraine is possible too

The lens applies to Ukraine on its own terms, and not only as russia’s mirror. A Historical Ukraine is possible too.

It would treat the last 6,000 years as a title deed. Ancient Ukrainians did march from Ireland to India for two thousand years after 4000 BCE. We are the emanation of that, speaking descendants of the Indo-European languages first forged in Ukraine. Historical Ukraine would look east to the Kuban and the country around Kursk and Belgorod, where Ukrainian was long spoken, and call them lost provinces. It would turn Ukraine’s suffering into a doctrine, like the Russkiy mir. It would keep an enemy for ever to explain it.

Such voices exist. In September 2022 I wrote: “Muscovy’s rather lucky that President Z is strong enough to ensure Ukrainians settle for ejecting Ruschia from within Ukraine’s 1991 borders.” And in the same post: “Some voices call for restoration of Ukraine’s historical lands.”

So Real Ukraine is the 1991 borders. Historical Ukraine could be anything from those borders to all the lands between Ireland and India.

Ukraine’s government has held to the 1991 borders through the whole war. That is Real Ukraine speaking, on the record. Real Ukraine keeps its history true and lawful, the terrible parts with the glorious, because true history is the only kind positive nationalism can use.

So this is Real Ukraine. It holds 100% of its sovereign territory, Crimea included, having won a war against a country that once covered a sixth of the world’s surface. It holds the stories it has earned by smiting russia.

On the anniversary of russia’s retreat from Zmiinyi, Snake Island, I wrote: “Immanent in Ukraine is the Mana of the whole of Indo-European civilisation.”

The oldest Indo-European story of all is the herdsman Trito winning back his stolen cattle, his capital, and “in every iteration of the story since 1,200 BCE Trito ALWAYS wins.” In a hundred years, children in Muscovy will be told: “Don’t go west of the Don. Dragons live there.”

Real Ukraine holds its place as the land that nourished the Yamna. Their language, culture and religion now live in the minds of more than half of humanity, across the whole space between Ireland and India. That place is territorial, not ethnic. It is a ground shared by all of us who descend from it, and owned by none of us, Ukraine included.

The History Provocation

Put it to the test of what I call the History Provocation. What makes history a provocation is what it does.

Historical russia’s history claims its neighbour’s land, names an enemy, and drags every audience back into the past. Real Ukraine’s 6,000 years claim no one’s land. They need no enemy. They ask for parity of esteem. That is the whole difference.

The job of Real Ukraine is the job of every real country: to build its future. Its economy, its human capital, its universities and engineers, the farms of its black earth, the young people who will come home when the war is won. It rests on the people who get up every morning and build it. Engineers, farmers, shopkeepers, bus drivers, programmers, teachers. The deep past is there to be proud of, to be studied and to be visited. It is not there to be fought over.

If russia wants to argue on history’s ground

Suppose Future russia still wants to argue on the ground of history. It will lose there too. russia takes its name from the Kyivan Rus’. Moscow’s claim to be the Third Rome is ironic “when we discover that in ancient Ukraine is the origins of the actual First Rome.”

Even Moscow’s church turns out to be imported. In 2021 the historian Ievgeniia Sakal completed a doctoral thesis at Yale, The Imported Church. It “shows that the key texts of the russian Orthodox Church were rarely russian in origin. The russian Church coopted texts of late Byzantine origin, texts produced by Ukrainians and Belorusians, and texts produced by Catholics and Protestants in the West.” Belarusians, like my own ancestors. Having faced “a legitimate and sophisticated Ukrainian Church”, she writes, the russian Church “was forced to adopt the scholastic culture of the Ukrainian Church”.

Byzantium, the Ukrainians and Belarusians, the Catholic and Protestant West: every source it borrowed from is Indo-European, and so is the language of its scripture.

So if Future russia still wants to play the game of Historical russia, it should know how the game ends. Historical russia is Ukraine. Rus’ was Kyiv’s name before it was Moscow’s, and the Moscow that calls itself the Third Rome took its church learning from Kyiv and from the rest of the Indo-European world. The history of the land of Ukraine runs far deeper than Rus’. Ancient Ukraine is the matrix of every living Indo-European language, religion and culture, of the Greek in which the Gospels reached the world, and of much that Christianity carried across Europe.

On history’s ground, Ukraine wins, and wins everything. But that is not the ground we argue on. We argue on what is real today: sovereign territory, the law and the record. The longer view of history is not a title deed. It is the story of all of us.

The bones of Potemkin

On 1 October 2022 I wrote that “the real Potemkin is buried in Kherson”, and wondered whether he would still be there when the russians left. He was not. On 3 November the New York Times reported from the city as the occupation administration pulled out: “They even took the bones of Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin, the 18th-century commander who helped Catherine the Great conquer southern Ukraine.” The German Catherine, the so-called Great.

Eight days later Ukraine was back in Kherson.

Historical russia left the city carrying its history in a box. Ukraine kept the city, and the steppe around it that nourished the Yamna 6,000 years before. Future russia will have to decide which it wants to be: the russia that carries the bones, or the russia that lets them go.

I will keep working on this idea. We can use the dichotomy to tell the russians we can do business with in future from the kind who would drag us back into the past, so that we can avoid them.

Outflank Dugin: the Cheburashka artefact

Now to Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut. You may remember that I began with the Cheburashka artefact. Here it is again. Someone corrected my pronunciation, and I am sure I still have it wrong. This is what Dugin, a so-called philosopher, wrote:

“Cheburashka is not an innocent creature. He is a toxic mutant. A demon of the moon. His true name is Sherdbar Shemot Shertatan: the demon in the name of Satan. Cheburashka destroys the traditional identity of the russian child. He is not a bear. He is not a hare. He is a rootless cosmopolitan. He has no parents. He has no nationality. He might be Jewish, though. He is a symbol of liberal post-humanism, sent to destroy the russian archetype.”

As I say in the preface, that is all you need to know when deciding whether Dugin is a philosopher. Philosophers do not write in those terms about a children’s cartoon. Security-service operatives do. They are trying to hack minds, to brainwash people, to attach the security service’s archetype of what russia means to a cartoon character and inject it into the minds of unsuspecting russians. It is a monstrous perversion of what any real philosopher would do.

The thesis is in the title. Outflank Dugin, don’t rebut. To outflank him, I simply set out the Cheburashka artefact and then walk through the twelve tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method. Last time I covered Tool One, archetypal literacy.

Tool One, in this week’s news

This week, whenever Donald talks about making peace, he is playing the Merciful Sovereign, implausibly. When the AfD politician says all that German money has been wasted on Ukraine, she is playing the Protective Sovereign, protecting your money. We know it is nonsense. If German money is not spent on stopping the harm to Ukraine, the russians will be at Germany’s door. They already are.

So archetypal literacy helps us discern the Mana in memes in real time. Today the Mana, the energy, in all the Starlink business is coercive control. We know how Donald and Putler operate. And from this new film about Elon, they are coercive control addicts.

Winning people’s consent freely does not interest them. They have to force it. Their addiction to coercive control runs so deep that even with a losing case, like trying to force Ukraine to surrender to genocide, they keep doing it. Whether they cut off Starlink, or pretend to want peace, or pretend to care about Ukrainians, we can spot the archetype immanent in their actions.

Once we see that archetype, we can judge that they are coercive control addicts. Ukrainians and their leaders did that long ago. They are navigating their way. And, I believe, they are trolling russia further towards its doom, by refusing to submit in any way that gives russia hope and makes it double down.

Tool Two: troll radars, incoming and outgoing

Tool Two is the troll radars, incoming or outgoing.

The question is this. Is the artefact I am meeting incoming to my mind, a russian or MAGA apparatus deployment directed at me? Or is it outgoing from my mind, something I am about to transmit? When we ask, should I share this, should I voice this, the outgoing troll radar applies. When it is coming in, the incoming troll radar applies.

Put to the Cheburashka artefact, the question returns: incoming. It is a piece of russian apparatus communication directed at its reader, and it needs immediate cognitive gatekeeping. Tool Two licenses the conscious gatekeeping that follows. I should have given a spoiler alert.

None of this is especially original. All that is original is the attempt to give a memorable mental algorithm, parts of which we might recall in the moments we need them.

The name comes from my Stanytsia Luhanska bridge years. The russian occupation forces on the far side of the bridge included, by their own designation, bridge-troll operators. Their job was to harass, demoralise and confuse the Ukrainian and OSCE personnel approaching the crossing. I learned fast to develop radars for the bridge-troll deployments in real time, to keep my team and myself alive and on top of things. I learned to tell a genuine logistical question from a deployment designed to confuse, and a genuine concern from a deployment designed to delay.

The detection tool was a literal radar. I learned to switch it on every morning on my way to work on the bridge. The tool transfers exactly to work in the information space. It worked in real time with the russian occupiers I had to negotiate with. And I can switch the incoming troll radar on when I read the news or my timeline, or when a particular piece of news troubles me.

Much of what we are seeing at the moment fits the archetype of the information bomb, which I spoke about last week in terms of the plague. Does anyone remember the plague? There was one for a while. Nobody remembers it now. It was an information bomb. It exploded, dissipated and left. Now a new information bomb is sucking up all our energy, our anger and our emotion. The incoming troll radar can help us notice it before we let it fully into our minds and get really activated by it.

The outgoing troll radar matters just as much, for our own mental hygiene and for others. It is the question we ask of our own work. Am I about to deploy something? This paragraph I am writing, this post I am about to retweet, this message I am about to forward to a friend: is it generous, ethical, patient, focused, insightful?

Today I had this experience for about the nine-hundredth time over one particular issue. There has been no progress whatsoever in how the other side presents the data. For about the fifth time, I wrote a reply. It was very well argued. But immanent in it was my extreme annoyance that, six months on, we seem to be getting nowhere.

I half knew, even as I wrote it, that I would never send it. I have written so many versions. By the time I had perfectly sculpted it, I had decided not to send it. My outgoing troll radar stopped me. Had I sent it, I would regret it now, because it would make no difference. In six months I will still be going round this cycle. But the concept helped. It stopped me expressing my anger in a way that would help neither me nor the other person.

The outgoing troll radar, like everything in the Disinfolklore method, runs on the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it generous? Is it ethical? Is it patient? Is it focused? Is it insightful?

Had I sent that message today, it would not have been generous. It may have been right. It certainly was not patient. Its energy was my annoyance. Was it insightful? Quite, I thought, the way I had worded it. But everything else outweighed that, and the person I sent it to would have been really upset.

On the other hand, there was a photograph doing the rounds today that I had not looked at closely. It was of hands, in the aftermath of a russian strike. I am sure we all saw it. On Twitter now it is impossible to hide the photos, as you could in the past. So I have to scan past them. But I had read that it showed a mother and her daughter, holding hands as they died from the russian missiles. The mother-and-maiden archetype really worked on me.

When I came across it again today, I looked more closely and saw that the description was true. I took the decision, knowingly, to share it. Those who promote russia, or the terrible things MAGA is doing to facilitate russia’s war crimes, must face the consequences of what they do. After a lot of thought, it made me feel a little better to make that small contribution. Maybe it will meet the eyes of someone who had sympathy for Putler or for Donald, and they will realise what is at stake.

That was a knowing decision. The outgoing radar asks: am I about to transmit a russian apparatus deployment unwittingly? It prevents the unwitting transmission. Of the two, the outgoing radar is the more important. Tool Two, in full operation, keeps both radars on continuously, especially when we are out in the world or on our timeline.

All the tools are on Disinfolklore.eu, my reworked website. I spent a lot of time on it this week, with new colours. It is great.

Tool Three: look for the Mana in the meme

Tool Three is look for the Mana in the meme.

Mana. The word is universal in human cognition. It appears under different names in every human society we have evidence for.

The Romans had numen, numinous power. Numen is also the name of the MAGA political consultancy linked to Brad Parscale, caught up in a huge scandal in South America at the moment, in Argentina, and in Romania, and probably in Bulgaria and elsewhere. But the Romans had numen first.

The Sanskrit-speaking Vedic Indians had brahman, sacred force, and prāṇa, vital breath-power. The Chinese had, and have, chi or qi, the vital animating energy that moves through bodies, places and texts. The Tibetan Buddhists have byin rlabs, blessing-power transmissible from teacher to student. The Avestan-speaking Iranians had khvarenah, the glory that legitimates the sovereign. The Hebrew Bible has kavod, the glory that fills the tabernacle. The Christians have grace. The Quakers have the light. The Wiccans have power. The Polynesian and Māori speakers, from whom the English word is borrowed, have Mana.

Robert Codrington introduced the term to Western anthropology in 1891, and Marcel Mauss universalised it in his Essai sur le don, The Gift, of 1925. The Jungians have psychic energy. The surrealists have X-energy. The synchronicity-readers have the unobserved coincidence-pattern. English speakers, under a hundred different working names, have it too. Charisma. Aura. Gravitas. Authority. Energy.

Different words, same underlying observation. There is some quality, some charge, some energy, some Mana, that attaches to certain people, places, objects, texts, words and sounds, and gives them outsized effect on the people they meet.

I use the word Mana as the shortest working English term for that universal observation. It deliberately echoes Manu, the first human in Indian culture. And Mannus, the first human in the Germanic tradition. And Manannán, the pre-eminent pre-Christian deity of Ireland. And Manawydan in Welsh, and Menua in the Armenian highlands.

So Mana seemed the right word. But it describes a universal quality, noticed universally. In the Indo-European inheritance the same observation is carried by the M-N- sound family: mind, meaning, human, monarch, mantra, and moon itself. All descend from one Proto-Indo-European root first spoken on the Ukrainian steppe, at Mykhailivka village in Kherson Oblast, just over the border from Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia, roughly 6,000 years ago. Mana sits at the headwaters of that river, of the Don, the Dnipro, the Donets, the Dnister and the Danube. Mana, chi, prāṇa, numen, byin rlabs, khvarenah, grace, X-energy. The same phenomenon, observed independently by every cognitively serious human tradition.

So when you meet a meme that has a particular grip on your mind and your emotions, that grip is what I call, for short, the Mana in the meme.

Tool Three asks: what is the Mana in this meme? What energy does the artefact carry? Is it positive, negative or neutral? Generative or destructive? Uplifting or degrading?

Put to the Cheburashka artefact, the question returns strongly negative Mana. The artefact’s energy is aimed at destroying a beloved object of childhood affection, to reroute tender attachment into suspicion of hidden enemies in one’s own community. The Mana is annihilation dressed as protection. The verdict is uniformly negative.

A second example, to fix the tool. Consider this artefact. “Saint Patrick crossed the Irish Sea in a small open boat with a handful of monks, carrying a Latin book, and converted a pagan island to a literate Christian one within a hundred and fifty years.”

The Mana of that sentence is positive, generative, brave, civilising. Deploying it would serve a hopeful, uplifting view of Irish cultural inheritance.

Compare: “The Welsh people are essentially a remnant population of slaves descended from the conquered Britons, displaced by superior Anglo-Saxon stock to the marginal western mountains.” That sentence carries strongly negative Mana. It degrades. It dehumanises. It dispossesses. It is also, incidentally, untrue, archaeogenetically and linguistically.

But Tool Three is not yet the truth tool. It asks only about the Mana: the energy, the direction of the meme, the feeling you get when it touches the Mana inside you, your own energy. Tool Seven will ask about truth.

Now the harder half, which is why the Patrick specimen sits here rather than a cleaner one. Its Mana is positive, and its history is wrong. Patrick did not arrive in an empty religious field. He came to a country with its own gods and its own Indo-European inheritance. What followed looks less like a rupture than like one Indo-European religion, Christianity, exploiting its likeness to another. Old wine, new bottle. The word pagan does the concealing work, because it names what was already there as an absence.

So the tool returns positive, and the tool is right. Mana valence is not truth value. A sentence can be generative, brave and civilising in its energy and false in its history at the same moment.

Generous Mana conceals better than hostile Mana does, because it disarms. That holds for a meme on a timeline, for history in a book, or for how another human being relates to us. The Welsh sentence puts a reader on guard. The Patrick sentence does not, and needs it more. Let that be a lesson. When Donald is being nice and generous to you, that is when you are really in trouble.

In a way Tool Three is the simplest tool. It asks the question a careful reader already asks: what kind of energy does this thing carry? The tool just gives the question a name and a discipline. Apply it consciously. Detecting Mana is part of every careful reading.

Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut Episode 1

Episode 2 - July 23

Ep 3 - July 30

Ep 4 - Aug 6

Ep 5 - 10 Sept

Ep 6 - 16 Sept

Ep 7 - 23 Sept

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Tool Four: the inner and outer realm

One more tool, the last for today. There are twelve in the Disinfolklore analytical method, and this is Tool Four: the inner realm and the outer realm.

Every human mind, in this framework, has two realms. The inner realm is the realm of the family, the body, the household, the close circle: the things one tends and is responsible for. The outer realm is the realm of the polis, the nation, the foreign country, the world. The Mexicans, as Donald would say.

The two realms have different rules. The inner realm runs on relationship and care. The outer realm runs on rule and reciprocity.

Mature cultures and mature individuals understand the distinction and run both realms competently. Pathological cultures and individuals confuse them. They treat inner-realm subjects by outer-realm rules: the parent who runs the family like a corporation. Or they treat outer-realm subjects by inner-realm rules: the politician who treats the state like a private fiefdom. Not looking at you, Donald.

russia’s apparatus deployments characteristically target one realm or both, in calculated ways.

The Cheburashka artefact targets both. It targets the inner realm by taking a tender object of childhood, a cartoon character beloved in russian families, and recoding it as a hidden enemy inside the household: a cosmopolitan with no parents, no nationality, possibly Jewish, sent to destroy the russian archetype. So Dugin says. It targets the outer realm by recoding the same object as a cultural and political threat at national level. It sneaks into the nursery, the inner realm, but what it is really after is the outer realm. Cheburashka becomes a symbol of liberal post-humanism in the great continental war that Rubio, too, is trying to fight against Western liberalism. The artefact’s craft lies in firing on both realms at once.

Tool Four asks: which realm is this meme’s deployment targeting? Once you have the answer, you know what kind of defensive gatekeeping to apply.

If the inner realm is targeted, the deployment is going for the listener’s family, childhood and emotional substrate. Tighten the gatekeeping there. Don’t let them in.

If the outer realm is targeted, the realm of our governance, our community, our country, the deployment is going for the listener’s political and civic substrate. Much of the patriotism in modern populist movements is, from my perspective, completely fake, and it targets the outer realm. Tighten the gatekeeping there too.

If both are targeted at once, you are looking at a high-craft apparatus deployment doing several things at the same time. If you do not have the mental energy, the capacity or the brainpower for it in that moment, or at all, the best thing is to put up the incoming troll radar and get out of there. Delete the meme. Delete the email. Do not get involved. But if you are going to push back and fight back, understand how complex it is, so that you can plan your strategy accordingly.

I’ll leave it there for this week.

Principles of Infolklore

Ep 1 - Aug 20

Ep 2 - Aug 27

Ep 3 - 3 Sept

Ep 4 - 10 Sept

Ep 5 - 17 Sept

Ep 6 - 23 September

russia cognitive warfare map

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