Examining the Crime Scenes
As I recap recent events and what we know about narrative warfare, Disinfolklore’s Stephen Douglas helps us understand how reality is skewered to the degree that people engage in their own destruction
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“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”—Joseph Heller, Catch-22
“If you ever wondered what you would have done to prevent the holocaust, well, you’re doing it now.”—Stephen Douglas, Disinfolklore
I am old enough to remember that in September, the DoJ, FBI, ODNI, and the State Department released a flurry of bombshells — indictments, affidavits, and sanctions — pointing to the nuclear-scale mind-hacking Russia is engaged in — most importantly, how much of the effective poison is being delivered by people who aren’t Russian.
‘DESTABILIZING DEMOCRACIES’: Canadian PM Names Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson as Paid By Russia
I wrote report after report, and as I did my own investigations, I discovered that the biggest promoters of known Russian influence activities, no longer covert, are Elon Musk on his X/Twitter platform, and Peter Thiel and JD Vance, on Rumble, a platform that boosts Russian propaganda 24/7.
It seemed curious to me that our enforcement agencies would indict RT employees paying for US influencers as they pushed russkiy mir, but not the Americans themselves. It seemed worrisome that we knew the Russians were monitoring 2,800 influencers in 81 countries, nearly 600 in the US, but those names were never released. Comedians, academics, bloggers, veterans, politicians, radio hosts, businessmen, veterans, professors, think-tank analysts.
Since the State Department issued the statement that ‘covert influence operations are not journalism,’ then why not charge the traffickers of the poison?
In the UK and EU, there are now digital online laws in place which hold the mules to account, which may be why there was less interference in the UK’s recent election.
Since we know covert influence activities are not journalism, but military aligned attacks on the minds of citizens, these activities do not fall under free speech. This is part of a decades’ long war against the minds of people in the West, and America — with the strongest military in the world — did nothing to prevent the menticide, which by the way, is ongoing.
It was in that moment when I was reading the Doppelganger dossier, where we understand Russian agents in charge of the operation to simulate Western news sites knew that Joe Biden was leading a strong economy. They knew that incumbents leading a strong economy always win in America, they knew he already beat Trump once, they knew us better than we knew ourselves.
As they ticked off facts about our economy, they wrote: “All of this suggests that the economy is very healthy.”
So they started kicking around the idea of creating a proxy war:
“In order to somehow spur the society when the economy is obviously booming, it is necessary to create a perceivable threat. The missiles in Cuba, Nicaragua, or Venezuela are a bit ridiculous because they bump against the Americans’ technological disregard for Russia…. But does it make sense to play on someone else’s field when there is a partner who is ready to play himself? A partner who needs to win the election and to fit in the concept of the current national and historical development…”
We were denied our own reality, unaware of our own strength.
And as I reflected on that, I recalled the words and wisdom of my friend Stephen Douglas, a cultural archeologist who was unaware that he was witness to a stealth genocide, as he worked as an international lawyer and diplomat in Ukraine. He found himself on a bridge, ensuring safe passage of civilians from 2015 through 2018, while listening to narratives coming from the Russian side that sounded folkloric to him.
He would then find the same narratives planted in Facebook and the media, and he began to dive into the origins of what he calls disinfolklore. He discovered that at its root, we — in the West — are experiencing a power grab by oligarchs trying to destroy the post-World War II human rights gains through narrative warfare. By so doing, they’re removing any constraints on their power.
Of his time in Ukraine, Stephen said he was a witness to this stealth genocide and didn’t know it because of the ferocity of disinfolklore. He now dedicates his time to exposing the techniques so those who have not yet been lost can better see reality.
Below are some of his experiences in Ukraine, and in my many interviews with him, what I most want you to understand is that these narratives we are told are designed to make us believe things are far worse than they are, so people actually vote against their own safety and security, which just happened in America.
People entertained by the vulgarian in greasepaint didn’t see the monsters behind him — the foreign oligarchs in the extraction business.
I do not see a deus ex machina on the horizon, but we still need to know what happened in our country, and how we can help those in other countries not yet captured by “these machine men, with their machine minds.” The next front is the EU.
In a June post in Disinfolklore, Stephen Douglas wrote:
I had a ringside seat while Russian Disinfolklore brainwashed some Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Ukraine into thinking, wrongly, their fellow Ukrainians wanted to kill them.
There is a similar pattern of designed division we have seen with less deadly consequences (so far) rising elsewhere in the world.
And if we can pinpoint how powerful Disinfolklore created and embedded division inside eastern Ukrainian society, where none before had existed, then, we will have a better chance to recognize and defeat similar efforts elsewhere.
Those Ukrainians who remained behind in Russia-occupied Ukraine after the 2014 invasion were kept, by Russia, on subsistence diets.
In its classic victim-blaming way Russian Disinfolklore propagated myths that Ukraine was starving those under occupation.
In international law a military occupier is responsible for provisioning those living under occupation.
Russia then portrayed itself in its Disinfolklore as the Knight in Shining Armour when it sprinkled a few breadcrumbs inside a community that had had no problems accessing food or fresh drinking water before Russia invaded.
Russia destroyed private enterprise in the areas it occupied. Every family, unless they had an entitlement to a Ukrainian social welfare system payment, became dependent on the occupiers for their subsistence.
Russia was able to exile, torture, kill, or imprison anyone who expressed dissent inside Russia-occupied Ukraine.
Or Russia’s coercive control operated more subtly. People understood that if they spoke out, they would lose their Russian-state funded job. They and their family would have no means to live on. This was another manifestation of the Russian coercive control governance model.
You can read his original Stealth Genocide report here.
Douglas also writes:
“Those living inside Russia-occupied land were subjected to unrelenting Disinfolklore that eventually brainwashed all but the most resilient minds into, eventually, surrendering to the Russian fist. The vastly confusing, effective, and psychologically sophisticated techniques that pro-Russia colleagues used to sabotage my work (and the work of teams I participated on) helped me discover Disinfolklore.
At first, the content I had to collect, parse, and interpret each day was mesmerizingly confusing. It was non-sensical, in many cases. There were repeated stories about ten thousand “Polish mercenaries” assembling in localities near the bridge which I would be ordered to visit by my supervisors where I would only find a few mystified village elders. I did not know then what experts in folklore wrote about the Lapplanders who use imaginative stories to inculcate their children with rules to keep them safe:
“When children are very small the Lapp parents give them rules to follow. These rules are often hidden in stories or tales.”
Russian Disinfolklore operates using the same methods to conceal its meanings long enough for them to become a part of the minds of those who uncritically read and share its engaging trolls.
This Russian Disinfolklore concealed itself in jokey memes or stories about jokey characters like the drunk former president Medvedyev. It communicated into our minds rules as effectively as those in the stories Lapplander elders shared with their communities’ children. Russian Disinfolklore affected how we interpreted the reality of Russia’s genocide in Ukraine. And it was so effective our communities were bamboozled into tolerating Russia’s unlawful genocidal military occupation of Ukraine for far too long.
Lastly, from his report titled European Football Championships episode, he writes:
In February 2014 hundreds-of-thousands of Donetsk male residents participated in the Euro-Maidan protests urging the then pro-Russia president of Ukraine to be impeached.
Today, ten-years later, that city and the part of its region the Russians occupy is completely denuded of males between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-five. I call this process that has been operating in Ukraine since February 2014 “Stealth Genocide.”
Russia’s creeping genocide in Ukraine was stealthy because not even I, a highly educated international lawyer, categorised what I witnessed as such. I who experienced a three-year-long fever dream on that bridge never, in my wildest nightmares, suspected that what I was seeing each day in Donetsk’s sister region of Luhansk was a preparation, through brainwashing Disinfolklore, for the genocide of Ukrainians by Ukrainians, at the behest of the Russians.
When I look back at what I was witnessing now with the benefit of hindsight I find myself in the position of someone in 1943 watching trains on the way to Auschwitz pass by their garden. We think of course we would recognise genocide when we saw it.
Yet, genocides are made up of heaps of dual-use moments. If we do not witness the gory deaths, we will not know that when we see the trains full of people on their way to what we are told is a work camp is one of the key moments in the genocide. Pattern Recognition is a skill good counter Disinfolklorists need to develop.
If you are scanning for the early warning indicators of an exact replica for the genocide Germany implemented against millions of Ukrainians (including one million Ukrainian Jewish community members) between 1941 and 1945 today, then you may well, as I did, miscategorise the totality of the elements of which Russia’s current genocide is made up.
Each holocaust and each genocide has different traits. While you are inside a genocide, unless you are scanning for the Mana of genocide, you may miss it. Alas too many today, around the world, have yet to realise that there is genocide in Ukraine. As one meme circulating since March 2022 (when it became clear Russia was executing genocide against Ukrainians) puts it:
“If you ever wondered what you would have done to prevent the holocaust, well, you’re doing it now.”
Those Donetsk residents - Ukrainians - who were to perish in the pointless “meat assaults” were radicalised by Disinfolklore. They became part of a system designed by Russia in Ukraine from 2014 onwards that would force them after 24th February 2022 into participating in endless “meat assaults.”
Their destiny was to be killed by their fellow Ukrainians lawfully defending their country’s territorial integrity and freedom from Russian occupation. And Disinfolklore was the method of propelling them towards a destiny few could have imagined was possible when in 2012 Donetsk hosted the European football championships.
This is what is at stake in Counter Disinfolklore: Controlling War Magic. If Russia can achieve that dastardly feat in Donetsk using Disinfolklore, Russia and other bad actors could, similarly, convince, using Disinfolklore, any population group of humans anywhere to participate in genocide against members of their own community. The United States embassy in Vienna quoted the following words spoken by Gubarev in a film released in October 2022:
“…if you [Ukrainians] don’t want to be convinced [that Russia should rule Ukraine], we’ll kill you. We’ll kill as many as we have to: one million, five million, or exterminate all of you.”
These are sentiments which reflect official Russian state policy as enunciated by senior Russian officials, including the Nordic Russian troll king Putin, and as executed by their minions who murdered hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians after 24th February 2022.
As an aside and to show how folklore is never far from any of our subject matter it’s worth adding that before 2014 Gubarev ran a company that supplied Santa Claus costumes in the Donetsk region.
Now, that this year’s European football championship has begun, imagine yourself in the position of the Donetsk residents queuing up for tickets in 2012. Imagine saying to one of them then Ruschia will invade and you will be tricked / brainwashed into fighting against your fellow citizens.
Unless Ukraine prevails and we get a handle on Disinfolklore, your children’s future may be the 2012 Donetsk children’s past…
We see the worst criminals queuing up to run the country and a lack of imagination and a lack of will to do anything about preventing the worst from happening in America.
I do believe our leaders are in fear, and I also believe our enforcement agencies are compromised, because what else could explain a felon tied to foreign oligarchs and dictators who worked in coordination to coup the country in 2021 being reinstalled.
But if our leaders read any history, they will understand they are less safe after the coronation. Just read my Gravediggers report to recall what happened to the previous chancellor of Germany before Hitler — Kurt Von Schleicher.
And also read my other Gravediggers report, which detailed what happened to the business elite who propped up a genocidal dictator. Nothing nice.
No one was ever coming to save us.
It was always going to be us.
This is what you would be doing in 1933 and 1943 Germany or 1990s Russia.
I do not sell hopium, but we have two months.
I will be writing about effective Resistance efforts in coming days.
But I think most urgently, we need to demand an end to this show of norms, which is marching American democracy to the gallows.
We need our leaders to put aside their own fears and take swift measures to protect us from this treason.
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