Podcast|Stealth Genocide: How Russia Uses Disinfolklore to Conceal and Create Genocides

It's 1942. You live by the railway. You see the trains travelling to Auschwitz.

Would you know you're witnessing genocide?

Between 2015 and 2018, working in eastern Ukraine as a diplomat, I witnessed a stealthily prepared and executed genocide. Even though I had studied the holocaust. Read much of its literature. It was not for several years after leaving that place, after the full-scale invasion, that I realised what I had seen and participated in.

Disinfolklore as a topic of study is my response to the attempt to understand how I missed what Russia was doing through its brain-washing operations in Russia-occupied Ukraine: preparing Ukrainians to kill or be killed by Ukrainians.

Disinfolklore can be used to conceal through stealth a genocide. Disinfolklore also can be used to conjure into being either a mythical or actual genocide. This is the importance of learning to see Disinfolklore and of integrating the Disinfolklore Analytjical Method into our every day thinking.

This is the Mana of Russian Disinfolklore. It's about borders, inner outer realm. Let's protect the inner realm of England from the outer realm Syrians. They're males. They're dark. They're going to come in. And Russia, as we know, for instance, carpet bombed Syria in the autumn of 2015. So it's a totally integrated product.

They create the refugee crisis, one million migrants to North Macedonia, and then they either fund directly, or say in the case of in Poland, where you have very antithetical government to Russism and see through it all, but they still benefited from the 2015 refugee crisis. But for the Russians, it's all tied into what I call the stealth genocide, which is now we see it. in plain sight, those of us who are tuned into what's going on in Ukraine. But the preparatory moment to it was from 2015 and to 2022. And I had a ringside seat to it.

And despite all my vaunted education, I never, I didn't realize it. I didn't realize I was in a genocide. And I liken it to this, I use this example. a lot where I say you know it's 1942 at the end of your garden there's a railway track and you see the cattle cars going by on the way to Auschwitz you know you're witnessing genocide of course you don't you're just seeing a moment in it um and we look we were i was always scanning for these signs in ukraine 2015-2022 never imagined i was i was part of it i was participant that's just a precursor.

so i happened to have been i studied international cambridge university which is famous for international law and i was inside what I now understand was a genocide. I've studied, I've read Primo Levi, I studied the Holocaust, I went to Auschwitz and Dachau and different places. I'm a great scholar of the Holocaust.

And yet I found myself inside a genocide for three years, ground zero of a genocide and I never realised I was in it. In fact, I didn't realise it until I marked the moment on X at Decoding Trolls on the 1st of March 2022 and I realized, oh my God, this is what they were doing. They were preparing all the time and how they did this in this amazing information space that was literally like I liken it to an IKEA kit that was brought from Moscow into Russia occupied territories and it's unpacked some of it looks really clumsy it's it's like newspapers it's letters it's um radio stations it's uh online you know 30 different online broadcasts it's television that looks production values that looks like it's cnn to really um soviet um stuff which jonathan you'll remember from your time in in russia just really old-fashioned gray gray man and all of this to my eyes when i was there from early 2015 was this is mad, I don't understand what they're doing, but imminent in it, the Mana of all of this was to create this, and this is again where folklore comes in, and particularly in our culture, where they were creating this inner and outer realm.

So we remember from these child stories, you know, the king's castle, the kingdom, the countryside, so this inner outer realm, which is matched by geography. So there's a river, this Russia occupied Ukraine. And then there's Ukraine.

And of course, inside Russia occupied Ukraine, they call the Ukrainians, the usurpers, of the power of the man of the kingdom. And so that's outer realm. And you create this sense of inner outer realm. You get the geography, but you also do it by saying, Ukrainians are trying to kill you.

And you begin in early 2014 thinking, I'm a Ukrainian. Why would the Ukrainians try to kill me? But it's everywhere. The entire universe of the space is telling you that Ukrainians are trying to kill you. And the vectors of this are a million stories every single day about mythical shellings, which never happened.

I know they never happened because I was there. when they were supposed to have happened, and even when I was right next to it, and this gets to one of your points, Jonathan, about how you verified, you know, I was in situations where I heard the explosion, I saw a Ukrainian soldier polishing his RPG, which throws these grenades kind of thing, and I asked him, did you hear that explosion you go no and then i go to russia occupied across this bridge smith this this and i suddenly meet a russian um syria like a senior officer who immediately conducts me on this whole odyssey of showing me where they exploded what exploded the ukrainians did it and i see what looks like blood on the ground but it's blackberry season and tens of thousands of tons of blackberries have been brought across this border. And so everything looks like blood on the ground. And then for weeks afterwards in the media, they're talking about the Ukrainians killed three people.

And so you could not have been closer to these explosions than me in actuality, but I don't know whether they happened. I don't know whether anyone was injured. I heard stories, two people brought to hospital, two not. And when you zoom out of this, you're left with stuff in the information space that you're reading on Twitter, or you'll hear it in a Donald rally or any of these things, and you're thinking, did this really happen? I don't know. And so how do I discern whether it matters whether it happened or not? And if I'm looking at it, people are creating the sense of other it's this what i call stealth genocide and this is core and disinfo because this is what the russians um were up to and i checked this yesterday actually president zelensky used the term genocide on the 5th of april 2022 for the first time and like me president zelensky is an international lawyer so you don't use the word genocide lightly.

And the President of Poland used the term on around the 15th of March 2022. And I had already noticed in Ukraine, I used, before Disinfolklore was born, I used this you would often see these protests, what I call these fake demonstrations. And I was able to discern, is this from a genuine organic demonstration of villagers annoyed that the gas has been cut off and so they're blocking the road, which is a model of protest that applies in that part of the world. Is it real or is it provoked by Russian agents?

And one of the indicators I used was they would liken some issue over the gas to genocide. This is genocide. I mean, it's a core tenet. I write about this a lot. that we often think disinformation or disinfolklore happens to other people, happens to stupid people, people who aren't educated, non-Ukrainians, Ukrainians or people who've been to university.

But it's a core tenet that the moment you start to think that, We need to check, check, check, as the Dalai Lama would put it. That is the moment when you become susceptible to it, because we are all susceptible to it. And in the Russist combat, and I'm going to use the term Russist because I have nothing against Russians, as none of us do, but a Russist is somebody who believes in imperial Russism and believes in the genocide in Ukraine. A Ruscist will have different vectors. So I talk in terms of vectors rather than narratives because you have a meaning.

The meaning is we will kill all Ukrainians or we will win the war in Ukraine. And the vectors are just thousands of articles telling us to lay down our arms. Ukraine can never win. Russia will keep on going forever like a transformer. they have vectors for everyone from president biden president biden's uh things they have them for that next they have them for uh people that i used to that i still know in eastern ukraine who are ardent ukrainian uh patriots today and will fight to the death to defend their land and their villages from but the russians are still targeting them with uh with with these vectors which will um manipulate their minds and their, as the French would say, their volonté, their motivation, their intentions. So you start reading the article and you're thinking, I support Ukraine. Ukraine will win. But by the end of it, this New York Times journalist is telling you, Ukraine can't win. Oh, so we must make peace. So it's really...important for me anyway to always remember that I'm just as susceptible to it than others. I've just created this set of routines, mental routines, which help me see through it and see where my mind is being affected.