Podcast | The Sberbank Troll & Infolklore (week 3)

Part One. The Christening of the Sberbank Report

Some of us might have seen last week a new character entered into our information space, and its Mana, its energy, doesn’t match its name. This is a core element in the Disinfolklore analytical method, so we can all learn how to do this. That when we see or perceive some piece of information warfare, we look for the Mana in the meme, and then we see if the name of that energy suits it.

So if Donald says he wants peace while bombing Iran, then the Mana, the energy, the substance of what he is saying doesn’t match the name. It’s not peace. And obviously that example works for the russians, and part of what I try to teach myself to do is learn to practise this in real time.

And so this is an example of it from last week that some of us who spend our days in the Ukrainian information space might have noticed, this character. And you might remember my piece last year on how Disinfolklore, part of the Disinfolklore method, is to look at memes as characters that we would look at, like in a book.

And then that enables us to examine them in ways which we don’t usually examine news stories. Ukraine being a perfect example of a character with female characteristics, according to the authoritarian mindset, who needs to surrender to the man, russia. And so if we look at that in that analytical way, it does help us. Because people like Putler talk about Ukraine as a woman.

Famously, the example I give on the 20th of February 2022, where Putler was giving a press conference. So four days before the full-scale invasion. And he used the term “like it or not, take it my beauty”. And russians perfectly understood what he meant by this, because they understood the reference point.

Which was a song by a Soviet-era hard rock band called Red Mould. And Red Mould had this famous song in the 1980s called “Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin”. So again, archetypal Disinfolklore, in two senses of the word archetypal. And Putler communicates his threat via this piece of Disinfolklore from pop culture that is visible to the Russists, but not to these Western experts that we hear so much about.

And the message was very clear, and it was very clear in gendered terms, as indeed that 1980s song is. “Like it or not, take it my beauty.” Perceiving Ukraine as a corpse, and also as the victim of necrophiliac, you know what.

And it’s not just me who noticed this gendered speech and this means of threatening, what has come and what has been realised thro