Breaking Archetypes
How to defuse an archetypal bomb
To break this archetype, say it plainly. The hand on your head is the hand that made the wound. Again, Donald made this wound in Iran. Then look at the bandage. Then look at the wound. Then look at the face beneath the crown and ask: is this a father, or is this a Santa Claus salesman with a microphone?
The Ukrainian Nazi: Archetype Four
The fourth archetype is the Ukrainian Nazi, the bogeyman at the forest edge.
Every folktale community needs a bogeyman. The Bavarian had his Krampus. The Russian had Baba Yaga — and now the Russians have another Baba Yaga. The Irish had their fear dearg. The bogeyman is the outer realm creature who lurks at the edge of the forest, who will eat your children if they stray, who justifies the high fence and the locked door.
Russian Disinfolklore in occupied Luhansk manufactured a bogeyman of its own. His name is the Ukrainian Nazi. Unlike Baba Yaga, he is industrially produced, day after day, in the DNINews.com bulletins, the LugInfo.com briefings, the Kazachi Vestnik weekly, and the MGB’s leaked confessions. He is the single most documented fiction in the Luhansk news monitoring corpus that I kept from 2015 to 2018, with over 10,000 individual items of Disinfolklore with archetypal identities immanent in them… continued on audio and in text:
To counter him, describe the real soldiers you have met. Say their names. Describe their grandmothers. Describe what they cook. The bogeyman cannot survive specificity. He is a silhouette, and he dies in the full light of a face.