My favorite subject, and it all begins around Kherson/Zaporizhia, whether it’s the UN Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes in Ukraine or the Yamna community, who a relatively small number of individuals created the language, the linguistic structures, the words we use almost in every sentence, the religions, the solid immanence in many Indo-European religions, including I would characterize Christianity as an Indo-European religion.
Buddhism was also an emanation of and created by this community’s descendants, which just in itself is an amazing just amazing, absolutely amazing. Because most of us grow up… We have a mental model of Greece, Rome, maybe ancient Egypt before Greece and, um, And then our cultures.
It turns out this is not true. And that Greek, Greece and Rome, Greek, well, Italic culture, Italic and Celtic languages, as far as we know, formed inside a mixture of the Yamna community from this area in Hearson, Micolae, Oblast. right around the river where Russia and Ukraine, this has been an intersection point, an interaction point for millennia, out of an interaction between migrating Yamnaf from there after 2500 BCE westwards, near Odesa, just east of Odesa, and this community of people there. Linguists and archaeologists have suspected, many of them have suspected this for decades, for a few decades. But...
And Jung refers to the reason why Jung explains why he believes that these archetypes are part of the collective unconscious of humanity is he just he can’t understand how else they could have come from, where else they could have come from. And he talks, Jung talks about the wildest migration theories, which now we know since 2015, ancient DNA. as it’s known in the literature, is scientific facts. So the scientific fact of the genetic content of people from India to Ireland whose genetic ancestry comes from what they call the steppe, what I call ancient Ukrainian.
So for me, a lot of my work is about re-archetyping Ukraine inside the mental models of humanity because I realized, as many of us did, there was nothing, there was some problem that people had, whether it was the former German policy or the policy of many of our governments. They all were perceiving, and perhaps many of us did this as well before we became aware about Ukraine and its importance, not only in our current day, in our current moment, but its importance over time. that there was something they basically, Russia was managing by controlling, by monopolizing the myth of Russia’s superiority of Ukraine, archetyping Ukraine as not a real country. By every time Donald Putin speaks, he’s re-archetyping Russia as this great power.
Many of us and many of our friends perhaps still will perceive Russia’s culture as somehow justifying its genocide in Ukraine and its activities in Ukraine or Dostoevsky or ballet. And I’m a great fan of, uh, those writers because I think they’re very insightful and very helpful to us.
I realized that basically from the very beginning of the war of the full-scale invasion without really, um, understanding it as being archetyping at the time. But I realized that what I had to do, my mission was to try and at least campaign for parity of esteem between Ukraine and other countries. modern nation states, which have won the monopoly by fair means of foul, certain communities of people after World War II, who had managed to become UN members, including Ukraine, which was a founding member of the United Nations. signed the UN charter in 1945. But then as I dug into it more deeply and followed this path from when I was in
Eastern Ukraine, working in Eastern Ukraine, I accidentally discovered the Yamnaya when some property developers were destroying this extraordinary structure in a posh suburb of Dnipro. And it made the front page of the New York Times, and all of the local people were protesting. And so I went to, in my capacity as a monitor,
to monitor the security situation, I went there to try and discover what was going on. And what I discovered was these property dwellers had destroyed a Yamna burial mound in which was buried the local monarch. and various other people throughout the millennia, including the last person to be buried in there was the head of the collective farm,
believe it or not, in like 1932. So delusions of grandeur there and continuity. And underneath this mound, when they destroyed it, was found the stone circle, which was created by one of the major ingredient cultures in the Yamna. And And through that, I began to, from a position of extreme skepticism,
that we could trace the linguistic journey of certain people carrying not just a language, not just the words, the vocabulary, the sounds and meanings which we use today. There’s about a thousand sounds and meanings in what we call Proto-Indo-European. or I call ancient Ukrainian, which is the language spoken by the Yamna between 4,100 BCE and 2,500 BCE.
And I recognize I’m throwing out these dates. For me, it’s really chartered to territory for most people. Most of us, our history kind of begins maybe around 1,000 BCE with the first date. King David in the Bible or whatever. But again, what I’m trying to do, and part of my mission, is to re-archetype our mental models,
our idea of not just Ukraine, humanity, our human history, and our European history, and Ukrainians’ position in it, but to create these new structures and these frameworks. Because that’s how what I call dis-folklore and disinformation unfold. does it creates frameworks untruthful frameworks in our minds um so you know people
inside maga in the maga disenfoked or galaxy you know they have all these in in jokes they they know all about these different things which you and i wouldn’t know about and and this is this is how it works as i understand this is how russian uh disinformation is why it’s so successful
because it’s it’s not a question of people’s intelligence or their education or or anything like that it’s about how people’s minds are are changed so i’m quite upfront about this when i outline these histories and all of this stuff which is you know the ancient dna studies is published in nature and science the pre and
preeminent scientific journals i stay away from from anything that’s in any way unkosher or not backed up. But yeah, so feel free to follow up on anything to do with the Indo-European thing. Yeah, part of what helped me see this pattern, this is what I really do, I hunt for patterns in data, And I assimilate,
as many of us do, who participate in X, because X, as we now know from the third report on foreign information manipulation and interference by the European Union, which was released. I highly recommend to anyone. to read along with the first two reports, which was published a couple of weeks ago. X is where on a data set,
I think it was over 40,000 FIMI instances of FIMI that were collected by the European Union. X was involved in 86% of them. So this is where we all are. And I know many of us have ethical dilemmas about should we be here, should we not?
And most of us are also part of Blue Sky and other places. But the fight is here and the examples are here of whether it’s, I saw Maid Marian Simonian tweeting again in her folksy distant folklore way where she does this a lot where she tells these stories as indeed as donald they tell these stories of
frankly horrifying things this is going to your question james uh really horrifying things uh like for instance don’t the way donald communicated and i think it was march 2024 that if uh that if the head of a major nato country said to him um we can’t pay for our NATO membership. Would you protect us?
And he said, I’d say to do whatever the hell they want with you. And then this unit of information was then reported by CNN as a fact that Donald had had told this head of state that America wouldn’t protect him. But we’re not clear whether this ever, ever happened, but it was reported as a fact by CNN.
And so you see these folksy stories get taken up. Simone, tonight, she’s talking about how people in the offices, and these terms really interest me, and they made me, I’ve seen them For years now, and if it’s a pattern, which is what, along with the horror of what they’re saying,
if it’s a pattern that made me suspicious something methodical was going on here, which is what I’ve used this folklore to explain and to interpret. She says, oh, people in the offices in Moscow are saying that if Germany gives their weapons to Ukraine, that they will, Ukraine won’t be able to do anything with them without Germany’s help.
therefore germany is complicit and so we’ll have to strike berlin and so this is a classic piece of distant folklore there’s a distancing uh in the narrative form it’s presented as a folksy story people in the offices of moscow as if she’s she’s
just been uh and the image in our head is she’s she’s just heard this gossip uh and she said this before when she’s spoken the saint petersburg economic forum in June 2022. Many of us will remember this here, where she said people in Moscow are saying that all our hope is in the famine.
And then she interprets what these folksy people are supposedly saying. And she’s sitting beside the head of state. She’s sitting beside Donsi Putin himself. on the days at St. Petersburg Economic Forum, dressed in green, which is why I call her Made, Marion, Simonian, like a reverse Robin Hood.
And this is an aspect of the distant folklore analytical method that we can use these folklore archetypes to interpret those who are themselves using these folksy archetypes to combat them. And she said, the people in Moscow are saying all our hope is in the famine.
And what they mean by that is, this is her saying that she understands what the folk what the ordinary folk in Moscow are saying. They are saying that there will be famine in Africa and the migrants will come to Europe and then the European Union will release the sanctions because it’s impossible for us not to be friends.
So this is the folksy banter of the schoolyard. This is you speaking, your seven-year-old child speaking to their seven-year-old friend, best friend, and they’ve had an argument. It’s impossible not to be friends. But this isn’t a micro chat in a schoolyard. It’s a conversation sitting beside the head of state of a country at war,
which is planning to famine millions of people in Africa in a madcap attempt, which would really only, you’d only see it in literature in Don Quixote or in some folktale. So the mad cap plan to win in Ukraine is to starve millions of Africans. That will provoke the Europeans into lifting the sanctions.
And then Russia will become friends with Europe and Ukraine will be abandoned. So the way she tells the story, it’s very solid Russian strategy, but it’s told in a folksy way. And it’s absolutely horrifying when you analyze what it’s saying. But it passes most people by. It enters their inner minds, as indeed does this stuff,
archetyping the former president of Russia as drunk. So many of us will have seen many sensible people tweeting today the content of the former president of Russia’s tweet a once again threatening WW3 if something happens. I think it’s related to the Germans. And so these are kind of folktale archetypes, folksy stories,
which communicate really horrifying things when you parse the data. And it’s a pattern that they use. And it’s really effective because people like us share these because they They provoke something in us, in our emotions. And even if we think we’re harming the former president by characterizing them, by archetyping them as drunk, we’re still repeating the meme.
And this horrifyingness is slyly communicated and the energy is continued and it’s pinging around the world. Thankfully, now, today, as many of us will know, because we’re tuned into this, we see great advance in our political leadership over what we have experienced since February 2022. But this method of communication has had the impact on President Biden’s policy,
don’t poke the bear, is a distant folklore meme, probably the most successful one ever. That actually impacts on foreign policy. It stopped America properly helping Ukraine. And international relations itself, the entire discourse is full of these issues. metaphors and distant folklore, don’t poke the bear being one,
but distant folklore means that are represented as being a means of communicating foreign policy and strategy affecting the lives and deaths of millions of people. Whereas in fact, These strategies are only communicated by means of these means and through these means. And so what I have spotted, which as far as I’m aware,
no one else’s or no other writers have really noticed is this continuity across multiple narrative forms, discourses. It’s obvious in anthropology or in folklore studies or in psychology, in Jungian psychology, when they’re referencing myths and archetypes and storytelling. But the same dynamic is at place inside international relations discourse inside the speeches up until recently of many of
our leading politicians. And obviously, everything Donald says, he speaks this folklore fluently. It’s these folksy stories from the Jan 6th anthem of the Jan 6th insurrectionists organized by the current head of the FBI. the songs which were used in his rallies, which many of us, the talk, the folksy way of speaking about Alphonse Capone,
the archetyping of Melania as Al Capone’s wife, using, wearing this, the clothes, haute couture clothes made by Ukrainian fashion designers in LA, Dressex, who supply haute couture interpretations of comic book, chic comic book aesthetics for people like Elon Musk and Melania Trump who want to archetype themselves as characters in our info space by referencing through their
clothes superheroes or characters from folklore, from folktale, from our contemporary folktale. So that’s kind of a sample of the The scale, because I noticed that many of the mythological founders in Indo-European peoples, they had in their names, in their monikers, this MN sound, like Manu is the first man, the first human in Indic culture, Yama,
who comes from Ariyaman. So there it is again, Ariyaman, in which he gave his name to Iran, becomes Yama in India. You’ve got this MN sound in it, and he is one of the founders in ancient Iranian culture from pre-Zaratustrian times. In Ireland, they have Manana. In Wales, Manaudin.
Obviously, Germany, the Germanic culture of Manus, the first man, the first human. So I was trying to work out what’s going on here. And you have in Minos, and you have lots of stuff in Greek, and in Armenia, and Menuhak. So you have all of these MN sounds. So, uh, and then this other sound, Rit, right, Rit,
Reta, truth in, uh, in Sanskrit, ancient Indian language, um, and, um, uh, in ancient Iran, um, uh, in Darius’s inscriptions, Darius, who founded the Akimeneid, there’s the MN again, empire, which is about 700 to 300 BCE, uh, before Alexander the Great came on the scene, so-called Great came on the scene.
Um, so you’ve got this, um, these sounds, these RT sounds, right, the claim for right, um, They claim to monopolize what is right, what is right, right, unified right. So these sounds seem to, they just recur again and again. They’re patterns which recur again and again, which seem to have some impact on our psyche, on our minds.
There’s the MN in mind as well. There’s a few of them which just reoccur and I think it’s these sounds embedded in stories, whether the stories are what we might consider folklore. And now I think we have to consider what folklore is, is what’s on TikTok.
It’s what we’re reading on X, the war lore that Mockers reads, that Will talks about. These are a modern manifestation of folklore, but what’s common to them and... to the stories Brothers Grimm and other community forming tropes, controls, and informational units like the Russian propaganda in Russia occupied Ukraine,
which is where I started looking at the stuff in detail. What they have in common is they have these sounds inside them that seem to have that recur, these patterns, and have been around for thousands of years attached to the same meanings. It’s in meaning as well. And they shine through
like different meanings shine through different words, different signifiers. So that’s the level I’m on. And I know the Russians are looking at it at this level, this linguistic level as well, to connect these symbols and signs and sounds and images to what Jung called our unconscious, not our collective unconscious, but I see the our individual unconscious.
And so the stories are a means of communicating these and somehow controlling us. I mean, I don’t really understand it, but I just see the patterns and they’re empirical. They’re empirical patterns through time, through culture. And we see them every day. I collect them all the time.
So that’s really my focus, what I bring, which is new to the thing. Totally. I mean, I was shocked to see, well, some of us may have seen how Russia was using generative AI to represent leaders in the West as cartoonish characters to help brainwash children in Russia. And then I saw at a recent meeting that, um,
leaders world, many of our leaders were shown as, uh, using generative AI as children. And, um, this is a whole, um, uh, and this was applauded and it was fun. It is fun, but it’s, it’s very dangerous. It’s dark stuff. And it’s, um, I tried to come up with a means of parsing any data,
whether it’s this or any other data, and I hope my 12 tools in my disenfoked or my 12-tool algorithm would help us see through nefarious attempts to manipulate our minds, like the Russians doing it using generative AI to represent... foreign leaders as cartoonishly bad characters and embed those archetypes in their minds the Russians,
I mean I saw early clues to this in the way in these Russian films there’s one of Gogol who’s a Ukrainian writer but his work Russia, or he went to, as I understand, he went to Russia, Ming would know more about this than me, but he went to Russia to try and educate Russia, Moscow,
about Ukraine as a culture, and all the Russians could see in his work was folktale, was this kind of folktale characters, and they kind of did this in a patronizing way to Lezio-Ukrenka as well, where they kind of look at Ukraine as this place of little people, quaint people.
A bit like how previous generation of English people might have used leprechauns to archetype Irish people as somehow inferior. But thankfully that’s dead now. And so for me as an Irish person, part of my Irish identity, I could see this family resemblance. But it’s a power, it can be a positive
power as well and what Russia is doing to the minds of Ukrainians inside the occupation and inside the Russians. They are really on the cutting edge of this stuff and the tools they’re using, whether it’s generative AI or narrative tools, are very much part of
what I’m trying to combat and give us the tools to see it because we’re not really at the races, generally speaking, in terms of in our culture, we’re not, if we just got to know what the Russians are doing, that backing, like with Russian literature,
that gives us a menu of what we shouldn’t be doing by accident and, and what we’re up against as well. So I, I think it’s very, um, um, it’s reading Harry Potter and things like that. I mean, and I think reading Harry Potter is very innocuous.
At least I know many people get exercised about its author and stuff. I don’t really understand what all that’s about. But, you know, as an artist myself, I’m amazed at what she managed to achieve. But I don’t think there’s anything too bad about it. And magic, I mean, it’s really important to understand how magic works, war magic,
and not be afraid of it and become familiar with it because it is magical what the Russians manage to do, what Trump manages to do. And if we’re not, we understand magic and magical tales. But primarily, I think it’s really important because this is where we get our archetypes. This is how we
if I avoid any sense of universal unconscious, collective unconscious, that’s somehow injected into our minds, which say that academic at MIT, the linguist, I can’t remember his name at the moment, but the guy with the beard, who we all hate, quite rightly so. Noam Chomsky. Exactly. Thank you, Lex. You know, I see where his linguistic work
begins and ends with the annihilation of Ukraine. If he wants to understand universal aspects of grammar and syntax, all he needs to do is accept that the Yamna people forged the first Indo-European language and spread it across the world. but he annihilates Ukraine twice, both in his political work and in his work in linguistics.
But anyway, aside from all that, we get our archetypes. I feel this myself. I understand it myself from my own experience, from cartoons, from Disney, from grim fairy tales, from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Child Snatcher, from all of these, both good and bad, And this is how I perceived reality that I found in Eastern Ukraine.
When I arrived there in 2015, in this forested area, this beautiful Halcyon, Arcadian forested area, from the first moment I arrived there, I saw something folklore about it. I didn’t understand what it was. And it’s that intuition I’ve been uncovering. And at this point in my work, I can report that since we do take in
archetypes as children from these folktales and from these, that if we want to win the war for the next generation,
