Decoding Trolls

About Decoding Trolls

Decoding Trolls decodes the meanings inside memes. Decoding Trolls sees any emotion-moving activity of body, speech, or mind as trolling. Trolling others' emotions is what we do as sentient beings. The point is to control it, through getting how it works. www.decodingtrolls.net (https://www.decodingtrolls.net?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Decoding Trolls

Category

news · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

6 Nov 2024

Latest episode

3 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

28 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   3 Oct 2026

   Podcast | When History Becomes War: Transcending the History Provocation troll (Ep 2)

   My new Historical versus Real Russia lens has been tested before. In October 1925, at Locarno, Weimar Germany guaranteed its borders with France and Belgium. But Weimar Germany left its border with Poland open. The Weimar state spent years campaigning about the past. The history it told claimed the land, claimed Poland. Fourteen years later, its army crossed the open border. “…The limb is gone, but the feeling of the Historical Russia remains. AfD, MAGA, Brexit, Poland’s PiS, France’s National Front and a heap of other backward-looking, oligarch-run democracy-hacking projects engage in History Provocation tactics - nostalgia concealing a will-to-power whose goal is to destroy the post-WWII architecture…” The Federal Republic, the same core after a far greater defeat, kept a legal claim on the lost east for two further decades. But the Federal Republic renounced force. It acknowledged its crimes from 1951. In 1970, it signed treaties with Moscow and with Warsaw, accepting the post-war borders. After signing the first, that August, Willy Brandt told West Germans on television: “There’s nothing lost with this treaty which has not been squandered away a long time ago.” That is what the Real Germany sounds like in a core that has lost its empire. That is what we must hear in the Real Russia of the future. If we want to hear the leaders of the future Real Russia, then we must hear it from them now. We must be looking for that meaning in what we hear around us today. So, by the time the Russian state collapses and becomes Moscow and St Petersburg and a couple of counties around those areas, we will be equipped to help steer it, and to ensure that it remains inside the boundaries of the Real Russia. Whenever it lapses into the Historical Russia discourse, we can help correct it. The question to put to every voice in Future Russia is Locarno’s. Which borders do you call final? And do you call all of them final? For their own good, and within the law If Russia had the power to conquer Ukraine, it would. But it doesn’t. Ukraine will enforce its borders for the decades to come. So unless Future Russia learns what the Real Russia is, and how to evacuate its brain, its consciousness and its national consciousness of this Historical Russia fallacy, the Ukrainians will enforce it. They will be fully within their rights under the law. They will enforce it using tens of thousands of drones every time Russia strays over its borders, in search of revenge, or some historical Russian troll. What I’m prescribing today is a change in mind and understanding. It is metanoia, in Yakubova’s speech. It is for their own good. It is for the good of humanity, and the good of European peace and security. And it is all within the law. Respect your borders. Don’t invade other countries. Don’t fill your population with nonsense about the past. Especially when that nonsense will, in due course, end up persuading them to participate in unlawful invasions of other countries, and the deaths of millions of people, since February 2022. Why we need to start now The reason to learn the difference now, before Future Russia arrives, is that many Westerners are already hypnotised by the Data-Resistant Archetypes. The archetype of Russia as a great power is a phantom limb (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/p/podcast-and-pensees-127-russias-antisemitic). It’s like when you lose a leg or an arm. For months afterwards, you try to move it. You try to pick something off the shelf, or you try to walk, and you can’t. It’s gone. That is the Historical Russia. The Historical Russia is still in our information space. As the Syrian regime began to collapse in the winter of 2024, the same IR (International Relations) experts who had not seen the end of Syria coming were urging Ukraine to concede territory to an unbeatable Russia. They still are. The limb is gone. The Historical Russia is dead. It’s in the grave. All that is left is an idea of the Historical Russia. That idea must be smited and replaced with the Real Russia idea. That is the purpose of this piece. The limb is gone, but the feeling of the Historical Russia remains. AfD, MAGA, Brexit, Poland’s PiS, France’s National Front and a heap of other backward-looking, oligarch-run democracy-hacking projects engage in History Provocation tactics - nostalgia concealing a will-to-power whose goal is to destroy the post-WWII architecture. The History Provocation Historical Russia knows how to work on that feeling. It’s like an AI agent coming to infect your minds, our minds, the minds of our countries, and our feelings of security. Then it comes over the borders and kills people, and does horrific things, all as an instrument of history. Its instrument is history, brainwashing. I call it the History Provocation. A state talks about the past, loudly and for years, until its target, and everyone watching, are arguing about the past too. Before you know it, we’re fighting over stuff which isn’t even true. Or if it is true, it doesn’t matter. What matters today is our future, and building and developing our human communities, educating our children, and building safe communities and a knowledge economy. It doesn’t matter if the history we’re arguing about is stolen, invented, or even perfectly true. What makes it a provocation is what it does to us and our minds. It sets the agenda. The History Provocation pulls attention away from the present. The History Provocation gives the state’s surrogates, the Historical Russia’s surrogates, a part to play. In October 2025, I put it bluntly: Putler’s “history stuff is just a way of establishing character for his surrogates and to hypnotise”. The record of the last History Provocation The record of the last History Provocation is in the European Union’s own database of Russian disinformation. “Ukraine is an artificial state created by the Russians”, 9 June 2016. “Ukraine has never existed as an independent country”, the next day. “Ukraine is not a real state because it has no real territory, no single language, single economy and single population”, September 2018. “Ukrainians and Russians are one people”, on the day Putler’s essay on the subject appeared, in July 2021. On 28 February 2022, four days into the invasion, “Russians and Ukrainians are one people” was offered as a reason to murder hundreds of thousands of native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians. Supposedly, in order to protect them. Of course, the Historical Russia is nonsense, from start to finish, as a casus belli. Some in the West read the warning Some in the West read the warning. I was one of them. At the beginning of January 2022, Germany’s chancellor’s advisers were some others. They met four leading experts from Germany on Russia. Die Zeit reconstructed the meeting that June. One expert found the questions very strange. Chancellor Scholz and his people were “not particularly interested in the current troop build-up. Instead, they asked about Russian colonialism, Putler’s politics of history and Russian fascism.” In mid-February, Chancellor Scholz was flying between Kyiv and Moscow to try and stop the war. In front of journalists, he kept returning to what Die Zeit called “Putler’s historical treatise”. He kept wondering whether Putler was concerned not with the Donbas or NATO at all, “but rather with an imperial project”. He was right to read the history. But he was very slow in understanding what Historical Russia means. He read it far too late. Years too late. Hundreds of thousands and millions will die because of that failure of cognition. That is the cognitive failure I am trying to address, by inserting into our minds today this distinction between Historical Russia and Real Russia. Two ways to meet a History Provocation There are two ways to meet a History Provocation. One is to read it as a statement of intent. The other is to argue with it. Every group of people that answers “one people” by debating the baptism of Rus’ in 988 has taken the road of Historical Russia and historical provocation. The argument can be won on the facts. It can be lost on the agenda. In Future Russia, Historical Russia will come to Western capitals with maps, anniversaries, grievances, marches and complaints. It will ask to be understood. The empathetic amongst us will surrender our empathy to them. We will try to understand: “Oh, so 988. Oh, 1433.” But the useful question will not be whether this history is true. The useful question will be: which Russia is speaking? If it is Historical, revanchist Russia speaking, then we must not entertain this nonsense for a second. After Real Russia has reasserted itself, or indeed asserted itself for the first time in world history. After, for example, it has done what Germany and Japan did after their crimes during the Second World War. Then we can have nice chats about history. But it will be several centuries before the Real Russian will be able to talk about history without catching themselves in the sentence itself. Without acknowledging publicly that they are speaking from a Real Russia perspective, and that they are not lapsing back into the Historical Russia doctrine. An empire falls, and Ukraine rise Ukraine knows how this story usually runs. We should listen to Ukraine, who were occupied by Russia for over a century. So if we want to understand Russia, we should not be speaking to Western experts who fall for the Historical Russia troll. They are fully able to explain what happened in 988 and 1233, but they actually have no idea of the true and contemporary Ukraine. An empire falls, and Ukraine rises. The empire recovers, and Ukraine is swallowed again. This is the cycle. The Ukrainian People’s Republic rose in 1917 out of the wreck of the tsars’ Historical Russia empire. It fell to the new reboot of Historical Russia that the Bolsheviks rebuilt. As we know now from historical sources, the Bolsheviks used the idea of a world revolution, and the idea of moving towards socialism and communism, as a mask. They knew they needed to mask the continuity of the ancien régime, and of the security and securocrats that persisted into the Bolsheviks. So they came up with this communist ideology to troll Ukrainians, and the rest of us, into thinking this was a plucky metanoia, a sincere attempt to build a workers’ paradise. In fact, all it was was a cynical continuity of what had come before. Independence for Ukraine came again in 1991, out of the Soviet collapse. In 2014, and in 2022, the rebuilders came back. Those rebooters, the Historical Russians, came back again and again. They keep coming back. They will keep coming back until we can understand this distinction between Historical Russia and Real Russia, and the poison that Historical Russia actually is. Historical Russia disguises itself as immanences in memes, and ideas, and people, and in our own minds, in fact all the time. It does this so that it can recreate and reboot itself, rather than engage in the kind of metanoia that Japan and Germany engaged in after the Second World War. After the next collapse Future Russia will be another collapse. The danger after every collapse is in the rebooting or the metanoia. Ending the pattern is the historical task of Real Ukraine. Thank God Ukraine has the power to do it. But we must help it through understanding. Every state that will be born out of Russia’s collapse itself must rebuild itself as a result of metanoia. Not just a reboot. Historical Russia will be ended in heads before it is ended on maps. In February 2026, I put it this way: “The war of archetypes is permanent (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-four-years-the-arc-of-a-war). It requires permanent counter-archetyping.” The archetype of Historical Russia must be smited wherever we see it. Only the Real Russia should be allowed to live in our minds. The war of archetypes is permanent. It requires permanent counter-archetyping. I’m trying to equip us for this today. An apparent contradiction My own intellectual project is mainly focused on recentring Ukraine in the story of humanity, in accordance with what history and archaeogenetics and archaeolinguistics today help us understand. Those before 2015, for instance, could not possibly have understood it. In July 2024, I put it in one line: “My core project: re-centring Ancient Ukraine in humanity’s mental models (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/p/pensees-70).” This can look like a contradiction. I’m banning Historical Russia, but I’m advocating in favour of ancient Ukraine. I’m saying Future Russia must leave its history alone and live on a map. But on the other hand, I’m allowing Ukraine, and I’m advocating for Ukraine, not to do the same. Recentring Ukraine is not a claim on anyone’s land. It’s a claim on our attention. The difference between the two, between Historical Russia and recentring ancient Ukraine in our minds, is the difference between Historical and Real. Songs, and a state The narrow version of my intellectual project, Finding Manuland (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/finding-manuland-first-episode), affords Ukraine what every sovereign culture already has. In 1777, Herder asked where Germany’s Shakespeare was. As I have written: “The modern state was created after Herder’s 1777 plea to unite the German tribes behind a set of stories (folklore, and more accurately folk songs) typifying Germanness. The Brothers Grimm, Goethe, and later Wagner answered that call. And 90 years later, the first unified German state was created. Identity is wholly a function of stories.” Herder was talking about songs which contained the stories. The same work made most of the states that we today take for granted. “You see, most European states alive today are a function of the national consciousness, wrought from the folklore collectors’ work, inspired by Ossian, Herder, the Brothers Grimm,” I wrote in November 2024 (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/p/pensees-83). “States which had never existed before (Greece, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Belgium) were all created out of this work.” Ukraine is one of them. Its songs and its poets, Taras Shevchenko first among them. I stayed on Shevchenko Boulevard on my first night in Kyiv. I wondered about him. Because I saw the name, I then researched him. He is for Ukrainian nationalism what W. B. Yeats is for Ireland. What Shakespeare is for England. What Herder and Goethe are for Germany. Every country has their Shevchenko. Taras Shevchenko, of course, was born a slave. He was only freed when he managed to convince a group of rich Muscovites that he, a Ukrainian, was so special that they should pay to emancipate him. Taras Shevchenko, first among them, made a nation of a people the empire called a province. As Timothy Snyder has written: “The earliest articulation of Ukrainian patriotism by Russian subjects came from the left bank of the Dnipro River, from the new university at Kharkiv in the 1820s and the 1830s.” In August 2022, Russia shelled Kharkiv in order to liberate the native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians living there. I wrote that by destroying the buildings of the university where the idea of a modern Ukraine, which contains Russian identity, was born, Muscovy could not turn back time. It was too late. They cannot return to the Historical Russia. And we must not let them return to the Historical Russia. That’s why we must learn to see the Real Russia. Parity of esteem From the first days of the full-scale invasion, my mission was, in the words I used later, “to campaign for parity of esteem between Ukraine and other modern nation states which have won the monopoly game of nation statehood by fair means or foul.” Ukraine was a founding member of the United Nations. It signed the UN Charter in its own right as a sovereign state in 1945. On the eightieth anniversary of D-Day, in June 2024, I wrote of Ukraine taking its rightful place “on the basis of equality and parity of esteem” among the great European peoples who, in the post-World War II legal order, became “sovereign, secure and prosperous nation states”. Positive nationalism That is positive nationalism. The collectors of the nineteenth century were recording a culture that existed. As I put it in 2024 (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/ways-of-seeing-disinfolklore-ii), “the collection of folktale songs during the 18th and 19th centuries was a good faith attempt to record actual existing culture.” It gave peoples a voice. And in the end, a state. Its counterfeit, Disinfolklore, came later. Disinfolklore takes the collectors’ tools and uses them to plant a negative identity. An enemy, a grievance, a lost land. Disinfolklore is the narrative mode that Historical Russia uses. Real Russia will use Infolklore (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-what-is-infolklore). Positive nationalism at work Ukraine today is positive nationalism at work. A whole society is mobilised against an unlawful invasion. Soldiers and medics, drone makers in garages, volunteers weaving camouflage nets, teachers holding lessons underground in Kharkiv’s metro, farmers clearing mines from their own fields. Ukraine is exercising the right of self-defence that Article 51 of the UN Charter recognises. Ukraine’s aim is not a lost province. It is not Historical Ukraine. As I said in March 2026: “Ukraine has one strategic goal (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-how-to-slay-the-disinfo-dragon) in this war: to destroy Russia’s capability to invade Ukraine again, permanently.” Part of Russia’s capability is its promotion of Russkiy Mir, or the Historical Russia fallacy. That fallacy is always used, and has been used for centuries, to justify going into other people’s lands and murdering them. Ukraine’s soldiers are dying for a free and sovereign Ukraine, not for a map of lost provinces and Historical Russia, or an Historical Ukraine. A sovereign country does not wait to be rescued. Allies can help. Allies should help far more than they have. But allies cannot be Ukraine’s state for it. Ukraine is doing it for itself, with its own drones, its own long-range strikes, its own defence industry. True history, and human rights When positive nationalism reaches for history, it reaches for true history. But even true history does not decide how we see today. True history, what I call real history, does not override the post-war legal order, or the protection of human rights and dignity which each of us is afforded as a function of being human. They are, after all, universal. The idea of universality of human rights was theorised by the Ukrainian international lawyer Hersch Lauterpacht. He later taught at my university, Cambridge University, after graduating from Lviv University. It was Hersch Lauterpacht, Sir Hersch Lauterpacht in the end, who wrote The Rights of Man in 1945. He argued that human rights should be afforded universally. Sovereign democracy cannot stand This goes back to when Surkov talks about sovereign democracy. He asserts, for Historical Russia, the right to curtail those living subject to Historical Russia’s laws: their right to participate in decision-making. But this cannot stand. This cannot be. It’s conceptually impossible to justify this, because the vision of Hersch Lauterpacht, the Ukrainian international lawyer, was accepted by the international community after World War II. His vision was for human rights protected by law, which applied universally to all humans. It was even accepted by Russia, and signed into treaty by Russia. And yet, the Historical Russia troll enables Russia to try and assert that its municipal law can trump international law. But this cannot stand. That is another clue for those arguing for Historical Russia. The Real Russia of the future must adhere to international law, strictly, or they will be punished for it by Ukrainian drones. It is so much easier to do what Japan and Germany did after World War II. To withdraw from the lands they purported to occupy. To try and make good on their crimes. To try and build up communities and societies within their lawful borders that the rest of the world envies. That is the challenge for the Real Russia, the future. That would be, and is, the essence of positive nationalism. I said it plainly at the end of 2024 (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/ten-reasons-why-finding-manuland): “What matters is the international rules-based order as established” in the wake of the Holocaust. Six thousand years That was the narrow version. This is the wide version of my project, Finding Manuland. Manuland is what I call “an imaginary community radiating around the hub (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/finding-manuland-i) of the modern state of Ukraine, stretching from India to Ireland”. I gave it that name in the autumn of 2021, as I passed a warehouse in northern France with the word Manuland written on it. I was on my way back to Ukraine from the last leave I would take before the full-scale invasion. The story Europe told itself For three centuries, Europe told itself a different story than the story I tell in Finding Manuland. The origins of Indo-European languages and its gods were placed in India, or in the German forests, or in Greece and Rome. You can listen to my Finding Manuland podcast on PowerofMana.net, on the Atlas series (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/podcast-finding-manuland-atlas-ep), which I began recently. There are five introduction episodes, or the series on which came first, Manu or Mannus (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/ep-1-using-m-n-to-determine-which). The mental models of our culture, our Indo-European culture, placed it in Greece, or in the German forests, or in Rome, or India. These mental models were built long before archaeogenetics. And they were built in good faith. “The idea that Western culture was founded in ancient Greece or ancient Rome has been relentlessly promoted, and in good faith.” I wrote that in March 2026. “Ancient Greece is just one daughter of Indo-European culture, privileged because we have amazing written records.” Soviet archaeology added a layer of its own. As I wrote in 2025 (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/p/pensees-114), Soviet archaeology “managed to troll many linguists, archaeologists, archaeogeneticists, historians and Comparative Mythologists/theologians into using formulae like ‘Steppe Ancestry’, ‘Southern Russia’, or ‘Pontic Caspian Steppe’” for the Ukrainian homeland of all living Indo-European languages. Halle and the Nebra moon disc In early February 2022, days before the full-scale invasion, I was on my way back from Ukraine. I visited the museum at Halle (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/our-expanding-mental-model-of-history), home of the Nebra moon disc. Germany’s president, Steinmeier, had spent years trolling Ukraine into surrendering occupied Luhansk and occupied Donetsk to Russia. He did it under the guise of allowing Russia to hold elections in these occupied territories, in exchange for peace. Steinmeier had spent years on the Ukraine issue. In 2022 he was still writing, in the introduction to an exhibition guide on the Nebra Sky Disc, that all Indo-European languages, including the Germanic, had emanated from “southern Russia”, instead of Ukraine. That is the Historical Russia occupying the minds of our leaders. I think President Steinmeier today would have a different answer to that. But people like him did not see through the Historical Russia troll. The cost is the graves of hundreds of thousands of innocent Ukrainians, and indeed of over a million Russians, in Ukraine. Where the story begins The ancient DNA studies of the last two decades now say where the Indo-European story begins. Every living Indo-European language goes back to the Yamna. The land that nourished the Yamna is south-eastern Ukraine, on the lower Dnipro, at Mykhailivka village (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/podcast-finding-manuland-atlas-ep-fac), on the right bank. It is just across from Enerhodar, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which the Ruschists are brutally occupying as I speak to you today. “More than half of humanity today speaks languages which were first spoken in south-eastern Ukraine, around where the Ruschists blew Nova Kakhovka dam.” Many great Indo-Europeanists, and their colleagues before the archaeogenetic evidence, had been willing to count today’s Russia as part of the Indo-European homeland. But I’m with one of the greatest researchers into the origins of the Germanic language, including English: Don Ringe, at Penn. Penn is where my grandfather went to university. “Only Ukraine makes sense,” as Don Ringe said, long before the archaeogenetics demonstrated the truth of this. I have taught myself to “dance in my mind between 6,000 years”, from the time the Yamna grew up inside ancient Ukraine to the present day, from Ireland to India. But the mental models we have been taught to imbibe go back through Rome, to Greece, and maybe to Egypt. Or maybe, if we know a bit about India, we’ll go back to India’s Indo-European history, which begins around 1200 or 1300 BCE. However, we can change our mental models and give it a time span of 6,000 years. That is the 2,000 years into the common era, and back to the 4,000 years when the Yamna first spoke the predecessor language of all of today’s living Indo-European languages, and cultures, and religions. That is a much bigger time span than we’re used to. And it’s a time span that begins and ends on the steppe of Ukraine. A daughter of that steppe Rome is a daughter of that steppe. “Ancient Rome is Ancient Ukraine’s daughter culture.” So is Greece, one of the amazing daughter cultures. So is Celtic Ireland, the Germanic north, England, Vedic India. When I began this work, I put it this way: “All roads may well lead to Rome, but they continue eastwards on from Rome, through Athens to ancient Ukraine.” Even the faith that Moscow’s church claims as its own arrived in Indo-European language. The New Testament was written in Greek. Greek is a daughter language of the language first spoken by the Yamna, in Mykhailivka village, in 4000 BCE. As I wrote in 2023 (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/p/indo-european-roots-of-early-christianity), “Greek was the lingua franca in the Roman occupied land of Judea, where Christ lived and taught at the time of Christ.” Rome was another Indo-European culture. Ancient Ukraine is the beginning of our history. Chornomorsk Chornomorsk is just east of Odesa. The Russians are bombing it relentlessly. It is thought to be the meeting point of the Yamna and Usatovo communities. Out of that encounter is believed to come all of the Italic, Celtic and Germanic language families, cultures, religions, ideas, words and meanings. It never fails to amaze me. I long to go back to these places now, with the knowledge of how all of our forebears began our time there. So when I talk about re-centring Ukraine, I’m talking about the true history. We now know it through modern, scientific, methodologically kosher archaeogenetics, linguistics, archaeology, theology and the rest. Rome is not a licence Of course, none of this licenses modern Ukraine to anything, any more than Rome licenses modern Italy, or modern Greece, to anything. In April 2022, while France hesitated over Crimea, I made the point as a joke: “Perhaps Italy could take Amiens? It’s basically Rome.” Nobody in Rome thinks the Caesars gave Italy a claim on Amiens, or that Pericles gives Greece a claim on Sicily. The glory of the ancients belongs to all their descendants. The glory of the ancients belongs to the land that raised them. It confers nothing on today’s army. Ukraine on its own terms This wider lens, which I talk about in my Finding Manuland project, applies to Ukraine on its own terms. Not only as Russia’s mirror. An Historical Ukraine is possible too. An Historical Ukraine would treat the 6,000 years as a title deed, like Russia treats its Historical Russia as a title deed and a casus belli. An Historical Ukraine would look east to the Kuban, to the country around Kursk and Belgorod, perhaps even to India, to Ireland. These are places where Ukrainian, or ancient Ukrainian’s proto-Indo-European daughter languages, have long been spoken. It would call them lost provinces. It would turn Ukraine’s suffering into a doctrine. An Historical Ukraine would keep an enemy forever to explain its present. In September 2022, I wrote: “Muscovy’s rather lucky that President Zelensky is strong enough to ensure Ukrainians settle for ejecting Ruschia from within Ukraine’s 1991 borders.” In the same post, I wrote: “Some voices call for the restoration of Ukraine’s historical lands.” Ukraine’s government has held to the 1991 borders through the whole war. That is the Real Ukraine speaking. On the record, Real Ukraine keeps its history true, the terrible parts with the glorious. That is because true history is the only kind of positive nationalism we can use. Real Ukraine So this is Real Ukraine. It holds 100 per cent of its sovereign territory, Crimea included. It has won a war against a country that once covered a sixth of the world’s surface. Ukraine holds the stories it has earned by smiting Russia. On the anniversary of Russia’s retreat from Zmiinyi, Snake Island (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/zmiiny-snake-island-attests-to-ukraines), I wrote: “Immanent in Ukraine is the Mana of the whole of your Indo-European civilisation.” The oldest Indo-European story of all is the herdsman Trito winning back his stolen cattle, and “in every iteration of the story since 1,200 BCE Trito ALWAYS wins.” In a hundred years, children in Muscovy will be told: “Don’t go west of the Don. Dragons live there.” Real Ukraine holds its place as the land that nourished the Yamna. Their language, culture and religion now live in the minds of more than half of humanity, across the whole space between Ireland and India. That place is territorial, not ethnic. It’s a ground shared by all of us who descend from it, whether we have ancient Ukrainian genes in us, as most of us do, or we simply speak the language. If you can understand this, in the language I’m speaking, or writing, then you too are part of that inheritance. You own it no more or no less than any of today’s Ukrainians. The test of the History Provocation Put it to the test of the History Provocation. What makes history a provocation is what it does. Historical Russia’s history claims its neighbours’ lands. It names an enemy. It drags every audience back into the past. Real Ukraine’s 6,000 years claims no one’s land. Real Ukraine needs no enemy. They ask for parity of esteem. That is the whole difference. The job of Real Ukraine is the job of every real country: to build its future. Its economy, its human capital, its universities, its engineers, the farms of its black earth, the young people who will come home when the war is won. Real Ukraine rests on the people who get up every morning and build it: engineers, farmers, shopkeepers, programmers and teachers. The deep past is there to be proud of, to be studied, to be visited. It’s not there to be fought over in a trench. If Russia wants to argue on history’s ground Suppose Future Russia still wants to argue on the ground of history. Future Russia will lose there, too. “’Russia’ takes its name from the Kyivan Rus’, centred on the ‘Ancient City’ of Kyiv,” as I wrote in March 2022. Moscow’s claim to be the Third Rome is ironic “when we discover that in ancient Ukraine is the origins of the actual First Rome.” An imported church Even Moscow’s church turns out to be imported. In 2021, the historian Ievgeniia Sakal completed a doctoral thesis at Yale, The Imported Church. It “shows that the key texts of the Russian Orthodox Church were rarely Russian in origin. The Russian Church coopted texts of late Byzantine origin, texts produced by Ukrainians and Belorusians”, like my ancestors, “and texts produced by Catholics and Protestants in the West.” Having faced “a legitimate and sophisticated Ukrainian Church”, she writes, the Russian Church “was forced to adopt the scholastic culture of the Ukrainian Church”. Byzantium, the Ukrainians, the Belarusians, the Catholic and Protestant West. Every source it borrowed from is Indo-European. So is the language of its scripture. How the game ends So if Future Russia still wants to play the game of Historical Russia, Future Russia should know how the game ends. Historical Russia is Ukraine. Rus’ was Kyiv’s name long before it was Moscow’s. The Moscow that calls itself the Third Rome took its church learning from Kyiv. The history of the land of Ukraine runs far deeper than the Rus’. Ancient Ukraine is the matrix of every living Indo-European language, religion and culture. It is the matrix of the Greek in which the Gospels reached the world, and of much that Christianity carried across Europe. On history’s ground, Ukraine wins, and wins everything. But that is not the ground we argue on. We argue on what is real today: sovereign territory, the law, the record, building our communities. How much can we develop, and teach our young to survive in a knowledge economy? That is the ground we argue on. The longer view of history is not a title deed. It’s the story of all of us. The bones of Potemkin On the 1st of October 2022, I wrote that “the real Potemkin is buried in Kherson”. Today Kherson is under the most catastrophic drone safari (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/humanitys-future-began-in-kherson). It is run by the very Russians who claim they arrive in Kherson to liberate its native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians, who mostly live there. And yet, as documented by many journalists and by the United Nations, up to 3,000 people are hunted by drones and murdered. Babies, small children, women. Buses, bus drivers. Doctors, medics, hospitals, ambulances. The woman herding her goats at sundown, as she had done for decades. They are used for training by the Russians. We’ve seen the videos. The videos exist. They’re undeniable. The Russians publish them themselves. The Ruschist state publishes them itself. That is the city where the real Potemkin is buried. Or was buried. In October 2022, I wondered whether he would still be there when the Russians left. They did leave, around that time. They retreated. He was not there. On the 3rd of November, the New York Times reported from Kherson. The occupation administration had already gone. The New York Times said: “They even took the bones of Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin.” Listen to those Historical Russian words, repeated by people like Putin to hypnotise people. They took the bones of Potemkin, “the 18th-century commander who helped Catherine the Great conquer southern Ukraine.” Catherine was German, not even Russian. Eight days later, Ukraine was back in Kherson. Historical Russia left the city carrying its history in a box. A bunch of bones of Potemkin. Ukraine kept, and will always keep, the city. The steppe around it that nourished the Yamna 6,000 years before. The long Dnipro River, the Don, the Donets, the Dniester and the Danube. Future Russia will have to decide which it wants to be: the Russia that carries the bones, or the Russia that lets them go. Continued from: Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   28 Sept 2026

   Podcast | Future Russia: The Pattern Ukraine Must End

   This is about Future Russia (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/p/podcast-and-pensees-134-hungary-liberated). Now is the time to think about Future Russia. Current Russia has one choice left that does not end in losing everything. It can accept that the world will settle for nothing less than its withdrawal from all of Ukraine, every village of Ukraine, Crimea included. Russia has shown no sign of making this choice. I contend it will not make this choice in time. “We need to understand the distinction between Historical Russia and Real Russia today. Historical Russia is often disguised. It comes through the words and the writings of journalists, or of Western so-called experts. It comes through Russians themselves, and propagandists, and Disinfolklorists. So in the future, as soon as it raises its head, we must have the analytical capacity to see the Mana (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/look-for-the-mana-in-the-meme), to see the energy, of either Historical Russia or Real Russia.” Ukraine’s war aims Ukraine’s plan does not depend on Russia choosing well from its perspective. In February 2024, Kyrylo Budanov, then head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, set out Ukraine’s conditions for ending the war. Ukraine should destroy Russia’s rear: its oil and fuel bases, the plants producing its weapons and ammunition, and its other strategic targets. Ukraine should take back all its territory before peace talks begin. In his words, Ukraine “will be able to feel secure only after all Russian war criminals are prosecuted, [Russia’s] nuclear weapons are destroyed, and [Russia’s] nuclear power plants are controlled by international organisations.” I called those Ukraine’s war aims (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/p/pensees-96-my-munich-speech): destroy Russia’s capacity to wage war, permanently. I wrote then that Budanov gets it. I wrote that this is a once-in-a-millennium chance for Ukraine, and for all of us. That includes Russians who understand what the Real Russia is, and how their future can be built only on the Real Russia, not the Historical Russia. Any chatter, I wrote then, about “peace” should be filtered through this prism. General Budanov had already said in October 2022: “As soon as the Russian regime collapses, it will all fall apart.” Future Russia This is what I expect. Current Russia goes on losing until it has lost almost everything. Future Russia is the state of Moscow and St Petersburg. The rest of today’s Ruschist Federation (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/p/pensees-27) becomes a whole plethora of sovereign states. Their independence is watched over for a time by Europe, the United States, China, the powers of Asia. Each of these future states must adhere to a Real policy, not an Historical policy. That is a condition of receiving the aid they will need to sustain themselves as sovereign independent states. The map already holds the outline. Within its internationally recognised borders, the Ruschist Federation counts 83 federal subjects. These are the regions, republics and cities that make it up. Twenty-one of them are republics. Most are named for people who are not Russian. As I wrote in 2022, “Russia’s self-image as an eternal monolith masks its continuing colonial legacy.” Muscovy was a village when Kyiv was already a city. Muscovy has never had a decolonisation moment. There was no Frantz Fanon in Moscow, and no Sartre. Future Russia is what the decolonisation looks like when it finally comes. Two Russias inside Future Russia The current Ruschist state dissolves and splinters. It leaves a remnant based around St Petersburg and Moscow. Even then, however, the Russia problem will not have been solved. A state of Moscow and St Petersburg can still be the old empire in a smaller coat. Inside Future Russia, two Russias will argue over the country. The rest of us need to know, from the first day, which one is speaking. One is Historical Russia. The other is Real Russia. The purpose of this is to explain to you the difference. Understanding this difference can help us cut through debates today, rhetoric today, and what I call, in other projects, Disinfolklore (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/disinfolklore-11) today. One is Historical Russia. The other is Real Russia. They cannot share one country. For 30 years, plenty of Russians, plenty of Western experts thought the Russia of the doctrine of Russkiy Mir and the Russia of the map could get along. Indeed, they thought they could even help each other. They cannot. Sooner or later, one devours the other. The Real Russia devours the Historical Russia. Or, as is occurring today, the Historical Russia is devouring itself. The hardest place to separate the Real Russia from the Historical Russia is not on any map. It is inside the head of every Russian. And, indeed, it is inside the heads of those of us who have spent our working lives watching Russia. I’ve noticed in my own time that Russia experts themselves are just as susceptible to falling for Historical Russia trolls as complete neophytes. The archetype, in the Kremlin’s own phrase What I want to focus our minds on is the meaning of the Real Russia. Historical Russia, Russkiy Mir, whatever we want to call it, I’m calling it Historical Russia. That is the archetype. The archetype, Historical Russia, is Russia as its doctrine remembers it. The phrase is the Kremlin’s own. So I afford it the privilege of calling it what they themselves call it. On 30 September 2025, it was three years since Russia had claimed four Ukrainian regions as part of its own constitution. That day, Putler described his programme for these regions, as Reuters reported at the time: “essentially a program of reviving our ancestral, historical Russian lands”. The doctrine’s theorist The doctrine has a theorist. Vladislav Surkov was for years the Kremlin’s chief technologist. He was the one who staged Russia’s politics. He was once Deputy Prime Minister of Russia. He was later the curator of its policy on Ukraine. He got his first start from Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky is a man who always advocates for the Historical Russia. He does so despite his opposition credentials. He does so despite his undoubted sacrifice in spending a number of years in the gulag before being released. Surkov was initially Khodorkovsky’s bodyguard. Then he managed to get himself into the role of PR, as an ideologue. In my book Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-outflank-dugin-dont-rebut), I maintain that Surkov is actually an actor. He is acting the role of controller of the Ruschist Federation. Surkov is actually from Ichkeria. His real name is not Surkov. On 11 February 2019, as part of his role and on the instructions of the security service curators he serves, he published an essay he called “Vladimir Putler’s Long State”. Surkov counted three historical Russias. Each of the historical Russias he counted was tied to a ruler who was great, in his mind: Ivan III, Peter the Great and Lenin. Surkov announced a fourth, the long state of Putler. I answered it the day that piece appeared. The bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska I had spent three years leading international monitoring patrols at one of Surkov’s finest creations. It was a scene he had drawn: the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-the-bridge-at-stanytsia-and). On one side of the river, we had Ukrainian defenders. On the other side, Russian occupiers, masked as the so-called fake Luhansk People’s Republic. Between them, up to 10,000, mostly elderly females, played bit parts in this entire drama, set up by Surkov. This was the only official crossing point on the line of contact in the Luhansk region. Russia occupied part of that region from April 2014. The bridge I worked on was real. The state, the fake Luhansk People’s Republic, was created by Surkov and his curators. That state, which staged the scene around the bridge, was a performance. And so, I maintain, is the state that performed that performance, the Ruschist Federation. That is the Historical Russia, not the Real Russia. A Russia with no border Historical Russia cannot recognise a border, its own or anyone else’s, because its borders run wherever history reaches. Borders like that are always being crossed. So there is always someone to fight. There is always a neighbour to be taken back into the house as “one people”, whether the neighbour wishes it or not. Surkov’s scene at the bridge That was the scene Surkov set up in eastern Ukraine. There, Russia’s Ruschists, on one side of the river, masqueraded as Ukrainians. They pretended to be involved in a civil war, defending their little fake statelet from Ukrainians. They archetype those Ukrainians, falsely, as Nazis. They used this geography, and they used the bit-part actors. The bit-part actors actually are real humans. The Ruschists interrupted their lives. Since they first entered Ukraine, they have remorselessly disrupted those lives, and destroyed them, and corrupted them. Russia has been famous for this pattern for centuries. What I witnessed at Stanytsia Luhanska, the bridge over the Donets River, was an archetypal scene. The Ruschist bridge trolls were at one end of the bridge. The Ukrainian defenders were at the other, attempting to defend the rest of Europe from their incursions. The Russians specialise in scenes like that. Surkov created this one. It was there just to play the role of stretching out Russia’s borders and provoking a reaction. That action becomes how the Ruschist Federation, the Historical Russia, spreads itself across the European continent. A permanent enemy Russia needs a permanent enemy. You create a permanent enemy by militarily occupying another country. Russia needs a permanent enemy to explain why it is always under siege. Russia needs the siege to explain why it can never be an ordinary country. A country that provides sanitation and indoor loos for its population. A country which doesn’t spend all its money throwing all of its population on a meat grinder, only in order to create the disguise for its own inadequacy as a governance system. This, my friends, has been going on for hundreds of years. Its perfidious invasion of Ukraine is the same pattern it has repeated for hundreds of years. So is its almost comically catastrophic attempt to take even small villages, 1,200 kilometres from Kyiv. That attempt comes four years after it promised to take the entire country in three days. If we are going to avoid this pattern repeating itself in the future, and continuing to cause chaos, we must understand the Historical Russia. We must understand the difference between the Historical Russia and the Real Russia. Breaking the cycle Historical Russia, in Future Russia, would look at any new sovereign state on its borders. It would see, as it does today, stolen, promised provinces. Then the whole cycle would start again. This has been going on for almost 300 years. We must break this cycle. Not just for the good of Ukrainians and other Europeans, but also for the good of Russians. Those Russians who can see through this troll, and who wish to fight and live in the Real Russia, not an Historical Russia. A garrison of its own doctrine Historical Russia cannot even accept Russia’s own borders. Borders are the one thing that fence Historical Russia in. Every settled frontier looks to it like an insult. So Historical Russia can never be at peace with its neighbours. Every neighbour has good reason to arm against it. It keeps Russia itself a garrison of its own doctrine. Historical Russia imprisons itself in a doctrine that demands its borders are always fluid. It is always on the watch for the enemy it needs. Real Russia, the map Real Russia is Russia as it actually is. In this context, Real Russia has two meanings. A Real Russian voice, Russian or Western, is one that sees both. The first meaning of Real Russia is geographical. Real Russia looks forward. Historical Russia looks backwards, and is backwards. Real Russia is seen on a map as it really is, with borders fixed by law. It has a future planned inside that map, rather than a past beyond it. For Current Russia, this means a colonial federation that has never faced what it is. For Future Russia, it may mean two great cities in the form of St Petersburg and Moscow, and a bit of land around them. It may mean neighbouring states which are sovereign states, and not lost provinces. Out of the claws of Historical Russia We in the West will have to play a role in keeping these new sovereign states out of the claws of a revanchist Historical Russia, based around St Petersburg and Moscow and a bit of land around them. We will play it along with the great Asian, Central Asian states, and China, and other Asian states, like Japan and Mongolia. That is the importance of this. Now is the time We need to understand the distinction between Historical Russia and Real Russia today. Historical Russia is often disguised. It comes through the words and the writings of journalists, or of Western so-called experts. It comes through Russians themselves, and propagandists, and Disinfolklorists. So in the future, as soon as it raises its head, we must have the analytical capacity to see the Mana (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/look-for-the-mana-in-the-meme), to see the energy, of either Historical Russia or Real Russia. I explain this because now is the time to understand the distinction between Historical Russia and Real Russia. Not after these states have asserted their sovereignty. Not after our troops and/or materiel, and our treasure, are invested in helping these states attain proper sovereignty and sustainable economies. Just as we did after the Cold War in Central Europe. No. The time is today to understand how Historical Russia differs from Real Russia. If we allow Historical Russia to survive its catastrophe, and its inevitable withdrawal from 100 per cent of Ukraine, we will be coming back for another round of this. Our children, and our children’s children, will be going through this same cycle again and again. Now, along with our Ukrainian brothers and sisters, we must make a play to end this once and for all. Not a small inheritance A Real Russia based around Moscow and St Petersburg is not a small inheritance. Moscow and St Petersburg hold universities, museums, scientists, engineers, writers, musicians. They have a talent for building things. They have museums in which they have stored the collected patrimony of the dozens of cultures and different peoples they have pillaged over the past few centuries. No one is talking, for now, about repatriating those things which belong to its former colonies. So Moscow and St Petersburg, in a Real Russia-based Future Russia, will have much to be getting on with. A Real Russia could spend this patrimony on its own people, inside its own borders. It could trade with the world instead of threatening it. Historical Russia, by contrast, spends its patrimony on a war to recover a past that never existed in the form it imagined. Just look what the Historical Russia ideology is doing to Current Russia. Look what it is doing, indeed, to the rest of our lives, and to Ukraine’s lives. A plain definition Real Russia has a plain definition. Real Russia’s territories and its borders are the ones the rest of the world recognises. Real Russia behaves as an ordinary member of the community of nations. Real Russia keeps the rules the world agreed in 1945, whatever its neighbours do. The only lawful use of force is under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations. There, states like Ukraine can exercise their inherent right of self-defence. Force is also lawful if a unanimous decision, including all five permanent Security Council members, determines that force may be used. Outside of that, for instance, deciding for Historical Russia reasons to invade Ukraine and kill millions of people is not a legitimate or legal means of waging war. It is not legitimate or legal activity for any state. Clean hands If anyone thinks it rather unfair that a Real Russia based on Moscow and St Petersburg sits within borders, surrounded by a heap of other new sovereign states, I refer you to the principle and the doctrine that she who comes to equity must have clean hands. The Ruschist Federation has only been in existence since 1991. It has invaded and occupied almost more countries than I can name off the top of my head. Russia’s own signature A Real Russian’s homeland is the Russian state inside its borders. Russian speakers in Riga, Almaty or Kharkiv are no more Russia’s provinces than English speakers in Dublin are England’s. That is the Real Russia. In December 1991, at Alma-Ata, the new states agreed that the borders of the Soviet republics would become the borders of sovereign states. Russia signed this. Historical Russia, or Real Russia, must decide. Which is it? Do you agree to these borders, and then you can remain a state, or do you not? Historical Russia, the record shows, will never be able to agree to honour its signature. Therefore Real Russia begins by remembering its own signature. Real Russia, the record The second meaning of Real Russia is the record. To reach it, Real Russians inside Russia and the rest of us outside it have to see past a façade. The façade is made of what I call the Data-Resistant Archetypes of a Potemkin State (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/data-resistant-mental-archetypes). A Potemkin state is a painted front with little behind it. There are three aspects to the Data-Resistant Archetypes of a Potemkin State. Historical Russia is obsessed with these three facets. Real Russia must transcend them if it is to preserve some territorial integrity of St Petersburg, Moscow and a bit of land behind it. Real Russia must renounce these Data-Resistant Archetypes of a Potemkin State. Western experts, or journalists, or any of us, come across any of these archetypes, in any clothes. They morph through memes and visuals and films and discussions and art all the time. But their essence is always the same. Russia is invincible. Russia is indispensable. Russia has the right to determine its neighbouring countries’ destinies. These three Data-Resistant Archetypes of a Potemkin State are the essence of Historical Russia. Remember these three, because they colonise Western minds as thoroughly as they colonise Russian ones. A mental archetype of an unbeatable Russia occupies the minds of those who would have us surrender to it. It digests and processes all the data about Russia. The output is always the same. Ukraine can’t win. Ukraine must surrender. Ukraine routed Ruschia in Kyiv, Kherson, Kharkiv and Kup’yansk. That is the Real Ukraine, confronted with the real, defeatable Russia. Yet still the Data-Resistant Archetype can’t compute that Ruschia, and its mental imprint in our minds, is a Potemkin State. These Data-Resistant Archetypes were embedded with care in our mind. The idea of Historical Russia was embedded along with them. We must overcome that idea if we are to solve the Russia problem. Sovereign democracy By 2005, as I wrote in 2022, every institution in Russia was part of the puppet show that Surkov, former Deputy Prime Minister of the Ruschist Federation, called sovereign democracy. What Surkov hoped to do by sovereign democracy was disguise autocracy, using its antithesis, democracy. The qualifier, the word sovereign, meant: we can have a democracy that isn’t really a democracy. We can set our own rules. We set those rules according to our sovereign will, our sovereign’s will, our autocrat’s will, our czar’s will. The right to participate However, what constitutes a democracy is set out in oodles of international, legally binding instruments, not least the human right to participate in the decisions which impact us. The public has a right to participate in decision making. This is a human right, which applies universally to all humans, as a function of being a human. A state has no right to abrogate that right, and cannot, unless it is for lawful reasons. You cannot create an autocracy and call it a democracy when it is the exact opposite. Not when it doesn’t conform to the OSCE Venice standards, for instance, about how to conduct elections. Not where there’s no free press. Not where the public have no right to participate in public decision making. Russian-language speakers have oodles more rights in Ukraine, or in Latvia and Lithuania, or indeed in any other democratic country, than they have ever had in Russia. A mask for autocracy But Surkov used this nomenclature, sovereign democracy, as a mask for autocracy. He used it to describe the Duma, the courts, the central bank and the state media that he helped construct. The fake “philosopher” Dugin, like Surkov, is actually just an actor. Surkov acts like the director of the sovereign democracy. Dugin, on the other hand, acts like a philosopher. Both are subject to the security state that has ruled Russia in all of its various guises for the past 150 years. Dugin supplies it with a philosophy. Putler also plays the role of czar. But really he himself is a puppet of the security state that he serves. Ever since Surkov spoke about this sovereign democracy in 2005, the ideologues all around them have added to it. The charge sheet Behind the façade, the record reads like a charge sheet of a criminal enterprise. This is the charge sheet of Historical Russia, which is the Current Russia. On 2 March 2022, the UN General Assembly, by 141 votes to 5, with 35 abstentions, demanded that Russia “immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.” On 16 March 2022, the International Court of Justice, in a provisional-measures order, required Russia to suspend its military operations, which it had begun on 24 February. On 17 March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued warrants for the arrest of Vladimir Putler and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova. The judges found reasonable grounds to believe that each bears responsibility for the war crimes of unlawfully deporting Ukrainian children, and unlawfully transferring them from occupied areas to Russia. Aggression against Ukraine in breach of the UN Charter. War crimes, in the Court’s own words, with a head of state wanted for them. The evidence of crimes against humanity that investigators keep on gathering. This is also Real Russia. It is not the Russia of the parades, or the imagined Russia of the Historical Russia. The Real Russia of record is indicted by the post-World War II legal order in a way, and with an intensity, commensurate with its crimes in Ukraine. That is the Real Russia. The test Historical Russia fails both tests. It wants its old lands back. It denies the record of the Real Russia. If the view that prevails in Future Russia contradicts those truths, if Future Russia wants its old lands back, we will not have solved the Russia problem. We will only have shrunk it to St Petersburg and Moscow and a little bit of land around it, a few forests. We will have given it a new grievance. Metanoia, or a reboot The Ukrainian historian Larysa Yakubova gives us a finer test. Her book is Ruscism: The Beast from the Abyss (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-the-beast-from-the-abyss), published in Kyiv by the National Academy of Sciences in 2023. In it, Professor Yakubova separates metanoia from a “reboot” (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-metanoia-or-the-reboot) of the old system. Metanoia is a change of mind that reaches all the way into values and practice. A reboot only reinstalls the old system. A Marshall Plan for Russia Almost from the beginning of the full-scale invasion, certain fake Russian opposition voices called for a Marshall Plan for Russia. These voices are also in favour of the Historical Russia. They promote the troll that the West somehow discriminated against Russia after the collapse of communism. That collapse was an entirely self-inflicted wound. The truth is that we poured trillions of dollars into our dream of a Real Russia. Russia actually chose an Historical Russia, an imagined Russia. That choice has led to this absolute and total catastrophe, not just for Ukrainians, but for the whole world. The whole world is paying a price for Russia’s Historical Russia doctrine. After the Second World War, and after 1991 In Yakubova’s distinction, metanoia is a change of mind that reaches all the way into values and practice. That is what we hoped would happen after 1991. What in fact happened was a reboot of the old system. It reinstalled the old Historical Russia system. The Real Russia of the future, on those borders around St Petersburg and Moscow and a couple of forests or parks around that area, must undergo the kind of metanoia that Japan and Germany underwent after the catastrophic Second World War. Russia invaded Poland along with Germany, and began the Second World War. It never paid a price for that. Individual Soviet citizens, mostly Ukrainians and Belarusians, paid with their lives for this catastrophic error. It was an error made in search of an Historical Russia, and its Polish lands back. But no metanoia took place. After the Second World War, it was just a reboot. After 1991, it was just a reboot of the old system. No metanoia, for all our hopes and dreams, and all our wishful thinking. No metanoia took place after 1991, no change of mind that reached all the way into values and practice. Such a change would have pierced the Historical Russia doctrine to the core, and destroyed it once and for all. No. Nothing of that nature happened at all. How the USSR ended In fact, the USSR failed, in the end, because the Russian Supreme Soviet was trying to exert an exploitative tariff for gas to Belarus. So the leaders of the Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics got together and dissolved the USSR. They did this so that they had standing in international law, could trade gas, and had the right to heat their own citizens. When Russia today threatens to cut off the gas of any country, what it is really doing is threatening death. It has been doing this for decades, since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The threat comes in a very nice guise. Russia is just saying, “Oh, we’re just going to cut off the gas.” Never mind the fact that Russia no longer has a market for gas, now that Europe is phasing out its purchases of LPG and piped gas by the end of next year. Russia is committing the same error again and again and again. That is Historical Russia. That is the sign of a reboot of an old system, like when you turn on an old computer. It is not the sign of metanoia. Learning to recognise a reboot Metanoia, I remind you, is the real Future Russia. We must all fight for it, and learn to recognise when all we are seeing is a reboot, or a call for a reboot. When the so-called Russian opposition call for a Marshall Plan for Russia, or indeed new sovereign states form and they manifest the symptoms of Historical Russia, or revanchism, we must by then have learnt to recognise those moments and to prepare for them. We must condition the trillions in aid it will cost to build proper, sustainable, sovereign entities, focused on the present and on developing their cultures and communities for the future. A Future Russia that changes its flag and its leader, yet keeps its Historical Russia doctrine, is just a reboot. Yakubova’s sentence In an article published in English in April 2022, Larysa Yakubova wrote that the idea that Ukraine’s and Belarus’s sovereignty was an accident was “deeply ingrained in the minds of Russian intellectuals”. They had not grasped what was true. “The sovereignty of the two countries was not fake at all. What was fake was their perception of the nature of these sovereignties.” These so-called intellectuals, like Surkov or Dugin, or oodles of other sympathetic Western intellectuals, are addicted to this Historical Russia fallacy. They must themselves learn to see through it, to what the Real Russia is. Now is the time to do it. For the Future Russia, they must learn to understand, and to support, the Real Russia whenever it is emerging from the Historical Russia. But when the Historical Russia looms, or moves its head like a monster from the deep, or the beast from the abyss (Larysa Yakubova’s metaphor), we must learn to put it down. In the sense that vets put down our favourite pets. Yakubova’s sentence is the Real Russia in a single line. They had not grasped what was true. “The sovereignty of the two countries was not fake at all. What was fake was their perception of the nature of these sovereignties.” In Future Russia, it will need saying about a dozen new neighbours, not just two. Speaking for Historical Russia Any Russian voice that speaks of historical lands, of one people, or of artificial states, alleging any state is any more artificial than another, is speaking for Historical Russia. Know that. When you hear a Russian or a Western expert speaking about the historical lands of Russia, of one Russian people, or of artificial states, accusing other states of being artificial, they are speaking for the Historical Russia. The Historical Russia has killed over a million people in Ukraine. It has evaporated and eviscerated whole cities and towns and villages and houses and buildings. I lived in and experienced them during my seven years in eastern Ukraine. The Good Russian The Good Russian (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/p/pensees-90) of the Western imagination can be discerned from the real good Russian by whether or not they understand this distinction. Many of the so-called Russian oppositionists who are feted in the West are still addicted to the Historical Russia. They still want to possess lands between the border of Ukraine and Japan. They still want to be prosecuting wars to defend mythological borders. They are Historical Russians. We must learn to discern those who are addicted to this Historical Russian fallacy. Even if they have been imprisoned or poisoned by Putler, they are still for the Historical Russia. In all of their guises Solzhenitsyn was an Historical Russia addict, even though he spent a lot of his life in a gulag, in part of Asia which the Historical Russia was unlawfully occupying. It treated him like a slave. That is how perfidious this myth of Historical Russia is, this standpoint, this consciousness. Anyone can have it lurking in their mind in the form of memes. But if we are to solve the Russia problem, we need to be able to see these Historical Russia addicts in all of their guises. I have written that many of the Russian so-called oppositionists turn out to be “imperialist sympathisers in disguise”. This addiction to lands and borders which stretch beyond the municipal boundaries of St Petersburg and Moscow is the sign of someone who is drugged with this idea of Historical Russia. The Crimea test, and another A simple test (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/p/podcast-the-economist-gets-trolled) is Crimea. The unwillingness to contemplate Ukraine retaking Crimea has always given the Historical Russians away. Some Russians, of course, the real good Russians, passed this test. They exist. Some are in prison, some in exile. Many are helping Ukraine win the war against Russia. There is another test. Any so-called Russian oppositionist who does not call for Russia’s withdrawal from 100 per cent of Ukraine is addicted to the Historical Russia. So is any Russian oppositionist who talks about a Marshall Plan for Russia. The Historical Russia is the Russkiy Mir fallacy that has led us, and led their country, to its near death. The real good Russians Some of these real good Russians wear Ukraine’s uniform. They name the record, the historical record, properly. They don’t want old lands back. They do not ask to be thanked for helping Ukraine destroy their own country and the Historical Russia fallacy. For the Historical Russia fallacy is the real enemy. These are the Real Russia in both senses. They are the only Russia worth fighting and building a future with. From family to neighbours The simplest tell is grammar. Historical Russia speaks of Russians and Ukrainians, one people with a quarrel in the family. Real Russia speaks of Russia and Ukraine, two sovereign states with a border between them. The grammar has to change from family to neighbours, from the brothers of the Historical Russia troll to the doctrine of two states with a treaty and border. Moscow will find that as hard as anything in its history. I’m not downplaying the challenge. It will have to do this if it wants to overcome the brainwashing. But the Japanese and the Germans managed to overcome it. So I’m sure that if Russia truly is great, it will overcome the Historical Russia fallacy, and the Historical Russia doctrine which has caused it so much misery and pain. It will be satisfied with St Petersburg, Moscow, and a couple of forests and villages around there as its future state. That can be the embryonic Real Russian state, the first Real Russian state in hundreds of years. But seeing as they cannot win on the battlefield in Ukraine, they’ll have to learn this whether or not they like it. Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   21 Sept 2026

   Podcast | Older than Writing

   Today I want to talk about something older than writing. The writer today, and I do consider myself a writer, still holds that position and still keeps that practice. I want to add something to it as well. The human inside and outside the loop, in the age of mythos. Enheduanna Enheduanna (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/enheduana-the-moon-and-me) is the answer to a question in the air just now. The oldest writer whose name we know was a woman. I have written about her before. I first met her as a cuneiform tablet in a dusty, forgotten corner of a Brussels museum. That tablet had been written six hundred years after Enheduanna died. She lived around 2400 BCE. So her songs went on being copied for six centuries, and were cut into clay, and that is why I could find one of them on a day when I was in Brussels to talk to people there about the Disinfolklore analytical method. Enheduanna lived in the city of Ur. In the marshland the Greeks would later call Mesopotamia, some four thousand three hundred years ago. That is the same Mesopotamia Peter Jukes, the writer and artist, refers to in his recent piece in Byline Times, “The Tyranny of Literacy: How Writing Only Scratches the Surface”. She was the daughter of Sargon, the first monarch to bind Sumer and Akkad into one dominion. She was high priestess of Nanna, the moon god. There is an alabaster disc of her in the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. Penn is where my grandfather went to university. It is also where Donald Trump went, but we will not hold that against it. I have not managed to visit the Penn Museum yet and I am desperate to. The disc was carved in her lifetime, and I will post a picture of it beside this piece. On it she stands larger than the men around her. That stone still catches the light after four millennia. The way a full moon does. What Enheduanna did, as the first named author in human culture, was not in the end to describe her world. It was to intervene in it (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/first-writing-in-any-indo-european). She used words to set her world right. A usurper defiled the temple she served, a ziggurat of the kind the Bible remembers as the Tower of Babel. She did not merely record the outrage. She wrote against it. Her writing outlived him. The averaging engine We are told reading and writing are dying. In truth, as Peter Jukes recently put it in Byline Times, they are exploding. There is more of both than in any century before ours. The real worry his essay raises is subtler. These new machines, the large language models we hear so much about, produce fluent text at stunning speed. One thing they do is predict the likeliest next word from billions already written. They are, as his piece has it, “avatars of the average”. They “produce nothing new but predict the old”. There is a counterweight worth putting beside that. One of the founders (@importai) of Anthropic wrote on X this weekend that the idea of these models as stochastic parrots has in many ways ruined our capacity to understand their real power. That landed with me. Until last November I thought I parroted the stochastic parrot line myself. They do predict the next word. But at the level of meaning they do not predict in that same stochastic way, and that is where the mystery sets in. Jukes’s warning still stands. If we lean on them too hard we may learn to average too. We may mistake the plausible for the true. His piece ends on a line that resonates. “The trouble with our moment is not that we grant our machines too much mind, but that we grant ourselves too little.” Every word of that is right (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/a-don-hacks-the-moon). It is also one half of an alabaster disc. I have been holding the other half in my hands and in my mind all summer. The whole disc begins where writing itself begins, with a woman writing to the moon, to the moon god Nanna. It travels a road older than the machines. Older than the essay as a form. Older than cuneiform, which was used six hundred years after Enheduanna’s death to record what she had once sung as a prayer. It is older than writing. What a writer is for Something subtle is buried in the word writer. A writer’s job, as I have come to understand my own, is to recouple two things that power, that mana, is forever trying to prise apart. What is legally right, and what is morally right. The tools for that work are hidden in the vocabulary of the work itself. We right the world by writing. We set down words that act in a reader’s mind like a writ, a summons, a binding instrument. Right, write, writ, word. Say them. Write them. You will hear one sound under all four. An R with a hard stop behind it. R-T- (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/saviour-trita-and-dragon-serpent). These are not plays on words. They are clues. They are clues to the early Indo-European mind, and to the minds that fed into it, out of which our whole culture comes. That same sound surfaces in the Vedic ṛta and the old Iranian arta. Both are Indo-European languages, attested very early in writing. Both mean truth, the true order of things. And the sound is in truth itself. Look at it closely. Strip its vowels and the skeleton sits there. T-R-T. The second letter and the second to last. The same two consonants, R and T, hiding inside an English word, one language family away and two thousand six hundred years from the rock inscriptions at Behistun in Iran, where arta stands carved in the living rock from around 500 BCE. And the sound is in writing nine centuries before Behistun. Around 1400 BCE the monarchs of Mitanni (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/m-n-sound-pops-up-3924-years-ago), on Mesopotamia’s northern rim, bore Indo-Aryan names built on arta-. Artatama: his abode is truth. Artashumara: he remembers it. That little R-T- skeleton has travelled again and again through the languages from Ireland to India. It is ṛta in the Ganges valley. Arta in Persia. Rectus in Rome. Recht and right and truth in the Germanic languages, like English and, well, German. It never quite keeps the same letters around it. It never once lets go of the same meaning. Rightness. The words a writer works with are made at their root, another R-T- word, of the truth sound. To write is, etymologically, to true the world. To make the crooked line straight. Enheduanna did it with a hymn. I try to do it in podcasts, tweets, essays, posts and pieces like this one. The instruments a writer uses change. The office does not. I hold the same office as Enheduanna, grand as that may sound, and it is the truth. The sound a writer cannot un-hear This is the discovery I have spent six years chasing. It started, as things usually start for writers and for artists, with getting snagged on the material. There is an R-T- in started, and in writer, and in artist. Years ago the sound of a word stopped me the way a knot in the grain stops a hand. The word was Manu (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/whats-the-power-of-manu-podcast), the first human and first monarch of the oldest Indian tradition. A crowd of other words came with it, uninvited, all carrying the same two consonants in the same order. M, then N. Say them slowly. Moon. Month. Mind. Meaning. Memory. Human. Money. Mana. Karman. The thing in the night sky. The span of time it measures. The organ that measures the world within us. The meaning that organ makes. The memory it keeps. The human who does all of this. The woman who makes that human, and you might look on PowerofMana.net for “The Moon, the Menses and the Maternal” (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/the-moon-the-menses-and-the-maternal). And the sacred power (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/the-x-energy-mana) once thought to run through all of it. Mana. One small sound, M-N- (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/sacred-m-n-sound), sitting beneath the deepest things a person can name. A writer’s first duty here, as ever and everywhere, is suspicion. So I followed the sound. Through thousands of scholarly papers. Across tens of thousands of kilometres between Ireland and India, again and again, in travels I recount in Finding Manuland. What I found is this. The oldest recoverable word for the moon in the ancestral tongue behind English, and behind all living Indo-European languages including Persian and Vedic and Sanskrit and Hindi, does not mean “the bright one”. It is not Luna, and it is not the sound inside lunacy. It is méh₁nōt, and it means the measurer (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/how-we-can-know-m-n-sounds-ubiquity). So many of these sounds sound alike that I would ask you to read along as you listen, if you can. Not if you are driving. Not if you are on your bicycle. If you are walking the dog, or the cat, you can probably manage it. The moon was named for the one thing it does that matters to a farmer, to a priest, to a woman tracking her own body. It measures time. It is the first clock, hung in the sky. Once you see that, the crowd of words stops being a coincidence and becomes a pattern. The word for the sky’s measurer was lent to the mind that measures within, and to the human being who is, above every animal, the measurer. Who made the pattern Who created this pattern, which every speaker of a living Indo-European language uses almost every time they say one of these M-N- words? A people called the Yamna (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/ancient-ukrainians-first-indo-europeans). There is an M-N- in Yamna too. Their community was centred on the Dnipro river just south of the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia. The Yamna, according to peer-reviewed research published in Nature on 4 February 2025, were the precursors of all living Indo-European languages. Both papers are here: the first (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08372-2) and the second (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08531-5). One involved Russian state-funded archaeogeneticists and the other involved Ukrainian archaeogeneticists. A word about that. Vladimir Putin chairs the Russian Academy of Sciences. We cannot trust anything that emanates from it. It is more than an archaeologist’s life is worth to publish what the evidence says, which is that all living Indo-European languages come from a village called Mykolaivka on the Dnipro, almost directly across the water from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, brutally occupied by the Russians since 4 March 2022. Those two papers in Nature, humanity’s pre-eminent scientific journal, reached that finding using archaeogenetics. It is a young science. It first showed what it could do in 2015, in another Nature paper, published around the time I arrived in Ukraine to work as a diplomat. That arrival started me on the journey that leads to what I am telling you now. Archaeologists named the Yamna for the pit graves (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/yamnaya-and-ancient-ukraine), the yamna, in which they buried their monarchs on the grasslands by the Dnipro. Their community took shape there some six thousand years ago. From that one community, and there is an M-N- in community, grew the mother tongues of nearly half of humanity, spoken today between Ireland and India. If you can understand these words, you are part of that family. Six founders out of eight Across that whole vast family the founder keeps the moon-sound. Manu in India. Aryaman, the oath-and-kinship god of old Iran. Mannus, forefather of the Germanic peoples, and there is an M-N- in Germanic as well. I made six podcasts on him (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/ep-1-using-m-n-to-determine-which), asking which came first, Mannus or Manu, and they are on PowerofMana.net from last year. Minos in Crete, with his brother Rhadamanthys, and both of them carry it. Menua, monarch of the Armenian highlands. And at the far western edge of the world, Manannán, Ireland’s pre-eminent pre-Christian deity, and Érimón, the first high king of all Ireland. Six of the Indo-European language family’s eight branches name their founder (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/trope-of-self-sacrificing-first-monarch) with the moon-sound. One is a charming accident. Six out of eight is a system. The two that clinch it are Manu in the far east and Mannus in the Germanic west. They stand at opposite ends of the earth the family ever reached. They are far too far apart to have traded the idea of naming a founder with that sound, or to have copied one another. So, by the practice established in Indo-European studies for over a century and set down very lucidly by the great Indo-Europeanist Bruce Lincoln, both must have inherited it from one common source. The Yamna, by the Dnipro. It is not the sound alone What I am speaking about is not just the sound M-N-. It is the sound together with its meaning. Look at the founders. Then look at the common meaning you will find in moon, human, karman, mind, memory, money, mana and month. They come from one semantic field. Spirit, or light shining through a mind. Light shining through a human. In karman it is the repository of one’s karma. Karma itself comes out of karman. So it is the subtle energy that lights a human, and that continues through different embodiments in Indo-European and Buddhist religious thought. So we are not talking about sound alone. We are talking about phonosemantic bundles. Sound and meaning travelling together through time, in the founders, across the Indo-European cultures, and in almost every sentence we speak. The anomaly This summer I put that pattern to a proper test, on a database of a hundred languages. Other scholars built it, for their own reasons. It had never heard of me, or of what I had noticed and followed for years. The test asked how often the two consonants, M and N, in either order, land on the family of meanings they keep company with. Moon and month. Mind and memory. Measure and man. And the act of naming, where the M-N- runs the other way round as N-M-. The number that came back is the reason this piece exists. The odds of the pattern arising by chance are not one in a thousand, or a million, or a billion. Written out, the number has sixty-five zeros in it. It is the same order of chance as winning the EuroMillions jackpot eight times in a row, on a single ticket each time. I had a friend at school whose family was quite rich, and whose mother won the EuroMillions twice. Not the zillions. Fifty million euros or so each time, which is a huge whack of money. But she did not win it eight times, and it was a different ticket each time. To believe in a coincidence like that you would have to be not sceptical but simply reckless. The M-N- watermark is real, measurable, and six thousand years old. It lies under the surface that writing only scratches. What I discovered, put modestly, is an anomaly (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/m-n-sound-as-linguists-holy-grail). Linguistics puts a different root behind moon and behind mind. Another root again for meaning and memory. Another for human. Another for money. Another for mana. Another for karman. If specialists notice the shared M-N- at all, across all the living Indo-European languages and all the ways those words decline, the answer is that it is a coincidence. You say, look, there is an M-N- in every one of them, so they must come from the same word. And the answer comes back: no, sorry, mate, they do not. The alternative is to believe that this sound-and-meaning bundle comes from one source underneath. We know about the Yamna community at Mykolaivka in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, in today’s Ukraine. So we can at least imagine that they had a word, and I believe that word was méh₁nōt, meaning moon. Out of that one word comes the idea of light shining through a rock in the sky, used as the metaphor that separates a human from a stone. Light shining through a human. Light shining through their mind. The energy and the light of a human being, rarefied into money, into mana, into energy. Instead of eight separate roots, and given what the statistics say, it is simpler and more logical to think they come from one. Manuland To follow the M-N- and the R-T- I have spent years travelling across and inside the area between Mane, overlooking the Spiti Valley in India, and Emain Macha, Ireland’s holiest site. Spiti is the limit of the Indo-European range. Stand there and you meet people with every cultural characteristic of Tibetans, and Tibet is just over the top of the valley, close enough to see. Look closely and they look Indo-European. You get the reverse as well. Half the people are ethnically Indo-European and half are Sino-Tibetan, half speak and live culturally as Tibetans and half as Indians. Once you get your eye in there it is a wonderful place. That is why I keep going back. I call the project Finding Manuland (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/finding-manuland), and you will find it on PowerofMana.net. The first five foundational Finding Manuland Atlas podcasts are up now, and they range over the whole Manuland zone. Over the next few years I will be describing my travels through its different parts, including the Spiti Valley. Menua’s canal still runs About halfway between Ireland and India as the crow flies lies the historical and the real Armenia. I have travelled there too. High in the mountains, on the shore of Lake Van, which the Urartians called Tushpa, a saltwater lake in the east of Anatolia now inside Türkiye, a monarch named Menua (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/who-was-menua) reigned some two thousand eight hundred years ago. He is one of the founders whose name carries the moon-sound. He was the builder-monarch of the realm the ancients called Urartu, the seed of historic and present-day Armenia. Though Urartu is not what its own people called it. They called themselves the Biainili. B-I-A-I-N-I-L-I. Menua cut a canal out of the high rock to carry water to his city. When I stood in Van last January I saw it. The waters still flow along Menua’s canal. Three thousand years on, the measurer-monarch’s channel is still carrying water into that valley and into the lake. It is a monument that does not sit in a museum. It works. It is still measuring water into a community, long after the empire that dug it passed into inscription and into today’s Armenia. The crossroads Van, and the exact ground Menua’s canal runs along, is the old boundary between ancient Armenia and Mesopotamia. The same Mesopotamia Peter Jukes writes of in his piece. That area south of Van, down to the Iraqi and Syrian borders, lies today in Türkiye. If you get a chance to go there, you must. I spend as much time in it as I can. I call it the crossroads, and soon I will make an episode of Finding Manuland by that name, to say what it is like to be there. It is the place where great empires have ground against each other for millennia. Kura-Araxes. Hatti. The Hurrians. Akkad. The Indo-European Hittites (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/why-no-m-n-sound-in-hittites-mythological). The Mitanni, with their Indo-European gods. Assyria. Urartu. The Cimmerians out of Crimea, and the Scythians out of Ukraine and out of Iran. The Medes. Armenia. Persia. Greece. Parthia. Rome. Byzantium. The Sasanians. The Caliphate. The Seljuks. The Mongols. The Safavids. The Ottomans. Even the Ruschists (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/macro-mana-transmission-in-russia)were there, and in 1921 they gave this part of Armenia away to the sultan. The archaeological, textual, linguistic and cultural legacies of all of them, Indo-European and not, and yes, the Yamna were there too, are visible in the ground, in the museums, and even in the sky at night. The moon. The different words for the moon. What the moon meant. That area is the seam where the moon-sound world of the Indo-Europeans met the world of Enheduanna’s clay. At Harran (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/video-podcast-edessa-and-gobekli), where I have also been, they worshipped the moon god as she did, and well into the historical era. That geographical space, around which all those empires radiated like a wheel, is not a backwater of my response to Peter Jukes’s excellent essay. It is its axis. Kin beneath the sound A boundary is where power does its prising apart of the legal from the moral. This is contested ground. It has been soaked in contest. It is precisely here, around the southern shores of Lake Van, running down into the plains of Mesopotamia, that the deep pattern does something a mere curiosity never could. It shows the peoples the map sets against each other to be kin beneath the sound. The Armenians carry the moon-sound in their oldest names. So do the Turkic peoples who later settled the same land. Osman, whose name founded the Ottoman dominion, wears the M-N- in the founder’s place. His name reached the Türk, I contend, not through the Arabic. Uthman has no etymology there, even according to Semitic etymologists. I do not believe Osman came through Arabic all the way across Anatolia, past the Caspian, into the Central Asian Turkic heartland of Kazakhstan. I contend it came through the millennia of interaction between the Yamna’s descendants and Osman’s forebears on the Kazakh steppe. That is how Osman got the M-N- in his name. Manas, the founder-hero of the Kyrgyz, made much of since the end of communism, also carries it. Zaman is the Turkish word for time, which is the moon’s own gift. And Iran wears the M-N- in the empire’s own name. Achaemenid preserves Haxāmaniš, the founder Achaemenes, having a friend’s mind. Another founder-name built on the moon-sound, and it stands carved in the same Behistun rock as arta, truth and cosmic order, set against druj, the lie, the usurper. When the Turkic conquerors took the Armenian city of Ani, the first governor they installed was named Manuchihr. The moon-sound appearing again, in a Turkic name, set over Armenians who bore the moon-sound in their own name. Armenian. The Turkic tongues carry the rule-sound too, the hard R-T-, in the very word Türk. The Mesopotamians, four thousand years ago, had a name for the Indo-Europeans arriving on their frontier from the north. The Umman Manda. Which is to say, near enough, the M-N- people. They did it twice, once for each of the two great sounds. Urartu, the realm Menua ruled, is the name its Semitic-speaking neighbours to the south gave it. Urarṭu in the Assyrian records. That is the very name the Hebrew Bible preserves as Ararat, the mountain range where Noah’s ark came to rest. Or rather, Ararat is what we say now. The Bible’s own letters spell only r-r-ṭ. Biblical Hebrew wrote no vowels. Say the consonants. R-T-, the rule-sound, the same skeleton that runs through write and writ and writer. The Armenian scholar Armen Petrosyan has argued that the ruling line of Urartu, Menua’s own house, were Indo-Europeans. If he is right, and who am I to argue with one of the greatest Indo-Europeanists, the R-T- pattern closes with a satisfying click. Mesopotamia’s Semitic tongues, listening across the frontier to the peoples to their north, caught the two sounds those communities carried deepest. M-N- and R-T-. They turned each into a name. The founder-sound became the newcomers’ name, Umman Manda, the M-N- people. The rule-sound became the highland realm’s name, Urarṭu, Ararat, the R-T- land. What a people’s neighbours call them is testimony of a rare kind. It records what strangers heard. And what Mesopotamia heard, four thousand years ago and three, were the moon-sound and the rule-sound. The same two sounds this piece has been tracing through mind and human and measure, right and writer, all along. Ani Ani’s ruined cathedrals stand within sight of a closed border, with a watchtower on the far side. I recorded my testimony to what it means to be a writer today there, last January. You can see it at Disinfolklore.eu/About (https://disinfolklore.eu/About/), or on PowerofMana.net as “What I Do as a Writer” (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/what-i-do-as-a-writer). The ravine behind me in it has been a bitterly disputed seam in the region. Today Armenia and Türkiye look set to rebuild jointly the bridge connecting their two great states. There the M-N- and the R-T- testify to a shared inheritance older than every grievance. This is where the writer’s office that Enheduanna and I share comes right back in. Legal questions about borders belong to international lawyers. The moral questions, like whether the peoples on either side are strangers or kin, are answered plainly by the sounds. They are kin. My work as a writer is to keep saying so. To recouple the legal with the moral by pointing, patiently, at the common root under the divided ground. Manuland, my name for the whole reach of the Indo-European languages from Ireland to India, is not a claim of ownership. It is an argument for kinship. It says we have far more in common than the map admits. The proof is in our own mouths. In almost every sentence we speak we pronounce words carrying these consonantal skeletons, sometimes through a thinly veiled shift from R-T- to R-D-. From right to word. Reversion to the M-N- So, back to the machines. The Tyranny of Literacy‘s well-measured fear and my six years chasing these sounds meet at the same door from opposite sides. The fear is that the large language model is an averaging engine that teaches us to average too, until the plausible crowds out the true. Peter Jukes (https://substack.com/profile/3254971-peter-jukes) essay in Byline Times (https://substack.com/profile/30303689-byline-times) cites a fine piece of science to sharpen it. Brain scans show the human mind is nothing like a next-word predictor. It is a meaning-organiser that leaps sideways at the edges of phrases in ways no machine forecasts. The mind, it says, “doesn’t optimise. It explores.” There is an arch joke buried in the name of one of my main projects. Reversion to the M-N-. It began as Reversion to the Moon, and it belongs exactly to this argument. It is my play on the phenomenon in data analytics and statistics, reversion to the mean. And in Disinfolklore (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-what-is-infolklore), my other project, Disinfolklore itself is a manifestation of that reversion to the mean (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/look-for-the-mana-in-the-meme), as in the angry manu. The angry spirit. The meanness we see so often in today’s information space. Reversion to the mean is the statistical recurrence at the very core of how these artificial neural networks work. Everything is pulled back towards the average, using standard deviation at the level of individual artificial neurons, whose weights are expressed as a function of the deviation from the mean. Everything pulled back towards the average, the expected, the already seen. The joke folds in on itself twice. Mean wears the M-N- sound, and is clearly related to its etymon in the reconstructed forebear of all living Indo-European languages, the méh₁ measure component of méh₁nōt, the moon. So does etymonitself, the technical word for a root, the very unit whose rules kept the pattern invisible. You see, once you get your eye in. Part of my job is to help you get your eye in, not only to these micro components in the words we communicate the world with, but to the macro. And that M-N- pops up again and again in every sentence we speak. The phenomenon I have spent six years documenting is the opposite of a decay towards the average. It is the M-N- regenerating itself, everywhere you look, across six thousand years. It surfaces again and again, carrying the same semantic field, in places that root-by-root etymology could never predict and was never going to find. Root-by-root etymology is what Indo-European linguists practise today. It traces each etymon down its own permitted pathway. This M-N- pattern lives at exactly the level that lens excludes. It is an empirical pattern the etymologists’ own rules prevented them from seeing. Their method was not wrong. It was a lens ground for a different task. That is why it waited for a writer. The word man This summer I spent a great deal of time proving an assertion I had long wanted to prove, using state of the art data analytics. I thought I had found a solution. What I needed was a means of proving it. The solution was to the Oxford English Dictionary’s crisp explanation of the origin of the word man. So this is not merely about words with no common meaning. This is the very designation for our species. The OED gives man as “a word inherited from Germanic”, whose “pre-Germanic etymology of the word is problematic”. If you have the time and the energy, go back to those six podcasts asking which came first, Manu or Mannus. I stood exactly where the OED and a machine cannot go. And I used the machine to get there faster than any writer working alone ever could. What the instrument did, and what it did not Every idea in my tests was mine. The etymologists, with their old-fashioned toolkit and their strict rules, keep these words apart even when their senses overlap. Asking whether they should be kept apart was my question. Not one idea came from the neural network model. For all its power it originated nothing. What it did, superbly, was test. It ran in an afternoon the checks that would have cost me a year by hand. It told me plainly when I was wrong. It killed several of my favourite ideas outright. That is exactly what a true instrument is for. I explored. It measured. I brought the possibilities. It supplied the probabilities. Those are not rivals. They are the two halves of that sentence about the mind, finally set to work together instead of one impersonating the other. The human outside the loop I would name the good half of the alabaster disc the human outside the loop. The anxious picture of our moment puts a person inside a machine’s process, nodding its outputs through, slowly deskilled. Turn it inside out. Put the human on the outside, holding the machine the way an astronomer holds a telescope. The theory, the questions, the wild sideways guess belong to the human. The instrument only lets her see further. The model, powerful as it is, could not have got here without visiting Menua’s canal. It is the most capable yet built, the generation its makers call Mythos, perhaps humanity’s finest ever instrument, and it is now available to a solitary writer in their garret. It is not, and cannot be, the decider. The measurement, in full I am a writer chasing an idea, and here is what the measurement found. On the NorthEuraLex database of 43,251 Indo-European word-forms across 1,016 meanings, words for the pre-registered meaning field carry the M-N- skeleton at 20.8 per cent, against 3.46 per cent for all other meanings. The pre-registered field was: moon, month, mind, think, memory, remember, meaning, measure, count, man, human, spirit, and name. The odds ratio is 8.0. A word on that field is eight times more likely to carry the frame than a word taken at random from the language. Fisher’s exact test returns p = 5.60 × 10⁻⁶⁶. It stands first of 182 co-occurrence frames tested. Or, in writerly language: the probability that this pattern is a coincidence is nought point, and then sixty-five zeros. If sound and meaning had nothing to do with each other, you could rerun this experiment on fresh data every second, once a second, since the Big Bang. That is about 4 × 10¹⁷ replays. You would still be short of one expected fluke by a factor of four hundred billion trillion trillion trillion. All of this worked because I did the six years’ work first. I was able to put to the Mythos model the question that had been puzzling me for years. I had noticed the pattern. I had formed the ideas. I had read thousands of papers and walked the road to Van and Mesopotamia and back and around, several times, all before the machines could do anything useful at all. The model amplified a prepared mind. It could not have prepared one. The other half is that she is equipped Peter Jukes’s diplomatically expressed warning is real. Surrender your thinking to the averaging engine before you have any of your own, and you will indeed become an avatar of the average. That is only half the story. The other half is that a writer who has spent her life looking hard, and that is the hard R-D-, into the material of her craft, into the sounds and the roots and the meanings and the buried systems beneath the plainest words she writes the world with, is not necessarily diminished by these machines. She is, for the first time, equipped. The lonely figure in the attic, pram in the hallway, alone with the page, can now reach past the edge of what any single lifetime could grasp at, in one afternoon. Not by handing over her mind. By keeping it, and pointing the instrument at what she alone can see. The cure for granting ourselves too little mind is to go and use the mind we have, with better tools than any writer before us has owned. The office has not changed Four thousand three hundred years ago Enheduanna heaped the coals in the censer, prepared the offering, which we can see on that alabaster disc, and in her own phrase conceived the word. A hymn from the moon god Nanna’s house, written to true a world a usurper had wronged. The office has not changed one jot since. The writer still exists to recouple the legal with the moral. To right the world through writing. To point at the common root under divided ground. Writers have always had the mana to bring communities together rather than to divide them. What has changed, only now, in the age of mythos these machines have opened, is how far a single prepared mind can reach while doing it. Enheduanna righted her city with a song. She had only her own two hands and a reed to press it into clay. I have the whole span of Manuland to walk, and an instrument steady enough to test my hypotheses. For both halves of the alabaster disc, and for both halves of the work, this era has opened. The machine and the mind. The sounds beneath our words and the buried patterns beneath our politics. And the strong, slightly vertiginous sense that I am only getting started. At bottom, tyranny or not, the writer’s job in Mesopotamia, as in Europe today, has not changed. Only our reach, and the stakes. I’m Decoding Trolls. I write at Disinfolklore.net and PowerofMana.net, and as Decoding Trolls on Substack, X, Bluesky and Mastodon. Please feel free to subscribe to my work for free. For those who pay for it, you’re amazing. I never thank you, so I am thanking you here. I’ll see you soon. Principles of Infolklore Ep 1 - Aug 20 Ep 2 - Aug 27 Ep 3 - 3 Sept Ep 4 - 10 Sept Ep 5 - 17 Sept Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

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