About the meme war
5 October 2022 g. at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) round table "NAFO and victory in the information war" was held in Washington: lessons, obtained in Ukraine".
NAFO is North Atlantic Fellas Organization (Fella can be translated as "guy", "buddy"), and the recognition of the new structure as an element of the military propaganda machine of the West indicates that, that the experience will expand.
A CSIS press release characterizes NAFO as "an organic online group of supporters of the pro-Ukrainian position, creative use of digital media to combat key sources of Russian disinformation”. It's about trying to devalue, "cancel" official information and facts, made public by the Russian side.
NAFO was established in May 2022 city, and one of its symbols is a hand-drawn image of a dog of the Japanese breed siba inu, with which numerous memes are made. "Trans-Ukrainians" are invited to use it as their avatars.
Then came images with systems Javelin, stylized as Mother of God icons (common american blasphemy), where, It turned out, parasitic Canadian journalist, a native of Ukraine Christian Boris. A savvy Canadian Ukrainian created a website Saint Javelin and started an online trade in "souvenirs" with similar paraphernalia. Pan Boris spends part of the proceeds on the purchase of equipment and ammunition for the Armed Forces of Ukraine and neo-Nazi formations.
These two areas - fundraising and spreading memes or comments - are the basis of NAFO's work.. The process is led by information operations specialists.
NAFO co-founder is Matt Moores, former member of the United States Marine Corps. In my time (2006 year) It was US Marine Corps Major Michael Prosser who proposed the concept of memetic warfare.. Prosser claimed, that an attack on any ideology should be carried out as an attack on its central idea, and memes are the weapon of such an attack. According to Prosser, ideologies have the same characteristics, what are diseases, and memes are the means of "cure" (or distribution) ideological diseases.
FROM 2006 years, memetic warfare methods have advanced significantly, today NATO is fully armed with them. In this war, the enemy ideology is devalued, and the Internet is a field, on which the information war is waged.
edition Politico notes, that "deepening into NAFO is a crash course in ...weaponizing internet culture".
NAFO structure looks amorphous, but it includes, eg, Estonian President Thomas Hendrik Ives, Minister of Defense of Ukraine Oleksiy Reznikov, US Army Major General Patrick Donahue, Congressman Adam Kinzinger and other notables.
The Washington Post writes, that NAFO's work is a trolling war. The publication cites Eliot Higgins, website founder BellingCat, associated with British intelligence. Higgins promises to talk about NAFO "as an example of online communities, responding organically to disinformation from governments”.
Western observers agree that, that NAFO builds its work on the so-called sheetposting (shitposting) – posting low-quality messages (literally: shit), thereby reducing the meaning of any texts and making them meaningless. The Economist calls it "frivolous practice", but counts NAFO moves "a remarkably successful form of information warfare".
Shitposting usually doesn't work in Russia, how it does not work in countries with an undestroyed conservative culture. However, in Ukraine and in the West, where "cancellation culture" has gone much further, vulgar memes go "with a bang".
And the work of NAFO is exemplary in this regard.. Memes and vulgar Russophobic jokes North Atlantic Fellas Organization hangs psychological hooks in the virtual space. Dog whips ina, eg, portrayed as "gender neutral", promoting LGBT. Line of "holy javelins" provides mockery of Christian images. And all this is connected with the stupidity of the people (stupid people are easier to manage), with the planting in his subconscious of hatred. The very vulgarity of memetic warfare, reinforced by a "cancellation culture", acts as a means of conquering the masses.
Leonid Savin
