Yet military organisations tend to lack the chaotic energy that characterises nafo. In 2006 Michael Prosser, then a major in the US Marine Corps, proposed that America’s armed forces create a Meme Warfare Centre “to advise the commander and provide the most relevant meme combat options”. Many have glimpsed the potential importance of memes in that endeavour. In recent years, armies have invested heavily in psychological operations to confuse, disorient and mislead adversaries, usually through cyber means. Many armed forces might envy that success. “People stopped caring as much about Ukraine and we were able to keep them engaged because we were funny.” “There’s a huge portion of people who just want their information in memes and that’s basically the gap that we fill,” says Mr Borys. nafo has also helped elevate Ukraine’s role in popular culture. He draws a contrast with Russia’s success in fomenting uncertainty and confusion in 2014, during its earlier invasion of Ukraine. Singer, author of “LikeWar”, a book on the use of social media in war. “It’s been effective at not allowing Russia to run wild across the info-war landscape the way they used to,” says Peter W. In many ways, nafo’s flippancy obscures its role as a remarkably successful form of information warfare. Another popular slogan-“What air defence doing?”-pokes fun at the failure of Russian air defences to prevent an attack on Saky air base in Crimea on August 9th. Saint Javelin’s website now sells shirts and mugs emblazoned with the phrase. Not me”-swiftly became a leitmotif of the movement.
#ARTOON DOG TORRENT#
His po-faced response to the torrent of mockery-“You pronounced this nonsense. When Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s senior diplomat in Vienna, accused Ukrainians of shelling civilians in June, he found himself on the receiving end of a nafo barrage.
Like many online communities, nafo revels in references and phrases that appear nonsensical to the uninitiated. A channel on Discord, a social messaging site, hosts a thriving community of more than 1,500 pro- nafo members, who participate enthusiastically in fundraising. He now employs (the name is a pseudonym) at Saint Javelin, which has raised over $1.5m in humanitarian and military support. Mr Borys initially donated money for body armour to procure a fella of his own.
Those efforts caught the eye of Christian Borys, a Kyiv-based Canadian journalist and founder of Saint Javelin, a pro-Ukraine fundraising outfit whose logo is a similarly flippant picture of the Virgin Mary cradling a Javelin anti-tank missile. Nafo’s inventor began drawing personalised shiba inu avatars, or “fellas”, for those who donated to the Georgian Legion, a group of foreign military volunteers in Ukraine. But the point was also to muster donations for Ukraine. The combination of a catchy name, playful imagery and satirical edge provided a collective identity to like-minded activists-many of them actual soldiers in the war-who could channel their outrage at the Russian invasion with irreverence and irony. The acronym and imagery were invented and tweeted by a user named in late May, two months after the invasion. Despite Mr Reznikov’s endorsement, nafo has no formal organisation or leadership.
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