If you don’t go on social media, you probably don’t know what “NAFO” is. Briefly: it’s some kind of intelligence operation to spam poor quality memes in support of the war in the Ukraine. It is vaguely based on the troll campaigns of the Alt-Right during the 2016 election. However, there is nothing clever or transgressive, it’s just “I support everything the media says.”
The only thing that whoever organized this took away from the old Alt-Right is that if you spam someone’s replies, you can get them to log off. So it’s a way of trying to silence people who voice opposition to the war, while creating the illusion of mass support for the war. They also just say over and over again that the Ukraine is winning.
On Twitter, if you post anything questioning the war, you get spammed with these horrible memes. I’ve never seen one that was funny. They are too bad to be made by AI; they’re either being made by Indians or women.
These memes are like “fuck you – I hope you die!” But actually, if they just said that, it would be funnier than what they actually say. It’s support for NATO, but “trade” is changed to “fella,” which is a play on “fren” from the old Alt-Right days. They adopted a smoosh-faced doge meme from like 2014 in place of Pepe. They make these memes that don’t even have jokes.
I just clicked the “Russia” hashtag on Twitter and this was one of the top posts:
“I’ll fuck your ass with barb wire!!!”
There’s always a lot of this:
It’s not really meant to appeal to anyone other than low level morons who don’t understand the concept of a joke. It’s all just “nasty woman who wants to hurt people out of pure sadism.” A lot of people, mostly women, have this daddy thing with Putin, because he is a masculine white man. Insofar as there is anything at all to be drawn from this spam campaign, that is all.
And indeed – they’ve recently started posting images of themselves, mostly in response to people saying that they are all just bots, and it’s exactly what you would expect.
I’ve said six million times that women, who cannot be conscripted, should not be legally allowed to promote war.
Anyway – when I first ran across this, I wondered if it could be some kind of Russian counterintelligence operation. Aside from the mentally ill and women, anyone who sees people treating a war that has killed now hundreds of thousands of people, citing the premise of vague “values and principles” no one can explain, with this level of retarded, inane jubilation is going to cause support for the war to drop. Treating the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and the destruction of an entire country, as a cutesy little game is extremely off-putting to anyone who is not an absolute freak.
This is to say nothing of how the Russian people view the fact that these accounts are actively calling for mass killing of Russians, actually leaning into “genocide” type language.
No one is going to say “I support this war now after seeing tens of thousands of accounts, most of which were clearly bots, spamming stale doge memes alongside vitriolic sadism.”
I don’t think it is Russians doing it, actually. I think the people running Western intelligence are just stupid, and incapable of really thinking through complex consequences. The goal is to give the impression of mass support for the war, to claim the Ukraine is going to win the war, and to silence people who question the war on public platforms, and they’re not thinking beyond that.
The team of Alexi Navalny, the Russian opposition candidate who is currently in prison for fraud, is thinking beyond that, however.
A few months ago, a random Russian guy on vacation in Egypt was killed by a shark while swimming (he was a father and his kids were on the beach witnessing it). These NAFO accounts started celebrating it, because they want to kill random Russian people. (The guy was not a government employee or a solider or something – it was just a random Russian citizen.)
On July 8, ahead of the NATO summit in Lithuania, there was a “virtual NAFO summit” broadcasting from the country. It was hosted by the Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs.
At the real life NATO summit, which is happening now, we see photos of these people walking around with shark plushies, celebrating the brutal death of this random guy because they openly say they want all Russians to be killed.
When people started talking about this, focusing on the fact that their main joke is this shark thing (which is not really a joke), the Chief of Staff for Navalny, Leonid Volkov, pointed out that this is definitely not helping the opposition in Russia.
The fact is that NAFO helps Putin a lot.
Putin’s very important propaganda line “The West supports Ukraine because they just want to kill all the Russians” would have faded away… were it not for the constant help of NAFO. https://t.co/sG4Wmn92w9— Leonid Volkov (@leonidvolkov) July 9, 2023
Obviously, the Russian opposition is trying to win hearts and minds and get the Russian people behind a pro-Western agenda. That is the purpose of the opposition.
Also obvious is that if Russians go online to see what the West is up to, and find out that they are celebrating a random Russian guy being eaten alive by a shark in front of his family, they are probably not going to have very positive feelings about that.
People who never liked Putin before are now supporting him simply because the alternative is allying with a group of people who are openly saying they want random Russians to die because of their ethnicity and national origin.
There is now a war between the Russian opposition people and these NAFO people, with the Russian opposition condemning them as liars and sadists.
Shall we continue? Here is what you also could have done. You could have reversed search the available photo of the victim to find out more images of him. That’s called verification, Mr. Niland. Not that tricky. pic.twitter.com/tv3sNYrPMw
— Maria Pevchikh (@pevchikh) July 9, 2023
And now Mr. Niland, NAFO, and everybody who’s posting this video, please have a look.
Have a genuine look with your own eyes and tell me honestly if you really think that this is the same person.
Fight your battles with dignity. Stop spreading disinformation. Thank you. pic.twitter.com/XJoeNJulDL
— Maria Pevchikh (@pevchikh) July 9, 2023
Given these dynamics, there isn’t going to be a Russian opposition. Even the leaders of it are now saying “well, at least Putin doesn’t want to kill me…”
If there ever was an opposition to Putin, it would not be pro-Western. It would be the opposite – some lunatic like Prigozhin attempting to establish a fascist state.
The poorly thought through nature of this spam campaign speaks to the lack of simple reasoning behind the entire Western operation against Russia. An all-out war against Russia is hardly even feasible. As a concept, it really doesn’t make any sense. Logically, what you would be doing is trying to put pressure on the Putin government, while supporting a kind of fifth column in the country – women, students, homosexuals, etc. – to oust the current government and replace it with a pro-Western government. But the West has done the exact opposite, portraying Russians as biologically evil and worthy of death.
We all remember that creepy ass Lindsey Graham clip.
PURE EVIL!
Lindsey Graham: “The Russians are dying… it’s the best money we’ve ever spent.” pic.twitter.com/q4zNkwAY9u
— Rev Laskaris (@REVMAXXING) May 27, 2023
That is the message to the Russians: “we want to kill you.”
The point is: this whole agenda is on its last leg.
The empire is collapsing in on itself, under the weight of its own hubris.