In an old Monty Python sketch, the British Army weaponises the Funniest Joke in the World to defeat the Germans. Non-German-speaking Tommies shout out the German translation of the joke, causing the Huns to keel over and drop dead laughing. The Germans attempt counter-jokes, to little avail.
The Pentagon apparently mistook the comedy sketch for a documentary – with as much comedic success as the Gestapo.
[Afghanistan] isn’t the only war America has been losing. We’re also losing the Meme Wars.
That’s the lesson from a truly ghastly discovery by the intrepid reporters at VICE, who obtained 23 pages of internal documents from the Pentagon about an anti-Russia meme it deployed last October.
Each word of the Funniest Joke had to be separately translated by teams of interpreters working on only one word for their own safety (one translator saw two words of the joke and had to be hospitalised for several weeks). Similarly, a team of the Pentagon’s crack memers worked tirelessly for nearly a month to produce…this:
Behold the meme that will bring down Putin for good!
Their goal: expose the fact that Russia has hackers (gasp!) and make them look dumb in the process. ‘We want something that’s in a PowerPoint their boss sees and he loses his shit on them,’ one US official said.
No artifice was spared as the DoD’s meme masters carried out their work. What creature would best serve as a metaphorical representation of Russia? A bear, of course! But wait: bears are formidable animals, and they didn’t want Russia to look tough and dangerous. They couldn’t use Winnie the Pooh; everybody associates him with China now.
In a feat of tactical, nay, strategic brilliance, America’s cyber elites figured out the solution: portray Russia as a bear, but make the bear look silly!
Well, someone is looking very silly, that’s for sure.
Hahahahaha…ha…ha…wait, that’s it? How does that even make sense? If the idea is that Russia is launching deliberate cyberattacks on the West, why is the bear stumbling? Doesn’t that suggest Russia’s malware is spread by accident instead? If that’s the case, do we really need a special arm of the Pentagon spending a zillion dollars a year to stop them?
So, are the Russians reeling like they’ve been hit with a one-two combination of Operation Barbarossa and Chernobyl? Is Putin falling harder than Boris Yeltsin on a five-day vodka bender?
As of writing, the meme has 309 Retweets and 434 Likes.
Ouch. The Stalingrad of meme warfare, it ain’t.
In a fit of understatement, the DoD’s internal report notes that ‘The graphics may not be shaping adversary behavior.’
Spectator Australia
The Pentagon would have been better off parachuting a Dirty Dozen 4Chan shitposters into enemy cyberspace.
The left can’t meme – and neither can the Pentagon.
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