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As a humorous response to the threat of the Russian occupation of Belarus during the joint military exercise of September 2017, civic activists created the fictional Republic of Veyshnoria. This meme soon obtained all the attributes of a micronation, including numerous virtual citizens, serving to critique the autocratic government of Belarus and creating a platformfor alternative nation-building. Via humor and fake news, fictional Veyshnoria is becoming increasingly instrumental in the realm of information and ideological warfare.
Keywords
AFS ethnographic thesaurus: Humor, jokes, political participation, parody
in september 2017, donald trump spoke to African leaders at the United Nations and made two references to a country called Nambia. President Trump's speech about a non-existent country swiftly invited ridicule online-in addition to memes and hashtags, the official Twitter of the Republic of Nambia opened with a statement: "It is about time we become famous. Thank you, Trump"1 (see Taylor 2017). Such playfully created countries, however, do not only ridicule the ignorant powerful-they also become instrumental in information warfare.
The concept of information warfare has long existed; according to the recurrently quoted definition, its activities "target or exploit information media in order to win some objective over an adversary" (Denning 1998:xiii). Hovewer, many have suggested that this definition has been expanded with contemporary Russian upgrades to information warfare techniques to reinvent reality and translate it into political action. One example is Novorossiya (New Russia), the name Vladimir Putin plucked from tsarist history and bestowed upon the huge wedge of southeastern ukraine (even though historically Novorossiya had represented a different geographical space). Although nobody who lives in that part of the world today ever thought of themselves as Novorossiyan, Novorossiya was imagined into existence: Russian media published its maps while Kremlin-backed politicians wrote its history into school textbooks (Pomerantsev 2014). The fantasy of Novorossiya legitimized the self-proclaimed pro-Russian Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People's Republic (LPR), its imagined territory becoming the basis for separatist states. In 2014, after the mass Maidan protests in Ukraine and the Russian annexation of Ukrainian Crimea, these states emerged with Russian support. Their territories have been in military conflict between Ukrainian army and pro-Russian (and Russian) separatist forces since then.
Another Russian fantasy turned into creating an imagined new nation in September...