About

Poland Wojak Pushing NATO Article 5 Button or Polish Wojak Pointing at Article 5 Button is an exploitable meme format depicting a maliciously smiling Wojak (known as Psycho Wojak) with the Polish flag and coat of arms overlaid on its head as it points toward a large red button with the text "NATO Article 5" labeled on it, presumably about to push it in regards to the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war. Such memes often feature the image along with the song "Tanc a Lelek" from the game Highfleet playing in the background. In mid-November 2022, the meme saw a significant resurgence following the missile strike that landed in Poland, killing two people.

Origin

With the 2022 Invasion of Ukraine, the Russian rhetoric and aggression towards Ukraine created the possibility that Russia sought to reclaim all of their former satellite states and occupied territories, including Poland, thus spawning the meme that Poland, if even slightly provoked, would incite NATO's Article 5 clause and escalate the conflict to a full-scale war between NATO and Russia. This is because Article 5 of the NATO clause dictates that an act of aggression upon any member immediately calls for the entirety of NATO to come to its aid in the form of declarations of war.

The first known appearance of the meme was on March 4th, 2022, when it was posted to the subreddit /r/NonCredibleDefense by /u/JacketsTapeRecorder,^[1] where it garnered several thousand upvotes and quickly rose among the top posts of the subreddit (shown below).

Spread

The meme continued to spread over the following days and months, particularly on Reddit. For example, two days after /u/JacketsTapeRecorder's meme on March 4th, 2022, an edit of the original post was made by /u/Chechen_Snacker^[2] on the 6th in which the video is a panning shot of Eastern Europe, starting with Russian forces, represented by the VDV, before panning to the Bouncing Ukrainian Pig meme and finally ending on a zoom-in of Poland threatening to press the button (seen below).

From there, other posts began to crop up on the subreddit of other NATO countries, such as Estonia, Romania and the Czech Republic threatening to "push the button."

On May 26th, 2022, the TikTok account MyNameIsKuba^[3] uploaded a version of the meme in which the button is shown before it cuts to show a map of the world with nuclear missiles being shot from America and then a clip of the supposed aftermath of the action (shown below).

November 15th, 2022, Missile Strike in Poland

On November 15th, 2022, AP News international correspondent Philip Crowther tweeted^[4] that it was reported by officials and the media that a missile had come from Russia and struck across the border into Poland, killing two of its citizens. Though this was later corrected that night after it was reported that the missile was actually from Ukraine's air defenses,^[5] this initially perceived escalation in the Russia-Ukraine conflict immediately caused a resurgence in the meme as people began posting about Article 5 and how it would be activated to initiate a full-scale war with Russia (shown below). For example, on November 15th, Twitter user Tsentey posted a version featuring the song "Tanc a Lelek" playing in the background, receiving nearly 100 likes in three hours.

https://t.co/pjh2B6m19G

— Tsentey 🇨🇭 (@Tsentey) November 15, 2022

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References