In this dispatch I intend to describe in detail the true nature of "The Great Backstab", which refers to the "surprise" betrayal of the fascists and extremists of NationStates by J o J. This is a story about a nation that used its position to slip into the deepest depths of the community to do what was necessary in order to strike at the core of the bad guys and sap their strength for as long as possible. It was a social engineering and infiltration operation that I spent years of this nation's existence on, but the dividends it paid were well worth it, and this dispatch will allow you to learn what was really going on behind closed doors. It is being presented in the most accurate way possible based on my own recollection of the events, and what remaining evidence I have access to. I am writing this not only for my own reflection and enjoyment, but also to help illustrate the magnitude of this maneuver to a select few in the community that I deem worthy. For the vast majority of you, I could NOT care less what you think about me, and that is why I undertook this task so publicly and brazenly so long ago. All I care about are results, and I got them. With that out of the way, let us begin.

This nation was initially founded in 2017 with no other purpose than to be a joke, all of the customizable fields in my nation and our regions were set to random things my friends and I found funny at the time. My political beliefs at the time were not very set in stone, nor did I care much about politics. However, in time that would change. As this nation continued to exist on NationStates, I would be exposed to many views and ideas and my views matured very quickly. I soon came to a set of ideals that was completely divorced from the right-of-center friends I had joined NationStates with, and for a while I just kept quiet about it and left my nation as it was. Eventually, I was considering the decision to distance myself from my group of friends and simply just make a new nation. However, by that time, I had refounded many regions and built a small empire for myself - something I wanted to do regardless of my affiliations, and it wasn't something I wanted to sacrifice. So instead, I decided to double down. Many regions had reached out to us to establish relations and forge alliances. This included past and present fascist bastions such as Nazi Europa, Fifth Empire, Farkasfalka, and others. At this point in time, I realized that perhaps I could begin a long-term infiltration to undermine the worst of the worst from within if I could continue to portray myself and my region as a friendly power. This is where the idea to infiltrate the sphere of tyranny originated. It was already too late to turn back, the nation already had bad blood with a lot of the site anyways!

Eventually, many of my at-the-time friends began to quit playing the game or forgot about it, and so I was able to do whatever I wanted to pursue this new goal as I saw fit. I developed a few key strategies to follow that should, in theory, increase my influence and notoriety amongst the fascists over time. These strategies were as follows:

1: Send resident nations to these major embassy regions, such as Fifth Empire, to permanently reside there and engage with them regularly. Some had already been sent there before I made this decision anyways. The idea was that this constant and persistent activity would keep me in their minds and prove my own staying power.

2: Create a handful of factbooks regurgitating random right-wing slop in large quantities, which was meant to demonstrate "devotion" to their cause and increase the chances of this random rhetoric striking chords with them.

3: Begin learning gameplay techniques and take over some regions in the name of combatting our common enemies. Their situation in 2018-2019 was better than it is today, but they were still backed into a corner and on the defensive against the majority. This is where I found the most success, because by refounding communist and other hostile regions, I was able to give off the impression I was making a difference and fighting back against the horde. It did not matter what regions were taken or how they were taken, as long as I had a bunch of ideologically hostile regions captured in my name to show them, which did in fact pay off later on.

4: Create a unique identity. The fascist and extremist bunch are pretty stale, they reuse the same tropes and concepts very frequently. I was able to make myself stand out amongst their crowd by depicting myself as a democracy and a centrist that was pushed into their camp by the extreme actions of antifascists. This is something they immediately seized upon, as such a thing was great for their propaganda against Antifa.

With these four strategies, I was actually beginning to make bridges within their community. The first step was making J o J a signatory of various alliances and pacts, such as The Obsidian Order, The Interregional Axis, the G7 Alliance, and more. After that, I was eventually brought into their military wings after they saw my continued capture of regions. Here, I was able to begin actually inflicting damage. By being brought on as a piler and sometimes a point, they unknowingly planted the seeds for the sabotage of their own raids. I had in truth already gained great knowledge about raiding, refounding, and all the necessary gameplay mechanics for what they were pursuing, but I simply pretended I was a noob. I was able to thwart multiple raids before they even began by "accidentally" clicking the move button during scouting of the target region, missing the jump, forgetting my puppet's password, and so many other random excuses that I have lost track of them at this point! They apparently didn't seem to mind because they were also making similar boneheaded mistakes, which was just hilarious. By 2020 I was becoming a key figure amongst their ranks, as my region collection kept growing and growing. I became very fond of seizing regions, raiding, and all that wonderful nefarious mischief. This is when I began hitting significant regions, taking things from huge regions like Psomewhere from the South Pacific, which garnered even more notoriety amongst the fascists. This development eventually led to my next avenue for sabotage, which was "protecting" their regions for them...

For the fascists, who have historically sucked so badly at region maintenance and defense, it was a godsend for someone like me to come along and be able to defend all their regions! I would frequently notice one of their puppets CTEing, and notify them, at which point they would let me take control of the region and hold onto it for them because they knew it would have a far better chance with my puppet as the founder. Little did they know they were already signing that region's death warrant. To give you an idea of how many regions were actually condemned to destruction by their own doing, I will list some of them here:

The Interregional Axis (Major interregional alliance between fascist powers)
The Obsidian Order (Major interregional alliance between fascist powers)
New Reich of Bunicken (A major fascist region which was in decline after their Kaiserin passed away)
Magyar
Underground Society
Jacksons Lighthouse
Order of the Black Eagle
Union of Strasserite States
Imperial Earth
and so many more...

I think you get the point now. They voluntarily handed these regions over to me, believing I would protect them for eternity... but in truth I was the worst one they could have given them to! This continued through 2021 and into 2022, where I got into The Wolf Clan by way of Apostate/DC and Puetavisa. Although they did not associate with fascists openly and encouraged me to ditch them, they liked my shenanigans overall and thought I would be a useful addition to their little band of demons. I signed on immediately, and I was immediately given positions in government and a path into their raiding group. I was surprised I got those positions so easily, but I nevertheless began doing the same thing to them that I had done to the fascists. I was quietly messing up their raids one way or another, and "protecting" their regions all along the way. I eventually became less active in the other fascist regions and focused on TWC instead. However, a crisis eventually emerged where I was finally able to sow the seeds of this major region's undoing.

The founder of The Wolf Clan, Alpha Wolf, suddenly disappeared one day for about two weeks with no word on where he was going, and Puetavisa was freaking out about it. Given that this was before the succession update, the potentiality of Alpha Wolf CTEing would absolutely mean an eventual liberation of the region by the Security Council and a subsequent raid to destroy the region. Apostate's, Puetavisa's, and my own constant rabble rousing had made enough enemies to guarantee that. Therefore, with continued radio silence from Alpha Wolf, Puetavisa suggested a new region be founded, Sanctum, and all 170+ nations of The Wolf Clan be migrated there. I heavily promoted this idea and pushed it to the rest of TWC's leadership, which eventually resulted in it being mostly accepted. However, there was debate about who should own the founder account. This is where I laid the seeds of destruction, because I proposed the idea of a shared founder account amongst the most notoriously misbehaved players in the region, Apostate and Puetavisa. I proposed this with the claim it would make sure we never had a founder randomly disappear again because multiple users would have access to the account, but in truth it was because I knew it was only a matter of time before one of them broke the rules yet again and got the nation deleted. With Alpha Wolf still away, and most of us in agreement, the plan went ahead.

As everything was being put in motion, Alpha Wolf actually returned, and when he found out Puetavisa was basically stealing the region from him, he was displeased to say the least. Alpha Wolf begrudgingly approved this plan since it was already in motion, but he eventually decided to part ways with us, saying all of us, except Puetavisa (By now known as Affray), were welcome to follow him on his own endeavors. When Sanctum was founded and ready to go, TWC was passworded and everybody was instructed to head to Sanctum. Anybody who did not move was kicked, and therefore, the final result was only about 70 nations in Sanctum - a total FLOP. This means out of the roughly 170 nations they had before, only 70 were real and/or active enough to follow orders, which leads me to suspect they had even more spies in their region than actual residents... which is amusing. Activity in the new region also flopped, and soon after the move my prophecy came true, with Puetavisa getting the founder puppet deleted. Upon this catastrophic turn of events for Sanctum, I knew I had subtly enabled the downfall of the region as a whole, and I quietly moved my nation back to J o J. The halfhearted defense of Sanctum was easily obliterated by the NS gameplay community, and the entire TWC/Sanctum community was basically vanquished on the spot as no good successor arose to serve as a refugee camp. This was mostly because the leadership finally collapsed; Alpha Wolf was gone, Puetavisa was now a DoS, Apostate quit NationStates for Torn, and then there was me who just quietly abandoned them all in their moment of need... The only minor successor region was eventually absorbed by Fifth Empire, and that was that.

Needless to say, they eventually found out about my treachery later on after Sanctum fell when I told Vandoosa in a telegram that I didn't care about anybody but myself, and that I was the one who suggested the shared founder account in Sanctum. Puetavisa put the pieces together and banned me from the TWC/Sanctum discord, but the damage was already done. Word also found its way back to the Fifth Empire's leadership of what I had done, but by then their military endeavors were dead in the water because they kept failing (I wonder why teehee), and I never had a position in government anyways, so all they could do was scold me in telegrams - which I simply ignored.

Thus, the story came to a close. By the time I pulled the rug out from under them, I had already sabotaged dozens of raids, stolen dozens more regions, directly contributed to the downfall of one of their biggest regions, and I probably shook their morale a bit too. I was so satisfied with myself that I had managed to quietly and deliberately inflict all of that damage over time without them ever realizing. However, this entire time I had been pretending to be in lockstep with them ideologically OOC, so instead of trying to "redeem" my nation to a bunch of random people in the majority that I didn't give a hoot about, I just turned it into an edgy "you're all bad" nation, and I allowed it to fade into obscurity over time. I was satisfied that I had achieved my overall objective at last, and since I had kind of lost interest in NationStates, I was ready to quit playing and move on to other things in life.

UNTIL a few years later in November of 2024, some random spark rekindled my desire one day. I logged back into my nation, and everything was just as I had left it, although there were a lot of cobwebs and dust. I had been quietly logging into all my puppets every two months so that they didn't CTE, and so I was able to take a stroll through all the ancient history. I remembered how much fun it was to cause mischief and seize regions, and I decided I would return to the game! Since then, I overhauled almost all of my puppets and regions, got rid of the old right-wing nonsense factbooks, then turned my sights on creating new infiltration puppets and seizing regions from all sides. That gameplay aspect of NationStates is the best part of the game in my opinion. With that, this story is finally concluded. Make of it what you will, because I don't mind what most people think about me. This nation has been and continues to be a fun little side project for me and me alone to enjoy, not something I want others to be happy about or approve of. If you're a random passerby who somehow stumbled across this story of which you knew nothing before, then I hope it was at least a bit interesting to listen to this long rambling story about old history, that's the kind of thing I love reading about every now and then too as a guy with a history degree and a passion for learning about the past. With that, I end this dispatch here and wish you well on your own journey, whoever you may be and wherever you may be headed, because at the end of the day this is just a game!