When it came up in 2012 I was still a lib and didn't pay all that much attention to the Kony 2012 stuff besides memes. Lately, however, I've been thinking about it more and the whole event strikes me as very odd. I did some googling and found this:
There is clearly more than Kony at stake here. Central Africa is well known for its rich natural resources – including copper, cobalt, gold, uranium, magnesium and tin. Once ravaged by King Leopold II of Belgium, the 21st-century American Empire now wants in.
At an AFRICOM Conference at Fort McNair on February 18, 2008, Vice Admiral Robert T. Moeller declared the programme’s mission meant maintaining “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market.”
Not only that. Ugandan President Yower Museveni has for some time courted Iran and President Ahmadinejad “in all fields.” This is the new Scramble for Africa – a sick twist of history in which global powers are returning to old hunting grounds and fiefdoms in preparation for a new proxy war.
If Invisible Children does not turn out to be some Pentagon-CIA front, the charity is still attempting to align social media, activism and youth political disengagement with the United States’ hawkish economic and military interests in Africa.
Was this for sure a CIA op, and does anyone know of any other evidence linking the CIA to this?
Also, does anyone remember how the guy who pushed the campaign went insane and was arrested for masturbating in public? What exactly happened there??
The Internet Historian, who leans a bit 4chany with some videos, had what I thought was a pretty good explanation. Basically the dude starting it was super naive and had no plan besides wanting to bring awareness to the issue. He was ironically pretty successful in hitting that goal, but having that actually happen-making everyone aware of something pretty evil but not having any actual ability to stop it-is probably enough to drive most people a bit insane.
So the real thing he overdosed on was liberalism? Liberalism and bathsalts which were in fashion at the time.
It makes sense. "What about the children in Africa" was a very popular topic for activism and charities until fairly recently (I feel like the cause has lost momentum since 2016-ish)
The whole "save the children in Africa" feels very End of History to me. Like the entire west went "well, we sorted out all the problems in our countries, maybe we should try to do something about the millions of people we starve". As soon as problems at home couldn't be masked anymore, the broader society just stopped giving a shit.
I don't think it was a CIA op specifcially as we probably signed Mr Kony's paychecks at some point. Howver "algorithm" turbo charging some mediocre white kid's clickbait is exaxtly how the cia designed the greater cultural system to work.
the guy who pushed the campaign went insane and was arrested for masturbating in public? W
Yep, deffinitely CIA
Well, Kony hadn't (and still hasn't) been seen for years at that point, and is believed to had already been dead when the film was made, for one. And now, his group, the Lord's Resistance Army, is all but destroyed.
Hmmm
So, as Invisible Children winds down, there's one big question: Was Kony 2012 a failure? It's a harder question to answer than you might think: Even some of Invisible Children's biggest critics have mixed feelings about the organization's legacy. If nothing else, pinning the failure to capture Kony on one organization is unreasonable (a huge variety of other actors were involved) and the Kony 2012 campaign did help mobilize a U.S.-backed African Union force in a bid to capture him.
The Reuters link is actually dead in the article (wapo)
The African Union (AU), backed by the United States, has put together a 5,000-strong military force to hunt down fugitive warlord Joseph Kony, whose profile has shot up following a celebrity-backed campaign against him.
Kony, accused of terrorizing northern Uganda for two decades, is wanted by the International Criminal court for war crimes. He is accused of leading a group that abducted children to use as fighters and sex slaves and hacked off living victims' limbs as a method of intimidation and revenge.
A video about Kony posted on YouTube by a California film-maker has been viewed by tens of millions of people, promoted on Twitter with the hashtag #Kony2012 and endorsed by major Hollywood celebrities.
The AU force aims to coordinate soldiers already hunting for Kony from South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Central African Republic (CAR) and Uganda with logistical and intelligence help from Washington.
In October, U.S. President Barack Obama said he was sending 100 military advisers to the four countries involved in the new AU force.
"The Americans are playing a pivotal role in some aspects," AU special envoy Francisco Madeira said on Saturday.
"They support us militarily, they support us with equipment, they support us with military advice, they support us even with intelligence and training," he told reporters at its launch ceremony in the South Sudanese capital Juba.
He gave no details on the troops' strategy.
The force will be headquartered in Yambio in South Sudan near the border to the DRC. Units will be also based in Dungu in the DRC and Obo in the CAR, officials said.
U.N. Central Africa envoy Abou Moussa said the force had to capitalize on the high level of global pressure on Kony.
"We need to take advantage of the high level of interest, goodwill and political commitment to finally put an end to this crime."
LRA violence in the region has subsided since 2005 when the LRA was ejected from Uganda and now Kony is believed to command only hundreds of followers, scattered in jungle hideouts.
(Reporting by Hereward Holland; Writing by Ulf Laessing; Editing by Ben Harding)
U.S. foreign policy guys might not have instigated, but it certainly seems like they threw in, as the other users said
I think it was just couple well-intentioned globe hopping white guys who found out about some stuff going on in Uganda that no one is the US really knew about. They come back, and start making this their "thing" and it becomes fucking huge.
But I think they then found themselves unable to manage this huge movement they created, and they found that the issue they had gotten into was a lot more complex than LRA bad let's just catch Kony. And so it just became super stressful, the Invisible Children people were not prepared to handle how big their movement got, and now they were dealing with navigating the US government and navigating relations between countries, and it all became to stressful and the guy just had a bit of a breakdown due to all the stress.
So it was just a bunch of well-intentioned white libs who took on more than they could handle, dived into an issue without fully understanding it, then found themselves at the forefront of that issue leading a whole movement, and just couldn't take the stress and so then the guy finds himself having a breakdown in public which included public masturbation.
