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??

  • FidelCashflow [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    3 years ago

    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.

  • deadtoddler420 [any]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    3 years ago

    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.

      • CTHlurker [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        3 years ago

        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.

  • RNAi [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    3 years ago

    the guy who pushed the campaign went insane and was arrested for masturbating in public? W

    Yep, deffinitely CIA

  • CthulhusIntern [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    3 years ago

    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.

  • deadbergeron [he/him,they/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    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.