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.
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.
So the real thing he overdosed on was liberalism? Liberalism and bathsalts which were in fashion at the time.