Social Media Scam Alert: Top Ten Ways to Tell Kony is Phony. The Hidden
Agenda is to Invade Africa
by Bruce A. Dixon
http://www.globalresearch.ca/coverStoryPictures2/29777.jpg
<
http://www.globalresearch.ca> Global Research, March 14, 2012
A week ago Invisible Children released a video that was immediately picked
up and promoted by every corporate news and entertainment outlet till it
went "viral". Kony 2012 allegedly "promote awareness" of and contributes to
the end of child soldiering in Africa. But is that really what it's about?
Is it, like the old Save Darfur war dance, another propaganda campaign to
justify US intervention in Africa?
Thanks to relentless promotion by Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, Bloomberg News, ABC,
CBS, Oprah, celebrities and politicians of both corporate parties, along
with right wing church groups and foundations, the Kony 2012 video has "gone
viral." Viewed on YouTube more than a hundred million times by now, it
paints a vivid and simple picture, clear enough, its narrator says, for a
five year old.
Joseph Kony, the YouTube video tells us, is a bad guy in Uganda, a lawless
warlord leading something called the Lord's Resistance Army, which kidnaps,
enslaves and murders innocent children by the tens of thousands. Just why
Kony does this is unclear, but we're told the Ugandan government would
gladly shut him down and bring him to justice if only the US would provide
the advanced weapons, sophisticated tracking gear, military training and the
boots on the ground to help get it done. To make this happen, all that Kony
2012's promoters ask of us is to help spread "awareness" of Uganda's
"invisible" child soldiers by facebooking, tweeting and repeating the Kony
2012 video, and by emailing influential politicians and the one-name
celebrities like Oprah, Bono, Rhianna, Cosby and Lady Gaga (OK, Lady Gaga is
two names) to whom they listen. The Kony 2012 video aims to bring the
criminal child-enslaving Ugandan warlord to justice by enlisting tens of
millions of us little people in making Kony's name an odious household word
around the planet, after which Washington DC will stretch forth its military
arm to bring Kony, alive if possible, before the International Criminal
Court for trial and punishment.
Almost everything is wrong with this simple picture, from the missing
histories and hidden motives of storytellers and players to false statements
of processes and problems real and unreal on both sides of the Atlantic. In
fact, Kony 2012 is not a search for justice. Kony 2012 is a corporate-style
PR and military psy-ops campaign, a cynical hoax engineered to justify US
and Western military intervention to control the incredibly lucrative oil,
mineral, water and strategic resources of the heart of Africa. The video
tells viewers not to study history, but to make it. Kony 2012 does not
promote "awareness ". It relies on and promotes ignorance and smug racism.
Black Agenda Report is far from the first or the only news source to point
that Kony 2012 is a warmongering hoax, and we certainly won't be the last.
As our contribution, we here offer our top ten reasons why Kony is phony.
Reason #10: Invisible Children is funded by a core of notorious right wing
donors including the Discovery Institute, which Bruce Wilson fingered in a
March 11 Talk 2 Action piece as the leading funder of efforts to promote the
replacement of biological sciences in schools with "intelligent design,"
along with the Caster Foundation and the National Christian Foundation, all
prominent backers of anti-gay referenda, politicians and initiatives in the
United States and around the world. The Ugandan regime of Yoweri Museveni is
a favorite of theirs for having passed legislation making it a criminal
offense to be gay, punishable by a life sentence. Credible African
journalists like Keith Harmon Snow have also alleged that Invisible
Children's white and male leaders have direct personal connections to US
intelligence agencies.
Reason #9: Invisible Children and Kony 2012 don't tell us that the Ugandan
government of Yoweri Museveni, one of the "good guys" in the Kony 2012
universe, is also accused by the same International Criminal Court before
which it wants to bring Joseph Kony, of using tens of thousands of child
soldiers in its genocidal depredations in neighboring Congo, where Uganda
and six other African nations invaded and killed an estimated 5 to 6 million
Congolese in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a larger death toll than
anyplace on planet Earth since the second world war. Bruce Wilson's
excellent March 8 Talk 2 Action article "Invisible Children" Co-founder
(KONY 2012) Hints It's About Jesus, and Evangelizing links to numerous
sources for this and much else.
Reason #8: Invisible Children and the Kony 2012 video also don't tell us
that Uganda's Museveni replaced a president and rival general from the
Acholi region of northern Uganda, the same ethnic group as Kony's LRA. The
Ugandan government has evicted hundreds of thousands of Acholi from their
lands and confined them to desperate and squalid refugee camps for more than
XYZ years.
Kony and his LRA did commit monstrous crimes in previous decades, but by now
are said to number only a few hundred combatants. Kony may not even have set
foot in Uganda in years, but he and the LRA are useful as convenient
bogeymen to justify the continued dispossession of Uganda's Acholi, whose
chief misfortunes besides the LRA itself, are having produced rivals to
Museveni and living at the edge of a resource-rich region that stretches
across Uganda's borders for hundreds of miles into Congo and Sudan.
Reason #7: Invisible Children and Kony 2012 are lying when they attribute
the disappearance of all 30,000 missing northern Ugandan children to the
LRA.
The truth is that some of the child soldiers the Ugandan government used in
neighboring Congo were abducted in northern Uganda, nobody knows how many,
and a large but unknown portion of that region's civilian dead, many of them
Acholi, perished at the hands of Uganda's government, which always had far
more firepower and resources than the LRA, and just as little regard for the
property and lives of innocent civilians and their children.
Reason #6: Threats of massive foreign intervention into civil conflict do
not bring adversaries to the table. Instead they make it unnecessary for
those on whose side the foreigners intervene to negotiate at all, and leave
nothing for the other side to negotiate over. Uganda needs an end to
violence, and resources devoted to building its civil society, not more
military aid.
Reason #5: The United States, the other "good guy" in Kony 2012's imaginary
world basically invented the modern African child soldier in the late 1970s
and early 80s, so their commitment to "ending child soldiers" is a bit
suspect.
Apartheid South Africa was bordered Portuguese ruled Angola and Mozambique,
with their own vicious versions of apartheid until 1974. In that year,
despite massive US and NATO aid, the Portuguese army rebelled, refused to
continue fighting against African independence and overthrew its own
government at home. White South Africa was deeply threatened by having
independent black regimes now at its borders. So, with US funding it helped
create and arm "contra" guerilla forces, UNITA in Angolan and RENAMO in
Mozambique to burn schools and clinics, to mine orchards and roads, commit
mass rapes, mutilations and murders, terrorizing citizens in their own
country.
Lacking foreign troops or popular support , but with US aid and plenty of
firepower, UNITA and RENAMO hit upon the innovation of kidnapping and
enslaving child soldiers to carry out their despicable mission. Both were
effusively praised and lavishly funded by Barack Obama's favorite president
Ronald Reagan, and their leaders welcomed at the White House.
The chaos and social demoralization spread by Western financed armies of
nihilistic child soldiers made them an ideal tool for use in whatever
African setting the West wished to delay or prevent the emergence of African
civil societies and central governments which might succumb to popular
demands to develop a country's resources for its people rather than to
benefit foreign interests. Employed in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo, Rwanda,
Uganda and elsewhere, "failed states" infested by murderous child soldiers
in the 80s and 90s proved to be incredibly good business environments for
(mostly) Western extraction of hundreds of billions worth of timber, gold,
diamonds, coltan and other vital African resources.
Reason #4: Depending on movie stars and celebrities is the precise opposite
of building the backbone and habits of a vibrant and self-aware civic
movement.
This kind of so-called activism reinforcing a slavish worship of celebrity
culture, acceptance of corporate marketers who tell us what to eat, wear,
covet, consume or shun and convince us it was our idea, not theirs. The real
deal is that FaceBook, Twitter and much of crowd-sourced culture are
fundamentally the master's tools, clicktivism, not activism.
It's never easy, and may not even be possible for slaves to free themselves
with the master's tools. That ain't what they were designed for. Most of
those forwarding and FaceBooking the Kony 2012 video, including some of the
celebrities, as Keith Harmon Snow points out, probably can't find Uganda on
a map.
Reason #3: When both corporate parties, the entire corporate media universe,
a constellation of celebrities and movie stars, all the right wing and much
of the establishment liberal church along with the whole bag of bipartisan
foreign policy experts agree on the need for decisive military action, you
can bet the course of wisdom and truth is just about always in the opposite
direction. Republicans and Democrats voted to send troops to Vietnam, and
only a single congresswoman voted against war in Afghanistan.
Reason #2: Kony 2012 and the campaign to keep US boots on the ground in
Central Africa are all about the oil.
And the diamonds.
And the gold.
And the coltan, and the water.
Uganda's northern region contains vast oil reserves, and neighboring Congo
is the source of most of the planet's coltan, a highly conductive compound
used in every cell phone, computer, aircraft, automobile, missile, GPS or
other electronic device on earth.
Reason #1: It's all about white people, the white West and their First Black
President doing their imperial and colonial thing, running the planet for
their benefit at everybody else's expense and feeling good about it, saving
hapless & hopeless black Africans from themselves. Such a deal. If they
wanted to take Kony down, they could have done it last week, last year, five
or ten years ago. If they do take him down it'll be cause their Kony tool
has outlived its usefulness, and maybe they need to plant a big wet sloppy
kiss on Museveni and his gang, a bigger and more important bag of fools and
tools.
The good news about Kony 2012 is that unlike the similar "Save Darfur" scam,
many voices have been quick to express skepticism, disbelief and flat out
ridicule of the Kony 2012 hoax.
The bad news is that US corporate media, Republicans, Democrats, the Obama
White House and State Department as well as rabid Tea Party senators and
congress creatures all being permanent cheerleaders for war and empire, few
of Kony 2012's many critics will get on the TV stations that caused
Invisible Children's video to "go viral." Mark Twain said a hundred years
ago --- talking about genocidal Western exploitation of the Congo, in fact,
that a lie can flash across the world in the time the truth takes to put its
boots on. But the boots are on. The truth is out here, and you are
responsible for helping it overtake the lie.
So forward the link to this article to your friends. Put it on your FaceBook
page.
Tweet it and repeat it and send it to as many of your family, friends,
colleagues, associates, bosses, employees and acquaintances as you can.
Tomorrow, when we record a YouTube video of it, do the same with that. The
cure for fake "awareness" campaigns that justify US military intervention in
Africa is the truth. Don't be used. Do study history, Africa's and your own.
And do make history.
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and lives in
Marietta GA, where he is a member of the state committee of the Georgia
Green Party. Contact him at
<
http://us.mc1613.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=Bruce.Dixon_at_BlackAgendaReport
.com> Bruce.Dixon_at_BlackAgendaReport.com
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