Kony: A Viral Campaign for Justice

The past week has seen a viral campaign spread on the internet perhaps faster than any other before. The objective of it’s creators, Invisible Children, is to bring to justice a man who has terrorized Uganda for 20 years.

Joseph Kony is the self styled mouthpiece of God, and he leads the Lords Resistance Army on their quest to create a theocracy in Uganda. Where the Islamist movement see a Sharia society as it’s end game, Kony wants to create a society which is governed strictly by the Ten Commandments. It should be noted that he breaks all ten of them several times a day, but like many African warlords he will simply deny such a charge.

In the scheme of things, there is no doubt that Kony is a monster. As far as brutal warlords go, there would be few a bad as him. He recruits child soldiers after his gang of thugs kill their parents, and he enslaves young girls kidnapped from schools. The documentary, however, has come under criticism from experts on the region for it’s over simplicity and glossing over of important points. As Joshua Keating has written in his post Joseph Kony is not in Uganda (and other complicated things), there are a lot of factual misrepresentations.

However, what this campaign illustrates is the power of social media in bringing about real justice. If you think global warming and equal rights for homosexuals are the important issues, please take a look at this picture. For now we need to ignore the fact that Kony does not have an army of thousands and is not even in Uganda. What we need is for Kony to be discussed within the 2012 US Presidential Elections. If Mitt Romney or Barack Obama pledge to send Seal Team Six to the Congo to bring this monster to justice, they will garner a lot of votes and it is all thanks to this somewhat misleading and misinformed video.

Tagged Joseph Kony, Uganda