[Caution: Viewers may find some images disturbing due to the topic of the film.]
Nearly 10 million hits on YouTube and counting... It is a campaign against a Ugandan warlord - Joseph Kony - that has gone viral.
In less than three days after filmmaker Jason Russell released the 30-minute documentary on YouTube, the "Kony 2012" campaign is trending worldwide on Twitter and made the front page of Reddit.
The campaign, produced by the Invisible Children movement, seeks to make Joseph Kony one of the most infamous people in the world. On iots website, the campaign says, "If the world knows who Joseph Kony is, it will unite to stop him. It starts here."
The campaign intends to urge the United States and other countries to intensify their efforts to nab Joseph Konyy, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), who has wreaked havoc over four Central African nations for more than two decades.
The US elite troops set up a base in Obo in December and have been coordinating their efforts with local government forces and Ugandan soldiers.Besides Obo, the US forces also have a forward base in South Sudan.
Not to wander too far off topic here, but Rush Limbaugh's disgusting sexist comments have had people so up in arms of late that this needs to be said. When President Obama sent that small number of elite US troops to Obo, Limbaugh either ignorantly or intentionally misled his listeners to believe that Kony's LRA is a "Christian" group, and that Obama had sent troops to help Muslims kill Christians:
Via:
On his radio show today, Rush Limbaugh launched another religion-based smear of President Obama: that he is sending troops to Africa to kill Christians. Limbaugh declared that "President Obama has deployed troops to another war, in Africa," adding that the group being targeted, the Lord's Resistance Army, "are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. ... So that's a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians." Limbaugh then claimed that Obama supports "help[ing] the Egyptians wipe out the Christians."
So proud was Limbaugh of this attack that he posted the transcript of it, complete with audio (for paid subscribers) on his website, under the headline "Obama Invades Uganda, Targets Christians":
Now back to Kony. The rebels currently number several hundred, a fraction of their strength at their peak but still include a core of hardened fighters infamous for mutilating civilians and abducting children for soldiers and sex-slaves. Tens of thousands of people have been killed since Kony took up arms in the late 1980s, initially against the Ugandan government.
The International Criminal Court has a warrant against Kony, one of Africa's most wanted men.
Driven out of Uganda, the guerrillas have since scattered across a vast region of the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, recruiting fighters from those nations over the years. The LRA emerged from the frustrations of Uganda's marginalised Acholi ethnic group against the government, but its leaders have since dropped their national political agenda for the narrow objective of pillage and plunder.
The Invisible Children movement's campaign founders hope that the buzz on social media will take this outside the continent and make the world sit up and take notice. But can the internet and a viral video bring an international criminal to justice?
