Is It Really America To The Rescue, Again?

So just yesterday was the day, where the billions of viewers who watched the Kony 2012 invisible children trailer were supposed to go out and cover the night. What happened is the question. Did the event get cancelled because when I walked around the streets of Leicester it was not covered by Kony posters or Kony Graffiti. In fact I think the birds were the ones who covered the night since there seemed to be an increase of bird poo in town. Now the day after the Kony campaign was released everybody on twitter and facebook was determined to find Kony and “cover the night” on 20thof April. Days after that, different theories and criticisms about the campaign starting rising making everybody question the real motive behind the campaign. The main criticisms going around are that “The campaign misrepresents reality – in other words, it distorts the truth for its own ends” They are saying that since America discovered that there is oil in Uganda they needed a way to get access into the country. So making a campaign focusing on the children in Uganda seemed to be the next best way to go about things. The campaign reinforces the idea that ‘the West’ (or just America really) must ‘save’ Africa where people are helpless victims of Evil Men. This is where the idea of America being the centre of attention comes in as they want to be seen as the heroes once again. The video emphasises that we must get the attention of the American leaders but says nothing about the African leaders. Why is that? Surely the Africans should be the first to be informed about such a problem if they did not know about it already. Why must they find out that America is coming to the rescue through social networks like twitter and Facebook? Because of this the idea of the campaign being misguided is more believable. There are other human rights offenders worse than Kony, why did America start with him if they really wanted to save the world. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/polis/2012/03/09/why-i-think-the-kony-2012-campaign-is-wrong/