2012 REDUX: KONY 2024

by Daniel Barge

Nobody really knows why the whole "Kony 2012" thing went madly viral twelve years ago. It was basically just a documentary and fund-raising campaign that aimed to bring down Joseph Kony the sadistic leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. Somehow it hit the mark with audiences around the world, spawning a load of conspiracy theories, and then suddenly imploded, with the guy behind it going on a drugs bender. 

Now Joseph Kony is back in the news, and we are being told that he is being hunted by Russian mercenaries, which, kind of, sounds odd.

As reported by top "African news site" Rolling Stone, which I always naively thought was a rock magazine:

"RUSSIAN MERCENARIES ARE chasing one of the world’s most notorious fugitives: the warlord Joseph Kony, who abducted tens of thousands of children from across central Africa, brutalizing and brainwashing them as child soldiers and sex slaves in a decades-long maelstrom of terror.

Multiple sources independently describe to Rolling Stone a bloody near-capture of Kony by Russian mercenaries working for the Wagner Group, in a remote corner of the Central African Republic in early April. A social media post affiliated with Wagner also confirms some aspects of the group’s interest in the warlord.

“This amounts to hot pursuit [in] the African bush,” says a U.S. source familiar with efforts to capture the warlord. “The U.S. military got within 72 hours of Kony. Wagner may be even closer.”

A new subtext of the story is that this somehow "proves" that Russia is displacing the West in Africa:

The operation demonstrates Russia’s ever-expanding reach across Africa, and also illustrates the shortcomings of more than two decades of U.S. military strategy on the continent. Despite spending billions on counterterror operations, training, and infrastructure in Africa since the beginning of the Global War on Terror, extremist violence is at an all-time high, according to researchers at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a U.S.-funded research institute. Even as fatalities from terror attacks have spiked with “a near doubling in deaths since 2021,” a string of coups and civil wars has unraveled Washington’s partnerships and created chaotic power vacuums.

It's old news that the US-backed French soft-colonial "empire" in Africa has hit a sticky patch, but that doesn't mean Russia is taking over.

Without a strong hand on the tiller, African countries are just reverting to their endemic mix of chaos and tyranny. Who knows, it might even be good for them in the long run. Not surprising that there are a few "Soldier of Fortune" types being sucked into this, whichever language they speak.

However, any gains in influence made by Russia will be even easier to destabilise from the outside, while the impending defeat of Russia in the Ukraine and economically will ensure that this African adventure by elements of the Wagner group will be short-lived. Chances are Kony, or someone very much like him, will pop up again and again in Africa in the years ahead.

Jason Russell: "White saviour" X "deep state" vibes

But whatever happened to Jason Russell, the oddly Richard Spencer lookalike behind the 2012 viral campaign? You can find out here.