There is an unmistakable similarity between this campaign, with its use of social media around the hash tag #BringOurGirlsBack, and the one organized in 2011 around the demand for the capture of Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, which was responsible for abducting hundreds of children across Central Africa. That campaign, which attracted the support of everyone from Christian fundamentalists to “humanitarian” imperialists like Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, has resulted in the deployment of hundreds of US special operations troops in Uganda and neighboring countries, which were reinforced and backed up last March by advanced CV-22 Osprey warplanes, capable of vertical takeoffs and landings. After two-and-a-half years of US military operations, Kony remains at large. What is inevitably glossed over in such moral appeals for imperialist intervention is why one or another atrocity has been selected for the full-bore media propaganda treatment and a military response, and what is the social and political context in which such horrific acts take place.
Posted on: Fri, 09 May 2014 14:32:40 +0000
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