If you do anything on the back of watching the #Kony2012, the 27-minute viral sensation currently embarassing the world wide web, it’s to investigate exactly where it’s come from, who is behind it and why people have been so taken in by it.
I actually find it amazing that people can suddenly care so much about an issue that they presumably have a superficial awareness of already, just because of a social media campaign led by Twitter and Facebook twinned with a baseless campaign that aims its cross-hairs on the Western all-feeling heart.
Not a new issue
How many people have seen Blood Diamond? On its opening weekend in January 2007 it took £1,471,104, two months later it had grossed £7,269,409. Blood Diamond also features scenes with modern African problems – the diamond trade, vicious rebel militias and child soldiers. One of the main sub-plots of the film is saving a child soldier, and returning him to his family.
This is not a new issue, nor is our awareness of it. People chose to ignore it, until now. And yet there doesn’t seem to be even a single dose of self-consciousness. We should be ashamed.
Campaign poster for Kony 2012. Photo credit: nick shultz
I’ll save you the biography on Joseph Kony, militia leader of the Lords’ Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda, since the film does it so well. The most important point here is not who he is, or what he has done (which is already known, and of course, disgusting) but what is the film and who is behind it?
Aside from Invisible Children’s suspect finances (in which around 30% of its income is used for charity business), worse is the fact so many people could be duped by a video that explicitly calls for a US-led intervention in Central Africa. Invisible Children wants its young and beautiful community to directly fund the Ugandan National Army (itself guilty of atrocities against civilians, according to Human Rights Watch), which will be led by “American advisers.”
For someone who comes across as a good Dad and a great all-round guy, Jason Russell is peculiarly fond of using Pentagonese, the opaque, Orwellian language of the military-industrial complex that gave us “collateral damage” (civilian dead), “immediate permanent decapitation” (death) and “pacification” (destruction).
What are these advisers going to be advising about? Who will their advice be advised to? Will it be good advice?
If Invisible Children is anything to go by, probably not. Because Russell and his Hipstomatic-schmaltz wants “direct foreign intervention” in Central Africa – that means boots on the ground, drones and jets in the air and the next inevitable step in America’s programme of endless global war.
You would think we had learned something after wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have already killed over 1 million innocent people, with a 90% civilian death rate, and a “textbook” intervention in Libya which has resulted in regime change and with it the total destabilisation of yet another Middle Eastern country. This, as they say, is what democracy looks like.
Just another manhunt
A coincidence, perhaps, but since last year the United States military has been running an extensive programme under AFRICOM, the United States African Command. This includes a string of new drone airfields in the Horn of Africa (conveniently in-land enough to deal with Uganda and Kenya too), and the trans-Saharan Operation Enduring Freedom, to “fight al Qaeda in the Maghreb.”
But what about Central Africa? Last October President Obama deployed around 100 US special ops troops to Central Africa, reportedly “to assist African forces in the removal of [LRA leader] Joseph Kony and the leadership of the LRA from the battlefield.” Perhaps these are Russell’s faceless “US advisers.”
And yet there has been no reported (and verified) LRA activity in Uganda since 2006, and it is widely accepted that Kony is no longer in Uganda. Does the West really want to inflame another region by pursuing a small, embattled radical organisation and giving it indispensable credibility and victimhood? The last 10 years has told us that that policy blows right back up in your face.
“Free flow of natural resources”
There is clearly more than Kony at stake here. Central Africa is well known for its rich natural resources – including copper, cobalt, gold, uranium, magnesium and tin. Once ravaged by King Leopold II of Belgium, the 21st-century American Empire now wants in
At an AFRICOM Conference at Fort McNair on February 18, 2008, Vice Admiral Robert T. Moeller declared the programme’s mission meant maintaining “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market.”
Not only that. Ugandan President Yower Museveni has for some time courted Iran and President Ahmadinejad “in all fields.” There is a new Scramble for Africa – a sick twist of history in which global powers are returning to old hunting-grounds and fiefdoms, perhaps in preparation for a renewed proxy war much like the Cold War.
So where does good Dad and all-round great guy Jason Russell fit into this, at the forefront of the Kony 2012 campaign? I wouldn’t want to contribute to the conspiracy theories just yet, but the whole thing stinks of some kind of front organisation.
If it’s not, it’s a direct attempt to align social media, activism and youth political disengagement with the United States’ economic, military and imperialist interests in Africa. Think of it as America’s answer to the Arab Spring.
Please, don’t be fooled.
Michael Buble
March 8, 2012
Stop Santa Claus 2012! He does more harm than Konky!
On a more serious note. Yeah the whole campaign reeks of pretentious self appeasement and conceit.
What about the peoples of Palestine? Or the forgotten children of cambodia? the slow starvation of children around the world? the marginal tree being sized up in a forest? or the fellow creatures we turn our blind eye on because they be tasty?
Seriously. People who were once talking about lulz cats all of a sudden getting all emotional about some dude living in a forest pimpin women and children takes precedence over everything else even lol cats.
The main problem is that they’re so easily and quickly manipulated like puppets. It’s just as quick and easy to lose their attention.
Chloe
March 8, 2012
so what are we supposed to do then? Just leave this problem alone like the rest you just mentioned? At least we are doing something about one of them and not just ignoring ALL of them. We care and we want to help and save lives. I had no idea about this till I saw this video. Im not okay with just sitting around now knowing that I can sleep safely with my family in a warm bed and know what kind of fear these children go through every second of their lives. If you have a problem with how Russell is helping then why don’t you start your own thing to save these lives and fix these problems if you think you can do it so much better. At least Russell took action and did something about it.
tomarrr
March 9, 2012
Thanks for getting in touch, Chloe. I find this a common problem with interventionist rhetoric – that action is good because it is action, regardless of what it is doing and what the potential results might be. If we accept that IC has a terrible financial record, and that 70% of the money you have given to the charity will not go to “saving lives” at all, then do you think that action is good enough? Do you think that sending Ugandan/US troops into another country to find a man who hasn’t been seen there in years, and whose organisation is by all accounts in tatters, is that good action? Wouldn’t amped-up police action be more appropriate? People are saying the same in Syria now without realising that by intervening thousands will die through “collateral damage” by bombing heavily built-up civilian areas. I have a problem with it, and I’ll give my 2 cents by writing about it and letting people know what is actually happening