Dangerous ignorance: The hysteria of Kony 2012

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Apr 25, 2002
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Dangerous ignorance: The hysteria of Kony 2012
The video qualifies as irresponsible advocacy by prompting militarisation and detracting from Uganda's real problems.

Kampala, Uganda - From Kampala, the Kony 2012 hysteria was easy to miss. I'm not on Facebook or Twitter. I don't watch YouTube and the Ugandan papers didn't pick up the story for several days. But what I could not avoid were the hundreds of emails from friends, colleagues, and students in the US about the video by Invisible Children and the massive online response to it.

I have not watched the video. As someone who has worked in northern Uganda and researched the war there for more than a decade, much of it with a local human rights organisation based in Gulu, the Invisible Children organisation and their videos have often left me infuriated - I remember the sleepless nights after I watched their "Rough Cut" film for the first time with a group of students, after which I tried to explain to the audience what was wrong with the film while on stage with one of the filmmakers.

My frustration with the group has largely reflected the concerns expressed so convincingly by those online critics who have been willing to bring the fury of Invisible Children's true believers down upon themselves in order to point out what is wrong with this group's approach: the warmongering, the narcissism, the commercialisation, the reductive and one-sided story they tell, their portrayal of Africans as helpless children in need of rescue by white Americans.

As a result of Invisible Children's irresponsible advocacy, civilians in Uganda and central Africa may have to pay a steep price in their own lives so that a lot of young Americans can feel good about themselves, and a few can make good money. This, of course, is sickening, and I think that Kony 2012 is a case of Invisible Children having finally gone too far. They are now facing a backlash from people of conscience who refuse to abandon their capacity to think for themselves.

But, as I said, I wouldn't have known about Kony 2012 if it hadn't been for the emails I've been receiving from the US. And that, I think, is telling. Kony 2012 and the debate around it are not about Uganda, but about America. Uganda is largely just the stage for a debate over the meaning of political activism in the US today. Likewise, in my view, the Kony 2012 campaign itself is basically irrelevant here in Uganda, and perhaps the best approach might be to just ignore it. This is for a couple reasons.

First, because Invisible Children's campaign is a symptom, not a cause. It is an excuse that the US government has gladly adopted in order to help justify the expansion of their military presence in central Africa. Invisible Children are "useful idiots", being used by those in the US government who seek to militarise Africa, to send more and more weapons and military aid, and to bolster the power of states who are US allies.

The hunt for Joseph Kony is the perfect excuse for this strategy - how often does the US government find millions of young Americans pleading that they intervene militarily in a place rich in oil and other resources? The US government would be pursuing this militarisation with or without Invisible Children - Kony 2012 just makes it a little easier. Therefore, it is the militarisation we need to worry about, not Invisible Children.

Second, because in northern Uganda, people's lives will be left untouched by this campaign, even if it were to achieve its stated objectives. This is not because all the problems have been resolved in the years since open fighting ended, but because the very serious problems people face today have little to do with Kony.

The most significant problem people face is over land. Land speculators and so-called investors, many foreign, in collaboration with the Ugandan government and military, are grabbing the land of the Acholi people, land that the Acholi were forced from a decade ago, when the government herded them into internment camps.

Another serious problem is so-called "nodding disease" - a deadly illness that has broken out among thousands of children who had the bad luck to be born and grown in the camps, subsisting on relief aid. Indeed, the problems people face today are the legacy of the camps, where more than a million Acholi were forced to live, and die - for years - by their own government as part of a counterinsurgency that received essential support from the US government and from international aid agencies.

Which brings up the question that I am constantly asked in the US: "What can we do?", where "we" tends to mean relatively privileged US citizens. In response, I have a few proposals:

The first, perhaps not surprising from a professor, is to learn. The conflict in northern Uganda and central Africa is complicated, but not impossible to understand. For several years, I have taught an undergraduate class on the conflict, and although it takes some time and effort, the students end up being well informed and able to come to their own opinions about what can be done. (I am more than happy to share the syllabus with anyone interested!)

In terms of activism, the first step is to re-think the question: Instead of asking how the US can intervene in order to solve Africa's conflicts, we need to ask what we are already doing to cause those conflicts in the first place. How are we, as consumers, contributing to land grabbing and to the wars ravaging this region? How are we, as US citizens, allowing our government to militarise Africa in the name of the "War on Terror" and its effort to secure oil resources?

These are the questions that we who represent Kony 2012's target audience must ask ourselves, because we are indeed responsible for the conflict in northern Uganda - responsible for helping to cause and prolong it. It is not, however, our responsibility, as Invisible Children encourages us to believe, to try to end the conflict by sending in military force. In our desire to ameliorate suffering, we must not be complicit in making it worse.

Adam Branch is senior research fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, Uganda, and assistant professor of political science at San Diego State University, US. He is the author of Displacing Human Rights: War and Intervention in Northern Uganda.

A version of this article first appeared on the CIHA Blog at UC Irvine.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/201231284336601364.html
 
Apr 11, 2007
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#3
'Stop Kony' screening tour cancelled after Ugandans react with outrage

It was planned as a tour of Uganda’s poorest towns and villages: the first chance for Joseph Kony’s victims to see the viral video sensation that has excited so many millions of people in North America.

But after a furious reaction, the tour has been cancelled. Too many Ugandans were outraged by the “Stop Kony” video when they saw it. Some even threw stones and shouted abuse, forcing the organizers to flee.

The video by a California-based activist group had already been strongly criticized by many African writers and Western aid experts, who called it simplistic, patronizing and inaccurate. They are worried that the publicity will distract attention from more deserving African needs.

But the video, calling for the arrest of the indicted war criminal who leads the Lord’s Resistance Army militia, has been viewed by more than 100 million people worldwide since its release last week. And it has stirred up a huge amount of curiosity in northern Uganda, where the LRA was born in the late 1980s – even though the vast majority of people could not see the video because they lack electricity, television, and Internet access.

So a Ugandan group, the African Youth Initiative Network, decided to organize a community tour for the video, bringing it to towns across northern Uganda for the rest of this month, so that impoverished people could see the 30-minute video for the first time.

The first screening was held this week in the northern Uganda town of Lira, once an epicentre of the battles between the LRA and the Ugandan military. The video was projected onto a white sheet, held up by crude metal rods, in a dusty town park. An estimated 5,000 people flocked to the show.

Curiosity soon turned to bafflement, and then to anger. The screening was hastily abandoned when people jeered and threw stones, forcing the crowd to scatter.

Many Ugandans at the screening were upset that the video focused on the U.S. filmmaker, Jason Russell, and his young blond son. Some were offended by its call to “make Kony famous” by putting his image on T-shirts and posters, since they saw this as giving celebrity status to a killer. Some said the video was reviving their painful memories of a war that had ended in Uganda in 2006 when the LRA was chased out of the country.

“There was chaos, we had to run away,” tweeted Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan blogger who attended the screening this week.

Most people were peaceful, but many were disappointed and angry, she said. “They have had enough of money makers!”

After the screening, Ugandans called local radio stations in Lira to demand that no T-shirts of Joseph Kony should be allowed into the region.

Victor Ochen, director of the youth network that organized the screening of the Kony video this week, says he is worried that the video will waste money that could be better spent on helping the victims of the LRA.

“Why spent millions on Kony alone while thousands of survivors are dying of repairable physical and psychosocial pain?” he asked in a message on his website.

Mr. Ochen is worried that the video will promote a military assault on the LRA, perhaps leading to the death of innocent children who were kidnapped by the LRA – including his own brother and cousin.

“Raising potentially false expectations such as arresting Kony in 2012 will not rebuild the lives of the people in northern Uganda,” he said. “Restoration of communities devastated by Kony is a greater priority than catching or killing him.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...celled-in-uganda-amid-outrage/article2370125/
 

ThaG

Sicc OG
Jun 30, 2005
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Unless the root causes of the problem - illiteracy, poverty and overpopulation are addressed, simply getting rid of Kony isn't going to make any difference. He is just another one in a long list of warlords from all over Africa, some of which have committed even worse atrocities than him. When he goes, someone else will appear.

The real news here should be that this has been going on for 20 years yet very few people in the West even know what and where Uganda is, let alone have heard about Kony and the LRA. Just as they haven't heard about the other places in Africa where attroicities of the kind have been going on for very long. That's the real story here...
 
Mar 8, 2006
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www.thephylumonline.com
#6
If they were literate and didn't live in poverty, it wouldn't even be considered overpopulation.


The real story here is, propaganda still works, but there is actually hope...this blew up almost immediately. They better prepare a false flag if they want to escalate in Central Africa.
 
Jan 31, 2008
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#7
'KONY 2012' HONCHO JASON RUSSELL
Detained for Allegedly Masturbating in Public



3:26 PM PST: We just got footage of Jason's naked meltdown on a public street ... pounding his fists in anger and screaming maniacally.

2:15 PM PST: Law enforcement sources tell us ... there are NO plans to charge Russell with a crime for yesterday's incident.

2:08 PM PST: Law enforcement sources tell us ... Russell is being hospitalized on a 5150 psychiatric hold so authorities can assess his mental state. The 5150 hold allows authorities to keep Russell for up to 3 days to determine if he represents a threat to either himself or others.

1:45 PM PST: The CEO of Invisible Children, Ben Keesey, tells TMZ ..."Jason Russell was unfortunately hospitalized yesterday suffering from exhaustion, dehydration, and malnutrition."

The statement continues, "He is now receiving medical care and is focused on getting better. The past two weeks have taken a severe emotional toll on all of us, Jason especially, and that toll manifested itself in an unfortunate incident yesterday."

"Jason’s passion and his work have done so much to help so many, and we are devastated to see him dealing with this personal health issue. We will always love and support Jason, and we ask that you give his entire family privacy during this difficult time.”


The mastermind behind the now-famous "Kony 2012" video was detained by police in San Diego yesterday for allegedly being drunk in public and masturbating.

Jason Russell was taken into custody by San Diego cops. In addition to allegedly masturbating, cops say he vandalized cars.

Cops told NBC7 in SD they received several calls around 11:30 AM ... reporting a man in "various stages of undress."

Sources tell us ... Russell was dancing around the Intersection of Ingraham and Riviera wearing "speedo-like underwear" ... and eventually removed the underwear and began to make sexual gestures.

We're told ... it appeared Russell was under the influence of some kind of substance.

Cops told NBC, "Officers detained [Russell] and transferred him to a local medical facility for further evaluation and treatment."

Russell is the father of two, and says he wants to have 9 more kids.

Russell is the co-founder of Invisible Children as well as the filmmaker of the ultra-viral video which has set records on the Internet -- with more than 80 million views


http://www.tmz.com/2012/03/16/kony-...llegedly-masturbating-in-public/#.T2PPVhGPUTY
 

ThaG

Sicc OG
Jun 30, 2005
9,597
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#8
If they were literate and didn't live in poverty, it wouldn't even be considered overpopulation.


The real story here is, propaganda still works, but there is actually hope...this blew up almost immediately. They better prepare a false flag if they want to escalate in Central Africa.
It wouldn't be considered overpopulation only by those who are ecologically illiterate and ignorant themselves. Which is what the majority of people not living in poverty are.

You think there is no connection between the birth rate in those countries and the fact that they can't provide decent education to their kids? That is not possible when there is one classroom and 300 kids in it, which grow up illiterate too, have between 5 and 10 kids themselves, and the vcious cycle closes
 
Mar 8, 2006
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#9
It wouldn't be considered overpopulation only by those who are ecologically illiterate and ignorant themselves. Which is what the majority of people not living in poverty are.

You think there is no connection between the birth rate in those countries and the fact that they can't provide decent education to their kids? That is not possible when there is one classroom and 300 kids in it, which grow up illiterate too, have between 5 and 10 kids themselves, and the vcious cycle closes
Likewise, you think there is no connection between the lack of education and the high birthrate? Central Africa is one of the most abundant and underdeveloped parts of the world. The entire world could be fed from Central Africa alone, if it were developed for sustainable agriculture.
 

ThaG

Sicc OG
Jun 30, 2005
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#10
Likewise, you think there is no connection to the lack of education and the birthrate? Central Africa is one of the most abundant and underdeveloped parts of the world. The entire world could be feed from Central Africa alone, if it were developed for sustainable agriculture.
Abundant?

Where exactly is the abundance here:



Those are of the most ecologically fragile areas in the world - you overgraze the savanna and it turns into a desert. Yes, the Great Lakes region has abundant rainfall, however the regions imemdiately around them are bursting with people - why do you think there are periodic genocides in Rwanda (1994 was only the most well known example), did it have nothing to do with the fact that the population density is 400 people per km2 and they are all subsistence farmers? And the average family relies on a plot of land less than a hectar in size?

ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/k0784e/k0784e00.pdf

This is the Volcans National Park where the mountain gorillas are:

http://maps.google.com/?ll=-1.560123,29.453831&spn=0.073701,0.132093&t=h&z=14

Do you notice every square meter of land starting right from the borders of the park is occupied with crops? That's one of the most famous nature reserves in the world. This isn't overpopulation?

Yes, there are some remote and underdeveloped regions in DRC Congo and the CAR where forest is somewhat intact, but do you want them to be developed in such a way?

Uganda isn't such an extreme case yet but it is well on its way - its population has grown 7-fold in the last 50 years (yes, 7), and is projected to increase another 6-fold iby the end of the century. Again, is it surprising that they can not provide basic education when most of the population consists of children? BTW, only the southern protion around Lake Victoria is wet, the Northern part is a much drier savanna, a lot of it not that productive.
 
Apr 25, 2002
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#12
Agree with the author as seeing the Kony film as an American issue and not a Ugandan issue. Bigger issue here to me is the lasting effect on social networking, facebook, etc. on the actual political issues they are trying to address. As Syrian's have pointed out Americans and "outsiders" have basically encouraged and incited rebellion only to have governments stand by and watch rebels get crushed. Or when people talk about what a great thing the Arab Spring was. Haven't done too much research on that recently, but what's really happened because of the whole thing? Is there merely a "rebellion" and overthrow followed by extinction of the movement, or is there groundwork to create governmental mechanisms and offices that are free from the symptoms of corruption, nepotism, bias, racism etc. that made the whole problem to begin with? It seems like our idea of "revolution" has been replaced with a more temporary, short-term, spur of the moment "pat ourselves" on that back type of thing that dies with the next cause rather than something that creates change. I'm not saying that to knock the use of social networking as a tool for change but just that it's really only a small component and if it doesn't lead to anything more sophisticated later it really could leave people worse off than they were when change started. I think the Occupy Movement is an example of a movement that shows the success of social networking and media and also as a movement that probably made a lot of executives or the government refrain from enacting things that would go against the movement.
 
Jan 31, 2008
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#13
The White Savior Industrial Complex
MAR 21 2012



A week and a half ago, I watched the Kony2012 video. Afterward, I wrote a brief seven-part response, which I posted in sequence on my Twitter account:

Teju Cole@tejucole
1- From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex.

Teju Cole@tejucole
2- The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.

Teju Cole@tejucole
3- The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.

Teju Cole@tejucole
4- This world exists simply to satisfy the needs—including, importantly, the sentimental needs—of white people and Oprah.

Teju Cole@tejucole
5- The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.

Teju Cole@tejucole
6- Feverish worry over that awful African warlord. But close to 1.5 million Iraqis died from an American war of choice. Worry about that.

Teju Cole@tejucole
7- I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.



These tweets were retweeted, forwarded, and widely shared by readers. They migrated beyond Twitter to blogs, Tumblr, Facebook, and other sites; I'm told they generated fierce arguments. As the days went by, the tweets were reproduced in their entirety on the websites of the Atlantic and the New York Times, and they showed up on German, Spanish, and Portuguese sites. A friend emailed to tell me that the fourth tweet, which cheekily name-checks Oprah, was mentioned on Fox television.

These sentences of mine, written without much premeditation, had touched a nerve. I heard back from many people who were grateful to have read them. I heard back from many others who were disappointed or furious. Many people, too many to count, called me a racist. One person likened me to the Mau Mau. The Atlantic writer who'd reproduced them, while agreeing with my broader points, described the language in which they were expressed as "resentment."

This weekend, I listened to a radio interview given by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof. Kristof is best known for his regular column in the New York Times in which he often gives accounts of his activism or that of other Westerners. When I saw the Kony 2012 video, I found it tonally similar to Kristof's approach, and that was why I mentioned him in the first of my seven tweets.

Those tweets, though unpremeditated, were intentional in their irony and seriousness. I did not write them to score cheap points, much less to hurt anyone's feelings. I believed that a certain kind of language is too infrequently seen in our public discourse. I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

But there's a place in the political sphere for direct speech and, in the past few years in the U.S., there has been a chilling effect on a certain kind of direct speech pertaining to rights. The president is wary of being seen as the "angry black man." People of color, women, and gays -- who now have greater access to the centers of influence that ever before -- are under pressure to be well-behaved when talking about their struggles. There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as "racially charged" even in those cases when it would be more honest to say "racist"; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse.

It's only in the context of this neutered language that my rather tame tweets can be seen as extreme. The interviewer on the radio show I listened to asked Kristof if he had heard of me. "Of course," he said. She asked him what he made of my criticisms. His answer was considered and genial, but what he said worried me more than an angry outburst would have:
There has been a real discomfort and backlash among middle-class educated Africans, Ugandans in particular in this case, but people more broadly, about having Africa as they see it defined by a warlord who does particularly brutal things, and about the perception that Americans are going to ride in on a white horse and resolve it. To me though, it seems even more uncomfortable to think that we as white Americans should not intervene in a humanitarian disaster because the victims are of a different skin color.
Here are some of the "middle-class educated Africans" Kristof, whether he is familiar with all of them and their work or not, chose to take issue with: Ugandan journalist Rosebell Kagumire, who covered the Lord's Resistance Army in 2005 and made an eloquent video response to Kony 2012; Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, one of the world's leading specialists on Uganda and the author of a thorough riposte to the political wrong-headedness of Invisible Children; and Ethiopian-American novelist Dinaw Mengestu, who sought out Joseph Kony, met his lieutenants, and recently wrote a brilliant essay about how Kony 2012 gets the issues wrong. They have a different take on what Kristof calls a "humanitarian disaster," and this may be because they see the larger disasters behind it: militarization of poorer countries, short-sighted agricultural policies, resource extraction, the propping up of corrupt governments, and the astonishing complexity of long-running violent conflicts over a wide and varied terrain.

I want to tread carefully here: I do not accuse Kristof of racism nor do I believe he is in any way racist. I have no doubt that he has a good heart. Listening to him on the radio, I began to think we could iron the whole thing out over a couple of beers. But that, precisely, is what worries me. That is what made me compare American sentimentality to a "wounded hippo." His good heart does not always allow him to think constellationally. He does not connect the dots or see the patterns of power behind the isolated "disasters." All he sees are hungry mouths, and he, in his own advocacy-by-journalism way, is putting food in those mouths as fast as he can. All he sees is need, and he sees no need to reason out the need for the need.

But I disagree with the approach taken by Invisible Children in particular, and by the White Savior Industrial Complex in general, because there is much more to doing good work than "making a difference." There is the principle of first do no harm. There is the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them.

I write all this from multiple positions. I write as an African, a black man living in America. I am every day subject to the many microaggressions of American racism. I also write this as an American, enjoying the many privileges that the American passport affords and that residence in this country makes possible. I involve myself in this critique of privilege: my own privileges of class, gender, and sexuality are insufficiently examined. My cell phone was likely manufactured by poorly treated workers in a Chinese factory. The coltan in the phone can probably be traced to the conflict-riven Congo. I don't fool myself that I am not implicated in these transnational networks of oppressive practices.

And I also write all this as a novelist and story-writer: I am sensitive to the power of narratives. When Jason Russell, narrator of the Kony 2012 video, showed his cheerful blonde toddler a photo of Joseph Kony as the embodiment of evil (a glowering dark man), and of his friend Jacob as the representative of helplessness (a sweet-faced African), I wondered how Russell's little boy would develop a nuanced sense of the lives of others, particularly others of a different race from his own. How would that little boy come to understand that others have autonomy; that their right to life is not exclusive of a right to self-respect? In a different context, John Berger once wrote, "A singer may be innocent; never the song."

One song we hear too often is the one in which Africa serves as a backdrop for white fantasies of conquest and heroism. From the colonial project to Out of Africa to The Constant Gardener and Kony 2012, Africa has provided a space onto which white egos can conveniently be projected. It is a liberated space in which the usual rules do not apply: a nobody from America or Europe can go to Africa and become a godlike savior or, at the very least, have his or her emotional needs satisfied. Many have done it under the banner of "making a difference." To state this obvious and well-attested truth does not make me a racist or a Mau Mau. It does give me away as an "educated middle-class African," and I plead guilty as charged. (It is also worth noting that there are other educated middle-class Africans who see this matter differently from me. That is what people, educated and otherwise, do: they assess information and sometimes disagree with each other.)

In any case, Kristof and I are in profound agreement about one thing: there is much happening in many parts of the African continent that is not as it ought to be. I have been fortunate in life, but that doesn't mean I haven't seen or experienced African poverty first-hand. I grew up in a land of military coups and economically devastating, IMF-imposed "structural adjustment" programs. The genuine hurt of Africa is no fiction.

And we also agree on something else: that there is an internal ethical urge that demands that each of us serve justice as much as he or she can. But beyond the immediate attention that he rightly pays hungry mouths, child soldiers, or raped civilians, there are more complex and more widespread problems. There are serious problems of governance, of infrastructure, of democracy, and of law and order. These problems are neither simple in themselves nor are they reducible to slogans. Such problems are both intricate and intensely local.

How, for example, could a well-meaning American "help" a place like Uganda today? It begins, I believe, with some humility with regards to the people in those places. It begins with some respect for the agency of the people of Uganda in their own lives. A great deal of work had been done, and continues to be done, by Ugandans to improve their own country, and ignorant comments (I've seen many) about how "we have to save them because they can't save themselves" can't change that fact.

Let me draw into this discussion an example from an African country I know very well. Earlier this year, hundreds of thousands of Nigerians took to their country's streets to protest the government's decision to remove a subsidy on petrol. This subsidy was widely seen as one of the few blessings of the country's otherwise catastrophic oil wealth. But what made these protests so heartening is that they were about more than the subsidy removal. Nigeria has one of the most corrupt governments in the world and protesters clearly demanded that something be done about this. The protests went on for days, at considerable personal risk to the protesters. Several young people were shot dead, and the movement was eventually doused when union leaders capitulated and the army deployed on the streets. The movement did not "succeed" in conventional terms. But something important had changed in the political consciousness of the Nigerian populace. For me and for a number of people I know, the protests gave us an opportunity to be proud of Nigeria, many of us for the first time in our lives.

This is not the sort of story that is easy to summarize in an article, much less make a viral video about. After all, there is no simple demand to be made and -- since corruption is endemic -- no single villain to topple. There is certainly no "bridge character," Kristof's euphemism for white saviors in Third World narratives who make the story more palatable to American viewers. And yet, the story of Nigeria's protest movement is one of the most important from sub-Saharan Africa so far this year. Men and women, of all classes and ages, stood up for what they felt was right; they marched peacefully; they defended each other, and gave each other food and drink; Christians stood guard while Muslims prayed and vice-versa; and they spoke without fear to their leaders about the kind of country they wanted to see. All of it happened with no cool American 20-something heroes in sight.

Joseph Kony is no longer in Uganda and he is no longer the threat he was, but he is a convenient villain for those who need a convenient villain. What Africa needs more pressingly than Kony's indictment is more equitable civil society, more robust democracy, and a fairer system of justice. This is the scaffolding from which infrastructure, security, healthcare, and education can be built. How do we encourage voices like those of the Nigerian masses who marched this January, or those who are engaged in the struggle to develop Ugandan democracy?

If Americans want to care about Africa, maybe they should consider evaluating American foreign policy, which they already play a direct role in through elections, before they impose themselves on Africa itself. The fact of the matter is that Nigeria is one of the top five oil suppliers to the U.S., and American policy is interested first and foremost in the flow of that oil. The American government did not see fit to support the Nigeria protests. (Though the State Department issued a supportive statement -- "our view on that is that the Nigerian people have the right to peaceful protest, we want to see them protest peacefully, and we're also urging the Nigerian security services to respect the right of popular protest and conduct themselves professionally in dealing with the strikes" -- it reeked of boilerplate rhetoric and, unsurprisingly, nothing tangible came of it.) This was as expected; under the banner of "American interests," the oil comes first. Under that same banner, the livelihood of corn farmers in Mexico has been destroyed by NAFTA. Haitian rice farmers have suffered appalling losses due to Haiti being flooded with subsidized American rice. A nightmare has been playing out in Honduras in the past three years: an American-backed coup and American militarization of that country have contributed to a conflict in which hundreds of activists and journalists have already been murdered. The Egyptian military, which is now suppressing the country's once-hopeful movement for democracy and killing dozens of activists in the process, subsists on $1.3 billion in annual U.S. aid. This is a litany that will be familiar to some. To others, it will be news. But, familiar or not, it has a bearing on our notions of innocence and our right to "help."

Let us begin our activism right here: with the money-driven villainy at the heart of American foreign policy. To do this would be to give up the illusion that the sentimental need to "make a difference" trumps all other considerations. What innocent heroes don't always understand is that they play a useful role for people who have much more cynical motives. The White Savior Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage. We can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years, but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send $10 each to the rescue fund. I have no opposition, in principle, to such donations (I frequently make them myself), but we must do such things only with awareness of what else is involved. If we are going to interfere in the lives of others, a little due diligence is a minimum requirement.

Success for Kony 2012 would mean increased militarization of the anti-democratic Yoweri Museveni government, which has been in power in Uganda since 1986 and has played a major role in the world's deadliest ongoing conflict, the war in the Congo. But those whom privilege allows to deny constellational thinking would enjoy ignoring this fact. There are other troubling connections, not least of them being that Museveni appears to be a U.S. proxy in its shadowy battles against militants in Sudan and, especially, in Somalia. Who sanctions these conflicts? Under whose authority and oversight are they conducted? Who is being killed and why?

All of this takes us rather far afield from fresh-faced young Americans using the power of YouTube, Facebook, and pure enthusiasm to change the world. A singer may be innocent; never the song.


http://www.theatlantic.com/internat...industrial-complex/254843/2/?single_page=true
 
Nov 24, 2003
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#14
Is there merely a "rebellion" and overthrow followed by extinction of the movement, or is there groundwork to create governmental mechanisms and offices that are free from the symptoms of corruption, nepotism, bias, racism etc. that made the whole problem to begin with?

Since even their "liberators" are plagued with the same issues: change = same shit, different toilet.
 
Mar 18, 2003
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#15
What pains me is how big of a waste this "revolt" was when you conider the genius in their approach. The effectiveness of the Kony 2012 film was unprecidented and it leaves me to wonder how this could have been done differently, perhaps against big oil companies and rising gas prices, or any of the attrocities our own government has been involved in. And now that it was already done it kind of ruins it for future use. Not that it won't work again, but the next time a video like this surfaces, even if the cause is just, people are gonna be saying "not this shit again". Smh.
 

ThaG

Sicc OG
Jun 30, 2005
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#16
What pains me is how big of a waste this "revolt" was when you conider the genius in their approach. The effectiveness of the Kony 2012 film was unprecidented and it leaves me to wonder how this could have been done differently, perhaps against big oil companies and rising gas prices, or any of the attrocities our own government has been involved in. And now that it was already done it kind of ruins it for future use. Not that it won't work again, but the next time a video like this surfaces, even if the cause is just, people are gonna be saying "not this shit again". Smh.
The "efectiveness" of Kony2012 is not something to be looked upon, celebrated or anything of the sort, it is a grave cause for concern. Because it is the offspring of mass ignorance about the world combined with lack of critical thinking skills. That's not a good thing. You don't want to be effective for such reasons if you really want to be a force of good in this world.
 
Mar 8, 2006
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www.thephylumonline.com
#17
Abundant?

Where exactly is the abundance here:



Those are of the most ecologically fragile areas in the world - you overgraze the savanna and it turns into a desert. Yes, the Great Lakes region has abundant rainfall, however the regions imemdiately around them are bursting with people - why do you think there are periodic genocides in Rwanda (1994 was only the most well known example), did it have nothing to do with the fact that the population density is 400 people per km2 and they are all subsistence farmers? And the average family relies on a plot of land less than a hectar in size?

ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/k0784e/k0784e00.pdf

This is the Volcans National Park where the mountain gorillas are:

http://maps.google.com/?ll=-1.560123,29.453831&spn=0.073701,0.132093&t=h&z=14

Do you notice every square meter of land starting right from the borders of the park is occupied with crops? That's one of the most famous nature reserves in the world. This isn't overpopulation?

Yes, there are some remote and underdeveloped regions in DRC Congo and the CAR where forest is somewhat intact, but do you want them to be developed in such a way?

Uganda isn't such an extreme case yet but it is well on its way - its population has grown 7-fold in the last 50 years (yes, 7), and is projected to increase another 6-fold iby the end of the century. Again, is it surprising that they can not provide basic education when most of the population consists of children? BTW, only the southern protion around Lake Victoria is wet, the Northern part is a much drier savanna, a lot of it not that productive.
[video=youtube;LJ8pjOG4pXI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ8pjOG4pXI[/video]
 

ThaG

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#18
1. Do you seriously think the approach in the video you posted can feed tens of millions of people on the southern fringes of the Sahara?

2. Do you even understand what the word "sustainablity" means. That's a rhetoric question, we have long ago established that you have absolutely no idea what it means, but it needs to be pointed out again

3. You "green the desert" in three ways. You either concentrate the rainfall in some way, or you divert rivers, or you pump fossil aquifers. For the Sahel, the first approach does not work at all because it is a flat plain so there are few places where you can build dams, not that there are major rivers to build them on other than Niger, and on top of that rainfall is very seasonal and temperatures are very high, so evaporative losses are huge, even if you build them. And most importantly, there isn't that much rainfall to begin with. So that doesn't work. Diverting rivers is highly undesirable as the Soviet experience in Central Asia has shown, so that idea is a non-starter. Tapping fossil aquifers is the definition of unsustainability because those are usually gone in a few decades. The Saudis were self-sufficient in grain for a few decades after they decided to use their oil-drilling experience to drill for water. But that water is now depleted and they are back to importing food. One of the major accomplishments of the Khadafi regime was tapping the waters of the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer in the southern parts of the country. But that water will too be gone by the end of the century too. What happens then?

Which brings us to the last, and most important point:

4. Every scheme we come up with to feed the people we can not feed today has one and only one possible result if it is successful - it magnifies the problem. Because once you can feed X number of people, in a culture of high fertility and low development, the population will qucikly reach and exceed that level and then you have an even bigger problem that you had before. That's the main reason why sending food aid is a futile and from a long-term perspective, actually harmful activity - because it temporarily keeps alive people who simply shouldn't exist in those regions. Places like Niger simply can not feed themselves but have a TFR of 6 or 7, and there is a major famine crisis every other year (this year too). Why is that?

And the same reasoning applies to the planet as a whole - every scheme we come up with to prop up the unsustainable a little bit longer only results in us becomening even more unsustainable and makes the eventual and inevitable crash even bigger. Yet the techno-utopians prefer to live in denial.
 
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#19
The "efectiveness" of Kony2012 is not something to be looked upon, celebrated or anything of the sort, it is a grave cause for concern. Because it is the offspring of mass ignorance about the world combined with lack of critical thinking skills. That's not a good thing. You don't want to be effective for such reasons if you really want to be a force of good in this world.
I'm not sure whether you're arguing what I said or expounding upon it.

The content of the video is not something to be celebrated - this is correct and I would agree. In fact, I made no mention otherwise. I said the video itself was unprecedented (in it's methodology and persuasiveness). What should be celebrated is not the content, but the means (viral video) of delivering the content. That is what most of my post was aiming toward. It is reminiscent of how in some movies there are depictions of people taking over airwaves to broadcast a message; ie. V for Vendetta, Hackers, Dark Angel, etc. Of course Russell didn't "take over" anything, but the end result was the same - the voice of an ordinary citizen was heard by millions of people. It is unfortunate that the message was complete shit, which is what pains me. Because this method could have been used as a "force of good" in this world. And now it has been watered down.
 

ThaG

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#20
I'm not sure whether you're arguing what I said or expounding upon it.

The content of the video is not something to be celebrated - this is correct and I would agree. In fact, I made no mention otherwise. I said the video itself was unprecedented (in it's methodology and persuasiveness). What should be celebrated is not the content, but the means (viral video) of delivering the content. That is what most of my post was aiming toward. It is reminiscent of how in some movies there are depictions of people taking over airwaves to broadcast a message; ie. V for Vendetta, Hackers, Dark Angel, etc. Of course Russell didn't "take over" anything, but the end result was the same - the voice of an ordinary citizen was heard by millions of people. It is unfortunate that the message was complete shit, which is what pains me. Because this method could have been used as a "force of good" in this world. And now it has been watered down.
I wasn't criticizing you I was just pointing out that the fact that such video was viewed got 85 million views and became an internet phenomenon is a problem. Because the reason this happened is that the vast majoirty of those 85 million people had no clue about the subject, they saw some people with their lips and noses missing, they got horrified, and they forwarded it to their friends thinking they're doing something good. I got it forwarded to me too from people who I thought knew better.

Very few of these 85 million people stopped to ask any questions like: Does the video get its fact straight? (it doesn't, the LRA is not in Uganda anymore and the government army is not exactly saintly when it comes to atrocities, as is the case pretty much everywhere in the region); What is the motivation behind it? What exactly does "we can make a difference if we forward this video around" mean? Etc.

And as I said above, very few of these 85 million people know where Uganda is and what its history is, even fewer had heard of the LRA before, even though the LRA has been active for two decades, or that the LRA is hardly the worst rebel group on the continent when it comes to atrocities against civilians. The Congo war was the bloodiest war since WWII, and to this day, very few people are aware it happened. That kind of thing. That's a the bigger problem here