Stop #STOPKONY

Joseph Kony is famous now. So is Jason Russell.

Even if you’re not among the tens of millions who viewed the KONY 2012 video since it was posted Monday, you’ve probably noticed the influx of black and red propaganda plastering the profile pictures of your blindly philanthropic friends.

I wonder: How could anyone watch that video and think they’ve gotten the whole picture?

Its intentions are suspicious at best and malicious at worst.

The ambiguous aims of Russell and Invisible Children are veiled beneath some grand narrative of human progress and the universalizing mission of new media.

When Russell announces the next 27 minutes of the video are an “experiment,” he’s not kidding. He’s testing how easily manipulated the video’s viewers are. We’re the guinea pigs.

KONY 2012 is an exercise in consumer capitalism applied to uninformed humanitarianism. It might be hard to hear, but we can’t buy the liberation of embodied people. Ending regional conflicts is not a pay-to-play game.

The video is problematic.

Why do we care at all about Russell’s son Gavin? Is the psyche of a toddler really the lense through which we want to view Uganda’s complex problems?

Why does Gavin figure as prominently in the video as Jacob, the Acholi child who represents all of northern Uganda?

Why doesn’t Russell explain to his son that only $3 million of Invisible Children’s nearly $9 million in expenses in 2011 went to direct services?

The intricate conflict in northern Uganda is reduced to a fight between “bad guys” and “good guys.” When Gavin humorously guesses the bad guys are “Star Wars people,” he might as well be right.

The KONY 2012 video presents Kony as an even more unsympathetic Darth Vader.

Everything is reduced to good versus evil, and, luckily, evil can be vanquished simply by donating a few dollars and spreading awareness about an arbitrary bad guy.

Some of the Invisible Children propaganda even renders Kony’s darkened profile in front of the faces of Osama bin Laden and Adolf Hitler, figuring him as yet another specter of evil to be vanquished by United States military action.

When Russell asks “who are we not to” stop a war, he poses an important question. It’s meant to be a rhetorical question but begs actual interrogation.

Are we right to donate money to a cause that encourages military intervention and cooperation with a corrupt government?

In addition to some trippy visuals that probably contain subliminal messages, the video also presents an ahistorical Uganda for Dummies.

Here I’ll provide a simplified gloss of recent Ugandan history and who Kony is. Compared to the information in the KONY 2012 video, this might seem like an eight-weeks course.

Kony, as so many of us now know, is a war criminal and leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army. The LRA arose in opposition to President Yoweri Museveni, whose forces supplanted Uganda’s previous regime and spread violence across the north.

In their subsequent power struggles, both the LRA and the Ugandan government committed atrocities against the Acholi population in northern Uganda.

The LRA became largely inactive in Uganda in 2006, spreading its efforts around the region to the Democratic Republic of Congo, southern Sudan and the Central African Republic.

Though violence continues, northern Uganda is currently in a state of relative peace.

Like the LRA, President Museveni and the Uganda People’s Defense Force are responsible for rape and murder but enjoy support from Invisible Children and the U.S.

Invisible Children blew up in the mid-2000s, making known the plight of Acholi child soldiers and prompting celebrity notice. Its message of peace struck a chord with many and is being revived, unnecessarily.

So, #STOPKONY.

Why? Because he is an evil man? I’m not convinced capturing or killing a single bad man will overthrow the LRA and end violence in the region.

It will hardly end the violences committed by the Ugandan government itself, with whom the U.S. is in bed.

Why us? Because we have money to spend? It’s hard not to be suspicious of a video that asks you to buy some package marketed directly at us kids, who desperately want to make a difference in the world but only know hashtag movements.

Why now? Because Jason Russell’s bank account has plateaued? Violence in northern Uganda has largely subsided, and peace talks might be a better solution.

The Africa Faith & Justice Network is certainly more interested in a non-military approach.

Overthrowing the LRA would likely lead to the rise of other rebel groups. A political effort condemning, rather than cooperating with, President Museveni would go a lot further than killing Kony.

Violence is not always the answer. All it takes is a flashy video and celebrity advocacy to convince thousands of people how to save the world. Do Beliebers know what they’re supporting?

Finally, what about the U.S.?

Russell offers this naive reaction to the horrors in Uganda: “If that happened one night in America, it would be on the cover of Newsweek.” Really?

This kind of statement requires a willful ignorance of violences and inequalities in the U.S.

Does he care that a fifth of American children live in poverty? Why are we eager to pour so much attention into a conflict miles away while remaining ignorant of problems within our borders?

I imagine someone could produce and proliferate a similarly sensationalized video targeting Obama that would shock people.

Maybe if we were shown images of American poverty set against sentimental music, the Twitter body politic would rise up and overwhelmingly support welfare programs, universal healthcare and free education.

When you reduce a complicated conflict involving real people — and not “invisible children” — to a hashtag, you inflict your own kind of violence against them.

It’s never wrong to think of the children, but you should also remember to think for yourself.

­— ptbeane@indiana.edu