Stop #stopkony

From Lenin’s Tomb:

Are you ready to party like it’s 1999? Is it time for another wave of humanitarian militarism? All of the ingredients, it would seem, are present. We have an intensely mediatized campaign in which no one learns anything about the ostensible subject. The video from Invisible Children by the despicably narcissistic Jason Russell is supposedly about a conflict in Uganda, but it tells us not a thing about Uganda’s politics, its rulers, the military who are hunting down the remnants of the Lords Resistance Army, Museveni or his US-backed invasion of the Congo (death toll from that war is close to 5m), or the Lord’s Resistance Army. We have a US intervention. The hundred or so US advisors assisting the Ugandan army are supposedly there in part due to pressure from Russell and his organisation. We have an evil-doer about whom no one knows anything, aside from the fact that he’s a Hitler or, worse, a Bin Laden. This approach, in which we learn only that Kony is a bad man, is justified with the repellently manipulative technique of having the film-maker’s son stand in for the audience – Daddy ‘explains’ to his son that Kony steals away children and makes them shoot people, and the little treasure gurns “that’s sad”. We have the helpless victims, who articulate only their suffering, reduced to bare-forked creatures of the imperialist imagination, and firmly locked in the missionary position. We have the absurdity of hundreds of thousands of well-meaning but slightly silly people who have allowed themselves to be manipulated and bullied into supporting the combined forces of US imperialism and the Ugandan military in the name of human rights. We have, in all, a white man’s burden for the Facebook generation.