Columnists Scott Horn and Mat Sloughter share their views on Invisible Children's new video "Kony 2012."
"Fad causes" leave U.S. appearing uninformed about foreign conflicts
Over spring break, a video by advocacy group Invisible Children went viral, already scoring more than 70 million views on YouTube in a week. Titled “Kony 2012,” the video documents armed conflict in Uganda and urges the United States to launch a military intervention in the country.
As a propaganda piece with the goal of spreading awareness, “Kony 2012” is certainly effective. The problem is, this new video is presenting a situation at least five years out of date. Since the video’s debut, plenty of critics have uncovered the questionable moral and financial history of Invisible Children, and the current situation in Uganda is easy to research. There’s no point in rehashing those facts here; however, underneath the debate about the video’s factual content, there is a larger question about the necessity of the video at all.
The Ugandan crisis has been slowly but steadily resolving itself over the past decade; Joseph Kony is no longer believed to even operate in the country. Very few of the millions of video viewers are aware of that fact. They post the video on Facebook, lament about the poor children and lecture anyone who doesn’t jump on the bandwagon as heartless.
Whatever happened to Darfur? How well is Haiti recovering after its earthquake? How about Rwanda? Somalia? The old cries of “Free Tibet!”? These have all been popular “worthy causes” that caught the American public fancy for a brief time, before a short attention span and the newest Hollywood gossip turned the American eye somewhere else.
It is arrogant to believe that a short video and a few Twitter tags from America are going to suddenly turn the tide on an African conflict that has been going on long before Americans deigned to pay attention to it.
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t provide help when asked. The U.S. already has military advisors on the ground in Uganda helping with the manhunt for Kony. We simply shouldn’t think that we can just swoop in like Superman, flex our muscles and solve whatever problems stand before us.
We need to end the era of “fad causes.” If Americans are to be part of the world community, we need to remain informed on all the world’s problems, not just the popular ones.
Video fails to indicate problems that persist in Uganda today
It took me by surprise last week when I saw friends on Facebook who don’t normally post anything about world affairs sharing a video about Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, notorious for its use of child soldiers. “Kony 2012,” produced by Jason Russell and Invisible Children, has gone viral, as intended. In mere days, millions of Westerners went from being uninformed about conditions in northern Uganda to being misinformed.
Russell’s goal is the capture of Kony, a truly horrible person guilty of terrible crimes. But the video’s information is massively oversimplified and years out-of-date. From the video, you might think the greatest problem currently facing the people of northern Uganda is a single madman acting without motivation. That madman and his dwindling army left Uganda years ago.
The greatest problems currently facing the region are disease and hunger, consequences not of the LRA’s more than twenty-year insurgency, but of the brutal tactics the Ugandan government employed to fight it. Watching the video, one might also think the U.S. government hasn’t, until last year, been interested in Kony. But the U.S. labeled the LRA a terrorist group after 9/11 and named the Ugandan government an ally in the “war on terror,” supporting a military campaign that did more harm than good.
I researched the LRA last summer for a paper; by the end of my research, all I could say with certainty was that the situation in Uganda is insanely complicated. Nothing anyone reads about it anywhere is wholly trustworthy. Americans like simple conflicts. We like problems we can solve by finding the bad guy and shooting him. Reality doesn’t work like that. You can’t untangle a knot with a hammer.
As a demonstration of the propaganda-carrying capabilities of social media, “Kony 2012” is impressive. As activism, it’s useless at best, harmful at worst. Northern Uganda needs help rebuilding now that the war there is over. African conflicts in general need African solutions. And we all need to dig deeper for our information, and not rely on what our friends post on Facebook.
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