Tens of millions of people have found out about the Kony2012 viral campaign against mass-murderer and warlord Joseph Kony of the Lord's Resistance Army -- and now tens of millions will find out about the ignoble way it ended: the maker of the film, Jason Russell, in acute distress from the enormous controversy and media attention from his viral brainchild, wound up having a freakout, stripping himself naked on the street, pounding the pavement, masturbating, and hitting cars before he was detained and hospitalized. No charges were filed and he is undergoing treatment.
Basically, Jason Russell picked up the firecracker of the Internet and thought he could have a festival of lights, but it blew off his fingers.
In the weeks since Russell's video got as much or more attention than a Lady Gaga music video, a "progressive" establishment made up of liberal journalists, humanitarian workers, pundits, and academics, as well as some Ugandans themselves and black activists in the West have tried to beat down this incredibly popular invention of a white California Christian evangelist.
The pundits attacked the video for being simplistic (Kony wasn't even in Uganda anymore), providing simplistic answers (it was hard to arrest a warlord roaming in the bush with an armed gang without harming some of the children in his thrall); inflicting American do-gooding naivite on the world or worse (inevitably the narrative of Western imperialism and colonialism in Africa was invoked).
This discussion at Ethan Zuckerman's blog "My Heart's in Accra" is a good digest -- it boils down to saying that untrained white people without the politically-correct sensibilities of lefty cadres in NGOs should stay out of meddling in difficult African affairs they know nothing about, or have only hopelessly prejudiced ideas about. The culture war between Christian provincials and secular urbanists was manifestly visible here, with all its variations.
There will be all kinds of morals of this story drawn -- already at least one doctor is trying to exploit it to try to build tolerance for people suffering from either metabolic disorders (Russell was dehydrated when he went beserk) or bi-polar disorders (his manic "up" phase in launching the video was believed to be followed by a depressive "down" when he began to face severe criticism).
When I first saw this phenomenon, I was critical of the "Facebook Nation" web meglomania involved, although I thought that we as human rights activists who had not accomplished anything substantive in the 15 or more years we had been working on this case should be willing to show some humility. We should concede that whatever its flaws, and whatever the pitfalls of politically-incorrect mis-steps into paternalism or even racism, the notion of a mass campaign to bring a warlord to trial in Africa wasn't something we should sneer at if we were true to our values.
After all, these same lefty pundits endlessly tell us that whatever its extremism and violence and idiocy, the Occupy Wall Street mayhem has "started a national conversation" -- they're willing to claim this and imply that only persistent urban camping extremism and violence qualifies to get such a "conversation" going (as if somebody dividing society into classes for class warfare and vowing to overthrow capitalism is about having "a conversation," when it's more like "the propaganda of the deed".)
Yet when the conversation started about mass crimes against humanity in Africa in this innocuous way of spreading a video and images for Facebook pages, there was no willingness to concede "the international conversation" had been started about how lawless violence in African can be ended.
What I was much more worried about with the Kony2012 campaign was the notion that anyone, good or bad, left or right, Christian or secular, could decide that it's a good thing to have ten percent or even all of the 800 million people on Facebook and the 100 million on Twitter and so forth to "do something together". It's manipulative and totalitarian and it didn't work for good reason: human beings are fallible and flawed, and no one person or group can decide to arrogantly galvanize "the world" in this fashion -- period. Viral machines run by charismatic but flawed human beings are not a good substitute for parliaments and free media and liberal democratic governments. They aren't even a particularly good helpmate for these institutions given the motivations for self-promotion and power that often drive those exploiting them.
Mark Zuckerburg, inventor of Facebook, of course set the stage for this when he explicitly explained at SWSX in 2009 that he believed the connective power of Facebook could transform Arab men who were hesitating between choising jihad and terrorism or democracy and human rights (or at least friendship and entertainment!), or that it could stop the terrorist movement called the FARC in Colombia. These were arrogant and foolish claims. I wrote "We are Not 69 Million of Anything' back then in protest because I didn't want Facebook membership to be transformed into a collectivized "better world" operation run by a few oligarchs in Silicon Valley and their pals in NGOs.
And I think this even more fervently now that we are viewed as "800 million of something" by the makers of Kony2012 and some of those they interviewed. "Direct democracy" in the form of clickocracy isn't democracy -- it isn't liberal and doesn't protect minorities and due process and the rule of law.
When you see the Kony2012 video, you realize it isn't so much the story of Kony and the need to get him and save the boy once in his clutches, but the heady idea that "we are the world" and we can all "do something together". It's like saying "I'd like to give the world a Coke" or singing "We are the World." Exhilirating stuff, with pictures of the globe, stirring music, and yourself starring as world-historical important Actor in concert with a lot of other egos now bent to this collectivized purpose. What can't we achieve?!
That the propositions are simplified and set up by only a handful of people never troubled the millions spreading and clicking; it troubled the far lesser numbers of establishment pundits, but only to the extent it threatened their power.
The film has particularly disturbing exploitative scenes with Russell's young son. This was a calculated move to make the millions identify with the cause -- either they were children barely older than the son, or they had children themselves and could identify with both the white and black boys. I don't think he should have used his son in the film -- it can't be anything but manipulation to try to prompt and rehearse a young child into making "wise" comments on a subject this awful and complex. That was disturbing.
As for claims that it was all white people with their wonder-bread complexes meddling in the affairs of black folks who know better, in fact numerous black activists are shown in the film, including many Ugandans themselves speaking on camera, not to mention the main protagonist, a victim of Kony's whose brother was killed. It's just that Ugandans -- and black Americans -- don't agree on the approach to be made to an intractable situation like this.
Yet those who dislike the film can't concede that what they do didn't get Kony arrested, that their methods of quiet "culturally sensitive" NGO work in the field with perfectly-calibrated racialized notions of their own of balance or "empowerment" of locals didn't work.
Interestingly, the Invisible Children group went to great lengths to emphasize institutions in the real world at the same time as they celebrated and exploited -- and exploded -- a viral video reaching tens of millions of people. They spoke of the importance of reaching 24 cultural and political decision-makers or "thought leaders" -- which amounted to writing them via their Twitter accounts. They spoke of the importance of writing and even visiting your Congress people (many non-Americans saw it but it was directed at Americans originally) -- and I realized that it wasn't Human Rights Watch that accomplished the decision by the Obama Administration to send 100 advisors to the Ugandan army to help capture Kony, it was this viral NGO and video campaign which actually got started some time ago.
Most intriguingly, Russell gave pride of place in the film to an important but controversial if also charasmatic figure, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the current chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Ardent belief in the impartial international powers of a world court is something that both the Christian evangelists in Invisible Children as well the lefty NGOs and journalists actually share in common -- although lately some NGOs are fretting, due to pressure from the backlash of oppressive African leaders, that the ICC is too "obsessed" with Africa and should go elsewhere in the world for other cases in other regions.
Almost unnoticed in the Kony frenzy is the fact that finally after a number of years, enormous expense and controversy, the ICC has rendered a decision in its first case. It concerns another bad guy like Kony, Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese warlord, guilty of recruiting child soldiers. While, as Ocampo mentions in the Kony2012 film, the first arrest warrants of the ICC were for Kony, the first verdict comes against Lubanga. As the Guardian notes,
All 28 people indicted by the court have come from the African continent, which has led to charges of bias. In 2010, Chad – the first ICC signatory visited by Bashir following the issue of his arrest warrant – defended its decision not to arrest the Sudanese president by accusing the ICC of only targeting African leaders.
There is real disagreement as to whether these decisions are just or more importantly, whether they serve as a deterrent. I think here, too, the world's efforts at creating a conscience and an adjudicator shouldn't be discounted, while imperfect, because the court has indeed grappled with actual crimes against humanity that states themselves proved unable to cope with.
It's interesting that the world's first attempt to get "The Internet" to do something that merely tantrum about its own demands for licentiousness (as in the anti-SOPA viral campaign) did involve a reference to Congress and to the ICC. That's not trivial, but a lot more thought has to go into how to continue to build on it and follow up on it. Ultimately, I believe it has to start with an awareness that a few people cannot expect to whiplash 800 million or 100 million or 10 million people in simplistic and manipulative ways. Liberal democracy is about considered debate and due process, not merely clictivism, and that counts when we want a liberal outcome.
Recent Comments