Joseph Kony, head of the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Last week, social media exploded over two simple words: ‘STOP KONY’. If
you happened to be on Twitter around 9 PM Eastern Standard Time, you saw that
become the top trend, with everyone retweeting and sharing a 30 minute video
documenting the horrors of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, head of the Lord’s
Resistance Army. The most heinous of Kony’s crimes has been the use of children
to populate the LRA through kidnapping and murder. Boys are forcibly armed to
fight for the LRA and girls are taken as sexual objects and domestics. At last word
60,000 have fallen prey to the LRA’s evil. The reason why this now dominates
discussions around the world has been that film on YouTube, created by the charity
Invisible Children. The film has gotten 26 million hits as of this morning roughly. It
has gotten the attention of the Today Show, CNN, and other news outlets. So, is this
a bad thing?

In a word: maybe.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for people taking action to make the world better however
they can. But the moment I saw the Kony 2012 campaign trending on Twitter, I felt
uneasy. Mainly because I wondered why Invisible Children made this push now when
I had heard about Kony and the LRA in 2005. As I looked through all the info I could
find, I found a number of people rightfullly outraged, asking what President Obama
was doing. Never mind the fact that he had sent 100 Special Force members into the
region late last year over the protests of Republicans. And let’s remember, last Tuesday
was their party’s Super Tuesday of primaries. Keep that in mind for later. And when I
got the chance to see the film, I was struck at the emotional effect…and also at how
simplified they really made things to prove a point. The goal of Invisible Children is
to get worldwide attention on Joseph Kony to have him detained and tried for his crimes.
But the way they’ve gone about it casts a shadow on their intentions.

Founders of Invisible Children, taken from Vice Magazine

One of the biggest criticisms of Invisible Children has been their finances.
It has been reported that in addition to getting two million dollars from
Oprah Winfrey, Invisible Children has recieved money from AIM AIR and
the National Christian Foundation. The latter organization is a red flag due
to it being the key group responsible for financially backing Calfiornia’s
Proposition 8 along with sending money to the Family Research Council,
named as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Not good
company to be in. Their usage of revenue has come under serious fire,
with Visible Children, an opposition group stating that IC has only used
33 percent of their almost 9 million dollar intake towards aid services in
Central Africa. One million was spent on travel alone. The three main
men, (Jason Russell, Ben Keesey, Laren Poole) each earned close to
90K. And to date, they’ve made half a million dollars on ‘awareness kits’
sold at $30 each. So if you want to be bold, Invisible Children are in
danger of becoming slick ‘poverty pimps.’

The big problem here is this: Invisible Children has now fallen into a trap
of its own making. It’s a trap that basically portrays them as well-meaning
but dangerously naive about the politics of Kony and Uganda. It’s a trap
that paints them as White knights coming to yet again speak for Africans
who cannot speak for themselves, even though they’ve been doing so since
the atrocities began. It’s a trap that gets well-intentioned people interested
in the cause, but also sells them the idea that involvement can be minimal
and short-term. And that’s a bad thing to portray. Look at Haiti as an example.
Hell, look at New Orleans. It’s a colonialism of conscience in some respects; a
thought process where wanting to help is tainted by how one goes about helping
and they resources they use to do so. It demands that you think of yourself and
the Ugandan people in father/children roles. That belittles them greatly, and
makes Invisible Children part of a list of exploiters. That’s sad.

The lessons to be learned from this? It’s good to want young people to know
about the issues of the world, but it’s never good to manipulate them into
doing so. Charities may need to be vetted more vigorously. And if people
really want to help, they should help themselves to all the knowledge they
can about the issue and not have one group or story be the defining tale.