The Undaunted front of Online Activism, or One does not Simply Overthrow Dictators with Retweets.

Hello there loyal reader (I think there is one). I've been struggling over the last couple of days to think of a particularly striking topic to discuss; there were a few interesting things happening in student politics but by the time most people read it the LUSU elections will be a rather distant memory in the minds of people who found their friend's names first, people who had stupid slogans second and RON third. There's a few things I intend to review, including some albums for RocSoc (for some reason they saw the first three and wanted me to write more).

Sometimes, things get too big to ignore though...

At the start of this month, a documentary video on Youtube entitled “Kony 2012” went viral in a big way, and chances are anyone who's viewing this probably already knows about it. For those who don't, I will do my utmost to condense 25 years of the most tumultuous period in Uganda's recent history and try to hopefully demonstrate a point.

Joseph Kony is the leader of a violently evangelical Christian guerilla group (to use the politically neutral term) called the Lord's Resistance Army, who allegedly come from Kony being told by God to spread the Ten Commandments (Kony's own interpretation of them) through Africa. He forces children into slavery either as soldiers or as sex slaves. The accounts about their activities towards their own people or the people of Central Africa don't get much better, involving tales of torture, rape, mutilation, assorted butchery among many other things. It's stuff that I personally don't want to get into and has been repeated by various sources. Essentially he's a bloodthirsty tyrannical African warlord; one of many combatants in one of the most unstable parts of the world, in Uganda, in South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Invisible Children are a charity whose primary aim is to stop Kony, and have made a multitude of films attempting to showcase the atrocities Kony (usually pictured attempting to impersonate Carl “Apollo Creed” Weathers in Predator) has done, Kony 2012, being the most recent of these videos. The video is very much propaganda in nature, as you sort of expect, and is 30 minutes long, a long time for anything to go viral, which makes me suspect most people who spread the campaign haven't watched it. The video's aim and purpose is noble enough; stop Kony. It's intended method for this is to take advantage of the nature of social media and it's ability to allow free thought and expression to be spread across the world, which forms the backbone of rebelling against opression. All well and rosy, although it's idea of social media as an unstoppable force for good and wonderment in the world is something that is open to debate. The video's tone is very similar to 80s fundraising campaigns such as Hands across America or Live Aid, where it seemed that greed was so good the only way to get people to do anything was to fellate their ego, which smacks to me of White Man's Burden.

The basic idea of Kony 2012 is that people will spread it around to everyone they know and buy wristbands and posters from the Invisible Children folks, so that on April 20^th, everyone will 'Cover the Night' and make sure that the collective voice is heard so that the people who can do something about it will do. The charity seems to be at least implicitly encouraging militaristic action targeting America in particular as a country that should be doing something about it. Currently Obama has sent about 100 tactical specialists (essentially soldiers there to help the Ugandan army out in terms of strategy) to Uganda to help, for the record, but Invisible Children is suggesting some kind of joint-operation between at least Uganda and the United States. The fact that the primary focus is on the United States to instigate change in the region again reminds me uncomfortably of White Man's Burden and undermines efforts by the Ugandan forces to arrest Kony. Speaking of Uganda, there is no mentioning of Uganda's somewhat spotty human rights record, nor of the instability of the region, which could get more than a little worse if people just blunder in. Invisible Children for the record responded, mainly by saying that they simplified the entire thing to make it “easy to understand.” All fine and dandy, except that by simplifying the debate, you've completely changed it. Those complications are the backbone, along without wanting to look like neocolonialists. There is simplification and there is changing facts to suit an argument. The latter has no place in rational discourse, and really is the problem with using social media in campaigns: It becomes an increasingly nonsensical game of Chinese Whispers which eventually gets split down two very extreme camps; extreme supporters who call the others child murdering bastards, and the other side who claim that anyone who supports the campaign are vaguely racist sheep.

All this makes me look like a cynical asshole I'm sure, but raising awareness is far from a bad thing, that aspect of the campaign I don't mind at all. Getting and encouraging people to think of the world beyond their front door is always encouraging. I don't know, if you want to raise awareness, be sure that you're not blindfolding them to the full truth at the same time.

Stay safe, and hug it out (Hey, if everyone did that we wouldn't have this problem to begin with )

HuggyDave