#endlosung

Mark Rutte en Diederik Samsom mogen dan vandaag een Europees plan voor de vluchtelingencrisis presenteren, maar de gemeente Ede heeft zojuist de ultieme oplossing gepresenteerd. Rutte en Samsom willen vluchtelingen die in Griekenland aankomen een enkeltje veerboot richting Turkije geven (zo ontzettend moedig). Turkije heeft immers “bijna” de status van een veilig land. Even los van de vraag of…

Last night, the Kony campaign definitively failed to cover London in posters denouncing Kony; I witnessed a few around Bond Street, and felt beholden to remove them myself; why? The Kony 2012 campaign is fundamentally wrong. 

The first thing to keep in mind is that Kony 2012 and the intention of saving lives and upholding the fabric of society are not one and the same. It is deleterious to intertwine one concept with absolute morality, as was done with the events of September 11 (on both sides of the debate), as was done with the Crusades (on both sides of the debate), as was done with World War I (on both sides of the debate). It is not difficult to witness the pattern emerging. Without extricating our side of the argument from the 'favour' of innate morality, it is infeasible to have an unobfuscated and lucid view of an idea.

One reason I disagree with Kony 2012, as it has been branded, is that the entire campaign is based on the assumption that the West knows what's best. We are able to run society effectively, as we did in the imperial/colonial days, and what we think is right for us, is right for a country the other side of the equator and millions of culture–miles away from us. We have a vague notion from, often, a few sentences, that we can descry Joseph Kony doing Bad Things, and we apply this notion to a serious campaign to bring Kony to 'justice' according to Western ideals, much like the famous attempts of American law firms to apply the stipulations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to countries across the globe. It is little wonder that those in the third world perceive the West as having a bumptious and purblindly parochial worldview.

Another reason is that the likely results of this (especially when further paragraphs are considered) will disillusion the young people who have helped to fan the flames of the campaign as to the real efficacy of human rights groups such as Amnesty International, who have campaigned indefatigably for aeons for the rights of humans around the globe, and have not just sprung up desultorily around a comparatively recondite issue; indeed, Amnesty International's response to the campaign was (rightfully) much more tepid. It oversimplifies the issue, as Rosebell Kagumire says in her video, to one man - no war is this simple, and certainly not this one.

The third reason I cite, and arguably the most poignant, is that Invisible Children have become a company with their own agenda. They have produced their own documentary, built up their persona to the point of driving their CEO to public debauchery, and striven to paint themselves as the face for the Kony campaign. This is not how things should be; Amnesty International have been campaigning for the arrest of Kony for years without rebranding, and Invisible Children's effort to arrest Joseph Kony is leading to media debacles that draw attention away from the matter actually at hand; the arrest of Joseph Kony, the first name of whom is not known by many, which says a lot about IC's branding of the campaign.

Having said this, the immediate arrest of Joseph Kony is not the huge matter it claims to be. While it is, of course, of considerable importance, all reputable sources suggest that Joseph Kony has not been in Uganda for a number of years; most sources agree that the figure is likely to be around half a decade. At around fifteen minutes in Invisible Children's latest, most prominent, and non-eponymous documentary film, it is mentioned in passing that Joseph Kony (and the Lord's Resistance Army) have not been in Uganda for years.

Beyond this, he is often likened to Adolf Hitler (a popular fallacious tool of rhetoric), and subject to cheap antagonisation. The Kony problem is gone; the Kony solution is not needed. The children affected by Kony at the height of the LRA's power, when Invisible Children was painfully absent, are now prostitutes and disease-ridden teens on the streets of Gulu, and other parts of Uganda.

This is not what debilitates Invisible Children's effort; this is what negates the purpose. With regard to the effort, it is clear that Invisible Children's finances are 'shady' at best; it spends a lot of money on film-making as opposed to visible work, and has never been externally audited. I wouldn't be the first to say that it is unwise to donate to a charity that you wouldn't invest in if it were a company. In addition to this, it has no clear aim beyond raising lots of money and arresting Kony; few who donate even have any cognisance of where the money is going, apart from making more films to draw more attention. It would be objectionable but honest to say that Kony 2012 is a charitable Ponzi scheme with no clear end-result.