Kony 2012

[singher23]

Has anyone else seen the YouTube video?

[manmander]

KONY 2012 - Would you ever think of shooting your parents? Could you ever imagine your own kid shooting you? What happens if there was no option and were forced? This is a reality for children in Africa as they are forced to by Joseph Kony!! KONY 2012 is a movement to capture and bring to justice Joseph Kony for his war crimes and crimes against humanity. Ignore everything and anything I post but do not ignore this post!! Please!

Please watch the video below and sign the pledge

Video -

Pledge - http://www.causes.com/causes/227-invisible-children

We should not ignore it - granted it is not Sikhi per se, but it is about compassion none the less!

[Beginner]

If only we could have done this in regards to 84

[genie]

Most western NGO's often have military intelligence funding or operatives within them who are there to further the interests of the western governments they come from.

Uganda's natural resources = copper, cobalt, hydropower, limestone, salt, arable land, gold (taken from CIA website.

What the CIA website fails to mention is the discovery of oil. Oil is the number resource that western governments are dying to get their hands on at all costs. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15645354

This is the real reason of propaganda videos like these and justifications for military adventurism. Sure there are evil people doing evil things but often governments need a pretext to invade or send troops to a nation and if there is no incentive there or there is no national Geo-political military interest there they will not care to do anything no matter how much human suffering is going on.

[VanHelsingh]

I read this earlier today on a blog.

You do not need to ask my permission to share this. Please link it widely. For those asking what you can do to help, please link to visiblechildren2.tumblr.com wherever you see KONY 2012 posts.

I do not doubt for a second that those involved in KONY 2012 have great intentions, nor do I doubt for a second that Joseph Kony is a very evil man. But despite this, I’m strongly opposed to the KONY 2012 campaign.

KONY 2012 is the product of a group called Invisible Children, a controversial activist group and not-for-profit. They’ve released 11 films, most with an accompanying bracelet colour (KONY 2012 is fittingly red), all of which focus on Joseph Kony. When we buy merch from them, when we link to their video, when we put up posters linking to their website, we support the organization. I don’t think that’s a good thing, and I’m not alone.

Invisible Children has been condemned time and time again. As a registered not-for-profit, its finances are public. Last year, the organization spent $8,676,614. Only 32% went to direct services (page 6), with much of the rest going to staff salaries, travel and transport, and film production. This is far from ideal, and Charity Navigator rates their accountability 2/4 stars because they haven’t had their finances externally audited. But it goes way deeper than that.

The group is in favour of direct military intervention, and their money funds the Ugandan government’s army and various other military forces. Here’s a photo of the founders of Invisible Children posing with weapons and personnel of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Both the Ugandan army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army are riddled with accusations of rape and looting, but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries”, although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006 by their own admission.

Still, the bulk of Invisible Children’s spending isn’t on funding African militias, but on awareness and filmmaking. Which can be great, except that Foreign Affairs has claimed that Invisible Children (among others) “manipulates facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony — a brutal man, to be sure — as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil.” He’s certainly evil, but exaggeration and manipulation to capture the public eye is unproductive, unprofessional and dishonest.

As Christ Blattman, a political scientist at Yale, writes on the topic of IC’s programming, “There’s also something inherently misleading, naive, maybe even dangerous, about the idea of rescuing children or saving of Africa. […] It hints uncomfortably of the White Man’s Burden. Worse, sometimes it does more than hint. The savior attitude is pervasive in advocacy, and it inevitably shapes programming. Usually misconceived programming.”

Still, Kony’s a bad guy, and he’s been around a while. Which is why the US has been involved in stopping him for years. U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has sent multiple missions to capture or kill Kony over the years. And they’ve failed time and time again, each provoking a ferocious response and increased retaliative slaughter. The issue with taking out a man who uses a child army is that his bodyguards are children. Any effort to capture or kill him will almost certainly result in many children’s deaths, an impact that needs to be minimized as much as possible. Each attempt brings more retaliation. And yet Invisible Children supports military intervention. Kony has been involved in peace talks in the past, which have fallen through. But Invisible Children is now focusing on military intervention.

Military intervention may or may not be the right idea, but people supporting KONY 2012 probably don’t realize they’re supporting the Ugandan military who are themselves raping and looting away. If people know this and still support Invisible Children because they feel it’s the best solution based on their knowledge and research, I have no issue with that. But I don’t think most people are in that position, and that’s a problem.

Is awareness good? Yes. But these problems are highly complex, not one-dimensional and, frankly, aren’t of the nature that can be solved by postering, film-making and changing your Facebook profile picture, as hard as that is to swallow. Giving your money and public support to Invisible Children so they can spend it on supporting ill-advised violent intervention and movie #12 isn’t helping. Do I have a better answer? No, I don’t, but that doesn’t mean that you should support KONY 2012 just because it’s something. Something isn’t always better than nothing. Sometimes it’s worse.

If you want to write to your Member of Parliament or your Senator or the President or the Prime Minister, by all means, go ahead. If you want to post about Joseph Kony’s crimes on Facebook, go ahead. But let’s keep it about Joseph Kony, not KONY 2012.

~ Grant Oyston, visiblechildren@grantoyston.com

Grant Oyston is a sociology and political science student at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. You can help spread the word about this by linking to his blog at visiblechildren.tumblr.com anywhere you see posts about KONY 2012.

[singher23]

I was literally just about to post that

[Khaalis]

http://www.machinegunpreacher.org/

Sam Childers is an amazing man. A reformed criminal who found God and found the courage to pursue a higher purpose. He has no funding from the US Government and has experienced these stories and faced the LRA head on. He is a believer the men of God should also have sharp teeth and claws (fight adharma).

I don't usually promote cinema, but I would highly recommend everyone to watch the recently released DVD 'Machine Gun Preacher'.

I would also encourage sangat to give a little financial support (outside of your dasvand) to this courageous mans excellent cause.