Make Joseph Kony Famous

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As some of you may be aware from the internet boom this video and movement this has created, a group called the Invisible Children are campaigning for the guerilla leader, head of the group called the Lord's Resistance Army, named Joseph Kony, to be arrested. They plan to do this by making him a household name and then, perhaps, he will be brought to justice for his deplorable crimes.

Take some time to watch this video. You won't regret it.

http://vimeo.com/invisible/kony2012

Spread the word. Make Kony Famous.

[Vimeo's controls keep disappearing on me so I'm adding the YT version for easier viewing below. -Tal]

 

The naivete of some people never ceases to amaze me. I despair for Africa, I really do, but I could spend my entire life busting my butt trying to improve things there, and it wouldn't make one <snip> of difference. I'll render my charity locally where it might actually help someone.

 

I consider myself pretty well versed in modern events, and I certainly knew about the situation in many African nations, where they kidnap children, train them to fire a rifle, and essentially brainwash them to their cause. But before today, I never heard of Kony. When they said 99% of the world doesn't know who he is, I believe them.

His death won't solve everything, and it is exceedingly likely someone else will step in the fill the power void he leaves behind. But his death or capture would be symbolic if nothing else. Killing Osama bin Laden didn't spell the end of al Queda or the Taliban. Still, it made me feel a whole lot better knowing we bagged that um... rooster sucker.

 

I know I'm an unfeeling uncaring American, but after 24 hours, I'm already tired of Kony2012. Although it is fun to post the following reply to all of the thousand of Youtube posts about Kony. "So I'm supposed to vote for Kony instead of Obama in 2012?"

 

Not unlike the phenomenon we have here in the states where the leaders of violence-plagued cities get together in public meetings and agree that "this has to stop." Fat chance.

 

In regards to Africa, I used to follow a South African blogger who no longer posts, but this article really summed it up nicely (at least to me)


EDIT:

Link removed as the article was reposted at a really offensive site. Instead I have just copied and pasted the article and spolered it below for size reasons.

Spoiler

Let Africa Sink
By: Kim du Toit
May 26, 2002 01:40pm

When it comes to any analysis of the problems facing Africa, Western society, and particularly people from the United States, encounter a logical disconnect that makes clear analysis impossible. That disconnect is the way life is regarded in the West (it’s precious, must be protected at all costs etc.), compared to the way life, and death, are regarded in Africa. Let me try to quantify this statement.

In Africa, life is cheap. There are so many ways to die in Africa that death is far more commonplace than in the West. You can die from so many things--snakebite, insect bite, wild animal attack, disease, starvation, food poisoning… the list goes on and on. At one time, crocodiles accounted for more deaths in sub-Saharan Africa than gunfire, for example. Now add the usual human tragedy (murder, assault, warfare and the rest), and you can begin to understand why the life expectancy for an African is low--in fact, horrifyingly low, if you remove White Africans from the statistics (they tend to be more urbanized, and more Western in behavior and outlook). Finally, if you add the horrifying spread of AIDS into the equation, anyone born in sub-Saharan Africa this century will be lucky to reach age forty.

I lived in Africa for over thirty years. Growing up there, I was infused with several African traits--traits which are not common in Western civilization. The almost-casual attitude towards death was one. (Another is a morbid fear of snakes.)

So because of my African background, I am seldom moved at the sight of death, unless it’s accidental, or it affects someone close to me. (Death which strikes at strangers, of course, is mostly ignored.) Of my circle of about eighteen or so friends with whom I grew up, and whom I would consider "close", only about ten survive today--and not one of the survivors is over the age of fifty.

Two friends died from stepping on landmines while on Army duty in Namibia. Three died in horrific car accidents (and lest one thinks that this is not confined to Africa, one was caused by a kudu flying through a windshield and impaling the guy through the chest with its hoof--not your everyday traffic accident in, say, Florida). One was bitten by a snake, and died from heart failure. Another also died of heart failure, but he was a hopeless drunkard. Two were shot by muggers. The last went out on his surfboard one day and was never seen again (did I mention that sharks are plentiful off the African coasts and in the major rivers?). My situation is not uncommon in South Africa--and north of the Limpopo River (the border with Zimbabwe), I suspect that others would show worse statistics.

The death toll wasn’t just confined to my friends. When I was still living in Johannesburg, the newspaper carried daily stories of people mauled by lions, or attacked by rival tribesmen, or dying from some unspeakable disease (and this was pre-AIDS Africa too) and in general, succumbing to some of Africa’s many answers to the population explosion. Add to that the normal death toll from rampant crime, illness, poverty, flood, famine, traffic, and the police, and you’ll begin to get the idea.

My favorite African story actually happened after I left the country. An American executive took a job over there, and on his very first day, the newspaper headlines read: "Three Headless Bodies Found".

The next day: "Three Heads Found".

The third day: "Heads Don’t Match Bodies".

You can’t make this stuff up.

As a result, death is treated more casually by Africans than by Westerners. I, and I suspect most Africans, am completely inured to reports of African suffering, for whatever cause. Drought causes crops to fail, thousands face starvation? Yup, that happened many times while I was growing up. Inter-tribal rivalry and warfare causes wholesale slaughter? Yep, been happening there for millennia, long before Whitey got there. Governments becoming rich and corrupt while their populations starved? Not more than nine or ten of those. In my lifetime, the following tragedies have occurred, causing untold millions of deaths: famine in Biafra, genocide in Rwanda, civil war in Angola, floods in South Africa, famine in Somalia, civil war in Sudan, famine in Ethiopia, floods in Mozambique, wholesale slaughter in Uganda, and tribal warfare in every single country. There are others, but you get the point.

Yes, all this was also true in Europe--maybe a thousand years ago. But not any more. And Europe doesn’t teem with crocodiles, ultra-venomous snakes and so on.

The Dutch controlled the floods. All of Europe controls famine--it’s non-existent now. Apart from a couple of examples of massive, state-sponsored slaughter (Nazi Germany, Communist Russia), Europe since 1700 doesn’t even begin to compare to Africa today. Casual slaughter is another thing altogether--rare in Europe, common in Africa.

More to the point, the West has evolved into a society with a stable system of government, which follows the rule of law, and has respect for the rights and life of the individual--none of which is true in Africa.

Among old Africa hands, we have a saying, usually accompanied by a shrug: "Africa wins again." This is usually said after an incident such as:

a beloved missionary is butchered by his congregation, for no apparent reason

a tribal chief prefers to let his tribe starve to death rather than accepting food from the Red Cross (would mean he wasn’t all-powerful, you see)

an entire nation starves to death, while its ruler accumulates wealth in foreign banks

a new government comes into power, promising democracy, free elections etc., provided that the freedom doesn’t extend to the other tribe

the other tribe comes to power in a bloody coup, then promptly sets about slaughtering the first tribe

etc, etc, etc, ad nauseam, ad infinitum.

The prognosis is bleak, because none of this mayhem shows any sign of ending. The conclusions are equally bleak, because, quite frankly, there is no answer to Africa’s problems, no solution that hasn’t been tried before, and failed.

Just go to the CIA World Fact Book, pick any of the African countries (Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi etc.), and compare the statistics to any Western country (eg. Portugal, Italy, Spain, Ireland). The disparities are appalling--and it’s going to get worse, not better. It has certainly gotten worse since 1960, when most African countries achieved independence. We, and by this I mean the West, have tried many ways to help Africa. All such attempts have failed.

1. Charity is no answer. Money simply gets appropriated by the first, or second, or third person to touch it (17 countries saw a decline in real per capita GNP between 1970 and 1999, despite receiving well over $100 billion in World Bank assistance).

2. Food isn’t distributed. This happens either because there is no transportation infrastructure (bad), or the local leader deliberately withholds the supplies to starve people into submission (worse).

3. Materiel is broken, stolen or sold off for a fraction of its worth. The result of decades of "foreign aid" has resulted in a continental infrastructure which, if one excludes South Africa, couldn’t support Pittsburgh.

Add to this, as I mentioned above, the endless cycle of Nature’s little bag of tricks--persistent drought followed by violent flooding, a plethora of animals, reptiles and insects so dangerous that life is already cheap before Man starts playing his little reindeer games with his fellow Man--and what you are left with is: catastrophe.

The inescapable conclusion is simply one of resignation. This goes against the grain of our humanity--we are accustomed to ridding the world of this or that problem (smallpox, polio, whatever), and accepting failure is anathema to us. But, to give a classic African scenario, a polio vaccine won’t work if the kids are prevented from getting the vaccine by a venal overlord, or a frightened chieftain, or a lack of roads, or by criminals who steal the vaccine and sell it to someone else. If a cure for AIDS was found tomorrow, and offered to every African nation free of charge, the growth of the disease would scarcely be checked, let alone reversed. Basically, you’d have to try to inoculate as many two-year old children as possible, and write off the two older generations.

So that is the only one response, and it’s a brutal one: accept that we are powerless to change Africa, and leave them to sink or swim, by themselves.

It sounds dreadful to say it, but if the entire African continent dissolves into a seething maelstrom of disease, famine and brutality, that’s just too damn bad. We have better things to do--sometimes, you just have to say, "Can’t do anything about it."

The viciousness, the cruelty, the corruption, the duplicity, the savagery, and the incompetence is endemic to the entire continent, and is so much of an anathema to any right-thinking person that the civilized imagination simply stalls when faced with its ubiquity, and with the enormity of trying to fix it. The Western media shouldn’t even bother reporting on it. All that does is arouse our feelings of horror, and the instinctive need to do something, anything--but everything has been tried before, and failed. Everything, of course, except self-reliance.

All we should do is make sure that none of Africa gets transplanted over to the U.S., because the danger to our society is dire if it does. I note that several U.S. churches are attempting to bring groups of African refugees over to the United States, European churches the same for Europe. Mistake. Mark my words, this misplaced charity will turn around and bite us, big time.

Even worse would be to think that the simplicity of Africa holds some kind of answers for Western society: remember "It Takes A Village"? Trust me on this: there is not one thing that Africa can give the West which hasn’t been tried before and failed, not one thing that isn’t a step backwards, and not one thing which is worse than, or that contradicts, what we have already.

So here’s my solution for the African fiasco: a high wall around the whole continent, all the guns and bombs in the world for everyone inside, and at the end, the last one alive should do us all a favor and kill himself.

Inevitably, some Kissingerian realpolitiker is going to argue in favor of intervention, because in the vacuum of Western aid, perhaps the Communist Chinese would step in and increase their influence in the area. There are two reasons why this isn’t going to happen.

Firstly, the PRC doesn’t have that kind of money to throw around; and secondly, the result of any communist assistance will be precisely the same as if it were Western assistance. For the record, Mozambique and Angola are both communist countries--and both are economic disaster areas. The prognosis for both countries is disastrous--and would be the same for any other African country.

Africa has to heal itself. The West can’t help it. Nor should we. The record speaks for itself.

Kim du Toit, May 26, 2002 at 01:40pm

 

So Snook, you link and show agreement with a post made by a South African old enough to be completely raised and formed by apartheid South Africa that says that an entire continent of black people are worthless, hopeless and we should just let them kill each other? Oh and the article is sorted under "nigger facts" and is hosted by a website called chimpout which has this on its front page:

Welcome to Chimpout. A black plague is descending upon civilization. That plague is called the nigger. Here at Chimpout we provide up to the minute nigger facts and news stories that are either covered up or buried by the mainstream media. Everything you read here is the truth, gleaned from worldwide sources.

Our message is simple. Niggers are a cancer upon human society.

You will find true stories of brutal nigger rapes, murders and other anti-social behavior, along with a healthy dose of general nigger stupidity that largely goes unreported by the big media outlets.

Sit back, read up and find out the true nature of the nigger, be prepared to laugh, cry and become furious as you discover the on going destruction and mayhem caused by niggers.

We are not a white supremacist site here at Chimpout. We welcome all races, creeds, and colors......just no niggers.


I know you didn't consider yourself to be very PC but man, not many people would have the balls to stand for these views in public.

 

Jee-zos. I just don't know how people can have views like that. It makes me feel a bit sick.

 

I noticed the "nigger" portion of the URL and it made me wonder. But reading the article, she did have some valid reports regardless of her probable racism.

Africa has received aid in many forms over the past several decades. Yet that aid has been misappropriated time and again, and those who need it have not been helped. It would seem that in order to actually help the suffering masses, military action is the only method that has a chance to bypass thugs like Kony. Yet we know from our experiences in Adghanistan and Iraq that military action is no guarantee of long term change. It's a problematic conundrum, and one that Westerners struggle with, because we are not uncaring in the face of the suffering that is all too evident in Africa, and we believe that we can change it if we just find the right formula.

But the sad fact is that experience tells us the right formula is an unobtainable Holy Grail. Our efforts, however well intentioned, have failed to produce the results we hoped for, and I would argue that they may in some cases made things worse.

 

LOL, you are jumping to conclusions that are incorrect. I wish his site was still up so I could link to the proof, but alas you aren't even close. The writer of that piece was imprisoned for protesting against Apartheid.

Also, Kim is a guy and that is just a reposting of his blog post. If someone is using it for racial issues, that is their problem not his (or mine)

 

Think before you donate to these guys. Their charity has gotten quite a bad reputation. 36% of their finances actually go to anything resembling helping these kids, and their accountability rating was 50%. I'm all for helping the children in Africa, don't get me wrong, but there are other ways to do it than giving money to them.

 

Why does something need to be done just for the purpose of creating lasting and permanent change. Kony deserves to go to hell, soon. That's worth pursuing.

There may be countless others like him, but he's been singled out by some pissed off folks, and those people are doing a hell of a job getting the world riled up. I, for one, hope they nab that bastard in 2012 and give him what he's got coming.

If we keep singling out the most infamous among them, and manage to take them out on a semi-regular basis, we may cause a few would-be maniacal warlords to stick with doing something a little less morally depraved. Even if the world becomes only a slightly better place as a result, those few would-be slaves that get to live free, I'm sure, would feel it's worth it.

I don't jump on many bandwagons, but I'm on this one. Change has to start somewhere, no matter how small. Stop Joseph Kony!

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Goddamn, that n*gger website is a freaking travesty. There are some sick f@*king people in this world. I'm ashamed that one of this forum's regulars posted that link as if we were all supposed to pop over to that site and be okay with it. "Oh gee, thanks for posting that informative article." Yeah, right.

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From that website's fantastic "rules" section

To this I can only say @#$%@#%@$%#$@^%^#$^#$^@#$%@#$%@#$%@#$%! A nice selective plague to rid our world of such amazingly deluded individuals who can regard another human being in such a way would be strangely satisfying. Racist bastards!

Okay, but back to Kony I guess.

 

I read the article, and found it to be interesting for what it had to say. But really, a big warning that the link would be taking you to one of the 9 levels of hell would have, at a minimum, been in order!

 

Russia Today (the site) provided an really nice article on this

That is a bit more somber than all the German sources I read on that matter.

But an interesting phenomena, all things considered.

 

I would like to apologize to everyone for that link. I googled the article that I remembered the title and it showed up as the first link. I never even noticed that it was a racist website as I didn't read the URL or click to anything else on the site.

To remedy the situation, I have edited the post to remove the link and I have just pasted the article into the post.

Once again, I apologize for anyone who was offended as I had no idea.