On Kony 2012: I honestly wanted to stay as far away as possible from KONY 2012, the latest fauxtivist fad sweeping the web (remember âchange your Facebook profile pic to stop child abuseâ?), but you clearly wonât stop sending me that damn video until I say something about it, so here goes:
Stop sending me that video.
The organization behind Kony 2012 â Invisible Children Inc. â is an extremely shady nonprofit that has been called âmisleading,â ânaive,â and âdangerousâ by a Yale political science professor, and has been accused by Foreign Affairs of âmanipulat[ing] facts for strategic purposes.â They have also been criticized by the Better Business Bureau for refusing to provide information necessary to determine if IC meets the Bureauâs standards.
Additionally, IC has a low two-star rating in accountability from Charity Navigator because they wonât let their financials be independently audited. Thatâs not a good thing. In fact, itâs a very bad thing, and should make you immediately pause and reflect on where the money youâre sending them is going.
By ICâs own admission, only 31% of all the funds they receive go toward actually helping anyone [pdf]. The rest go to line the pockets of the three people in charge of the organization, to pay for their travel expenses (over $1 million in the last year alone) and to fund their filmmaking business (also over a million) â which is quite an effective way to make more money, as clearly illustrated by the fact that so many canât seem to stop forwarding their well-engineered emotional blackmail to everyone theyâve ever known.
And as far as what they do with that money:
The group is in favour of direct military intervention, and their money supports the Ugandan governmentâs army and various other military forces. Hereâs a photo of the founders of Invisible Children posing with weapons and personnel of the Sudan Peopleâs Liberation Army. Both the Ugandan army and Sudan Peopleâs Liberation Army are riddled with accusations of rape and looting, but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is âbetter equipped than that of any of the other affected countriesâ, although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasnât been since 2006 by their own admission. These books each refer to the rape and sexual assault that are perennial issues with the UPDF, the military group Invisible Children is defending.
Letâs not get our lines crossed: The Lordâs Resistance Army is bad news. And Joseph Kony is a very bad man, and needs to be stopped. But propping up Ugandaâs decades-old dictatorship and its military arm, which has been accused by the UN of committing unspeakable atrocities and itself facilitated the recruitment of child soldiers, is not the way to go about it.
The United States is already plenty involved in helping rout Kony and his band of psycho sycophants. Kony is on the run, having been pushed out of Uganda, and itâs likely he will soon be caught, if he isnât already dead. But killing Kony wonât fix anything, just as killing Osama bin Laden didnât end terrorism. The LRA might collapse, but, as Foreign Affairs points out, it is âa relatively small player in all of this â as much a symptom as a cause of the endemic violence.â
Myopically placing the blame for all of central Africaâs woes on Kony â even as a starting point â will only imperil many more people than are already in danger.
Sending money to a nonprofit that wants to muck things up by dousing the flames with fuel is not helping. Want to help? Really want to help? Send your money to nonprofits that are putting more than 31% toward rebuilding the regionâs medical and educational infrastructure, so that former child soldiers have something worth coming home to.
Here are just a few of those charities. They all have a sparkling four-star rating from Charity Navigator, and, more importantly, no interest in airdropping American troops armed to the teeth into the middle of a multi-nation tribal war to help one madman catch another.
The bottom line is, research your causes thoroughly. Donât just forward a random video to a stranger because a mass murderer makes a five-year-old âsad.â Learn a little bit about the complexities of the regionâs ongoing strife before advocating for direct military intervention.
There is no black and white in the world. And going about solving important problems like there is just serves to make all those equally troubling shades of gray invisible.
