Today Invisible Children gets most of its funding from the US government
April 20, 2020 9:19 AM   Subscribe

“Operation Kony: A US Crusade in Africa” (42½min video, .mp4, magnet) A documentary explores the relationship between the Kony 2012 viral video, the organization Invisible Children which produced it, and U.S. military activity in Africa.

Joseph Kony, a notorious insurgent leader and war criminal active in Uganda and elsewhere in Central Africa for decades, is still at large. The authors assert that the U.S. military's intelligence-gathering activities and other operations during the many years of their presence in the area would not have been tolerated without the cover story of searching for Kony. At least one interviewee, Ugandan activist Milton Allimadi, says that they were never really looking for Kony in the first place. (previously, previously, previously, previously)

Truth Wins Out, an organization formed to fight what it considers “anti-gay religious extremism”, obtained and presented an audio clip of Kony 2012 filmmaker Jason Russell at a 2005 Christian conference in San Antonio in which he describes a previous video produced by Invisible Children as a “Trojan Horse” for secular institutions:
Coming in January we are trying to hit as many high schools, churches, and colleges as possible with this movie. We are able to be the Trojan Horse in a sense, going into a secular realm and saying, guess what life is about orphans, and it’s about the widow. It’s about the oppressed. That’s God’s heart. And to sit in a public high school and tell them about that has been life-changing. Because they get so excited. And it’s not driven by guilt, it’s driven by an adventure and the adventure is God's.
Lisa Dougan, the current president of Invisible Children, says that it is “in no way a religiously-affiliated organization.”
posted by XMLicious (4 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
Your multitudinous tags could also use "whitesaviorcomplex" and/or "whitesaviorindustrialcomplex". Whether or not IC considers itself "a religiously-affiliated organization" and whether or not it has any connection to AFRICOM, its real purpose is to sustain itself, and probably has been at least since KONY 2012, followed shortly by Jason Russell's public meltdown. That it survived both that incident and the failure of its primary goal proves that that goal was never really the point in the first place.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:16 AM on April 20, 2020


Thanks for sharing this. KONY 2012 happened in a crucial time in my mental development (I was 17). I wonder how it impacted who I am today. Maybe the belief that "good people can sometimes be bad people or idiots".
posted by rebent at 3:00 PM on April 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


here is a youtube link
posted by rebent at 3:27 PM on April 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


In my consciousness, Kony has been, variously: a threateningly good guy, a legendary bad guy, a mythical Kaiser Soze guy, a jokey 4chan invention, and/or some person caught up in a viral genre. I still don't understand it, and I've thought that Kony was a major moment through which I officially became an old.
posted by rhizome at 1:58 PM on April 21, 2020


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