Young Filmmakers Take On Cannibal Prophet, Profit

If you’ve spent any time on Facebook or Reddit the past two days, you have most likely already seen the flood of posts re: Joseph Kony and his anti-fan club, Invisible Children.  For the rest of you out there who haven’t been so exposed to the recent controversy, I’d like to give some background info.

Joseph Kony is a bad man, of that there is no doubt.  Kony is a Ugandan military leader with a Westboro-esque brand of Christianity, with numerous instances of leading his army to pillage, rape, and murder.   He accomplishes his lofty goals with the help of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a ragtag group of enslaved child soldiers who accept Kony as their leader and prophet.  The fact that these psychopaths exist in countries with poor rule of law, easy access to weaponry, and a poor and uneducated populace should come as no surprise, unfortunately.  Cannibalism is also among the list of atrocities, which stands out as particularly shocking to most people (except to those of us who have seen Vice’s interviews with General “Butt Naked” of Liberia, a reformed guerrilla and ex-cannibal).  Kony has been evading capture since 2005, when he was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.  In October of last year, Obama pledged 100 troops to assist in the dismantlement of the Lord’s Resistance Army.

So the Facebook/chain-email narrative got this much right:  Joseph Kony and his misfit army are responsible for gruesome killings, rape, murder, and the enslavement of children.  However, human-rights violations exist the world over, and this story would not have become such a sensation if there were no hero.

The public heard about Kony through a group called Invisible Children, a group seeking to bring awareness to Kony’s actions.  They are the producers of KONY 2012, a film describing the LRA’s misdeeds.  Once this documentary made its way through the social network, however, it soon became obvious that they were not exactly the heroes they made themselves out to be.  A blog called Visible Children pointed out that Invisible Children spends very little of its income on actual aid to the war-torn areas of Uganda, and has been disingenuous in its videos.  For instance, most of KONY 2012 was shot in 2003.  Not only that, but Joseph Kony hasn’t actually been in Uganda since 2006.  A member of Invisible Children actually responded to a post on reddit, defending his non-profit, which you can read here.  Be sure to check the responses below.

So now that we’re aware of the problem thanks to Invisible Children, where do we go from there?  Well, the answer isn’t that easy.  Giving to Invisible Children isn’t the solution, despite what they may say.  Only about 31% of donations actually made it to Uganda.  Their solution is to support the Ugandan Army and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, both of which have been accused of serious human rights violations.  Plus, as the Visible Children blog pointed out, “The issue with taking out a man who uses a child army is that his bodyguards are children.”  As much as it may hurt to hear it, there’s no easy fix to this problem.  However, I’d like to think we all learned a valuable lesson about the need for skepticism in the era of social news.