kony 2012: critiquing a campaign is not the same as criticising the campaigners

The Kony 2012 campaign by Invisible children has no doubt created some heated debates.

There has been thousands who have shown their support for the Kony 2012 campaign and probably thousands who have critiqued it (though no doubt more have supported than critiqued).

However, a common thought I have found in FB threads, blog comments and Twitter posts is that those who critique the campaign are criticising Invisible Children as an organisation.

While there are most certainly some articles and blogs which do criticise Invisible Children, some with scathing and slanderous attacks (which I will not link here as I do not think they are helpful in this issue), many who have spoken about Kony 2012 have not sought to bag Invisible Children, just point out the short falls in this particular campaign.

There is no doubt that Invisible Children is an organisation who has done and is currently doing some terriffic things in the way of film making, ground work in Africa and in particular advocacy and awareness raising of horrific issues of poverty, war, abductions and murders, particularly those relating to the LRA and Joseph Kony. For this they are to be thoroughly applauded! The Invisible Children’s film The Resuce (2009) is one such effort which I applaud.

kony 2012: at least someone’s doing something!

A point I failed to make in my last post, I will make here.

Reading through the comments on another blogger’s post, I have come across many comments like this one:

Harriet says;

[...] this article is full of good points, but i’m sick of seeing people hating over the Kony2012 campaign, yeah deploying more US soldiers into Africa isn’t a good idea, but at least these people are trying to make a difference in this world, giving hope to people. you’re just too scared incase it goes wrong, so what if it goes wrong, at least they and the rest of the world tried, rather than just typing about it with negative views. [...]

So isn’t doing something better than nothing?

I guess I think that this is a false assumption – that if you don’t get involved or support the IC’s Kony 2012 campaign, that you are doing nothing and sitting idle while the LRA reaks havoc on East Africa. The point should not be, “well so long as someone is doing something, no matter how misguided or harmful it might be.”

invisble children: kony 2012 – a response

Invisible Children’s campagin to bring down Joseph Kony has gone viral!

IC is an organisation that strode to promence when they released videos about the tragic child soldiers in Uganda, the DRC and Sudan, many of which have been abducted by Kony’s Lord’s Resistence Army (LRA).

The IC Campaign sates:

KONY 2012 is a film and campaign by Invisible Children that aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.

But how do they seek to do this? And is this the best way?

The IC Kony 2012 campaign states:

We are taking action to ensure these two things

1) That Joseph Kony is known as the World’s Worst War Criminal.

2) That the U.S. military advisers support the Ugandan Army until Kony has been captured and the LRA has been completely disarmed. They need to follow through all the way and finish what they have started

Seems nobel enough. I myself would love to see the end of child soldiers and the violence, the murders, rape and kidnapping that the LRA has conducted since 1987.