A misplaced public awareness campaign about a Ugandan warlord led to a nude breakdown in the streets of San Diego — the campaign known as Kony 2012 certainly contained multitudes. The tone-deaf creation of theater kid Jason Russell, it defined early-aughts political slacktivism and a particular style of post-colonial condescension. Although they took aim at a Warlord in Uganda, the 'Invisible Children' organization failed to account for their total lack of knowledge and inability to learn anything about the situation they were trying to resolve. The results were disastrous.
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Welcome, listener, to the 88th premium chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Kony 2012 episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis Few.
So we've been talking some on the sort of the main pod about how QAnon is morphing into this vague sort of save the children campaign.
It pulls on your heartstrings by appealing to abused children, in a way that's very
loud and angry without accomplishing much, in a way that fixates on drawing attention,
in a way that's more social media focused than actually solving any problems in the
real world.
All of that reminded me of one of the biggest viral videos of all time, Kony 2012.
If you happen to be online in 2012, you almost certainly remember it.
I mean, Akoni 2012 was this well-produced, half-hour long video that told the story about human rights abuses of a warlord based in Uganda named Joseph Kony.
And it presented an ambitious plan to bring him to justice.
The video and that plan were conceived by a San Diego-based non-profit organization called Invisible Children.
So, when Kony 2012 was released, it was, at the time, the most viral video in history, achieving 100 million views in just six days.
Wow.
So, even at the time, the most famous pop stars couldn't achieve that level of virality.
Like, Lady Gaga's music video for Bad Romance took 18 days to cross the 100 billion viewpoint.
And the maker of that viral video is a man named Jason Russell.
But instead of riding high on that success, Jason Russell had a very public and very naked meltdown after cracking under the pressure of sudden fame and intense criticism.
So actually naked, right?
Actually naked, yes.
To give you an idea of what Jason's all about, here's how he describes himself on the Invisible Children website back in the day.
Jason Radical Russell is a co-founder of Invisible Children, as well as our grand storyteller and dreamer.
His sparks of creative intelligence and insanity have propelled IC to redefine the concept of humanitarian work, offering new life to old hope.
What?
A filmmaker by trade, Jason graduated from the University of Southern California's film school with a degree in cinema production.
He admires Oprah, Bono, Steven Spielberg, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Baz Luhrmann, and Dan Eldon, and believes wholeheartedly in magic and the impossible.
Already a proud papa to Gavin Danger and Everly Darling, Jason wants to have nine more children with his beautiful wife Danica, the girl who has been his best friend for over 23 years.
Wait, he wants to put nine children in her?
I want eleven children!
But he has two and the kids' names- That's like a threat.
If I'm in a relationship with someone and they tell me that I'm- I wanna put- Even to provide the sperm for nine births, I would be horrified!
You're milking me!
I wanna put double digits kids in ya.
You're milking me!
These names are unforgivable.
Gavin the Danger and Everly Darling.
This guy is very Californian and he's very Christian.
This guy is an escaped AI from Pixar, let's not... 100%.
Now, before we dive deep into the history of our hero...
Let's take a look at Jason Russell's nemesis, Joseph Kony.
To understand the rise of Kony, I'm going to rely on a 1997 report titled The Scars of Death, Children Abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, which was published by the non-profit organization Human Rights Watch.
So, in the north of Uganda, there is an ethnolinguistic group of people known as the Acholi.
Through most of the second half of the 20th century, the Acholi people were in conflict with ethnic groups in southern Uganda.
This conflict was sparked, interestingly, by British colonialism.
So, there's at least one instance in which British colonialism made things worse for the local population.
Can't possibly have others.
Let's not look too far.
During the period of British colonial administration, the British mostly employed people in southern Uganda for the civil service, while people in northern Uganda, especially the Acholi, were mostly recruited into the armed forces.
This created a division between the Northern and Southern Uganda that persisted even after the nation's independence
in 1962.
Southern Uganda was wealthier and contained most of the country's educated elite,
while people in the North were much poorer and often relied on cattle farming and military service to support
themselves.
This socio-economic division was exacerbated by frequent bouts of ethnic violence.
So it sounds like basically what happened is that the British rolled in, they created an ethnic caste system, and they said, fuck off, bye, have fun with that.
Fast forward through a lot of turmoil to 1987.
At this point, militant Ancholes are being led by a woman named Alice Laquena, who claimed to be a spirit medium.
Laquena anointed her soldiers with shea butter oil, which she claimed would cause bullets to bounce harmlessly off of their chests.
During Laquena's final clash with the Ugandan government, She led thousands of Acholi soldiers towards the capital city of Kampala.
Laquena got within 60 miles of the capital, where they encountered a large government force.
Laquena's soldiers, armed with rifles at best, proved to be no match for the military's heavy artillery, and thousands of her followers were killed.
Laquena herself fled to Kenya.
In the wake of Laquena's defeat, the Ancholi rebel movement disintegrated and many rebels surrendered.
But a few remained defiant under the leadership of a young relative of Alice Laquena's.
His name?
Joseph Kony.
Kony claimed to be the inheritor of Laquena's spiritual tradition.
His small group of rebels eventually came to call itself the Lord's Resistance Army.
Joseph Kony's goal was to violently overthrow the government and spiritually purify the Ancholi people from within.
Oh no.
However, the Lord's Resistance Army had a tendency to focus more on innocent civilians than the government.
Here is a description of some of the atrocities committed by the group from that Human Rights Watch report I mentioned earlier.
The Lord's Resistance Army is ostensibly dedicated to overthrowing the government of Uganda, but in practice the rebels appear to devote most of the time to attacks on the civilian population.
They raid villages, loot stores and homes, burn down houses and schools, and rape, mutilate, and slaughter civilians unlucky enough to be in their path.
When the rebels move on, they leave behind the bodies of the dead.
But after each raid, the rebels take away some of those who remain living.
In particular, they take young children, often dragging them away from the dead bodies of their parents and siblings.
The rebels prefer children of 14 to 16, but at times they abduct children as young as 8 or 9, boys and girls alike.
They tie the children to one another and force them to carry heavy loads of looted goods as they march them off into the bush.
Children who protest or resist are killed.
Children who cannot keep up or become tired or ill are killed.
Children who attempt to escape are killed.
The report goes on to describe just a litany of just unimaginable atrocities committed by this group.
So just everyone agrees that Joseph Kony is a incredibly evil man.
But this whole situation is essentially the product of a terrible, decades-long, unnecessary conflict that gave rise to an indiscriminately violent rebel group.
The situation in Uganda was a thorny problem that required one to untangle the complex economic, historical, religious, and ethnic forces at play to even begin to understand it.
Who could possibly help bring peace to Uganda once again?
Who could end Africa's longest-running war?
How about a Christian theater kit from San Diego?
Jason Russell.
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