more thoughts on Kony 2012

There has been quite a bit of talk recently about the KONY 2012 project, both positive and negative.  Below are some good thoughts a friend of mine shared on facebook, along with a video, which helps us understand the larger picture.  Regardless of your thoughts on the KONY project and their tactics, it certainly is bringing quite a bit of attention to the tragic, heartbreaking situation in Uganda.  It's good for all of us to dig a little deeper into these things. 

You and I may or may not agree with Invisible Children's approach to the KONY project, but the fact remains that they are taking action where they see injustice.  I just hope that these actions bring help, not harm...and that we can all find ways to take action against atrocity.  

‎"What KONY 2012 doesn't find time to address in its dramatic 30 minutes is that the primary beneficiary of Invisible Children's call for U.S. military assistance and intervention is the oppressive Ugandan military and its general, President Yoweri Museveni. Museveni is, by most accounts, a brutal dictator who gets credit for, among other things, the following crimes against humanity:

1. Being the first in Uganda to normalize the strategy of kidnapping and forcefully conscripting thousands of children into armed combat and using rape as a weapon of war -- against both women and men.

2. The forced expulsion of 2 million of northern Uganda's mostly Acholi people from their land and homes into squalid concentration camps – an ethnic-cleansing policy that lead to thousands of deaths of mostly children from poor sanitation, disease, starvation, and brutality at the hands of government troops.

3. Contributing to the ongoing conflicts in neighboring countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo which earned Museveni and the Ugandan government an indictment and guilty verdict at the International Court of Justice for, among other things: "acts of killing, torture and other forms of inhumane treatment of the Congolese civilian population, destroying villages and civilian buildings, failing to distinguish between civilian and military targets, failing to protect the civilian population in fighting with other combatants, training child soldiers, inciting ethnic conflict and failing to take measures to put an end to such conflict."

We don't learn any of this by watching KONY 2012. The tragic and more complicated reality is that Joseph Kony is just one of a number of brutal tyrants in the region who need to be brought to justice. By following Invisible Children's overly simplistic and thoroughly Americentric one-track solution of supporting Museveni and the thugs in his army with American advisors, military equipment & technology, as well as millions in tax-payer dollars, we might find down the road that this is yet another case where the cure is much worse than the disease."