Konyi

 March 2012

The Konyi video by Invisible Children is not exactly what it appears to be.

Konyi is not the world's worst war criminal. He is not even close. The US killed nearly 1/2 million Iraqi children before the second invasion.

Konyi is not in Uganda. He is probably in the Democratic Republic of Congo, if he is alive. The story of the Congo itself is tragic. You might look up King Leopold of Belgium.

The US has been chasing Konyi for months, with US troops, more than 100 of them.

The US is rarely, if ever, motivated by humanitarian reasons.

The Ugandan government, allied to the US is corrupt to the core. Indeed, that government came into being using child warriors. Invisible Children wants you to back both the US and Uganda.

The Ugandan government just sold some of its best land, which was occupied by tribes, to a Saudi billionaire. Then the Ugandan army forced those people to move.

Africans are sick of rich white Americans telling them how to solve their problems. This goes back a long time. An old African saying, "first we had land and no bibles. Now, we have bibles and no land."

Invisible Children, run by rich white youth, pays its personnel incredible salaries, well over 90 thousand a year.

They want you to send money to them and buy trinkets they sell.

Invisible Children wants you to believe that all of humanity has common interests. That is nonsense. Humanity is divided by many competing interests--race, nation--and I say the key one is class. Anyone suggesting to you that all classes are united is probably about to pick your pocket.

That is not a road to social justice. It is, instead, a certain path to even more injustice, while the Invisible Children crowd moves on to collect more money.

It is flatly silly to think that electronic media is the pathway to a better world. It is not. It can be momentarily useful, but over time the government can easily control it, as China does, play with people on it, as they have before, and use it as a massive source of disinformation, which I think Invisible Child is.

The only key point Invisible Child makes is that people can investigate concrete situations, and do something.

Everything else is wrong. It is a terrible pedagogical project. Here’s the big things IC has wrong:

*Rely on money and celebrities, most of them multi-millionaires, easily fooled.

*Send Invisible Children money to keep their loop in play. Money solves problems.

*Believe that posters, wristbands, and trinkets really matter, when they make IC rich.

*We are all in this together in one wonderful humanity. We are not. Class war is everywhere.

*Let IC think for you and, above all, do what they tell you to do.

What Invisible Children represents is a graphic description of self-alienation. You give up your analytical abilities to someone else, you do what you are told, you deepen the oppression of yourself and others, you empower your enemies, unwittingly, and you never get to the root of the problem that you set out to address.

Sure, Konyi should be caught and tried. But he is nothing compared to the nation states at war now.