An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
Ah, my poor beloved, earnest, do-gooding, farina-brained Americans. By now everyone in Portland has probably heard that contrary to their initial impression, it is not cool to wear a wristband and raise awareness about Kony, and in fact doing so is a sign that you may be racist, colonialist, and quite possibly terminally afflicted with the dread White Man's Burden, or perhaps just a fatuous, fashionable twit. This must be very confusing to people in Portland. Max Fisher explains it all to Portland in the Atlantic. Quite right he is, too.
It's the exchange on Twitter that followed that brightened me so:
From Teju Cole, who affords me shy hope for future of the English language:
The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.
This world exists simply to satisfy the needs—including, importantly, the sentimental needs—of white people and Oprah
I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.
Fisher responds:
Cole is not wrong, even if his language is soaked in resentment, that sentimentality has driven some of the Western world's worst abuses, and that behind this sentimentality is an assumption of the rightness of privilege. Paternalism, after all, is a way of casting oneself in a loving and familial role that also happens to exercise power over someone else, who is cast as subjugate whether they want to be or not.
But Cole makes the same mistake as Invisible Children, reducing an entire culture to his interactions with it and a few easy stereotypes, a monolithic mass to be judged and maybe even solved.
And then Cole:
Huh? I’m as American as you.
Game, set and match.
I refer you now to my friend Christy Quirk, a woman whose wiseness I have come to cherish more and more with every passing year in Turkey. She explains why Facebook campaigns hurt democratic movements--and would twice as certainly have no effect on the fate of Kony, in as much as the LRA is no longer in Uganda. In any event, the LRA is much smaller than previously thought. It does not have have 30,000 or 60,000 child soldiers. The figure of 30,000 refers to the total number of children abducted by the LRA over the past 30 years. In October last year, Obama authorized the deployment of 100 US army advisers to help the Ugandan military track down Kony. There is in fact no threat to remove them.
As Christy tartly observes,
There are lots of things about Facebook that annoy me (mostly how it went from being a useful way to find out what your coolest friends were doing, listening to or reading to becoming an echo chamber of your most annoying friends’ scores on idiotic quizzes, but that’s a different blog post on a different blog) but the thing that bothers me most these days is all the groups and petitions devoted to “supporting” various democratic movements.
Moldova introduced itself to hundreds of thousand clicktivists earlier this year. Then there was Iran. (The online response to China’s cracking some Uighur skull has been, at best, muted, at least in my network. I suspect it’s because there aren’t as many hot girls involved). The most recent example comes from Baku, where two Azeri youth activists were beaten up by sportsmenki and tossed in jail for doing little more than having dinner at a downtown Baku restaurant.
Since this happened, I have been invited to no fewer than six groups that express support for them, but have not joined one. I feel bad about this, but the only things less effective than Azeri youth activists are the Facebook groups set up to “draw international attention” to their situation. (Harsh? I know from Azeri youth activists). Furthermore, they fail to achieve even that amorphous goal: the tepid support most of the groups receive does little but illustrate what is already screamingly obvious — very few outside Azerbaijan care what goes on there. And after generating all the international attention, then what?
Like Twitter, Facebook democracy support groups bug me for several reasons.
First, Facebook groups prolong the illusion held by many in opposition movements in the Former Soviet Union that democratic change can come from anywhere but inside the country. One of the Azeri opposition’s favorite strategies for achieving power was writing lots of letters to foreign leaders, taking expensive junkets to Brussels and beseeching visiting OSCE diplomats plaintively. Really, who can blame them for wanting to spend more time in Vienna than Yevlax? However, challenging despots requires hard, risky groundwork, convincing skeptical voters in your own country that you’re responsible enough to be trusted with the reins of power and that it’s worth the risk to join you.
Second, it prolongs the illusion that organizing is as easy as clicking a button. It’s a lot more fun to organize several thousand Europeans and Americans to support your “cause” than it is to mobilize IDPs still living in train cars 14 years after the oil-rich country lost a war. It’s a lot easier to broadcast a Twitter to the universe than it is to go out and talk to people in Lenkoran who don’t have electricity, much less internet, face to face.
Third, it diminishes the stakes. If people in Azerbaijan truly want to boot the kleptocrats (and there is plenty of evidence to suggest most don’t), they have to join civil society organizations or political parties or labor unions that oppose the government. They have to volunteer to monitor elections. As a result, jobs will be lost, university places sacrificed, nights spent in jail and heads cracked. The idea that it can be done any other way is an insult to the people who have tried and succeeded (or, tried and failed).
The situation in Azerbaijan right now is terrible. It was terrible before Facebook and will continue to be terrible long after Facebook joins Friendster and MySpace in the dust-bin of social networking history. If you’re going to click, click on something like Daily Puppy or your favorite porn site. It will have about as much impact on Azerbaijan.
Save the wristband, though, my loves: I'm sure it will come in handy when next you adopt an adorable pet cause. Care2Care greeting cards suggests many fine causes to me every day. Perhaps you'd care to join this cause for legalizing chickens? A modest goal, entirely within your reach.
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Aug '10
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
The Obama campaign marches on. Obama is the activist worldsaver !! Remember the 100 or so troops he inserted ? Well, they turn out to be campaign workers ,probably subcontracted by Anita Dunn.* updated as i just saw it used as a talking point on Lou Dobbs by the token liberal in a panel trying to rebut the usually unassailable Kevin Williamson. Proof enough for me
The Corner has a good article here on this as well.
My 15 yr old implored me to get this important stuff on Ricochet this morning as I dropped her at school. We didn't have time for the chronology of African horror stories. I wonder how she'll feel about King Leopold II.
Obama's buddies at the UN must be holding their sides trying not to laugh. Those 100 troops are hiding in barracks somewhere.
The old jokes about the sound of one hand clapping ? Not too funny in Sierra Leone.
This will pass, as soon as the Obama campaign ratchets up the "Foreign Policy Credibility Tour 2012 " , titled Kony 2012 , in this episode the famed killed of OBL goes after the worst man in the world.
Edited on March 10, 2012 at 1:14amApr '11
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
I like this article, mostly as it affirms many of my personal feelings about Facebook activism. I'll engage in a friendly debate there, but the various causes and click-to-support things I've found annoying as mail spam.
Also: I clicked the Daily Puppy link at the end of the original post. Huzzah!
May '10
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
"White Savior Industrial Complex"
Oh thank you, thank you, thank you.
Jun '10
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
Social networks create the illusion of a link between caring about something (or saying that you care about something) and real change that will make that "something" better. Cristy Quirk is right: one Facebook support group or 10,000 support groups will do nothing for Azerbaijan. The situation in that country will change when its citizens, as Rob Long says, put some skin in the game (see, e.g., Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa).
I can do some real good helping my neighbor, a stroke sufferer, with some of his yard work, or by telling my grandchildren what my Dad did in WWII and why it matters to them, or helping clean up the banks of the river that runs three miles from my home. The farther a problem is away from us, the less we can do about it.
I'd love to see Tibet freed from the iron boot of China, and I admire people who actually are doing something meaningful, but I can't do much to help. I can cut my neighbor's grass.
May '10
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
So what you are telling me is the road to hell is paved with good intentions?
Apr '11
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
A few months ago I was at a kinda heated Henry Jackson Society meeting with, amongst others, the Azeri ambassador and some dissidents. The truly terrible way that the ambassador and assorted employees and allies handled the meeting suggested to me that engagement with facebook would probably be a considerable help to the government there. I'm not sure that the opposition/ dissidents would benefit much from further exposure, but I think it's been moderately helpful as a networking tool for them, and that western pro-azeri pages would probably be helpful in that, too, should someone be persuaded to care.
Edited on March 10, 2012 at 1:21amFeb '12
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
"If people in Azerbaijan truly want to boot the kleptocrats (and there is plenty of evidence to suggest most don’t)..."
"The situation in Azerbaijan right now is terrible"...
Can it really be both? Having a number of friends from Baku, I hear the former, and not the latter. They have a secular country - the only one of 5 Muslim former Soviet Republics. Sure, they have corruption and suppression of opposition - but no more than the neighbors. And they have fairly independent foreign policy. So, by the standards of the neighborhood they are not that terrible... Are they worse than Turkey or Saudi Arabia?
Jun '10
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
James Of England
A few months ago I was at a kinda heated Henry Jackson Society meeting with, amongst others, the Azeri ambassador and some dissidents. The truly terrible way that the ambassador and assorted employees and allies handled the meeting suggested to me that engagement with facebook would probably be a considerable help to the government there. I'm not sure that the opposition/ dissidents would benefit much from further exposure, but I think it's been moderately helpful as a networking tool for them, and that western pro-azeri pages would probably be helpful in that, too, should someone be persuaded to care. · 39 minutes ago
Edited 38 minutes ago
James: If there is evidence that the social network support groups actually help, then so be it. To the extent they highlight a problem or an atrocity, that might help. They may be tool, but if they are the center of a strategy to take control from kleptocrats, I think they're doomed to failure. Until the people take the kind of risks that a Havel or Walesa took, it's mostly just eyewash.
Jun '10
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
Insulting someone's intelligence or naiveté is not the best way to get them to find productive ways to help. It makes them think everything is a scam. Is this? Probably. I did my homework so I did not send the group in money but it opened my eyes to evil that is happening in the world so I can pray for a solution and a viable way to help.
Mocking is the least useful tool. For a group that swears by the Ricochet Code of Conduct, well, I wish I could appreciate the irony that cussing is forbidden but mocking is not. I just can't today.
Feb '12
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
Wisdom from Cracked.com.
Jul '11
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
I ignored the whole issue. There is so much oil money flowing in to Uganda that their biggest problems are continuing the fake sugar shortage in order to kill the rainforest and put rigs on faux sugar plantations. The Russians, Chinese, US and England are all vying to bribe the politicians and Bin Laden family construction equipment is flowing in as the ecosystem dies along with every gay person in Uganda who are now summarily executed these days. I am curious how the well intentioned on facebook are going to change any of the above.
Edited on March 10, 2012 at 8:17amMar '11
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
(1/2) You have a point but you are missing the one being made. As Ms. Berlinski notes the LRA has been terrorizing central Africa for decades and after horrible slaughter and ruthless effort it is finally on its' last legs. For a plethora of "Facebook activists" to suddenly become concerned about the horrors occurring in the Third World at large and imagine their sympathy can make any difference at this late stage trivializes what has gone before. It is offensive.
During the previous Administration President Bush offered intel and training support to Uganda in this effort and last year President Obama furthered that with some AFCOM Special Forces to finish the job. At this point that is all we can offer. Faux Facebook compassion is little better than mockery at this late date.
Mar '11
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
(2/2) The only fashion in which this video does have some value is actually the one you mention AUMom, if not the one intended by its' purveyors. For a moment US citizens are spending some time contemplating the evil and horror that exists beyond our borders. That educates a new generation and it has value.
Edited on March 10, 2012 at 5:33amNov '11
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
This is a priceless sentence:
Do they pay Atlantic writers extra for ramming as many assumptions and nebulous abstractions into a sentence as they possibly can? As Rick Santorum might say, it makes me want to throw up.
Jul '11
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
White rule, for all it's horrific ills, likely postponed genocides of massive proportion as we are destined to see this century as food and water become scarce.
Edited on March 10, 2012 at 8:19amRe: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
I felt the same way Claire does the first couple days this campaign was launched, but reading this patronizing post has made me realize how foolish I've been.
No harm can come from people, especially young Americans, being aware of the evils in this world. Some teenager who might otherwise be texting friends all night may be moved to pray for the situation in central Africa. I'm not going to mock that.
May '10
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
Am I the only one who doesn't understand the context of this post? I think I slept through the entire sentimentalism spasm.
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
Yes, Mao, it's exactly the harm that comes from young people deciding they must "save the planet," "stand up against corporations," or "condemn Israeli apartheid." It's the harm that comes from a vague awareness of a problem and the instant adoption of a fashionable cause unmatched by any seriousness.
Jul '11
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
Claire, that is a great answer.
Jul '10
Re: An Exquisite Footnote to the Kony2012 Sentimentalism Spasm
I dunno. The only people more tedious than the ones who fancy themselves regional experts because they watched a viral video, are the ones who ascribe everything to "white privilege".
Myself, I lost interest when it became apparent that the money wasn't going to cut a check to the Artists Formerly Known as Blackwater™, to go in and snuff this S.O.B.