If you choose to believe that political leaders only choose to act based upon self-enrichment schemes, I won't be able to change your mind.
I would attempt to explain to you how a political scientist looks at democratic leaders. The paradigm for determining what choices leaders make is nearly universally to determine choice-outcome for re-election. Simply put, democratic leaders will always choose to act on what they believe will keep them elected. Again, I'm not making this up. Asking anyone with a brain and a B.S. in Political Science.
Of course, you're too thick on these plots and schemes of the eeevil people in power. For everyone else, at least you can see that I tried to reason.
Next, Uganda. Uganda has serious problems. Nobody says otherwise. So what? That Kony isn't in Uganda. So what? It's still a thorn to Uganda, the DRC, the Central African Republic, and other nearby countries. Your perspective of looking at this as a country-based problem is far too simple to show a true appreciation for this complex, multi-national issue of social injustice. If you look at Kony as a "Ugandan problem", you've already proven your failure to understand the issue.
However, for the sake of a 30 minute video, which by its nature aims to get the viewer to become more informed on the issue, it's an excusable error of specificity. If you're trying to make an argument on the entirety of the issue outside of that 30 minute box, I'm holding you to a higher standard. You can't argue this issue within the framework of a national-level problem.
Next, the experts. We could throw expert opinions at each other all day. I've read quite a few. The vast majority see stopping Kony as a a great thing. Many are critical of the possibility, the cost, the impossibility with the status quo balance of power at the time of authorship. So what?
KONY2012/.Invisible Children is the attempt at playing the gamechanger. It's an attempt to get the Western world to help pay the cost and tip the balance to end this atrocious injustice. If it succeeds (and that we're arguing about this to begin with indicates that it has), then the discussion is reframed so that we start to look at this major international problem without the Afro-pessimism (borderline racism) that has pervaded the discussion in the Western world for so long so as to prevent their honest approach at a serious and ignored problem.
I mean, let's look at the Bosnian crisis. Our actions there are completely against the argument you present- we had virtually no economic interest in the region. In fact, America wanted the fledgling EU to solve the problem and bring justice to mass murderers like Milosevic. They didn't, NATO and the US stepped in when multi-lateral talks failed to address the crisis. The airstrikes to subdue military conflict (and later NATO ground troops) forced the Dayton Accords.
You want to talk about a hot political mess, there you have it. And those groups had some serious military hardware.
But what may be most important, they were white. And European.
Why Bosnia, but not Rwanda? The misstep in Somalia and political backlash didn't help, but let's be honest... it was Afro-pessimism, this foolish idea that the black African is somehow immoral or incapable. That they are less deserving of relief from tragedy and are mere victims of their own wretched backwardness. That's the same line of thinking that prompted the White Man's Burden, that the white man must change and civilize the black and brown, and now it fuels your foolish paradigm for doing nothing at all. All humans are equal, but some are more equal than others?
And Kafein, that's a very fair perspective to have on it. Even if it were about the oil, that's a pretty good reason to intervene. Nobody wins if the oil isn't tapped. But I really can't stress enough that you think about what you said, that Africans are doing "nothing to help themselves". That's just not true and fails to consider the lasting problems that stemmed from Colonialism. I'm not going to blame you for that view. It's not a new one, and assuming you were raised in a Western country that's certainly what society seems to think collectively. But it's wrong.
I'll end on an important note. Use some foresight here. Our ancestors failed at doing so time and time again. We look back at all the social injustices in modern history, and in every single case we know that we should have done something about it sooner. We should have stopped the chocolate chip cookies before they murdered millions, we should have been more wary of Stalinism before it murdered millions more, we should have stopped Milosevic sooner, we should have stopped the genocide in Rwanda. But during all of these events, we failed not in the end but in their beginnings. We hesitated, we argued, we didn't want to act. We let it get as bad as it could before we made the hard choices and did what needed to be done, if even so much.
When will we overcome our own errant nature? We're already 26 years late. That's long enough in my mind.
