By: Patrick T. Adams
Two weeks have passed now since what can only be classified as a social media phenomenon: the Kony 2012 viral video. For about a week, this 30-minute video, sponsored by the not-for-profit group Invisible Children Inc., spread like wildfire through YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, bringing the video to over 85 million views. It had nothing to do with the usual suspects of social media mentions: March Madness, American Idol, the GOP campaign, etc. In fact, oddly and frighteningly enough, it was political without seeming political – your typical trip into postmodern hipsteria. It had nothing to do with the Keystone pipeline, the Arab Spring, ObamaCare’s constitutionality, birth control, or unemployment, but rather with the welfare of displaced and abused Ugandans amidst a violent insurrection led by religious extremist Joseph Kony. There is a crucial contention to shed light on, though not with the moral status of this civil war in itself. On the contrary, the contention is with the U.S. decision to intervene politically and militarily. I can tell already that I’m fighting an uphill battle against a vast social media army, but you have to climb a few flights of stairs just to defenestrate anything.
The subject matter of the video concerns Joseph Kony, a Ugandan guerilla warlord and religious zealot who is notorious for his abduction and conscription of thousands of children into the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). While his political ambitions are to usurp the current Ugandan regime and erect a theocracy based on the 10 Commandments – a sort of Christian Sharia law – his militant sadism and mystical obsession with black magic seem to suggest pathological megalomania.
There is no question that Kony is truly evil and quite insane – bearing an uncanny resemblance to Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – but are his actions proper grounds for a U.S. political or military intervention? Many seem to think so, including George W. Bush (ordered the 2008-2009 Operation Lightning Thunder during his presidency), President Obama (signed into law the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act), and an overwhelming consensus crossing both sides of the aisle in both the Senate and House of Representatives. The acclaimed documentarians from Invisible Children clearly reached some very elite ears in addition to those of several impassioned Americans.
The government’s role, however – despite years of neoconservative and liberal welfare wars – is not to apportion its troops’ lives and its civilians’ money for the sake of foreign disputes that have negligible relevance to U.S. foreign policy interests. The government, as the American Founders imagined and established, should be reined in because of its monopoly on the use of force, a monopoly to be exercised only in retaliation to initiated force (there is no such thing as a right to initiate the use of force). Man requires individual rights, within a social context, as a moral sanction to act on his own judgment for the sake of his own life. To surrender one’s judgment to another or idling oneself to deterministic forces is to surrender the only human means of survival: the mind. In this respect, government is necessary as a means to securing man’s rights.
Rights are also not determined by arbitrary, subjective whims. Conceptually, rights are conciliated by a philosophical axiom, the law of identity, meaning that rights are not contradictory (i.e. they do not apply only to certain individuals but not others, or in some scenarios but not others). The identity in question when regarding man’s rights is the identity of man qua man, thus by being a man (read: human being) one has certain rights. As mentioned before, man’s identity is that of an organism who survives by the unfettered use of his mind, and rights are the recognition of this fact insofar as they leave a man free to follow the convictions of his own mind. A slave owner who believes in the right to life while denying it to his slaves has some premises to recheck.
A proper application of individual rights to foreign policy will show that government action not on its citizens’ behalf is a sacrifice of its citizens’ pursuits, and therefore of their individual rights. International political and military engagements require an enormous commitment of resources: strategic planning, time, money, and often human lives, with the latter being the most important consideration. When and if the government commits these things to any other purpose than ensuring the protection of its citizens, it is then abusing the powers delegated to it.
This is the case with the U.S. providing assistance to the Ugandan government. One hundred U.S. troops have been committed by the authorization of President Obama, but consider taxpayer dollars as well. According to a Congressional Budget Office cost estimate published in late 2009, implementation of the Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act would cost $28 million over the 2010-2014 period.
But these are just insignificant considerations, right? It’s just 100 troops. They’re just advisory. It’s only $28 million. The Ugandans are less privileged than we are.
To think in such a way drops context and marginalizes our own problems. The U.S. is not a disposable asset to the rest of the world simply by being the most prosperous nation on Earth. Those 100 troops, advisory or not, are being put at risk simply by allying against such a radical militant group, and even if it were just one troop, that doesn’t reduce the significance of that life, let alone 100 of them. Servicemen do serve a purpose, but it’s to protect our individual rights, not to distribute war handouts. Remember the hellhole of Vietnam? The U.S. initially became involved only in sending Green Berets as “advisors” to the South Vietnamese. We all know how that turned out. It’s really easy to get desensitized to numbers in this day and age when politicians toss around the military and billions of dollars like pocket change. This is why it’s so important to deal in concepts in lieu of the sensory overstimulation and shock value coughed up by sensationalist documentarians and politicians.
Also, the focal point of this movement is what appears to be a madman driven by religious ideology. Assuming Kony is still alive - and apparently there is reasonable speculation that he isn’t - who’s to say that making him “famous,” as the Invisible Children movement intends, or offering financial and military assistance to his enemies won’t provoke the LRA to commit retaliatory violence, possibly exacerbating the situation and requiring more effort to defeat the LRA? Who’s to say that this won’t become pro-Kony propaganda that gains him recruits in the form of opportunists and similarly minded ideologues? Islamic terrorists acting in the name of Allah certainly didn’t mind provoking the powerhouse United States over the past few decades.
However, it’s important to identify the critical difference between the actions of Islamic militants, specifically al-Qaeda, and those of the LRA. The former actually initiated aggression against innocent Americans in multiple instances throughout the 1990s and 2001. In such cases, the U.S. had moral justification in responding with retaliatory force. On the other hand, the LRA is indeed contemptible, but they do not warrant a U.S. political or military intervention; they have not initiated aggression against us.
It’s no wonder that pacifist anti-war groups gain so much clout when the U.S. sacrifices human lives and spends itself into oblivion with so many altruistic liberation wars and skirmishes. On the current path, if the time comes when the U.S. is truly put in a position to defend its citizens’ rights and safety, it will be even more difficult to gather the resolve to successfully engage in an armed conflict when resources are allocated elsewhere.
What is particularly unsettling is that a string of well edited documentary clips and poorly developed concepts is enough to mystify and incite mob rule from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. And a couple of weeks later, it seems to be completely forgotten. Although it’s creepy, it’s not surprising in a country where the overwhelming attitude is that benevolence requires coercively forcing the sacrifice of its citizenry to the latest emotional impulse. The proper alternative to this altruistic bandwagoning, however, is a genuine intellectual commitment to principles and not mere stimuli. A positive difference in the state of the world can’t be achieved by drawing tickets randomly out of a lottery of issues.
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