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(1) By Stephen Gowans, what’s left

Professing grave concern over Syria’s escalating violence, the United Nations General Assembly on Friday demanded that “all in Syria immediately and visibly commit to ending violence.”

This would be all to the good except that the General Assembly’s idea of what constitutes “all in Syria” and what it means by “ending violence” amounts to one side in the civil war (the Republic) laying down its arms unilaterally, while President Assad steps down and cedes his authority to an interim government approved by the “international community,” which is to say, the very same countries that are furnishing the rebels with arms, logistical support, diplomatic assistance, territory from which to launch attacks, salaries for fighters, lucre to induce government officials to defect, and propaganda.

The resolution is hardly a plea for peace. It’s a demand that the Republic capitulate. (NB: Russia and China along with a dozen other nations denounced the resolution. See addendum below.) Significantly, the resolution’s sponsor, Saudi Arabia, is the rebels’ main arms supplier. No wonder the Bolivian representative to the UN was moved to declare that the aim of the text is not to assist the Syrian population, but to ‘defeat Damascus’.” “Anybody who doesn’t believe that needs only read it,” he said.

Indeed, the text is perfectly clear: peace means regime change and regime change means peace.

“Rapid progress on a political transition,” the General Assembly said is “the best opportunity” to resolve the conflict peacefully. That is: peace equals Assad stepping down. Or, peace, yes, but on the rebels’, which is to say, the United States’, terms. And UN General-Secretary Ban Ki-moon, echoing US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, has underscored the equating of peace with Assad’s departure, defining “political transition” as a necessary condition of peace.

Importantly, the United States—whose efforts to eliminate Syria’s Arab nationalist government antedate the Arab Spring—opposes Assad, not because he is a “dictator” or “kills his own people” as the propaganda has it, but because his government has long charted a course on foreign and economic policy independent of Washington. Assad’s crime, in the view of Washington, is to have tried to privilege the Syrian population over the interests, both immediate and distal, of US banks and corporations.

Significantly, the resolution ignores the political and constitutional concessions the Syrian government has already made in what has turned out to be a fruitless attempt to engineer a peaceful settlement with an opposition that is hostile to peace. With Libya as a model for how a opposition with the backing of only part of the population need not negotiate with the government it opposes if it can enlist the support of the United States and Europe, the Syrian rebels have never had an incentive to sit down with Damascus and work out a modus vivendi. On the contrary, all the incentives are on the side of an intransigent commitment to violent overthrow of the government. The overthrow comes about as a result of the support in arms and political and propaganda backing the United States and its allies provide, and therefore is effectively authored in Washington, but attributed, for political and propaganda purposes, to the rebels’ own efforts. Having the US State Department, CIA and Pentagon on your side can more than adequately make up for the deficiency of failing to win the support of significant parts of the population.

The General Assembly’s text demands that “the first step in ending the violence must be made by the Syrian authorities,” who are called upon to withdraw their troops. It is highly unlikely that a US ally would ever be called upon to withdraw its troops in the face of an armed insurrection. This is a standard reserved exclusively for communist, socialist, and economic nationalist governments—those whose commitment to self-directed, independent development runs counter to the unrestrained profit-making of US banks and corporations. No international body has ever seriously demanded that Saudi Arabia refrain from violence in putting down rebellions in its eastern provinces, or that Bahrain—home to the US Fifth Fleet—cease its use of violence to extinguish its own, local, eruption of the Arab Spring (a military action against civilians ably assisted by Saudi tanks.) Asking Damascus to unilaterally lay down its arms is a demand for capitulation, disguised as a desire for peace.

Parenthetically, the uprisings in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are regularly depicted in the Western media as “Shia” and backed by Shia Iran and therefore sectarian, not as popular democratic movements against tyrannical monarchies. By contrast, the Syrian uprising, though having a strong sectarian content and being principally Sunni and supported by the Sunni monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the Sunni-dominated government of Turkey, is depicted as a democratic uprising against dictatorship, not sectarian.

The United States and Israel, in backing the General Assembly resolution, denounced Syria’s use of “heavy weapons, armour and the air forces against populated areas”—though Washington’s concern for using overwhelming military force against populated areas stops at Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Populated areas of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon have felt the heavy hand of Israeli heavy weapons, armour and air force. And Turkey’s rulers—who allow their territory to be used by the rebels as a launching pad for attacks on Syria—continue to kill their own people in their longstanding war against Kurd nationalists.

Ban Ki-moon warned the Syrian government that its actions “might constitute crimes against humanity or war crimes, which must be investigated and the perpetrators held to account,” words he never uttered in connection with Nato’s assault on Libya nor Saudi Arabia’s and Bahrain’s use of violence to quell uprisings in their countries. Nor have his predecessors uttered similar words in connection with the United States’ and Israel’s frequent and undoubted crimes against humanity and war crimes. Moreover, Ban hasn’t warned Syria’s rebels that they too will be held to account for their crimes. (The Libyan rebels haven’t been.)

Thirteen countries opposed the resolution, almost all of them committed to independent self-directed development outside the domination of the United States. These include Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

Against this axis of independence are the sponsors and chief backers of the resolution: the US-vassal Sunni petro-tyrannies—champions of a Sunni rebel movement that’s supposed to be (improbably) galvanized by democratic, not sectarian, ambitions—while the United States, its Nato allies, and Israel—authors of the gravest humanitarian tragedies of recent times, hypocritically profess concern over escalating violence in Syria. The resolution can hardly be seen as a genuine expression of humanitarian concern. It’s a demand for the Republic’s, which is to say, the non-sectarian Arab nationalists’, capitulation, disguised as a plea for peace, and a blatant taking of the imperialist side in a civil war.

Stephen Gowans is the founding editor of What’s Left, a leading Canadian political events column.

(2)
UN General Assembly targets Syria as US proxy war escalates
By Alex Lantier
4 August 2012

The UN General Assembly voted 133-12, with 31 abstentions, to endorse a resolution denouncing the Syrian government yesterday, as fighting escalated in the US-led proxy war in Syria. The vote was the focus of a massive propaganda campaign, aiming at placing blame for the bloody proxy war waged by the US and its European and Middle Eastern allies on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Having been blocked by Russian and Chinese vetoes at the UN Security Council from passing resolutions condemning Syria and giving a legal fig leaf for a US-led invasion, the US and its allies proceeded to organize a vote at the UN General Assembly.

The resolution effectively blamed Assad for the fighting, stating that “the first step in the cessation of violence has to be made by the Syrian authorities.” It denounced “the increasing use by the Syrian authorities of heavy weapons, including indiscriminate shelling from tanks and helicopters, and the failure to withdraw its troops and the heavy weapons to their barracks.”

This is nothing other than a demand that the Syrian government commit political suicide, by unilaterally disarming in the face of an international Islamist insurgency armed, financed, and organized by the US and its allies.

The vote came only days after reports emerged confirming that US President Barack Obama had previously signed a “finding” ordering US intelligence agencies to give covert aid to anti-Assad forces. It had already been widely reported that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are arming oppositional forces in Syria, which include a large number of foreign fighters recruited by Al Qaeda-affiliated groups. Their operations are directed from Adana, the site of the United States’ Incirlik air base in nearby Turkey.

Yesterday British Foreign Secretary William Hague confirmed that Britain is also giving covert support to anti-Assad forces. He said, “I do not ever comment on intelligence matters, but I can say that we are helping elements of the Syrian opposition, but in a practical and non-lethal way. We have helped them with communications of that kind, and we will help them more.”

Hague added that the British government aims to “isolate the Assad regime from its remaining associates, or friends, in the world.”
The UN General Assembly resolution also criticized the UN Security Council for its “failure” to act against Syria, in a barely veiled attack on Russia and China. They have voted against Security Resolutions criticizing Syria, fearing that such resolutions could allow Washington to openly attack Syria, the way NATO used UN resolution 1973 last year to justify its aggression in Libya. Both Russia and China voted against the resolution at the General Assembly.

With the lopsided General Assembly vote and its enthusiastic reception in the American and European press, the UN and the media functioned as lackeys of imperialism. Were it not for the deadly seriousness of the situation—the Syrian war alone has already cost over 10,000 lives, with 200,000 Syrians fleeing their country, and over 1 million turned into refugees inside Syria—the absurdity of the UN resolution would be laughable.

The UN resolution was drafted by the Saudi, Qatari, and Bahraini absolute monarchies. News reports presented the handiwork of these ultra-right Sunni-sectarian regimes, freshly covered in blood from their crushing of last spring’s mass protests in Bahrain, as part of a democratic US campaign to protect civilians from authoritarian governments!

Nor did anyone seek to explain what principles make the Assad regime’s use of heavy weapons in a proxy war with Washington more reprehensible than the Turkey’s bombings of Kurdish villages, as part of its long-standing military suppression of Turkey’s Kurdish minority.

All of these points are well known to the diplomats who gathered at the UN and voted for the resolution. One suspects that for many governments, their decision on how to vote was quickly settled by their financial dependence on US subsidies. The rest heeded the examples of heads of state who crossed Washington—Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, murdered in the streets of his bombed-out home town after being sodomized with a bayonet, or Assad, for whom the Washington Post recently predicted that the “only exit may be [a] body bag.”

In its slavish hypocrisy and propaganda, special mention must be reserved for the role of the American media, which is moving into full war mode. On Friday morning, the New York Times published a lead article by C.J. Chivers, which opened by declaring that “diplomatic efforts [are] dead and the future of Syria [is] playing out on the battlefield.” The announcement by Kofi Annan on Friday that he will resign as UN negotiator for Syria is seen as confirmation of the end to all negotiations with the Assad government.

The US media has enthusiastically endorsed the anti-Assad forces, even after it has been widely reported that Al Qaeda is active among them. This ranges from the sympathetic portrayal on last night’s ABC News show of anti-Assad youth, armed with Kalashnikovs and driven to fight by faith in Allah, to Chivers and the Times praising anti-Assad insurgents’ use of roadside bombs.
In the Orwellian world of American bourgeois politics, no one stops to ask how to resolve the crying contradiction between US policy in Syria and its claim it is fighting a “war on terror.”

If the media cannot answer or indeed even ask such questions, it is because the answer is too explosive: the “war on terror”—ostensibly the basis of US politics for over a decade—is a pack of lies. Washington makes or breaks de facto alliances with Al Qaeda purely based on the cynical calculation of its imperialist interests.

Why is Washington fighting Assad and backing the brutal regime of Afghan President Hamid Karzai? The answer has nothing to with democracy or a fight against Islamist terrorism. It is that the US and its allies have first pickings of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth and enjoy the advantages of controlling its highly strategic location. Syria, however, is as an ally of Iran and Russia. It is considered a threat to Israel and, more broadly, to US hegemony in the Middle East.

As a result, the anti-Assad forces are lionized by US officials and the media, even as reports emerge of their hostility to the Syrian population and their mass killings of political opponents.

Thus yesterday Abu Ahmed, an official in the Syrian town of Azaz near the Turkish border, told Reuters: “The Free Syrian Army is causing us headaches now. If they don’t like the actions of a person, they tie him up, beat him, and arrest him. Personality differences between brigade members are being settled using kidnappings and force.”

A widely circulated video also appeared on YouTube showing the interrogation of Ali Zein al-Abidine Berri, a pro-Assad leader of an Aleppo clan who was captured by anti-Assad forces. The video shows him, his arm bandaged and his mouth bloodied, answering questions and shielding himself with his arms. He was reportedly executed after the interrogation.
____
Alex Lantier is a senior political analyst with WSWS.ORG.

 

ADDENDUM
BBC News/ Middle East
Russia says UN vote undermines peace efforts in Syria

Barbara Plett
BBC UN correspondent

Russia has said a resolution on Syria passed by the UN General Assembly undermines peace efforts there, as fighting continues on the ground. Moscow’s UN envoy, Vitaly Churkin, told reporters the resolution was one-sided and supported the armed opposition.

Western nations praised the resolution, which passed by 133 votes to 12 with 31 abstentions. It criticises both the UN’s own Security Council and the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The assembly debated the resolution, which was proposed by Saudi Arabia, shortly after the resignation of UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan and the failure of his six-point peace plan.

In Syria, government forces backed by tanks launched a new assault in Damascus while shelling continued in the country’s largest city, Aleppo.

The resolution condemning the Syrian government and calling for a political transition is not legally binding, but its Arab and Western sponsors see the overwhelming “Yes” vote as proof that they have world opinion behind them, despite the deadlock in the Security Council, which they harshly criticised.

Even so, the massive majority came at a price: the text had to be watered down in an attempt to win over many states, dropping explicit calls for Bashar al-Assad to step down and for member states to support Arab League sanctions.

And even though the opposition was small, it again included China and Russia. Moscow opposed the resolution as unbalanced, making clear that it believes the UN is taking one side in a civil war. So the General Assembly intervention will do nothing to bridge the fundamental divides in the Security Council, and may widen them.

Activists say more than 20,000 people – mostly civilians – have died in 17 months of unrest.

‘Strong message’
Russia voted “no” on Friday along with China, Syria, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Burma, Zimbabwe and Venezuela. Among those states abstaining were India and Pakistan.

Mr Churkin told the UN that the Saudi-drafted resolution concealed “blatant support for the armed opposition”.

He said his country regretted the resolution which “only aggravates confrontational approaches to the resolution of the Syrian crisis, doing nothing to facilitate dialogue between the parties”.  It was “written as if no armed opposition existed at all”, he added.

Mr Churkin pointed out that the resolution called on the UN envoy to work towards a transition to democracy in Syria, yet the envoy’s task had been to arrange dialogue, not regime change.

Chinese deputy UN ambassador Wang Min said pressuring Syria’s government would “cause further escalation of the turmoil” and allow the crisis to spread to neighbouring countries.

Russia and China have blocked three attempts in the UN Security Council to impose sanctions against Damascus.
Syria’s UN ambassador, Bashar Jaafari, suggested Saudi Arabia and fellow resolution sponsor Qatar were trying to act as both “a fireman and an arsonist at the same time”.

The resolution expresses “grave concern” at the escalation of violence in Syria and deplores “the failure of the Security Council to agree on measures to ensure the compliance of Syrian authorities with its decisions”.

It says it is up to the Syrian government to take the “first step in the cessation of violence”.

Susan Rice, the US envoy at the UN, welcomed the passing of the resolution. The UN General Assembly “sent a strong message today: the overwhelming majority of nations stand with the people of Syria”, she wrote on Twitter.

Britain’s UN ambassador Sir Mark Lyall Grant said a “colossal majority” had supported the resolution.

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said: “This resolution… sends a clear signal that the world stands together in condemning the Syrian regime’s systematic human rights violations and in calling for accountability.”

During the assembly’s session, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the conflict in Syria had become a “proxy war” and called on powers to overcome their rivalries in an effort to end the violence.

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From our friends at Pambazuka News—
Thank you, Pambazuka

By Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja

In his excellent contribution to this blog on 15 February 2012, Joshua Marks writes that: “It is difficult to make sense of the reaction of many Western governments and international actors to the disastrous elections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on November 28, 2011.”

To those of us who have followed the actions of Western governments and international actors since their complicity in the illegal removal of Patrice Lumumba from his position as the democratically elected prime minister of the Congo in September 1960 and his assassination on orders of the US and Belgian governments in January 1961, their total contempt for the democratic right of the Congolese people to choose their own leaders is perfectly understandable. It is symptomatic of the hypocrisy and double standards governing the foreign policies of these self-appointed promoters of democracy and human rights.

_________________________________________________________________________________

“Dead, living, free, or in prison on the orders of the colonialists, it is not I who counts. It is the Congo, it is our people for whom independence has been transformed into a cage where we are regarded from the outside… History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets… a history of glory and dignity.—— Patrice Lumumba, October 1960

 

_______________
In a presentation to the 2009 annual meeting of the African Studies Association in New Orleans, I made the following critique of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, based on his 4 June 2009 speech in Cairo:

‘The hope in Africa is that governments claiming to have the interests of the African people at heart, as Obama’s administration does, will support the continent’s popular struggles for democracy. That implies holding the same yardstick for all regimes, and not employing double standards or playing favorites with strategic allies. For example, the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is notorious in its violation of human rights and its conduct of fraudulent elections, and yet Washington is extremely timid in pressuring its ally on this matter. In his Cairo address to the Muslim world, President Obama had little to say about democracy in Egypt.’ [1]

The double standard in Obama’s approach was evident one month later, in his 11 July address to the Ghanaian Parliament, where he took a patronizing attitude in lecturing Africans on the virtues of strong institutions instead of autocratic leaders. In Cairo, on the other hand, he had no courage to remind his audience that Egypt, like so many other countries on the African continent, was being governed by an autocrat. As long as the autocrat was in full control of the country and its people, there was no need to call this strategic ally to order. The same applies to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia today, countries whose democracy and human rights record is despicable, but whose regimes remain among Washington’s best allies in the Middle East.

In the DRC, the Obama administration has disappointed all those who had expected a return to the principled policies of democracy and human rights promotion of the Carter administration. As a Senator, Barack Obama is credited with one major piece of legislation, which then Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton supported as well. It is Senate Bill 2121, the “Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act.” It has been enacted into law as PL 109-456. One of the provisions of this law requires the US government to impose sanctions on countries engaged in plundering the DRC. Obama as President and Clinton as Secretary of State have done nothing to implement this law, in the face of several UN reports on the plunder of Congolese natural resources and other forms of wealth by Rwanda and Uganda. The reason for this failure is crystal clear: Rwanda and Uganda are major US allies from the Great Lakes region in the fight against international terrorism, the number one threat of the post-communist age for the United States, with Rwanda having troops in Darfur, and Uganda leading the peacemaking role in Somalia.

The role of President Jimmy Carter in the democratization process is all the more important because it took place before the end of the Cold War. In the wake of the First Shaba War of 1977, Carter sent Ambassador Donald McHenry on a 97bymission designed to read the riot act to then Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko. The gist of McHenry’s brief was the liberalization of the system, and Mobutu responded positively by appointing a prime minister to take care of the day-to-day running of the government, and the holding of the freest parliamentary elections that the country ever experienced under a one-party system. Individuals were free to stand for Parliament on their own, instead of being handpicked by the politburo of the ruling party, the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (MPR). The result was a parliament full of independent voices, and one that had the courage to stage fairly brutal interpellations, or questions and answer sessions during which cabinet ministers had to explain their policies and justify their expenditures.

It was out of the Parliament elected in the wake of Shaba I that Etienne Tshisekedi and the Group of Thirteen emerged in December 1980 with their fifty-two page letter to Mobutu demanding multi-party democracy. Repeatedly arrested, tortured and jailed under Mobutu’s reign of terror, Tshisekedi and a diminishing number of his comrades persisted in their defiance of Mobutu’s externally backed kleptocracy. Despite the ban on opposition parties, they founded the Union pour la Démocratie et le Progrès Social (UDPS) in February 1982, making the latter the oldest pro-democracy political party in the DRC today. Tshisekedi’s exemplary courage in the face of adversity and his commitment to the ideals of democracy and social progress are qualities that ordinary Congolese find admirable in a person who has come to incarnate their deepest aspirations for freedom and material prosperity.

As a delegate to the Sovereign National Conference in 1992, I still remember the hugs and applauses we received from the people of Kinshasa when we came out of the People’s Palace in the early morning of August 15 following our nightlong election of Tshisekedi as prime minister of the transition to democracy. We were congratulated for having voted for the “people’s candidate.” For most of the Congolese people today, there is no doubt in their minds that faced with a choice between the neoliberal policies of the dominant centers of world capitalism and the best interests of the Congolese people, he will not hesitate to side with his people.

The same cannot be said of Joseph Kabila, a very weak leader who, after eleven years in power, is still unsure as to what his job is all about. He is more at ease behind the steering wheel of a vehicle (a fast car, a jeep) or on a motorcycle than he is at playing the game of head of state. For someone who had been named major general at twenty-five years of age and without officer training or significant military experience, he is deficient in both military science and the art of governance. His humiliating military defeat at Pweto on December 3, 2000 was a traumatic event with serious consequences for him and for the country.

On the one hand, it bonded him with the late Augustin Katumba Mwanke, then governor of Katanga, who sent a helicopter to rescue the young general from Pweto, protected him against the anger of President Laurent Kabila, his father, and became his éminence grise once the young Kabila became president. On the other hand, according to Gérard Prunier, the fall of Pweto and the collapse of pro-government forces, including over 300 Zimbabwean troops, “is one of the causes eventually leading to Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s assassination.” [2] As a beneficiary of this assassination, Joseph Kabila came to power treating the international community as his power base, [3] and the latter fell in love with him as “a man who seemed to play the political game on their terms.” [4]

Given the strategic importance of the DRC as a land of considerable natural wealth located in the centre of Africa, with world-class resources in fresh water, tropical rain forest, hydroelectricity, arable land and numerous minerals, the major powers in the international community do prefer leaders with no national constituency who are easy to manipulate like Joseph Kabila over those like Etienne Tshisekedi, who are unapologetically nationalist and committed to serving their peoples. In eleven years in office, Kabila has failed to fulfill his mandate in restructuring the state and the security forces.

Ours is probably the only country in the world with general and superior military officers who cannot read a map, as some of them are illiterate. Instead of a professional and disciplined national army, we have units made up of former rebels and militia groups, who continue to harass the civilian population and engage in heinous crimes such as rape and forced labour. It is also the only army in the world to incorporate an independent militia loyal to a foreign country (Rwanda), the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP), which has been commanded by a general who refused orders to deploy to a part of the country other than his own region of origin (Laurent Nkunda), or one for whom there exists an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (Jean-Bosco Ntanganda). The presidential guard, which is the best equipped, trained and paid unit, is rumored to include mercenaries from Angola, Burundi, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

In the economic and social field, the country’s enormous wealth in natural resources has not been used to benefit the mass of the people. Instead, it has gone to enrich the country’s rulers and their business and political partners at home and abroad. In the 2011 UNDP Human Development Report, the DRC is ranked the last of 187 nations surveyed in terms of the Human Development Index, a measure of well-being based on life expectancy, personal income, health and education. In this context of a failed state, Congolese people would be unlikely to vote for a man who had done nothing for them in more than ten years in power. Kabila and his external backers were surely aware of this in devising his electoral strategy.

The constitution was changed by his loyal parliament to remove the requirement for a run-off election in case no one had received an absolute majority of the votes cast; eighteen new judges were named to the Supreme Court in the middle of the electoral campaign, to make sure that they would ensure Kabila’s victory; and Pastor Daniel Ngoy Mulunda, a close political ally of the President, was selected as chair of the so-called Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI). In addition to these measures, a formidable machine of violence and intimidation, corruption, and electoral fraud was established to make sure that Kabila would come out as a victor. Now that the Catholic bishops of the DRC have called on the CENI to correct their lies or resign, I wonder what US State Department officials who rejected our complaints about Ngoy Mulunda and defended his integrity would say today.

In this regard, it is amazing that some observers should claim that “there is no data that could give a reasonable degree of certainty as to who actually won the polls.” [5] If the people who organized the election had any expectation that the process would be highly competitive, why would they resort to corruption, intimidation, violence, and massive fraud, including fictitious polling stations, insufficient or no presidential ballots in some polling stations, rigged ballots, the expelling of poll watchers from the opposition and civil society from a number of polling stations at the time of vote counting, and the falsification of electoral returns at the so-called compilation centres?

Moreover, why did the CENI refuse to allow the technical teams from the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Federation of Electoral Systems (IFES) sent by the US to help them recount the votes? Recounting the votes on the basis of results from each polling station is the only way of establishing the truth of the ballot box. Figures in the possession of the Catholic Church, which had deployed 30,000 observers or close to half of all polling stations, should be able to help in this process. The bishops must show their commitment to the truth by publishing the results obtained by their observers.

Another comment from external observers is that people have remained largely passive in the face of the election being stolen by Kabila and his cronies, and this might be an indication that they have accepted the current outcome. Nothing could be farther from the truth. All over the world, the Congolese diaspora has proclaimed Tshisekedi the winner of the presidential election and demonstrated against the fraudulent results and their apparent acceptance by the international community. South Africa, Belgium, France and the UK are now deporting Congolese immigrants without appropriate documents in retaliation for their participation in sometimes violent protests.

Were the DRC a country in which the rulers and the security forces respected the rule of law, millions of Congolese would also descend in the streets of our cities and towns to enact what their compatriots living in liberal democracies are doing. During the electoral campaign, when it was relatively easier to manifest their political sentiments, Tshisekedi was the single candidate to draw the largest number of people at his rallies all over the Congo, in each of its eleven provinces, including supposedly hostile areas like Katanga and Maniema. On 26 November, the last day of campaigning, the police held him hostage for nearly six hours at the airport, and prevented him for holding his final rally in Kinshasa. Over ten opposition supporters were killed on that day by the security forces.

The DRC is a country in which approximately six million people have been killed as a result of the Congo wars of 1996-97 and 1998-2003, together with their economic and social consequences in the affected areas. Other parts of the country have also known episodes of state-sponsored terrorism, notably the brutal repression of the politico-religious group Bundu-dia-Kongo (BDK) in Lower Congo, ethnic cleansing of peoples from Kasaï in the Katanga province, and retaliatory killings for anti-state and communal violence in Equateur. A comprehensive record of the most important of the crimes committed between 1993 and 2003 has been compiled in the mapping report published on October 1, 2010 by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. State responsibility for some of the criminal acts is well established, and this includes the wanton killing of BDK adherents, and the assassinations of journalists such as Bapuwa Mwamba in 2006 and of human rights activists such as Floribert Chebeya in 2010.

The International Criminal Court is doing nothing about all of these crimes against humanity. And yet, the ICC prosecutors were brought to Kinshasa to intimidate Tshisekedi and other opposition leaders that they would be held responsible for election-related violence. Since 26 November 2011, the police and the security forces have, in Kinshasa and elsewhere, continued to pick up young people, whose destination and fate are unknown. On 16 February 2012, when the Catholic Church asked its faithful to march in commemoration of the 1992 March of Christians and in protest against electoral fraud, the police and the militia of Kabila’s party, the People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy (PPRD), went into churches even before the march was to start to beat up on worshippers, and their weapons included tear gas and clubs. Why aren’t President Kabila and his security forces being held responsible for election-related violence by the ICC?

While they have closed their eyes to state-sponsored violence and to violations of the electoral law by Kabila and the CENI, or issued mild statements in condemning these crimes, Western governments and international actors have not been so kind to Tshisekedi. Every statement he makes is closely scrutinized and condemned if it is found to be politically incorrect. For example, he is condemned for castigating the violation of law by Kabila and his government, and held responsible for inflammatory statements likely to provoke violence. On the other hand, the people responsible for real violence against citizens, including death, are never condemned publicly and they move about freely. In addition to President Kabila, people in this category have included Gabriel Kyungu wa Kumwanza, the architect of ethnic cleansing in Katanga beginning in 1992, and John Numbi, the Inspector General of Police, who has been suspended but never charged for the murder of Chebeya. General Ntanganda, the CNDP commander wanted by the ICC, is being protected by Kabila as a high-ranking officer in the army, while Jean-Pierre Bemba is being prosecuted at the ICC for crimes allegedly committed by his troops and in his absence in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic.

By recognizing Kabila as DRC president after fraudulent electoral results, Western powers and the international community are showing that their strategic interests are more important than their avowed commitment to democracy and justice. Recently, the international community did recognize Alassane Ouattara as president of Côte d’Ivoire in spite of the decision of that country’s Constitutional Court in favor of the incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo. Following a UN Security Council resolution calling for the protection of Libyan civilians against the regime of the late Muammar Qaddafi, major Western powers led by NATO recognized the Libyan rebels as legitimate representatives of the Libyan people and their aspirations for change. Refusal to recognize Tshisekedi as the winner of the presidential election and the legitimate representative of the deepest aspirations of the Congolese people for democracy and social progress amounts to both hypocrisy and double standards, particularly for those states claiming to stand for democracy and human rights. It will at least let us know who our true friends and enemies are in the world today.

In remaining in office based on fraudulent electoral results, Kabila has usurped power in the DRC. He is therefore in violation of both our country’s constitution and the African Union’s Resolution against unconstitutional change of government. In accordance with Article 64 of the DRC constitution, which recognizes the right and the duty of Congolese citizens to resist the usurpation or seizure of power by unconstitutional means, peaceful manifestations of resistance will continue at home and in the diaspora against the illegal Kabila regime. To prevent further violence and unnecessary loss of life due to the current impasse, Kabila must be pressured to accept an honorable exit similar to the way that Fredrick De Klerk did in post-apartheid South Africa, by becoming President of the Senate, which is the second highest office in the country. He must accept the verdict of the ballot box and the people’s choice of Tshisekedi as the person who must preside over the process of change and reconstruction in the Congo. A power sharing formula similar to those in Kenya or Zimbabwe is simply not workable, given the history of the last twenty years since the National Conference. Sharing cabinet posts, state enterprises, and ambassadorships among the different political groupings is not necessarily a way of solving the most important issue facing our country today, namely, the restructuring of the state to strengthen its capacity for order and security, revenue mobilization internally, service delivery, and economic development.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja is professor of African Studies Department of African and Afro-American Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

END NOTES

1. Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, “Putting Africa’s House in Order to Deal with Developmental Challenges,” ASR Forum on “Africa in the Age of Obama,” African Studies Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (September 2010), p. 14.

2. Gérard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 234. ↩
3. Ibid, p. 258. ↩
4. Ibid, p. 264. ↩
5. Laura Seay, “Political Repression Threatens Increased Violence Against Civilians in Congo,” Preventing Genocide – Blog, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, March 2, 2012.

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By Horace Campbell, Pambazuka
Thank you, Pambazuka NEWS

2012-03-22, Issue 578

cc J G LA ‘This Kony2012 video has reinforced my own conviction that demilitarization and peace in Africa is intricately connected to demilitarization and peace in the United States.’

INTRODUCTION

In any major disinformation campaign, the minimum requirement for success is to at least be credible. Invisible Children, Inc. is not a credible basis for information on Uganda and Africa. Joseph Kony is not in Uganda and cannot be compared to Hitler, Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. This group that is called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has in the past kidnapped children and turned them into child soldiers and has exploited young girls. However, this LRA is not the military threat to Africa which is portrayed in this massive campaign called Kony2012. At this moment, to mobilize millions around the world around a campaign that Joseph Kony is a major military threat in Uganda and Central Africa is disinformation.

This is the act of deliberately spreading inaccurate information. The campaign, Kony 2012, is a classic example of military disinformation. The success in tapping into the emotions of 80 million young persons has exposed its linkages to the disinformation and cyber warfare capabilities of the US defense infrastructure. Ugandans have already responded with clarity to this manipulation of the war in their society. I think that it is important to examine the wider context of the ‘invisible hand’ behind the production of Kony2012 and the current campaign calling for a day of Action on April 20. This campaign raises deeper issues about the contemporary moment in global politics and the intense competition for imperial domination of Africa.

Disinformation and Ideological coercion of US citizens to support the military-industrial complex has been most manifest in the propaganda war over terrorism. However, this war on terror only served to isolate the United States, weaken the society and bog down its military in quagmires such as Afghanistan. Yet, despite this ideological coercion and decline, planners of the military information operations have been studying social media and information warfare in order to neutralize the growing opposition to militarism in the United States. This social media event must be examined thoroughly because the Kony2012 video broke records to become the fastest-spreading online video in history. This fact of the breaking of records alone requires deeper understanding. I will argue that the barrage of media coverage which ensured this record was not accidental. The massive promotion of this on-line can now be understood in the wider context of full spectrum warfare. in which combat operations are reserved for the last resort. Psychological warfare and disinformation operations are crucial to weaken populations both at home and in ‘enemy’ territory. I am contending that the Kony2012 was a test to intercept the social media capabilities of the youths in the USA in this revolutionary moment. Kony2012 with its ambition to ensnare millions has already been exposed with millions debunking the assertions of the film. Pambazuka has published the response of Mahmood Mamdani. The Association of Concerned Africa Scholars has published their statement addressed to the U.S. Government about the Lord’s Resistance Army and Central Africa.

A special Africa Focus bulletin has pulled together reflections of videos, blog posts, and articles with Ugandan voices and other commentaries. This record is important in that it gives a comprehensive list of resources so that young students who are organizing rebuttals can find resources to counter the planned April 20 manifestations to support the call for the US military to intervene in Africa.

In the face of this massive grassroots opposition to the manipulation by Invisible Children, even the New York Times has now joined in with its Opinion Page article that ‘Kony is not the problem.’

If Kony is not the problem, then what should peace and progressive forces do to ensure that campaign such as these are nipped in the bud?

Jack Bratich who has been studying cyberwar as part of the ‘counter-radicalization’ of the youth has penetrated the mind games embedded in this video. He summarized his arguments in an on line article, [url-=http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/13/my-little-kony/]“My Little Kony: The Rise of the Flashpublics.”[/url] Professor Bratich has also used the formulation of genetically modified grassroots organizations to characterize these pseudo grassroots campaigns managed and orchestrated by conservative forces. If one then examines the world of the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California where Jason Russell was trained, one will encounter the sophisticated interplay of artificial intelligence, graphics and the exploration of new mind games. These mind games are intended to demobilize the youth.

After the fabrication of terrorism in Africa over the past decade crowned with the colossal failure of the NATO intervention in Libya and the international revulsion in relation to the execution of the leader of Libya, AFRICOM and the US military had to find new sources of support. It was in the midst of this search for new support where this video became the social media event of the moment. This video Kony 2012 in 30 minutes tapped into the emotions of young people, exploited their idealism and called on them to subsidize their own repression by making contributions to this information warfare platform. I want to use this commentary to agree that stripped of all of the layers of mobilization for action to catch Joseph Kony, one of the objectives of this Kony 2012 video is to experiment with alternatives to the growing political consciousness of the youth in the United States as manifest in the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

Jason Russell and his stewardship in the conservative Christian fundamentalists ranks has assisted us in making the necessary connections between humanitarianism, disaster pornography, the US military, universities and long term planning of the US militarists in Africa. We are informed that after his graduation from the Institute of Creative technologies at the University of Southern California in 2002 he went with his friends to Africa to put into action what he learnt about story telling. We know from the information that the Invisible Children has posted about itself that it belongs to that subset of sub-contractors of the armaments culture, especially the humanitarian militarists such as the Enough Project, one of the chief promoter of the Save Darfur campaign, the Center for American Progress, and Resolve, a human rights group connected to conservative Catholic missionary organizations. So although the Kony 2012 is presented as a ‘one person campaign on a personal journey,’ we can make the linkages to grasp the forces behind the mind games. That Jason Russell suffered a ‘meltdown’ as a result of the push back from concerned citizens should not deter a close examination of his journey through the corridors of religious conservatism and militarism.

I am now persuaded that this video is another failed effort by the military planners in the United States. In this instance, the enemy as outlined by Jack Bratich is the youths who are mobilizing against Wall Street and the bankers. Millions of young persons in the United States are graduating from colleges with thousands of dollars in debt. They end up unemployed and are strung out without hope. The new social movement of youths opposing the top 1 per cent that has exploded in the United States in the midst of the capitalist depression offered a new way to educate the citizens of the United States. The more perceptive of these youths have been at the forefront of the campaigns calling for real social and economic change. Kony 2012 was one effort to blunt this mobilization of the 99 per cent. The effort failed. The authors of this effort were opposed in Africa. The people of Northern Uganda for who the video sought to speak, reacted to the manipulation. The government of Uganda had to distance themselves from this disinformation campaign. Even the foreign policy experts such as the Council for Foreign Relations had to distance themselves from this military/humanitarian propaganda of Kony 2012 and the Invisible Children saying that the video Invisible Children was “manipulat[ing] facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders. “

In this disinformation blowback, we have been given a very clear window into how the military information operatives are studying ‘social media’ to ‘cleverly target’ young persons in order to lobotomize them in preparation for the era of singularity. This week I will place the Kony2012 campaign into the failure of the planners of the US military and the conservative republican forces who want to dominate the US military and corporate spaces. From this outline of the linkages between the Conservatives in the United States and the Ugandan leadership around Yoweri Musevieni, this contribution will analyze the linkages between Jason Russell and the conservative religious fundamentalists in the United States. The manipulation and exploitation of his own son in this ‘production’ brought us face to face with the mental pathology that Frantz Fanon warned about in his analysis of colonial wars and mental disorders. One of the challenges of the peace movement is to work for healing in a way that supports peace and reconstruction at home and in Africa. Jason Russell and the authors of Invisible Children are in need of healing. However, in order to heal, there must be truth telling.

This Kony2012 video has reinforced my own conviction that demilitarization and peace in Africa is intricately connected to demilitarization and peace in the United States.

THE US MILITARY AND THE UGANDAN MILITARY IN NORTHERN UGANDA: INVISIBLE CHILDREN AND ITS MESSAGE

After nearly 80 million persons watched this on line video which was launched to call for US military intervention in Central Africa, there is enough information on the atrocities in Northern Uganda that it has become evident that the authors of the video were indeed calling on US citizens to call for the US military to intervene in Uganda to support the Musevieni administration. Now that even the establishment platforms such as the New York Times and the Council for Foreign Relations have revealed that the video Invisible Children was “manipulat[ing] facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders, “it is necessary to go further to call for the withdrawal of the 100 combat equipped advisers who have been deployed to assist the Musevieni government in Uganda. These advisors were deployed in October 2011, the second time that the US military has explicitly intervened to support the Museveni regime.

The people of Northern Uganda have reacted to this video because they have suffered at the hands of the Museveni military. We know that the Lord’s Resistance Army derives their legitimacy from the repression that has been carried out in this region.

Mamdani is correct when he said that there is no military solution to the questions of the atrocities in Northern Uganda. The military solutions proffered by the Invisible Children are just another vehicle to continue the relationship between Museveni and the US military. The issues of war, displacement, killings and refugees have plagued the peoples of Northern Uganda for more than thirty years. Yoweri Museveni had come to power in Uganda in 1986 and has used the war in the North to maintain himself in power. While a young student at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Museveni had been loudest in his anti-imperialist and militaristic rhetoric, but as soon as he ascended power in 1986 he became a firm ally of not only the conservative militarists in the USA, but the conservative Christian fundamentalists.

From his early alliance with the Reagan Administration, Museveni was projected as a ’reformer’ and the United States has been training Ugandan troops in counterterrorism for several years. With this assistance, the Museveni regime has been able to keep the news of the concentration camps in Northern Uganda out of international headlines. Five years ago, Joseph Kony and the remnants of the Lord’s Resistance Army was expelled from the region of Northern Uganda by the Ugandan Army. Earlier Kony had been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Since that time the LRA has been a roving band across the regions of Northern Uganda, Southern Sudan, Eastern Congo and the Central African Republic. Reduced to less than 200 to 300 persons, the LRA depended on its international supporters. It must be stated that while the Ugandan government and the USA were deploying assets to track Joseph Kony, the Sudanese government in Khartoum was assisting Joseph Kony. This was the same Sudanese government which the US military and intelligence were sharing information in order to counter-terrorism in Central Africa.

In 2008, the US government made public their alliance with the Museveni administration when it was announced that a team of 17 advisers and analysts from the US Africa Command had launched Lightning Thunder to capture Joseph Kony and the remnants of the Lord’s Resistance Army. At that time, I wondered why the US did not simply ask Omar Bashir to provide information on how his government coordinated support for the LRA. However, by the time of the public disclosure of US support for the Ugandan military, Kony and the remnants of the LRA had left a wake of mayhem from Uganda, across the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Southern Sudan to the Central African Republic. This was a clear failure of the US Africa Command which had worked closely with Ugandan officers on the mission, providing satellite phones, intelligence and other support. Veteran East African activists know that the Museveni government did not really want Kony captured because his primary basis for the militarization of the society would be removed. One can still see the information on this operation called Natural Fire 10 on the information platforms of the US Africa Command. Any self-respecting military establishment would be embarrassed to advertise the failure of the hunt Kony campaign. This campaign had been orchestrated to blunt the discussions on Amnesty and Reconciliation in Uganda. Whatever the names of the operations, Natural Fire, or Operation Lightning Thunder, it was summed up thus, “by any reasonable definition the operation was an abject military failure.”

This abject military failure has now been placed before the world after October 2011 when, the Obama administration announced its decision to send 100 combat-equipped US military “advisers,” most of them Special Forces troops, into Central Africa with the stated aim of hunting down and either capturing or killing Kony and other leaders of the LRA. It is now known that the one thread that links support for these operations has been the work of those who have been calling for US military intervention, especially Invisible Children, the ’non-profit organization which gave themselves the mandate to bring awareness to the activities of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

JASON RUSSELL AND INVISIBLE CHILDREN

From the period of colonialism and the imperial partitioning of Africa, humanitarianism has always been presented as a front for military operations. But, in the 21st century, this humanitarianism has to be linked to the military information operations. Invisible children have been one clear example of the linkages between pseudo non-governmental organizations and the US military. When the video called Invisible Children, Kony 2012 went viral in March 2012; many of the unsuspecting 80 million viewers quickly became aware of the explicit message that this was a message that called on US citizens to support the deployment of US military forces in Uganda and Central Africa.

Jason Russell, the public face of this ‘non-profit’ organization, Invisible Children had been trained in the US military sponsored information warfare center at the University of Southern California (USC) called the Institute for Creative technologies (ICT). This ICT was exposed in the run up to the information warfare against US citizens at the time of the war against the people of Iraq. Jason Russell graduated from the USC in this period of propaganda warfare and fear mongering in 2002. The web site of ICT said explicitly,

“At USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), high-tech tools and classic storytelling come together to pioneer new ways to teach and to train. Our goal is to create engaging and effective immersive experiences that shape the future of learning. With applications for therapy, leadership, and decision- making, ICT also seeks to redefine the range of skills these experiences can address. ICT was established in 1999 with a multi-year contract from the US Army to explore a powerful question: What would happen if leading technologists in artificial intelligence, graphics, and immersion joined forces with the creative talents of Hollywood and the game industry?“

For decades the US military entangled universities in their mission of wreaking death, destruction, fear and horror. Universities in the USA compete with each other to launch projects aligned to what Henry Giroux has described as “University in Chains.” The higher the rank of the University, the more competitive they are in this insensate contest for outside funding. The University of Southern California nestled close to Hollywood with access to ‘inventive combinations’ has been one of the most successful in this competition for defense dollars and contracts such as that of ICT. Syracuse University is the home of the prestigious S.I.Newhouse School of School of Public Communications. The Newhouse School is home to two Department of Defense sponsored programs which teach active-duty military personnel photojournalism and broadcast journalism. The Military Photojournalism (MPJ) and Military Motion Media (MMM) programs consist of students from the Navy, Marine Corps, Army and Air Force. These enlisted service members have been serving as mass communication specialists, combat photographers and military journalists. They come to the School for ten months to learn how to become better storytellers.

I am drawing attention to these programs because peace activists within Syracuse University have long campaigned for the end of these Pentagon related projects within the University. I invite researchers to see the special issue of the Syracuse Peace Council Bulletin on Syracuse University: A player in the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex. As part of the rebuttal to this Kony 2012 campaign it is incumbent on peace activists to expose the military connections of their universities to the Pentagon. Under the pressures of education cuts, researchers have been pushed into relations with the Defense Department because this is one of the only growth areas of the US government.

Now, the defense planners have upped the ante in an effort to entangle the minds of the young in the United States by the skillful use of social media tools to harness support for US military operations in Central Africa. In the case of the video Invisible Children, we can see the sophisticated interplay of artificial intelligence, graphics and the exploration of new mind games. My own students from the Newhouse School have alerted me to the sophisticated techniques which were being experimented in this video, Kony 2012. Some of the experts in this field of 21st century communications and journalism call this technique ‘flashpublics’.

This is the formulation used by the journalism professor Jack Bratich who has been studying cyberwar as part of the ‘counter-radicalization’ US youth. Bratich has exposed the Alliance of Youth Movements as one of the fronts of the corporations and locates the KONY 2012 as part of the new a new conservative front of so called grass roots youth movements. Jack Bratich in his evaluation of the ‘inventive combinations’ that were harnessed by the authors of Invisible Children noted,“as flashpublics are designed to assemble people rapidly for an event. However, this flash collective is specifically issue-oriented and more widely dispersed (as the eventual “meeting spot” itself is unknown and distributed). The flash of the flashpublic is a quick mobilization of attention and sharing towards a predefined political objective. It involves what Anna Gibbs calls an “affective contagion” tied to processes that early 20th century social theorists associated with sympathy, suggestion, even mass hypnosis. The flash fuses the condensed time of transduction (sharing, sending, connecting, composing) with the time of induction (priming, pacing, guiding, binding), all designed to generate mental/bodily states in viewers resulting in increased suggestibility.”

Bratich furthered this analysis by linking the Invisible Children organization to a new network of youth movements that are being supported around the world under the rubric of the Alliance for Youth Movement. This organization is being used as an instrument of US militarism and imperialism.

After the successful use of social media by the Obama campaign in 2007-2008 and the impressive networks refined by the April 6 movement of Egypt, long term planners had to experiment with new tools of information warfare. This information ploy against the youth had failed when the Save Darfur campaign was discredited.Books by Mahmood Mamdani such as Saviors and Survivors exposed the real mission of the planners of the Save Darfur Movement. Jeremy Keenan exposed the fabrication of terrorism in the Sahara in his book, Dark Sahara. Abdi Samatar has exposed the fabrication of terrorism in Somalia. Peace activists have exposed the role of AFRICOM in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the covert operations now underway. All of these forms of militaristic interventions must be exposed.

It was said then (during the Save Darfur Campaign), as it is being said now, Africa does not need saviors. Africa needs solidarity and for this the peace movement in the USA ought to be at the forefront of exposing the real intent of the manipulation of this video and campaign.

We know that Jason Russell is part of the network of conservative Christian fundamentalists who have been working with their fellow believers in Uganda. It is important for Ugandans who have worked with this ‘grassroots’ organizer to know that Russell has in the past been affiliated with Liberty University, an institution whose founder Jerry Fallwell was a firm supporter of the white racist minority regime in South Africa.

The intellectual base and financial foundation of Jason Russell and the Invisible Children organization is of interest for those who are tracking the links between the religious right and the military. As many in the NGO multibillion dollar business of humanitarian work in Africa, less than one third of the donations received by this organization goes to the ‘victims’ in Africa. “Barely one third of its spending last year supported programs in Central Africa, while 20 percent covered salaries and expenses and 43 percent was used for “awareness programs.” That is the youths of the USA were paying to subsidize this information war that was being waged against them. According to Invisible Children’s 2011 annual report, the group brought in $13.7 million in revenue that year. The breakdown of expenses shows that about $3.3 million went to programs in Central Africa and $2.3 million was spent on awareness programs. The group spent $1.4 million for management and general expenses, $850,050 on “awareness products,” $699,617 for media and film creation, and $286,678 for fundraising.

THE CONSERVATIVE FUNDAMENTALIST CONNECTIONS

But these figures are paltry in relation to the real networks of conservative Christian fundamentalists of which the Invisible Children form a part. In an article posted on Alternet we are informed that “Invisible Children is funded by Antigay, Creationist Christian Right.

“Among its biggest donors is the National Christian Foundation and the Christian Community Foundation, two grant-making groups that provide financial backing to key organizations of the Christian right, such as Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, which promote anti-abortion and anti-gay legislation and religion in school, as well as the Discovery Institute, which advocates teaching “intelligent design,” or creationism.”

It is these same conservative Christian fundamentalists who have been the most energetic in the support of the US global war on terror. Jason Russell in his own words has described his journey from the Institute for Creative Technologies to the formation of the Invisible Children NGO. It is this training that gave this organization the expertise to use film, creativity and social action to mobilize youths in support of the US military in Uganda.

DISINFORMATION AND BLOWBACK

Many have critiqued the Invisible Children video and its simplicity and manipulative designs. I am maintaining that it is a misconception to see this as simplicity. It is a deliberate attempt as disinformation. I had defined in the introduction and I am restating here, Disinformation is “Information that seems truthful, relevant and based on unbiased facts, but has been concocted to mislead the recipient in order to attain fraudulent monetary, military, political, or religious objectives.”

Some have called on the US government to end their relationship with the Museveni government. However, I want to add that the end of this psychological warfare against the youths will only take place when a counter movement develops which can expose the varying networks and layers of the US armaments culture. No amount of disinformation can now cover up the complete waste of lives in Afghanistan. The burning of the Koran, a US soldier going on the rampage and the atrocities of the US military has discredited the military so that no amount of flash publics can repair the damage done. There are many who have rightly pointed out that the US military is involved in a major buildup in order to justify a larger deployment of troops in Africa. Africom has been deployed to defend US energy corporations and forward planners have written of the need for US to defend its interests in Africa. The African peoples know that these interests have not been for the health, safety and security of the African poor and exploited.

The attention of the peace movement ensured that when the Libyan intervention took place, The US government and the Obama administration had to resort to covert ‘special operations’ forces. But these covert forces and the private military forces employed by the oil companies cannot blunt the new wave of revolutions in Africa. The Center for Strategic and International Studies gave the game away when it convened a discussion on Youth Revolt. These strategic centers are integrated into the same institutions that profit from war making. With the new uprisings in Africa and the birth of global movements for change, the Invisible Children initiative was an attempt to halt the radicalization of the youth. It is an effort to blunt the growing and deepening anti-war sentiments in the society. In this climate, creating images of white supremacy and saving African lives was meant to harness the energies of millions.
This effort failed.

In the face of the failure, Jason Russell exposed his own state of mind and the state of mind of those who authored Invisible Children. Jason Russell suffered a ‘meltdown’ and has been admitted to a psychiatric’ hospital. This meltdown exposed fully the fact that Kony 2012 was a disturbing campaign orchestrated by a disturbed campaigner.

This week as we write, many concerned citizens are grappling with the militaristic climate that inspired the killing of the young African American, Trayvon Martin. It is the militaristic mindset unleashed military propaganda such as Invisible Children which inspires the climate of violence and killing at home and abroad. I cannot end without calling on all who read this column to sign on to the petition on Change.org. It is the petition to ensure that the killer of Trayvon Martin be arrested and charged for the murder of this young 17 year old who was shot and killed on February 26 as he walked to a family member’s home from a convenience store where he had just bought some candy. The United States had justified its intervention in the Middle East as a pre-emptive war. The killer of Trayvon Martin argued that he was acting pre-emptively in self-defense.

The 20 celebrities and 12 officials who have been targeted by Invisible Children can now make their position clear on the realities of the mindset of the violence which has engulfed Africans at home and abroad. There have been many who have been seduced by the campaigns of the US military. Now, the peace and progressive forces are being called upon to develop another type of storytelling and video game which can assist in the healing of humans.

In this way, there will be a global movement calling for the dismantling of the US Africa command and another force in world politics to channel the energies of the youth away from mind control and subliminal messages.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
* Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

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Michael Yaki, Blogger, San Francisco Gate

Wherein the author decries the cowardly actions of two depraved, ignorant and— worst of all—callous fools. But what else could we expect from the offspring of a man who has set new records for egomania and imbecility in the entire pantheon of worthless plutocrats that disgrace this nation?—Eds

Which brings me to the Hunger Games.   I am a fan of the books, even if, at the very end (spoiler alert!) I was so depressed that I wanted to throw myself off a ledge (albeit, a very low one).   But the central tenent of the Hunger Games, as all Tributes know (another spoiler alert), is that a desperate and corrupt central government — the Capital — uses the Games as a means of enforcing control on a weak and scattered post-apocalypse America.   The Tributes are brought to the Capital for training, but they have no idea what weapons, if any, will be afforded them until the Games actually begin — and even then, it is (more spoiler alert!) a luck of the draw as to whether a weapon they want is available and not taken by a competitor.  Katniss, the heroine of the stories, is skilled with the bow but (spoiler alert) it takes a lucky break for her to finally get her hands on her chosen weapon.