Don't Fall for Kony 2012: Slickest Neocolonial Propaganda Vehicle Ever

Something stinks on the internet.

Yesterday the video "Kony 2012" produced by the organization "Invisible Children" reached a bizarre critical mass on the internet. It was inescapable on facebook: if you're like me, seemingly all your friends who have a social conscience shared it earnestly with heartfelt calls to spread its message. It gathered millions and millions of pageviews overnight.

Kony 2012 is slick. It's got extraordinary production values for an internet meme sensation.

It's got a narrator who is likable and earnest. It's got a beautiful little blonde toddler who makes just the right faces when confronted by the illogical and outrageous monstrosity of adults doing horrible things for seemingly inexplicable reasons. It's got a beautiful young Ugandan boy whose ready smile belies a past haunted by horror. It's got a vision of people working together to do the right thing, of people power transcending political boundaries. It's got a nightmarish and uncomplicated villain.

It also has a message of mobilizing popular support behind American military intervention across a swath of Central Africa. It's got rightwing pig Senator James Inhofe ("he wanted to assure people that lifting the ban on gays in the military has not led to the legalization of bestiality..."). It's got religious fundamentalist backers. It's got a dubious financial record as a charitable institution. It's got a hypothetically sinister role in the new cold war between the U.S. and China over Africa's resources.

After reading various pros and cons over Kony 2012, I finally watched the video. I found it creepy and disturbing. It is slickly manipulative, leading the viewer through an argument full of flawed logic, questionable assertions and sleights of hand, referencing just enough plausibility to make its emotional resonance seem legitimate. It even uses some of the messaging of the Occupy movement, almost as if its makers are hoping to siphon off the energy from the social justice cause du jour to their absolutely manufactured crusade.

Of course the warlord Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army (no longer actually in Uganda) are thoroughly unsavory characters. But it is not possible to look at Kony's anarchic warlordism — or at civil unrest across Africa general — in isolation from the story of classic colonialism, imperialism, and today's neocolonialism. Africa's vast natural resources are the battleground of the future. Western humanitarian intervention in Africa is always more complicated than it looks; it is never a simple story of saving lives.

Like many countries in Africa, Uganda is the playground of American evangelical fundamentalists. Using charitable assistance as a kind of Trojan horse, this right-wing political movement has insinuated itself in local culture. It's responsible for the rise of legal repression and brutality against gay, lesbian and transgendered Africans in several countries. The Ugandan parliamentary bill that has been on the verge of passing for a couple years now that promises the death penalty for homosexuality is the documented brainchild of American Christian fundamentalists working with local right-wingers. This movement is similarly responsible for harnessing AIDS prevention and family planning to conservative Christian ideology. It strikes me as highly unlikely that the ever-so-likeable "Invisible Children" of Kony 2012 are not utterly intertwined with these modern missionaries of hate.

There's much about the video that just seems questionable. Like how self-referential it is, suggesting somehow that the video had impact before it was even made. It's classic propaganda designed to tug the heartstrings and deflect scrutiny from its assertions. But it also strikes me as tragically familiar, hence my choice of illustrations for this essay. "The White Man's Burden" is the deeply racist notion, from the height of the colonialist era, that civilized white people had the duty to rescue the black and yellow "savages" from their state of barbarism and bring them to civilization. From Rudyard Kipling's poem:

"Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought."

It's amazing that this video seems to successfully convince millions of do-gooders, many of whom you would think would know better, that if only American military forces were tromping across the African countryside that things would actually get better for long-suffering Ugandans! White people, Americans and Europeans all, need to stop meddling in Africa. The real truth must be told: seemingly senseless civil conflicts like the one around Joseph Kony are the rotten fruit of neocolonialism. All these private armies have their origins in the halls of America and Africa's former colonial masters. Kony's brutality dwarfs before the ruthlessness of direct American meddling around the world and the shockwaves it unleashes.

One can look at a nightmare like Somalia and make valid criticisms of local and regional factions and forces. But if you step back and take a long enough view, you realize that what happened to Somalia was that it got in the way of the cold war. Somalia is like it is today because of neocolonialism, tossed aside like a dried husk when the cold war ended.

Honestly I never heard of the Invisible Children and the Kony 2012 campaign before this week. Some people I know claim to have heard of it before. But I smell a big fat rat. People who should know better are being had by this video. I predict that when the truth comes out about this "spontaneous viral explosion" of concern over Kony and Uganda it won't be pretty. Its oh-so-innocent call for military intervention in Africa will prove to be no accident. And it's cast of concerned "bipartisan" government figures will prove to be a gallery of rogues. Beware.

The main enemy is at home.

(Highly offensive racist cartoon "The White Man's Burden" above from the mainstream New York World of 1899 courtesy of YesterYear Once More blog). If you're living in a tree and haven't seen the original Kony 2012 video, here it is:

International Women's Day, 2012

In getting used to the idea that women's rights to control their own bodies, including the right to have abortions, would remain a social battleground, I can't say I ever really expected the field of battle would actually shift backwards. But so it has done, and now it seems that even women's right to contraception is under attack. At the extreme end may be the putrid neanderthal spokesasshole Rush Limbaugh and his verbal assault on Ms. Susan Fluke, suggesting she was a "slut and prostitute" and out to get the government to support her licentious lifestyle, but at the other end are all manner of politicians including both Republicans and Democrats who think that it's high time that society controls women's genital organs. Apparently the small government types have problems with regulation of pollution and corruption but no problem at all with regulation of women's bodies. That they yearn for a time when women were nothing but baby machines says so much about their general worldviews.

I counter this 1950s style assault on women with a classic propaganda image from the other 1950s, the era of Soviet/Chinese solidarity against the American-led Cold War. Against a field of multilingual banners labelled "Peace," a Chinese and Russian woman gaze determinedly and resolutely against all odds. One boldly grasps a red banner, and yet almost tenderly they grasp hands between them. While certainly representing a different shade of stereotype, these women know that even peace is something that might require a battle to defend. And there remains so very very much to defend.

Happy International Working Women's Day. Stand shoulder to shoulder with your sisters.

It's 10 PM...How Many Times Have Your Kids Been Stopped and Frisked Today?

Working-class communities, especially communities of color, are under siege in New York City. The good-guys: hard working people just trying to survive. The bad-guys: The New York Police Department. The insulting and humiliating harassment known as stop and frisk, overwhelming a tool of racial profiling, up. Police assassinations of innocent people, up. Police spying and harassment of apolitical Muslim community organizations and activities, up.

Above is one of a series of posters my neighborhood Occupy group has developed to start a dialogue to build support for action on May Day. This one calls out the policy of stop and frisk: "It's 10:00 P.M.... How many times have your kids been stopped and frisked today? Take action on May Day!"

Middle-class white people grow up being taught that the police are their friends: Officers Friendly, helping to maintain the peace, keep people safe, and preserve order. This is an illusion made plausible because the police, especially in New York City, really is an institution built on a foundation of racism. It looks very very different to people outside that white middle-class bubble. Regardless of the number of African-Americans or latinos recruited to the force, it's evident that the nature of the NYPD is utterly bound not to protect all citizens equally but to protect the privileges of wealth and power.

Check out this absolutely incredible statistic from the New York Civil Liberties Union: "In 2011, 684,330 New Yorkers were stopped by the police.
603,268 were totally innocent (88 percent)
402,308 were black (59 percent)
176,165 were Latino (26 percent)
62,033 were white (9 percent)"

And further: "In 2006, 21.5 blacks were stopped for each arrest of a black person as opposed to only 18.2 whites stopped for each white arrest....Cops found guns, drugs, or stolen property on whites about twice as often as they did on black suspect...Police used force – i.e. handcuffing, frisking, drawing weapon, restraining – about 50 percent more often on blacks than on whites in 2006."

"Nearly nine out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent, according to the NYPD’s own reports." And yet, this is an actual premeditated NYPD policy, claiming "Stops save lives."

Apparently the life of Ramarley Graham didn't count. 18 years old, Graham was chased by the police after allegedly being observed buying a little weed. He ran into his house; the cops broke down the doors after him, and then assassinated him in his bathroom in cold blood. He was unarmed. The cops then aggressively questioned the dead young man's grandmother for seven hours. Graham's brother later said, "They think the badge they carry on their chest is a license to kill people." With absolute legal impunity, one might add. Ramarly Graham joins the ranks of police murder victims like Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo.

Recently exposed was a massive program of spying on New York's Muslim community by the NYPD. Islamic Centers, mosques, community organizations, student groups, social clubs, student group hiking trips, social and electronic media groups: all have been subjected to heavy infiltration and surveillance. Apparently the NYPD views all Muslim New Yorkers as potential terrorists.

In diverse communities like my Sunset Park, Brooklyn, the cops do not feel like friends. These activities are not suppressing crime, they're treating all citizens like criminals. They suggest that poor people and immigrant people are not welcome to participate in civil discourse, not entitled to live safely free of illegal harassment.

Michael Bloomberg's New York City is a place where wealthy real estate interests are given huge privileges over regular people. If they want your home for one of their projects they know they can just kick you out with no recourse. The connections between such class privilege and the establishment of corrupt banks and financial institutions that made Occupy Wall Street resonate so clearly on the national consciousness is crystal clear. But it's also clear that this is not just about banking and finance, it's about what being beholden to those interests does to a city, does to all of the people who live in it.

So by calling out the racist harassment inflicted on the city's population by its police force, social justice activists now including Occupy Sunset Park and other Occupy assemblies, join voices with suffering communities and engage the political struggle for creating a city — a world? — where we, together, reject the legacies of false democracy and violent repression.

He Talks! Hear Me on Candy Samples' Latest Podcast!

As regular readers of this blog know, Candy Samples makes regular music videos and I'm proud to be an extra in all of them. She's my favorite drag queen! But Candy does more than sing and act: she has a regular podcast, called The Candy Show. She talks to a variety of guests, and dishes on all sorts of subjects from gossip to politics. Candy likes to use her powers for good; The Candy Show is a fun listen with a lot of heart.

Well I am honored beyond belief to announce that I am Candy's featured guest on her latest edition! Season 6, Episode 6 of The Candy Show is available as a FREE download from iTunes. Just click here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-candy-show/id253279135.

We talk about The Cahokian and blogging, and about the Occupy movement and activism, and all sorts of stuff. And you get to hear my voice in all its Midwestern accented glory! Yes, I only live in Brooklyn. Download the podcast, I'd love to hear what you think. Maybe I'll start up my own!

The New York Post: The Der Stürmer of Our Time

Sean Delonas, ultra-racist and anti-gay cartoonist from the racist New York Murdoch tabloid "The New York Post" has proved once again that the spirit of the Nazi propaganda rag Der Stürmer is alive and well in today's New York City. Anyone who doubts that Islamophobia is racism should view this latest outrage and compare it to the vile ouevre of classic 1930s Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher. (I posted a previous Delonas cartoon equating Obama to a dead chimpanzee here on The Cahokian back in 2009. Good As You blog features an incredible roundup of some of his previous racist and anti-gay vitriol here.)

Delonas' cartoon was the response to complaints from New York City's Muslim community upon the discovery that the corrupt and deeply racist New York Police (NPYD) have been spying on the Muslim community mosques and organizations via in-depth surveillance and infiltration, even spying on things like hiking trips. Of course in Delonas' fevered imagination, all Muslims are terrorists, and all are hook-nosed, bearded and be-turbaned.

Delonas, fully encouraged and promoted by his employers in the Rupert Murdoch empire, seeks the same thing as Streicher and Der Stürmer: the dehumanization and demonization of people determined to be "other" into icons of derision and disgust. Never mind that the NYPD has been spying on peaceful men, women and children, American citizen and immigrant alike, the hateful bigots of the Post think they're all subhumans without the same rights as other people.

The printed equivalent of cable TV's ignorance-promoting Fox News, The New York Post is the voice of rightwing white racial resentment. Viciously pro-war and pro-repression, the Post is low on facts and information and high on bigotry. The New York Post deserves to be thrown into the trash; it's probably too toxic even to be used to absorb pet urine.


Here's a couple classic anti-Semitic Der Stürmer originals for comparison, snagged from the online German Propaganda Archive. A sense of familiarity is striking.

Without Comment: Williamsburg, Brooklyn 2012

Posted on a wall in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Get ready for May first. Spring is coming!

(Thanks David!)

Convergence: Occupy & Anti-Pinkwashing Movements, March 3 NYC

In a striking convergence of movements, NYC Queers Against Israeli Apartheid are marking Israeli Apartheid Week with an occupation of the New York City Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Community Center. As I have reported here several times, the NYC gay center has banned any discussion of solidarity with queer Palestinians, and banned any group intending to do so from using its meeting rooms, betraying the sense of openness and inclusion on which the Center was founded decades ago. It's clear that a handful of wealthy contributors and influential politicians are bound and determined to decide what part of the gay community is welcome at the Center, and the well-paid staff of the Center have heeded their master's voices.

The March 3 action is being called to end these policies of censorship. The action's demands include: End the ban on Palestine solidarity organizing at the Center; Open the Center to all who respect its stated mission; and Open the Center's board meetings and decision-making process to the community. As a fact sheet for NYC-QAIA says: The Center's “haven” then is for Zionist, not Arab, Muslim or especially Palestinian, queers as the ban brands anyone who even discusses the racism and violence of the Israeli government as a terrorist sympathizer, and a threat to the safety of “good” and “normal” queers. The Center’s Board has hidden behind closed-door meetings, flatly ignored calls, letters and requests to dialogue, and has refused to come forth with a promised policy on who can rent rooms at the center. They have failed the diverse LGBTQ communities and must be held accountable. A year has passed and it’s time to renew our action."

NYC-QAIA argues that here is a microcosm of society as a whole: the 1% are trying to use their wealth and power to silence the 99%.



It seems appropriate then that NYC-QAIA would apply the direct action tactics of the Occupy movement. I urge support of this protest!

The attempt by the State of Israel and its supporters to use pinkwashing to leverage support for Zionism in the gay community continues. Articles in the media lauding Israel for being some kind of "gay haven" bear the unmistakable stamp of official Israeli government manufacture. Take for instance this Associated Press article from January 24, 2012 syndicated widely including by the New York Times (though since scrubbed from the NYT site): "Tel Aviv Emerges as Top Gay Tourist Destination." While dropping tidbits of supposed balance, the article maintains an overall laudatory tone to Israel. But careful readers will not be fooled. Check out this sentence: "Omer Gershon, 37, a veteran of the Tel Aviv gay club scene, said tourists are drawn to the city's "crazy" night life." Wait, just a veteran of the Tel Aviv club scene? Flashback to last year: Omer Gershon was the paid agent of the Israeli government propaganda ministry who last year made a video under an assumed name falsely claiming that he had been the victim of alleged anti-gay attitudes of the Peace flotilla. His video was exposed as being a clumsy bit of pinkwashing propaganda. That the same name turns up in a "news article" as just another gay Israeli shows that it's just another clumsy lie dictated by Israeli government disinformation agencies. And it's outrageous that it was presented by AP as news. The only question is whether its author "Aron Heller" is a dupe or a paid employee of the Israeli government.

To counter all the nonsense hasbara propaganda being so clumsily disseminated, the first-ever U.S. LGBTQ delegation to Palestine went on a fact-finding mission to Palestine in January. They documented the systematic apartheid-style repression of the Palestinian people, and issued a strongly worded statement, which includes a section against Pinkwashing: "We call out and reject the state of Israel’s practice of pinkwashing, that is, a well-funded, cynical publicity campaign marketing a purportedly gay-friendly Israel to an international audience so as to distract attention from the devastating human rights abuses it commits on a daily basis against the Palestinian people. Key to Israel’s pinkwashing campaign is the manipulative and false labeling of Israeli culture as gay-friendly and Palestinian culture as homophobic. It is our view that comparisons of this sort are both inaccurate – homophobia and transphobia are to be found throughout Palestinian and Israeli society – and that this is beside the point: Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine cannot be somehow justified or excused by its purportedly tolerant treatment of some sectors of its own population. We stand in solidarity with Palestinian queer organizations like Al Qaws and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (PQBDS) whose work continues to impact queer Palestinians and all Palestinians....

"We stand in solidarity with queer Palestinian activists who are working to end the occupation, and also with Israeli activists, both queer and others, who are resisting the occupation that is being maintained and extended in their name....

"We name the complicity of the United States in this human rights catastrophe and call on our government to end its participation in an unjust regime that places it and us on the wrong side of peace and justice." Read the whole statement; it's crystal clear and inspiring.

This convergence of movements is auspicious. We are indeed all together. If you're in NYC, see you on March 3rd!

Spring Is Coming: May Day 2012

These beautiful images are from Occupy May 1st General Strike! Los Angeles, part of the nationwide campaign from the Occupy movement to make a big showing this upcoming May Day. Across the country in both big cities and small neighborhoods, local assemblies are laying plans for actions to show the world that the Occupy movement is not gone or defeated, despite the successful repression of nearly all the physical "Occupy" encampments. Occupy Wall Street in New York has voted to stand in solidarity with the call for a day without the 99%, a general strike and more. "No work, no chores, no banking, no shopping, no school."


To be sure the General Strike on May Day is being organized by Occupy's more leftwing elements, but it rests on a solid tradition of activism by working people. Indeed it's the kind of action that anyone who is part of the 99% can participate in. From the May 1st website:

"How can I participate?

If you are part of unionized labor, and your contract is up for negotiation, you can officially strike on May 1st. If you are not – call in sick. Take a holiday. Don’t show up to school. March with us, or join in one of the many events that will be taking place on May 1st, either in the day or in the evening. Block parties, rallies, protests, marches, family BBQ’s – this is a day when we take a stand against the way the system has enslaved us and burdened us with unmanageable debt, incredibly long working weeks, unfeasibly expensive healthcare — by taking a day for ourselves, being human again, spending time with our families and friends. Our bosses dictate everything to us — but not our holiday. The holiday of the working class, the 99%."


I love the Queer Liberation poster for May Day that uses a classic image of the late Divine, the iconic heroine of 1970s underground alternative culture.

My local Brooklyn Occupy assembly is still discussing its plans for the day. I'm really excited about the possibilities.

Without Comment: Peace Prize

Found on facebook.

The Right Wing's Prescription for Women

Planned Parenthood has been a target of the right wing for years. The current congress has gone to great lengths to demonize the private non-profit agency which provides millions of women, poor and otherwise, with health services including contraception and abortion. For all the insistence on the part of the rightwingers that the issue is preventing government-funding of abortion, the facts show that this is a smokescreen. There's a pie-chart floating around that clearly shows that abortions represent a small portion of Planned Parenthood's services. Given the legal hostility from many Republican and Democratic congresspeople in recent years, Planned Parenthood has worked very hard to follow the letter of the law and isolate the federal funding it gets from those abortion services. But it's futile to present either of these facts to the foes of Planned Parenthood, because the truth is that abortion is only the tip of the iceberg of their objections.

The rightwingers claim they are waging a battle based on moral and religious opposition to abortion based on the "sanctity of life." But what is actually quite clear is that these right wingers are actually waging a battle against something much bigger. And this is revealed by the current controversy over the initial Obama administration insistence that healthcare reform means that religious employers must include access to contraception in the insurance plans they offer to non-clerical employees like the teaching and medical professionals who work for churches and hospitals run by religious institutions. While it seems tragically likely that the Obama administration will concede this argument, the current controversy forces the right wing to admit that contraception itself is their actual problem, even knowing that contraception is a proven abortion preventative. Yes, that's right, the right wing does not want women to have access to the means to control their own bodies.

The right wing wants to defund Planned Parenthood not out of concern for some moral abstraction, but because it wants to preserve the dependency of women, especially poor and working-class women. The Sarah Palins and Michel Bachmanns of the far-right fringe notwithstanding, independent women who are not dependent on men are societal threat to the way the far right wants the world to look. And more fundamentally working-class women who rely on the affordability that government-funded healthcare provides are to them simply expendable.

The recent flap over the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure's shameful temporary plan to withdraw financial support of Planned Parenthood is illustrative. The Komen Foundation is less an institution concerned with women's health than a money-making scheme, a front for fake concern about the inadequate funding of women's healthcare. Forget how an organization allegedly concerned about women's health could sponsor pink buckets of the Colonel's greasy chicken, how could an organization allegedly concerned about women's health, full of smart people who know every last detail of those financial distribution pie-charts, claim that pulling the plug on poor women getting breast screenings could have anything to do with abortion at all? Who actually believes that? Only right wing ideologues with an agenda, that's who.

Here's the truth: This is yet another front on the class war being waged by the privileged classes on regular people. They don't want to pay for abortion, for contraception, for breast screenings, because they don't want to fucking pay for anyone's healthcare at all. Well, except their own.

Funny, it always comes down to the same problem....and the same solution.