科尼2012：看不見的兒童的瘋傳視頻引發批評，別人說毫無根據

KONY 2012 中文字幕
2012-03-07
KONY 2012 是部影片，也是一個行動。由「看不見的孩子」發起，目標是令 Joseph Kony 成名，不為慶祝，只為將其罪行公諸於世，協助捉拿他，建立國際公義的先例。

科尼2012：看不見兒童的瘋傳視頻引發批評，而別人說毫無根據
Kony 2012: Invisible Children’s viral video sparks criticism that others say is unfounded

By Laura Rozen
Senior Foreign Affairs Reporter
The Envoy – Thu, Mar 8, 2012.
Translation by Autumnson Blog

A group of blond-haired, blue-eyed Southern California surfer boys from advocacy group Invisible Children got more than 30 million people to watch a half-hour video on a 20-year-old conflict in Central Africa—in just three days. But the fallout has been some tough criticism charging that the group is raising awareness about a conflict that has essentially wound down since its height in 2003-4—and cut corners with the facts to amp up its message. Detractors piled on that Invisible Children spends the bulk of its budget on staff salaries and making films that attract much publicity, but don't do much to help people on the ground. But in a backlash to the backlash, other Africa experts and human rights advocates today say the widespread negativity is unfounded.
一群來自宣傳組織看不見的兒童的金發碧眼南加州衝浪者，在短短三天得到超過三千萬人觀看一套半小時​​的視頻，就一宗在中非洲的20年之久衝突。但後​​果已是一些強硬的批評，指控該組織在提高覺醒，對一宗基本上自2003-4年在高點時已經清盤的衝突，和不按常規而隨手以某些事實來放大它的訊愿。貶者羣起對看不見的兒童花費大量預算在員工薪金和拍攝吸引眾多宣傳的電影，但沒做很多來幫助地面上的人。但在一反彈後的反彈，其他非洲專家和人權倡導者今天說，廣泛的負面說法是毫無根據的。
"The argument now is that Kony and the LRA are no longer this massive threat," Cameron Hudson, former Africa director in the Bush administration National Security Council, told Yahoo News Thursday, referring to Joseph Kony, the founder of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which is accused of abducting and killing thousands of children and committing other atrocities in his two-decade war against the Ugandan government.
“現在論點是科尼和聖靈抵抗軍不再是這巨大的威脅，”前布殊政府國家安全會的非洲主任卡梅倫哈德遜星期四告訴雅虎新聞，指向反叛的聖靈抵抗軍（LRA）的創辦人約瑟夫·科尼，他被指控在他二十年對抗烏干達政府的戰爭，綁架和殺害成千上萬的兒童及犯有其它暴行。
Hudson, now policy director at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, stressed that he doesn't share the critique, praising Invisible Children for creating a campaign that reached tens of millions of people who probably never previously heard of Joseph Kony. "I just saw P.Diddy tweet about this thing," he said.
現在是美國大屠殺紀念館的政策主任哈德森強調，他沒有共享批評，讚揚看不見的兒童創建了一個運動到達數以千萬計的人，他們之前可能從未聽說過約瑟夫·科尼，“我剛剛看到P.廸地啁啾有關這件事，”他說。
Hudson believes the criticism is mostly sour grapes. "I think that these guys are getting mercilessly picked apart by a bunch of intellectual elites who spend their days tweeting but never trending," he said. "If their aim is to raise awareness, they have done that in spades."
赫德森認為批評大多數是酸葡萄， “我認為這些傢伙越來越無情地被一堆知識精英分化，他們虛渡日子啁啾但從不跟隨大勢，”他說。 “如果他們的目的是提高醒覺，他們已經在鏟中完成。”
Invisible Children is a California-based advocacy group whose founders were San Diego college students who went to south Sudan and northern Uganda in 2003 at the height of the conflict. On Monday, Invisible Children released a powerful, slickly produced half-hour video on the conflict, seeking a half million viewers. By Thursday they had surpassed that goal more than sixty-fold, with well over 30 million viewers. Their viral tag lines: #Kony2012 and #Stop Kony, along with Uganda and Invisible Children, were top-10 trending topics around the country.

"Where you live shouldn't determine whether you live #KONY2012", the group posted to Twitter Thursday.

Michael Poffenberger, executive director of Resolve, an advocacy organization that works with Invisible Children, agrees the awareness generated about a previously mostly invisible conflict is nothing but a good thing. "You have to recognize that for more than two decades [Joseph] Kony and the LRA have been perpetrating horrific atrocities in remote parts of Central Africa, and nobody has been paying attention," he told Yahoo News in an interview Thursday.

Poffenberger said he and the founders of Invisible Children became obsessed with the Lord's Resistance Army, its founder Joseph Kony and the plight of thousands of African children disappearing in the conflict, when they traveled to the region separately in 2003-2004. "They created this initial film that took off," he said. "And they have been connecting with an audience. The majority of their supporters—and they have hundreds of thousands of supporters—are millennials" who never previously donated to a nonprofit. And he believes this newly activated millennial audience could help foment political change.

In May 2010, members of Invisible Children and Resolve were in the Oval Office as President Barack Obama signed legislation—the Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Recovery Act (see photo below). The bill, originally spearheaded by former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), ended up with the support or sponsorship of 267 members of Congress—more than any other piece of Africa legislation in history, said Sarah Margon, a former Feingold staff member.

Invisible Children and Resolve activists watched as President Obama signed LRA disarmament bill they had championed …
看不見的兒童和決心活動家觀看，當奧巴馬總統簽署他們擁護的聖靈抵抗軍解除武裝法案...

"We have seen your reporting, your websites, your blogs, and your video postcards—you have made the plight of the children visible to us all," Obama said in a statement to the groups that had spearheaded the grassroots advocacy campaign, including Invisible Children.

Last year, Obama ordered a few hundred special forces to Central Africa to assist in the hunt for Kony.

Invisible Children does have programs on the ground in Uganda, including information collection and monitoring programs for tracking abductees. (According to financial information Invisible Children posted to its website to rebut some of the criticism, it spent about a third of its $8.8 million 2011 budget on programs in Central Africa.) But there's an inherent push and pull between advocating for a cause and explaining the actual complexities on the ground, even those who praise the group note.

"There is a legitimate debate about the degree to which the video oversimplifies a complex issue," Resolve's Poffenberger said. "But you can't present a documentary that appeals to the human rights professional crowd and also gets viewed by 30 million people ... about something occurring in Central Africa. There's a trade-off that you have to accept and make very carefully."

Invisible Children has helped raise awareness so that millions of Americans now know about the LRA and are pressing their members of Congress for action, Margon, the former Feingold Senate staffer and an Africa expert at the Center for American Progress, told Yahoo News Thursday. "At the same time, there are certainly cases where they have cut corners on some of the facts to get their message out," she said.
Others note that the production value of the video sets it apart—and may speak to the next big tool in global activism. "Ten years ago, the Stop the Landmines advocacy group got the Nobel Peace price because they used email," said Hudson, the former Bush White House aide. "This is the next iteration. Desk-top movie-making, to create a video of such high production value, that you change the way these conflicts are viewed and understood."

Academics and Washington policy wonks aside, Hudson said, few Americans had heard much about the LRA issue before Invisible Children's video—at least not in a way that captured their attention and compassion. "So they have tapped into a huge market that had not been tapped into before. And there is limitless empathy in this country for these causes."

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/envoy/kony2012-invisible-children-viral-video-uganda-conflict-sparks-183106657.html

青少年運動推廣美國在中非的軍事存在
Youth Movement Promotes US Military Presence in Central Africa
The Intel Hub
By Nile Bowie
March 8, 2012

Edward Bernays believed that society could not be trusted to make rational and informed decisions on their own, and that guiding public opinion was essential within a democratic society.
愛德華伯內斯認為，社會不能被信任會靠自己作出理性和明智的決定，而引導輿論在一個民主社會是不可或缺的。
Bernays founded the Council on Public Relations and his 1928 book, Propaganda cites the methodology used in the application of effective emotional communication.
伯內斯成立公共關係議會和他在1928年的書宣傳，援引了方法被用於有效情感溝通的應用。
He discovered that such communication is capable of manipulating the unconscious in an effort to produce a desired effect – namely, a capacity to manufacture mass social adherence in support of products, political candidates and social movements. Nearly a century after his heyday, Bernays’ methodology is apparent in almost every form of civic and consumer persuasion.
他發現這樣的溝通是能夠以努力來操縱無意識者去產生預期的效果 - 即有能力來製造羣眾社會堅持去支持產品如政治候選人和社會運動。差不多在他的全盛期後一個世紀，伯內斯的方法明顯在幾乎每一種說服公民和消費者的形式中。
The platform of social media is being used in unprecedented new ways, one such example is a new online documentary about the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), an extremist rebel group operating in Central Africa.
社交媒體平台正在被用於前所未有的新的方法，一個這樣的例子是一套新關於聖靈抵抗軍（LRA）的記錄片，一個在中非洲運作的極端反叛集團。
The documentary is unprecedented, not for its educational attributes but for its capacity to use visual branding, merchandising and highly potent emotional communication to influence the viewer to support US military operations in resource rich Central Africa under the pretext of capturing the LRA’s commander, Joseph Kony.
這部紀錄片是史無前例的，不衹為它的教育性屬性，而且其能力去使用視覺品牌、銷售和高度有效的情感溝通來影響觀眾，支持美國在資源豐富的中非洲軍事行動，以捕捉“聖靈抵衹抗軍的指揮官約瑟夫·科尼作為藉口。
The Lord’s Resistance Army was originally formed in 1987 in northwestern Uganda by members of the Acholi ethnic group, who were historically exploited as forced laborers by the British colonialists and later relegated by the nation’s dominant ethic groups following independence. Together with the Holy Spirit Movement, the LRA represented the armed wing of a resistance faction aiming to overthrow the government of current Ugandan President and staunch US military ally, Yoweri Museveni.

The LRA was originally formed to combat ethic marginalization, but soon became dominated by Joseph Kony, a self-proclaimed spiritual messenger of the (Christian) Holy Spirit. Kony utilized his messianic persona to lead a syncretic spiritual movement based on Acholi tribal beliefs’ and extremist Christian dogma.

It is claimed that LRA seeks to establish a theocratic state based on the Ten Commandments, however its inner ideological mythology is largely unknown. In an effort to mobilize a large scale armed resistance, the LRA routinely recruited child soldiers and forced them to commit heinous acts such as cannibalism and mutilation on others who resisted to join the rebel group during their extensive twenty-five year campaign.

KONY 2012 is directed by Jason Russell and runs just thirty minutes; the video has received over twenty million views on YouTube and Vimeo and it’s national support group on Facebook is said to gain 4,000 members each hour.

The highly produced feature is narrated from the perspective of Russell and his attempt to explain the Lord’s Resistance Army to his infant son, Gavin. The video features footage from Russell’s trip to Uganda (prior to 2006, when the LRA was still operating in the region) and introduces the viewer to Jacob, a Ugandan boy who was formally recruited by the LRA as a child soldier.

Russell presents various montages of ethically diverse groups of students raising their fists in the air, sporting KONY t-shirts, and scenes of mass celebration in response to President Obama signing the S. 1067: Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009.

The bill was passed without congressional approval, and allows the US to deploy military forces in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic and South Sudan (at the consent of those nations) in pursuit of LRA rebels.

The film further advocates the requirement of public support for US military operations in the region through forms of street activism, encouraging viewers to purchase Action Kits ($30.00) and posters ($10.00) featuring images of Joseph Kony. Russell then targets specific celebrities and US policy makers and pressures them to endorse the campaign against Kony. Perhaps most absurdly, Russell suggests that without mass public support from the American public, the US would withdraw its military presence from the region.

This is the first large-scale campaign to mobilize social medialites to aggregate public support for what would otherwise be, controversial pro-intervention US foreign policy.

The production relies on highly charged and often unrelated emotional triggers, which ultimately rely on the viewers sense of compassion in tandem with a lack of prior information on the subject to produce a desired result – explicitly, the villainous mythification of Kony and the mainstream acceptance of US presence in Africa through a proposed archipelago of AFRICOM military bases in the region.

The production targets an age group between thirteen and twenty-one, and uses a level of academic vocabulary appropriate for a young adult audience with a limited attention span; the narrator at one point even insists the viewer pay attention. The viewer is encouraged to form an emotional connection to Russell, as we witness unrelated footage of his child’s birth.

The viewer is then subsequently associated with Russell’s role as a nurturer to his young son, before shifting to scenes of Russell nurturing the Ugandan child soldier, Jacob. Russell is shown prophetically pledging to stop the LRA to the traumatized and crying young boy. The intimate portrayal of emotion in these scenes work to further incite a reactionary response from the viewer, towards the preordained conclusion suggested in the narrative – a mass mobilization of support for the US military in their efforts to stop Jacob’s source of trauma. Bernays’ would be beside himself.

KONY 2012 is produced like any other sleek marketing campaign – instead of stimulating elements of self-satisfaction like advertisers would do to promote a product, US military intervention is justified to end an atrocious humanitarian catastrophe.

The film also plays on an underlying theme of the White Man’s Burden, a notion that persons of European descent inherit a quality of guilt for their ancestors’ inclination for slavery and colonialism, requiring an activist response to finally correct the situation by “saving Africa.” During the Nigerian civil war in 1967, western media successfully used images of starving children for the first time to strengthen public support for military aid to the secessionist Republic of Biafra before rebel forces were defeated. This film attempts to purportedly “change the conversation of our culture,” however it remains a highly sophisticated refurbishment of pro-military interventionist foreign policy propaganda, dependent on dangerous subliminal messaging.

Furthermore, the film was produced by an organization called Invisible Children, Inc., who have been criticized by the Better Business Bureau for refusing to provide necessary information in the Bureau’s standards assessment. Invisible Children, Inc. has failed to disclose a list of sponsors (beyond the donations of American high school students), and has also earned a low rating in accountability from Charity Navigator because they won’t let their financials be independently audited.

In a 2011 financial statement, the organization disclosed that only 31% of all the funds they receive are used for charitable purposes, with the majority allocated toward travel expenses and employee salaries. Invisible Children has also been accused of fraud and voter manipulation in a recent charity contest sponsored by Chase Bank and Facebook. The group’s Co-Founder and President, Laren Poole addressed the International Criminal Court in 2009 alongside Aryeh Neier, President of George Soros’ pro-war Open Society Institute.

Invisible Children has partnered with two other organizations, Resolve and Digitaria, to create the LRA Crisis Tracker, a digital crisis-mapping platform that broadcasts attacks allegedly committed by the LRA.

On its list of corporate sponsors, Resolve lists Human Rights Watch and the International Rescue Committee. Digitaria’s website boasts commercial clients such as CBS, FOX, MTV, ESPN, Adidas, NFL, Qualcomm, NBC, National Geographic, Hasbro and Warner Brothers. While KONY 2012 attempts to portray itself as an indigenous activist movement bent on bringing justice to African children, its parent organization is affiliated with the upper echelon of the US corporate media and a network of foundation-funded pro-war civil society groups with a long history of fomenting pro-US regime change under the banner of democratic institution building.

According to Invisible Children’s own LRA Crisis Tracker, not a single case of LRA activity has been reported in Uganda since 2006. The website records ninety eight deaths in the past year, with the vast majority taking place in the northeastern Bangadi region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a tri-border expanse sharing territory with the Central African republic and South Sudan.

Since December 2009, the eastern Djemah region of CAR has seen occasional LRA activity; the western Tambura region of South Sudan has experienced even less. The LRA has been in operation for over two decades, and presently remains at an extremely weakened state, with approximately 400 soldiers. Due to the extreme instability in northern DRC after decades of rebel insurgencies and Rwandan/Ugandan military incursions into the nation, it remains highly unlikely that cases of violence in the region can be sufficiently investigated before concluding LRA involvement.

The whereabouts of Joseph Kony are completely unknown; he was last seen in crossing between Sudan and CAR in 2010, according to unverified reports. The US military currently has one hundred military officers training and overseeing the Ugandan military in anti-LRA operations. Due to the complete absence of LRA activity in Uganda, it becomes feasible that the US may be planning further operations in the resource rich DRC. Over six million Congolese nationals have been killed in war since 1996, largely with US complicity.

The regimes of Paul Kagame in Rwanda and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda have both received millions in military aid from the United States. Since the abhorrent failure of the 1993 US intervention in Somalia, the US has relied on the militaries of Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia to carry out US interests in proxy.

Paul Kagame of Rwanda has been given free reign by the US to conduct military operations inside DRC in the on-going ethnic conflict in that region following the 1994 Rwandan genocide. For Ugandan participation in the fight against Somalia’s al Shabaab, Museveni receives $45 million dollars in military aid.

The US has contributed enormous sums to these nations and now is beginning to consolidate its presence in the region under Barack Obama and AFRICOM, the United States African Command. The LRA has contributed to less than one hundred unverified deaths in the past twelve months. Considering that the United States completely ignored events in DRC and Rwanda that collectively resulted in nearly seven million deaths, their participation against the ailing Lord’s Resistance Army is completely absurd by comparison.

Through AFRICOM, the United States is seeking a foothold in the incredibly resource rich central African block in a further maneuver to aggregate regional hegemony over China. DRC is one of the world’s largest regions without an effectively functioning government. It contains vast deposits of diamonds, cobalt, copper, uranium, magnesium, and tin while producing over $1 billion in gold each year.

It is entirely feasible that the US can considerably increase its presence in DRC under the pretext of capturing Joseph Kony. The US may further mobilize ground forces, in addition to the use of predator drones and targeted missile strikes, inevitably killing civilians. In a press conference at the House Armed Services Committee on March 13, 2008, AFRICOM Commander, General William Ward stated that AFRICOM will further its regional presence by “operating under the principle theatre-goal of combating terrorism”.

During an AFRICOM Conference held at Fort McNair on February 18, 2008, Vice Admiral Robert T. Moeller openly declared AFRICOM’s guiding principle as protecting “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market”, before citing China’s increasing presence in the region as challenging to American interests.

The crimes of the Lord’s Resistance Army have been documented in the past and they are truly despicable actions. Presently, the operations of the LRA have nearly dissolved and their presence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is difficult to verify.

While the pro-war filmmakers behind KONY 2012 naively call for the US military to assert its place in the conflict, an independent fact finding mission would be far more effective in assessing the seriousness of the LRA threat in the present day.
http://theintelhub.com/2012/03/08/youth-movement-promotes-us-military-presence-in-central-africa/

KONY 2012 (對抗國際第一號罪犯)

匿名 - 科尼2012 警告

科尼？美國的戰爭罪犯怎辦?

科尼2012 - 瘋傳的光明會宣傳

科尼2012騙局...銀行家智取數以百萬計的青年活躍分子？

繼科尼2012欺詐後立法者推動美國入侵非洲

烏干達人對科尼2012 宣傳影片憤怒回應

全球主義者拔科尼2012 上的插頭，帶著壯觀的失敗和燒傷 (蕾哈娜中招自辨)