On Joseph Kony and Raurangi Marino.

Joseph Kony has done some awful things. So has Raurangi Marino. The difference in scale is clearly significant, as is the difference in crimes they've committed. There are resonances, though. Both men overstepped a line which most of us assume is uncrossable, and the violence they have inflicted is even more horrific for being committed against vulnerable children. Likewise, both of them have received quite a bit of  press recently: Joseph Kony through the 'Kony 2012' campaign launched via social media by 'Invisible Children' this week, and Raurangi Marino through the Michael Laws 'opinion' piece in the Sunday Star-Times last weekend.*

An odd pair? An inappropriate comparison? A red herring? Perhaps. But hear me out. The inital link between Kony and Marino - that they both received media attention this week - is not an insignificant basis for discussion.

In both cases, specific people who are not journalists use their resources and media savvy to publicly draw attention to the limitations they perceive in a system of justice which is unable to appropriately respond to - let alone prevent - people (such as Kony and Marino) who are guilty of hideous crimes. Furthermore, both Kony and Marino are described as tips of evil icebergs: Kony is just the first in a long list of criminals who are wanted for their crimes against humanity; Marino is but one of a much larger number too ("There are more Raurangis out there..." "there are thousands of feral kids currently in New Zealand").

Another similarity, and one I find particularly disturbing: in both the film and the opinion piece a lone white man (but with thousands - even millions - of implied supporters on whose behalf he speaks) issues a rallying cry against a specific non-white man, assuming the position of confidently speaking for what is transparently and singularly 'right.' Kony2012 makes the point, indeed, that the US military intervention in the situation was "not for self-defense, but because it was right."

Analysis is tricky in both of these cases: one is on very thin ice when trying to find a balance between contextualising both the crimes and their media representations on the one hand, and not 'excusing' the violence inflicted on the other. 

And yet, while it's awfully tiring to keep having to point this kind of thing out - and despite the Kony2012 film claiming "we are not just studying history, we are shaping it" - neither media statement actually engages history - including, yes, colonial history and its ongoing consequences - in order to understand the present predicament.  'Invisible Children' rewinds only as far as the American frontman's first connection with a Ugandan man a few year ago, and Laws goes back as far as the immediate family in which Marino was raised.

Instead, Kony and Marino are framed as singularly bad, and are understood through a consideration of (selectively described) present circumstances rather than through an engaged treatment of how things came to be this way. Because the little matter of colonialism is excised from the history of each case, it can parade around in new garb as a solution instead: Kony is to be identified and captured through US military presence; 'ferals' like Marino "are coming our way" and, it is implied, need to be controlled. Actions which are clearly imperialistic in the abstract are posed as reasonable solutions, and because the backstory has been amputated it is less easy to spot the continuities between past colonial acts and present ones, insight which could plausibly raise a question about the value of repetition.

People are susceptible to these kinds of media stunts because they are hungry for explanations of how the world runs. They have a hunch they need an analysis which explains why things are the way they are, and neither mainstream education nor mainstream media are presently scratching that itch. If it did, perhaps people would be informed enough to make these kind of media products unmarketable. Sure, there are always alternative perspectives which draw the dots differently but these are necessarily complex (the complexity of the recent Occupy movement, which was framed and perhaps at times operated as disorganisation, is a case in point) and would run the risk of revealing, for example, the depth of violence and poverty tied up with corporate greed. An analysis which offers an easy narrative - Kony is evil, Maori are animals - is, ultimately, at the service of the media consumer rather than justice. (I wonder if the target audience watching a clip on youtube or reading an opinion piece in a newspaper seeks to understand these men are unlike them in order to be sure they are not themselves capable of such horrific actions.)

The media-ness of the film and opinion piece are key here, especially when we try to consider what is so compelling about them. Both pieces are tightly focussed on their ideal audience and, thereby, have selected their ideal media platforms. The film is slick like a music video, densely layered, self-consciously 'meta' as - for example - the viewer of the film on youtube watches someone watching something on youtube. Kony2012 knows its genre inside out and references films, social media, music and celebrity while drawing on the same old comfortable narratives that make it feel intuitive. (I will be haunted for a while by the image of the five year old blond boy in Kony2012 being taught that Africa is where the bad people are; he points at a photo of Kony, identifying him as the bad man and announcing later that when he grows up he wants to go to Africa too. Exploitation of children, anyone?)

Ultimately, history and race are central to both of these stories and to how they're told. The 'merchandise' viewers are urged to purchase to 'make Kony famous' chillingly echoes the famous colour scheme and style of Obama's famous election campaign poster. One blogger has commented that the Kony2012 would make Nazi propagandists proud, and I would add that it's worth noticing Laws's repetition of 'feral' and 'breeding' - Jewish people were compared to multiplying rats too. 

Public media lynchings by white men of black men are less easy to notice when the victim is not an innocent; they might even feel a bit like justice. But. Neither Kony nor Marino can be understood outside of the long sweep of circumstances that produce and enable these specific moments of crossing the line; and the information, analysis and justice we seek - including the limits of the present institutions which purport to deliver it - can't be either.





* In case you have had your head in the sand (or don't have internet access) here's a quick background...
Kony 2012 is a carefully produced and very widely distributed half hour film made by an American group keen to draw attention to the figure of Jospeh Kony, leader of the LRA (Lord's Liberation Army), and calling on young people around the world (by which they mostly mean the US) to 'make him famous' this year with the purpose of applying pressure on the US government to (continue to) intervene in the situation and, ultimately, to bring Kony to justice.
Last Sunday ex-MP and ex-Mayor and inflammatory radio host Michael Laws published an 'opinion' piece in a major NZ weekend paper in which he described Raurangi Marino, recently convicted for violent crimes against a 5 year old girl, as 'feral' and extended this term (and his eugenicist vitriole) to the Maori community more broadly, warning readers that these "ferals" are "breeding;" "And they are coming our way."
The Kony2012 film has already been roundly and robustly critiqued in many venues; the Laws piece doesn't seem to have raised any response at all.