Kony 2012 & Jason Russell

[1]2,400 words

Kony 2012 director Jason Russell’s fifteen minutes are almost up, so I thought I would get my thoughts on record before he is hopelessly passé.

Most commentary has focused on Joseph Kony and Jason Russell themselves. This is understandable, since Kony is a vibrant cannibal statesman and Russell is an obvious magnet for bullying.

But I want to begin with some comments on the movie. Kony 2012 [2], which was uploaded to YouTube on March 5th, is excellent propaganda — albeit in service of a stupid aim — and Jason Russell, aged 33, is a highly talented filmmaker. (Kony 2012 is the tenth video he has made about Kony.)

Now before you object, we have to remember that this documentary is directed at Americans — at American ’tards to be precise. Thus everything smarmy, annoying, and pretentious in the video is not just Jason Russell being Jason Russell. It is there because it is carefully calculated to appeal to ’tards. And it does. Over 84 million of them, and counting — nipping at the heels of that talking dog video:

http://youtu.be/nGeKSiCQkPw [3]

On Russell’s posters, Kony’s face appears alongside the faces of Osama Bin Laden and Hitler. Why not Stalin and Mao? Because the average American would not recognize either of them. Beyond that, the purpose of the video is, in effect, to start a war with Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army, and the United States has fought wars against Bin Laden and Hitler. So it makes perfect sense.

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Everything about this video is calculated to appeal to the idealism of whites. Undergirding white idealism is an element of grandiosity. The old version of white idealism — the imperialistic, crusading “white man’s burden” version — was based on frank expressions of white pride and supremacism. Whites felt entitled to improve non-whites because we looked down on them and wanted to raise them up to our level, and if that meant invading and colonizing their lands and supplanting their religions and cultures, then so be it.

The modern version of white idealism on display in Kony 2012 is premised on white guilt and self-hatred, but it is equally supremacist and grandiose, for if one is guilty of everything, then one is responsible for everything, i.e., one can do anything. Every time one pities another, one secretly congratulates oneself for being superior. Every time one blames one’s race for the world’s woes, one slyly congratulates oneself as being part of the only people who really matter, the only real agents of history. Everybody else is just along for the ride.

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If whites are responsible for black crime, wars, cannibalism, corruption, and chaos, that means that blacks are not responsible. They are not agents. The all-powerful white man has somehow turned them into zombies hell-bent on self-destruction. Proclaiming oneself a Christ figure and offering to suffer for the sins of others is obviously pretentious. But declaring oneself a race of devils and doing penance for the sins one has caused others to commit is equally pretentious. And the whole game is given away when the white devils’ penance consists of invading Africa all over again.

Kony 2012 appeals to white grandiosity on all sorts of levels, not just the explicit message. Three of the more subtle ways of inflating the ego of the viewer are the ideas of exceptionalism, of being on the “cutting edge” of progress, and of “thinking globally.”

The exceptionalism of this video is ludicrous, but nothing flatters the American ’tard more deeply than the idea that he is engaged in something utterly unique and unprecedented. We are told, for instance, that today, unlike every previous generation, our actions will shape the course of history for subsequent generations. (That’s the difference between us and them.) We are told that if Americans commit troops to finding Joseph Kony, this will be the first time in American history that we have sent troops abroad on a moral crusade unrelated to calculations of national and economic interests. I kid you not.

The idea of progress is enormously flattering to the ego, for it basically offers us the opportunity to look down upon Plato and Aristotle, Dante and Goethe, Kepler and Newton, Bach and Wagner simply because we were born after them and have been raised to a higher level of civilization by the work of all our forebears. And of course, we can always raise ourselves to an even higher level than “those people” (our knuckle-dragging peers) by integrating our lives with the “cutting edge” of technology, like Facebook and Twitter. Early on in the film, Russell informs us portentously that there are more people on Facebook than there were alive on the planet 200 years ago. Later, we are also informed that Facebook and Twitter have “changed everything” by allowing “the people” to shape policy directly, bypassing the moneyed interests and establishment media. Moral superiority is only a free Facebook and Twitter account away.

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The idea of “thinking globally” is underscored from the very beginning. This movie does not begin with the Big Bang, but it does start out in the solar system. Then we see our planet, a blue oasis of life in the black desert of space. We see a baby being born. All of us begin this way, Russell informs us. And all of us matter. Throughout the movie, Russell moves masterfully from the global to the particular. One graphic shows the faces, in color, of two people who know about Kony’s crimes against the backdrop of thousands of black and white images of the ignorant. As the images recede, they form a globe. Later, we see a vast sea of faces in color. That’s progress! Another graphic illustrates the thousands of victims of Joseph Kony. Then it zooms in on the face of one child, whom we have already met. It is seductive. We see the big picture. We see ourselves as the kind of people who see the big picture. Yet we never lose sight of each precious individual. That’s just the kind of people we are. We see the universe in every grain of sand.

And now that we have achieved enlightenment, we are told what to do. We need to Tweet Oprah, Ryan Seacrest, and other members of the Hollywood Brain Trust to support sending US troops to Uganda. We need to donate a few dollars to Invisible Children ($10 million were donated last year), for which we will receive an Action Kit: a box including two Kony 2012 bracelets, as well as posters, stickers, yard signs, and flyers designed to raise awareness of Kony. The bracelets have serial numbers. Enter your number into a website, and one has an account. One can geo-tag one’s posters and flyers with one’s phone and track one’s impact in real time. The goal of the campaign is to change the conversation of the culture by making Jospeh Kony famous. This campaign will culminate on April 20th, with the Cover the Night initiative, in which Russell’s followers will blanket the world with Kony propaganda. (I hope the kit contains information on how the get bailed out of jail on the morning of April 21st.) The video ends with three things the viewer can do right away, from the comfort of his own keyboard.

The reactionary in me wants to sneer and poke fun at all this, but the revolutionary in me is taking notes. Because this is the kind of work that White Nationalists should be doing. Imagine if the South Africa Project [7], which has done excellent work raising awareness of anti-white genocide in South Africa, were to grow into something like Russell’s Invisible Children charity, which spent nearly $9 million last year on its projects, including the Kony 2012 video. And Invisible Children is just one of many charities funneling aid into the black hole of Africa.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with thinking globally, if one really is thinking. And there’s nothing wrong with idealism, provided one has the right ideas. The problem with Invisible Children and every other pro-black charity is that they are premised on massive moral, political, and demographic delusions. Listening to Jason Russell, you would think that whites run the world and are essentially invulnerable, while Africans are an endangered species.

But the truth is that whites do not run the world. We do not even run our own countries. We are ruled by Jews who are promoting low white fertility, racial miscegenation, and race-replacement immigration by fast-breeding non-whites as a deliberate policy of anti-white genocide. As the global white population is in demographic decline, Africans cannot slaughter and eat one another fast enough to prevent their populations from doubling every few decades.

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Jews, moreover, are masters at manipulating the altruism and idealism of people like Jason Russell into sacrificing white genetic interests to non-whites, although such behavior also has rather deep roots in white history and psychology. In the United States, for instance, Jews had little or no role in the abolition of slavery, but they played a large role in the Civil Rights movement, which was grafted onto the indigenous stock of abolitionism even as it was used to further Jewish ethnic interests.

As for taking sides in African civil wars: Africa is filled with savage warlords who commit horrifying atrocities. It is only natural to feel sympathy for the victims of such atrocities. But is it really logical to conclude that the victims are fundamentally morally different from their persecutors? If they were stronger, would the victims treat their persecutors with any more humanity? Would they not also rape, torture, mutilate, slaughter, and cannibalize their enemies in the grand African fashion? If this is the case, then why take sides in their conflicts? And why, of all things, bring them here and resettle them as refugees? That’s just asking for trouble.

In the specific case of Joseph Kony, sending US military advisers to Uganda de facto strengthens the existing Ugandan government of Yoweri Museveni, who also uses child soldiers and has been guilty of torture and repression since assuming office in 1986. Joseph Kony, moreover, has not been seen in Uganda since 2006, which raises the question of whether Invisible Children, like so many other charities, has long outlived its usefulness.

On March 15th, Jason Russell was picked up by police in Southern California and taken to a psychiatric ward for observation. As Jim Goad [9] put it so cattily:

several witnesses reported seeing a naked man mincing and flitting around the street while wagging his finger like a disapproving Mick Jagger. He was reportedly screaming at passersby, pounding his fists on the pavement, interfering with traffic, and vandalizing cars. According to at least one witness, Russell was openly masturbating in the warm California sun. At press time, it remains unclear whether the alleged masturbation and car-vandalizing were separate incidents or were instead fused into one very weird act of vehicular sexual assault

But why take Goad’s word for it? See for yourself [10]. (The naughty bits are tastefully blurred.)

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Apparently, the claim of masturbation was unfounded. In the clip, Russell can be heard ranting about the devil. His wife Danica and a spokesman for Invisible Children claim that he suffered a psychotic break induced by stress, as well as malnutrition and dehydration. Russell does not live in an African refugee camp, so why was he starving and dehydrated? He does say in his Invisible Children bio that he is in training for an “Iron Man” competition, so perhaps that explains it.

Russell’s ego, however, seems to be made of weaker stuff. Apparently, he had been upset by criticism directed at his film and at him personally. Danica Russell claims that “because of how personal the film is, many of the attacks against it were also very personal, and Jason took them very hard.” He is expected to remain hospitalized for a while. I wish him well and implore his doctors not to let him read Jim Goad’s piece, or he might never recover.

Everything about Jason Russell’s persona makes men want to corner him in the locker room and give him a wedgie. This is how Russell answered the question “Who am I?”

I am a rebel soul: dream evangelist. I am obsessed with people. I tell stories by making inspiring movies that move people’s emotions, and then I take those emotions and transform them into action. My middle name is Radical. I married my best friend. We have known each other since we were six and seven. I have a three-year-old boy named Gavin Danger & a one-year-old girl named Everley Darling. I truly believe I am the luckiest person on earth because of my family, friends and the ability to go to a dream factory every day for work.

He also says, “If Oprah, Steven Spielberg and Bono had a baby, I would be that baby.” Naturally, his favorite superhero is Peter Pan.

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Russell certainly gives off a narcissistic vibe, as do most theater people. He gives himself and his son Gavin a lot of screen time in Kony 2012, which I think is effective — if a bit cloying. But I can see how people interpret it as a giant ego trip, which fits in with the underlying grandiosity of his message.

Russell is also good-looking, and he knows it, judging from his constantly changing hair styles and colors. He dresses like a metrosexual hipster. His speech is fey and sibilant, and he loves musicals. Naturally, he’s being teased as a fag, but he’s probably not gay. He’s just “modern.” Yes, he minces and prances and wags his finger like Mick Jagger. But Mick isn’t gay either. He’s just English.

Russell seems congenitally liberal and PC, but he is actually an Evangelical Christian, which produces the same ethomasochistic behavior as secular liberalism, although the operating system is slightly different. The two most un-PC — and thus probably the most honest — statements he has made is that he finds pregnant women sexy and wants to have nine more kids with his wife.

[13]What, then, could explain Russell’s breakdown? I have a theory that actually explains his effeminate behavior as well as a lot of other things, such as his interest in Africa, his talent at making propaganda films, the choreographed crowd scenes from Kony 2012, and even his choice of April 20th (Hitler’s birthday) for the Cover the Night vandalism spree: there really is a woman trapped in Jason Russell’s body and struggling to get out, and her name is Leni Riefenstahl.