The complaints about the finances of Invisible Children strike me as wrongheaded and a bit reactionary. That a campaigning organization has spent most of its money on campaigning is not a problem, and the idea that they should have used this money to somehow “directly” help people in Uganda is the kind of liberal charity-ism which gets in the way of thinking about problems as political problems requiring political, rather than philanthropic, solutions; in other words, this “criticism” replicates exactly what is wrong with Invisible Children. The problem is what they are campaigning for: “awareness” among people in the US leading to US intervention against Kony, which imagines the US (intentionally blurring the distinction between the US population and the US state) as a philanthropic actor, rather than a understanding the US state politically, as one of the central elements of an imperialist system.
(Source: stopthescam)
