Lessons from Sarajevo: A War Stories Primer

Conclusion: Bringing the Stories Home

[ 125 ] The end of history [. . .] has been for the last half-century a technical possibility . The potential self-destruction of the human kind, in itself a turning point in history, has affected and will affect the life and the fragmented memories, respectively, of all future and past generations—including those “that are past ten thousand years backwards or forwards,” as Aristotle wrote [. . .] But to express compassion for those distant fellow humans would be, I suspect, an act of mere rhetoric. Our power to pollute and destroy the present , the past, and the future is incomparably greater than our feeble moral imagination. Carlo Ginzburg I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly. Teju Cole In the final seconds of Kony 2012, the son of the video’s director says, “I’m going to be like you, Dad. I’m going to come with you to Africa.” The screen is filled by the image of a total eclipse, the sun just beginning to reappear. Director Jason Russell’s voice-over then intones, “The better world we want is coming. It’s just waiting for us to stop at nothing.” Viewers are then instructed to do three things: (1) sign a pledge; (2) get an “action kit”; and (3) donate money to the film’s advocacy group. And— oh yes, they should also share the video. Isolating this moment—the climax of Kony 2012, along with the cosmic hook that leads to its final pitch—seems a bit unfair, but it does demonstrate one thing: the film could really be selling practically anything. A “better world” is possible, so long as we “stop at nothing.” And a son who Conclusion Bringing the Stories Home [ 126 ] CONCLUSION tells his father what every father wants to hear: an affirmation of the father’s own choices, a certain form of immortality. “Africa,” of course, is the odd note here, particularly if you really haven’t seen the rest of the video. And, despite the film’s stated goal (to “make Kony famous”), there are still a few people who haven’t. Kony 2012 was posted on YouTube and Vimeo on March 5, 2012, by an NGO called Invisible Children. Since 2004, the group had been working to make a U.S. public aware of the horrific war crimes perpetrated by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and its leader Joseph Kony in Uganda and neighboring countries. But the success of Kony 2012 was a quantum leap, unprecedented in any sort of social networking; it achieved a level of recognition previously inconceivable within the world of human rights organizations . Within weeks the film had been viewed over 100 million times, making it to date the single most viral video in history. I begin my concluding chapter by recapitulating this phenomenon for a very simple reason : Kony 2012 is also a film that Rousseau would have loved, and that Mandeville would have loved to hate. In making this video for the Facebook age, Jason Russell and Invisible Children have given incontrovertible proof that sentimentalism, in war stories at least, is as wildly popular today as it was in the eighteenth century. A brief description of the characters that populate Kony 2012 will sound, quite frankly, like a recapitulation of the rest of this book. The film’s titular subject is the beastly war criminal, Joseph Kony, a man who continues to maim and kill, and who also abducts children, forcing them to become soldiers and sex slaves. (“Making Kony famous,” Invisible Children believes, will also make him a marked man, and facilitate his capture.) The film also briefly introduces a young African boy named Jacob, whose brother has been killed by the LRA, and who is himself in danger of being abducted and victimized by them. And then there is the heroic filmmaker, Jason Russell, who witnesses the boy Jacob’s suffering and responds by promising that “we will stop them.” But the film’s real protagonist—the face with far more screen time that any other—is Russell ’s son Gavin, a representative of vulnerable children everywhere, but principally a stand-in for the film’s audience. If Gavin gets the message, we certainly should. [ 127 ] BRINGING THE STORIES HOME The critical uproar against Jason Russell and his film arose quickly, and...