Jean-Claude Singbatile told Time about the massacres she witnessed while she was abducted. “They scream only once,” she said. This powerful, four word article barely needs any more description. These four words are extremely impactful and they show how Jean-Claude must have felt. The Lord’s Resistance Army is a guerilla movement that will not die. However, the leader Kony, and none of the original guards members remain the same. The guard is currently filled with abducted boys and abducted girls. Some say, or want to believe, that the army has decreased to below 200 people. This could explain the reasoning behind the many recent civilian abductions. Although the LRA’s members are changing, their tactics stay the same - “the sadistic killings, the child abductions, the ghostlike movements” are all reasons why the LRA is so threatening. In the army, the adults are used for labor. Then, if they are lucky they are released. If they are not, they get killed. The children are a much different story. The boys are abducted to replenish the front lines of the army and the girls are used as housewives. The LRA is preforming a gendered body practice by using the children for different tasks. Some children are even supposed to kill other children. (Watch video here http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,45378815001_1931109,00.html) On rare occurrences, the children and the adults get away. Sarah John, a women who experienced the threat of the LRA, tells Time about an instance where “dirty, smelly, unwanted visitors” ransacked her place. They destroyed everything they could not carry away. Sarah John escaped when the intruder, who was assigned to guard her, stepped away to relive himself. This incident can be related to Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels, Maus I and Maus II. Like Sarah John, Spiegelman often got out of sticky situations during the Nazi reign. Spiegelman knew the right people and had many talents. His friends and his talent helped him get by easier. During his time in the concentration camps, Spiegelman got extra food and clothes that fit because he taught the guards English. “Always I was handsome… But with everything fitted, I looked like a million!” The LRA could be compared to the concentration camps and the Nazis. They both take innocent lives, and only the lucky survive. The articles in Time are presented as regular articles. By using pictures and videos, the story becomes more credible and gains ethos. The media shows how devastating the situation really is. The audience can see and hear how afraid the people in Africa are. The articles are short, but they get the whole message across. James Clifford writes about “partial truths” and that every history/anthropology source must have a subject position and a selection process. However, this article seems to be neutral. The subject position is clear - no country seems to think the LRA is good. Time used suitable pictures and media to back their position. Rather than forcing their audiences to take a side, they use real life accounts to make the reader choose. Time chooses horrifying accounts, not to sway, but because there is no other kind. The picture above shows four sad, scared children. One child is resting his hand on his head expressing how exasperated and distressed he is. He is living his life in fear. The littlest boy is biting on his finger. Like most little children, he is doing this because he is afraid of what is going to happen. The eldest boy’s shirt is rugged. This could imply that he was harassed by the LRA because like the boy in the video, their shirts look the same. His tattered, white shirt and the expression on his face have a deeper meaning. Their bodies and mind have forever been changed. They have seen and heard things that no one should ever have to experience. The LRA is a force that needs to be forever gone.
Individual Analysis (Chloe Gansen)
The Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, is a supposedly Christian-based rebel group first established in Uganda. Under the leadership of Joseph Kony, the LRA has murdered, raped, and kidnapped countless victims, all in an attempt to overthrow the Ugandan government, and more specifically president Yoweri Museveni. The group wishes to create a government revolving around the Ten Commandments. The irony in the group’s ideology is the group has gone against nearly every Christian belief and is ruthless in their ways. While reading online articles on Al Jazeera (a satellite television network based in Qatar), it became apparent that the LRA is hated throughout the world. The articles are presented in a matter-of-fact point of view. The way the African civilians are regarded in the articles relates to the theory of ‘raced or classed bodies’. In general, thoughts of poverty, violence and suffering often come to mind when people of Western culture think about Africa. Because a great deal of sympathy is already felt for the people, it is in no way difficult for the media to further trigger emotional turmoil. The media seems to use these aspects of African culture to define the people or, rather, ‘class’ them. True to this, Al Jazeera brings up instances from the LRA’s past to show just how the severity and cruelty of the group has flourished since it was first established. Specific examples of the horrors the LRA has committed help the reader feel the severity of the situation. Al Jazeera was immensely straightforward regarding the hideousness of the group. One article brings up the system in which the LRA recruits its members. Civilians are forced to join the group, and any defiance to do so is worthy of severe torture or even death. The fact that young children are often recruited shows that the group takes advantage of the aspect of ‘docile bodies’, as they use the children’s own naivety against them. The brutal mindsets and inhumane behaviors are not innate characteristics of the children. Besides writing about past events and specific practices of the LRA, Al Jazeera utilizes many images and video clips to supply the reader with a more relatable and meaningful story of exactly what is going on in this region of Africa. The above image is that of a young LRA rebel passing through a village. The boy seems to be fairly young, though he seems to be fully comfortable prancing around the villagers with dangerous weapons. A video of “the lucky ones” can be found from the following link: http://english.aljazeera.net/video/africa/2010/08/201082075013808342.html. This footage shows the devastation and fear felt by the people, all in part by the LRA. Overall, the situation the LRA has created in Africa is destructive and inhumane. Al Jazeera has done a wonderful job presenting the facts and figures of this group, and lets the audience draw the conclusion that the acts of the LRA are truly evil.
Individual Analysis (Samantha Ristow)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrva2aKW1lU (What is the LRA?)
http://blog.invisiblechildren.com/2011/10/an-lra-survivor-speaks-out-to-rush-limbaugh/ (Evelyn Apoko)
http://blog.invisiblechildren.com/2011/04/article-“i-escaped-life-as-a-child-soldier”/ (“I escaped life as a child soldier”)
What is the Lord’s Resistance Army, or the LRA? The LRA is an African rebel group that terrorizes the regions of Uganda, Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Invisible Children website has a blog in which all posts share the same subjectivity towards the LRA, as well as how they depict members of the LRA, and LRA leader, Joseph Kony. The LRA is labeled as ‘brutal’, ‘heinous’, ‘terroristic’, ‘violent’, ‘murderous’, ‘hostile’ and ‘cult-like’. In such a devoutly Christian region, Joseph Kony claims that ‘his commands come directly from the spiritual world’ and that he ‘wants to rule the country by the Ten Commandments’. However, he has ‘broken every single one’ of them on his mission to satisfy his own ‘personal gain’. Kony and his notorious, ‘terrified followers’ expand the LRA by abducting thousands of young children and ‘brainwashing them to fight’, ‘transforming them into monsters’, and using abducted girls as ‘sex slaves’. The LRA is practicing ‘gendered’ body practices with the youth they abduct by using the boys to become fighters and the girls to be used for their own sexual purposes. In the last twenty years, the LRA has enslaved 66,000 children, including Evelyn Apoko, who spoke out to Rush Limbaugh who accuses President Obama of killing Christians in Uganda.
“I know that there is nowhere in the bible that says Christians should treat humans like animals.”
“I have witnessed the spirit of Joseph Kony and it is not from God.”
“The LRA is not Christian. Joseph Kony and his commanders could hardly be considered human.”
Joseph Kony and his ‘terrified followers’ are a prime illustration of ‘made bodies’ or ‘cultured bodies’. The LRA’s routines, rules, and practices contribute to how these ‘rebels’ are cultured. The LRA is notorious for ‘abducting thousands of young children and brainwashing them to fight’. We can assume that the younger a child is when abducted, the easier it is for the LRA to ‘brainwash’ the child and essentially construct a ‘monster’ from an innocent child. These young children have the potential to become ‘docile bodies’, regulated by the LRA’s violent norms of cultural life. We can also assume that older children who are aware of the LRA and their ‘bizarre’ tactics are unlikely to become cultured into ‘docile bodies’. These older children still have the potential to become cultured in ways that drastically change their outlook in life. The LRA forces children to live in fear as they force abducted children to participate in the LRA’s culture and to live in an ‘environment lacking love and respect’.
One of the blogs on the Invisible Children website is a first-hand experience by a young man named Stephen. He shares the violent, abusive acts threatened and carried out by the LRA:
“We watched some of our companions get beaten to death with clubs and rifle butts. Others, who were unable to keep up with the hours of marching due to wounds on their feet, were hacked to death with machetes. We were taken to the bush and trained to kill, rape and torture others.”
“I was however spared from ever having to kill another person.”
“Many times, the children are forced to kill a family member or a villager before they are taken away, so that the youths feel too ashamed to return home.”
These testimonies from Africans that have experienced first-hand the hatred of humanity in the LRA are evidence that this is ‘the way things actually [are]’. These testimonies present pathos with presents emotional appeal, and are a form of ethos. So far as I have seen in the Invisible Children blog, the LRA is not being recorded in Hegelian or Rankean terms, and the LRA’s grand narrative is still under construction.
The photo below depicts African child soldiers. Their bodies represent the culture of the LRA. Assumedly, their bodies (based on how young they were when abducted) are continuously being constructed by the violent everyday practices of the LRA. The young boys are posing with weapons, assumedly given to them by the LRA, as if to publicize who they are and what they represent—fear. The boys have been cultured by the LRA’s violent norms of cultural life. The all share serious facial expressions, especially the one on the far right. He displays a facial expression that is threatening and angry. We can assume that he is a ‘docile’ follower of the LRA. All of the newly transformed rebels wear rugged clothing, representing their hostile way of life.
Analysis (Group)
Our group took a risk with doing our project on the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA. Since President Obama just recently stated that U.S. 100 troops will be sent to Africa, there is not much information in U.S. news on who the LRA is and events related to the LRA before we became involved in this foreign policy move. Our group analysis is very broad because we do not have much to compare or contrast between our individual analyses.
Since the LRA is so notorious for their violent culture, we found that all of our sources in our individual analyses were very similar. Our sources shared the same subjectivity in which all of them were against the LRA. The rhetoric of our sources used connotation that opposed the LRA. The connotation helps strengthen how the rest of the world views the LRA and their culture. In general, the West tends to feel an immense amount of sympathy for the people of Africa, as they have been associated with high poverty level and crime rates. These negative determinants of health have become classified as cultural norms and a constant in African culture. As a result, Africans could be considered ‘raced’ or ‘classed’ bodies because the media defines and relates certain characteristics with Africans and their culture. The LRA is a ‘matter out of place’ in normal African culture. Essentially, Africans that feel the adverse effects of the LRA, and the members of the LRA have become ‘docile’ as they have learned to live in such a violent region. The LRA controls the public of central Africa. The African rebels associated with the LRA are all negatively seen in other cultures, including ‘normal’ African culture.
We do not believe that ‘leading classes’ are ‘controlling the news’. They are ‘controlling the news’ to a small extent, but since all of our sources, including those from the West and the Middle East, view the LRA very similarly which makes it difficult to judge how much power they actually have.
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