<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>Begin forwarded message:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="5" color="#000000" style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>From: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="5" style="font: 18.0px Helvetica">Louis Proyect <<a href="mailto:lnp3@panix.com">lnp3@panix.com</a>></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="5" color="#000000" style="font: 18.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>Date: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="5" style="font: 18.0px Helvetica">March 7, 2012 4:42:26 PM CST</font></div></div></blockquote><br><blockquote type="cite"><div><br>I first found out about Joseph Kony this morning from a PEN-L comrade who has been following the story behind the liberal interventionist campaign based on the online movie "The Invisible Children". I sent his note to a good friend from Uganda who had this to say:<br><br>---<br><br>Thank you for your mail, and your good work on this subject. Certainly the intervention of the US in the war against Kony and the LRA has an odour, or rather stench, of a 19th century civilising mission to it. As to the reasons behind the intervention, it has seemed for a long time that US has been working towards increasing its influence in Southern Sudan and central Africa. The breakup of the Sudan into two states, with the aid of its Ugandan proxy, was done with this objective in mind. Now the war against Kony allows the US to integrate the armed forces of the client regime in Uganda even more tightly with the US military. At the same time, Kony and the LRA, themselves in part a by-product of the war to break up Sudan, now provide a pretext for the US to treat Southern Sudan as a failed state that is unable to police its own territory, and therefore further entrench itself there.<br><br>I would guess the US perceives that intervention in countries like Uganda and the Sudan, both neighbouring countries of the resource rich DRC, gives it a strategic advantage in the new scramble for Africa, particularly as Chinese oil, mining, and construction companies have been moving into the continent that was formerly a back yard of the Europeans and North Americans. The conflict in the 1990s in the DRC and Great Lakes involved the replacement of French with US clients in Rwanda and DRC, and undoubtedly US/European rivalry played a part in those years of pointless bloodshed. However, I feel the US is most concerned now to make sure that US power is not marginalised in Africa by Chinese economic investment and Chinese patronage of the African states and elites. Chinese corporations have invested in Sudanese oil fields, and recently there was some talk of the Chinese state paying for the extension of the railway line from Northern Uganda to Juba, capital of Southern Sudan.<br><br>Such investments by Chinese corporations in peripheral places like Uganda and Sudan may be relatively small in world terms but, given the marginalisation of these places, even these small sums do nonetheless threaten the thousands of threads of patronage, corruption and client-ism that have thus far bound the post independence African states to Europe and North America.<br><br>Besides that, don't empire, wars and humanitarian interventions become a self justifying way of life for those who embark on them?<br><br>Talking of civilising missions, did you hear of this?<br><a href="http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/dr-livingstone-s-lost-1871-massacre-218211.aspx">http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/dr-livingstone-s-lost-1871-massacre-218211.aspx</a><br><br></div></blockquote>[...]</div><br></body></html>