Sometimes You Just Have to Shake Your Head
There are crazy people all over the internet. You run into them. You deal with it. But every once in a while you run into someone so strange, so utterly fucked-up, that your brain just throws out a red card and shuts down. And today I ran into one: Sam Childers, Christian Preacher, Missionary, and either one of the most irresponsible men on the planet, or just batshit insane.
Childers's runs a website called Machine Gun Preacher, which appeals to a particularly familiar Christian narrative: violent, criminal drug-user with a wasted life who eventually found Jesus. It's there that Childers's steps take a different turn. Outraged and alarmed by the torment suffered by children in the violent landscape of southern Sudan, Childers found his path in pursuit of his nemesis, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), Joseph Kony's band of nutjobs who enslave children and mutilate adults on the direct instructions of the Holy Ghost, and who may actually have won the coveted "Godwin's Law Exemption". Childers's was so outraged by child soldiering, and the torment suffered by children, that he resolved to found a charity and fight back.
Vanity Fair covered this all in an article back from April, but were not entirely generous Brett Keller is much less generous, posting an excellent analysis of the VF article, and has been joined by some well-justified umbrage from Tales From the Hood. Because, you see, Childers's decided that his mission in life was not just to help the stricken children and stop child soldiering, he decided his mission was to hunt down and kill Joseph Kony. To that end he hired his own militia, claiming to join the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA, the SPLA disputes this), and began smuggling and selling arms in the country.
If you know something about that part of Africa, you probably just felt an odd sensation in your head. That was the lizard, primitive part of your brain uttering a plaintive "What the Fuck?" and then pressing the Caps Lock key about twenty million times, so the words are about the size of a coconut and are currently lodged between your hippocampus and your prefrontal cortex. Don't think about it too long, you'll give yourself an aneurysm. Just take deep, relaxing breaths and break it down into slightly smaller swear words.
Seriously? An officer in the SPLA? What the fuck? What the fucking fuck? The same SPLA that has a grudge match with Human Rights Watch? The same SPLA that first recruited thousands of child soldiers, and then didn't bother to get around demobilizing them until...oh...last year? The SPLA that is currently fighting to hold together as different warlords try to negotiate deals for themselves? The disorganized, undisiciplined mess that everyone seems to see as the lesser of two evils by a thin margin? This is who this guy is responsible to? How does he explain this? "We treat our child soldiers better then Kony treats his?" "We only hack off some limbs?" "I just work here?" If he really is part of the SPLA, how do we know where the money he raises goes? What if the SPLA decides to use him to go after some of their own renegade warlords? Is that what his charity works on then? Pacifying Sudan in the name of the SPLA? It's the SPLA for God's sake! There is no better testament to how fucked up, horrible, and utterly insane the government of northern Sudan is than to point at the SPLA and say "See these guys? These are the good guys". I feel like I've fallen into some kind of Bizarro-Universe, where everything is completely backwards and nothing makes sense, but even there this would probably blow someone's mind.
And then he sells weapons to people, like factions in Rwanda and the Congo, and seems to brag about it. Rwanda and the Congo? I mean, running weapons is bad enough (PROTIP: If you are storing weapons in an orphanage, you're probably the villain), but this? Really? What the fuck is this I don't even - I mean, seriously? You could count all the moral, well-trained, reputable armed groups in the Kivu theater and still have fingers left over after they've lopped off both of your hands with a machete. What the...you know what? I'm not even going to bother anymore. I mean, while people like Jason Stearns might yell at people for portraying Congo as the land of Rape and Lions, I don't think he could argue that you should start selling weapons to the armed groups in the Kivu theater. Who did he sell to? The FDLR, who instigated the Rwandan genocide? The RPF who ended the genocide, and in the process of repatriation, caused tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of Hutu to "disappear"? Did he sell to rapists who murder, or murderers who rape? Admittedly, to the victim having a knife shoved up their ass the question is probably academic, but shouldn't he at least tell his donors which group of crazed motherfuckers he sold weapons to? Depending on how many weapons he sold, they could have contributed to the torture and death of possibly hundreds of people - shouldn't they at least get to know which ones?
This isn't irresponsible - that would imply that some standard of responsibility applies in Bizarro-Universe. This isn't even well-intentioned but badly implemented. This, the entire idea of running a charity while fighting for a corrupt, election-defrauding, child-soldier using army and arming the world's largest morass of active grudges, is just plain, simple batshit fucking crazy.
But hey, at least he's doing something for the children, right? Maybe that'll make anything better.
(Everyone else who's posted on this has attracted his defenders. I wonder if they'll come here?)
Childers's runs a website called Machine Gun Preacher, which appeals to a particularly familiar Christian narrative: violent, criminal drug-user with a wasted life who eventually found Jesus. It's there that Childers's steps take a different turn. Outraged and alarmed by the torment suffered by children in the violent landscape of southern Sudan, Childers found his path in pursuit of his nemesis, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), Joseph Kony's band of nutjobs who enslave children and mutilate adults on the direct instructions of the Holy Ghost, and who may actually have won the coveted "Godwin's Law Exemption". Childers's was so outraged by child soldiering, and the torment suffered by children, that he resolved to found a charity and fight back.
Vanity Fair covered this all in an article back from April, but were not entirely generous Brett Keller is much less generous, posting an excellent analysis of the VF article, and has been joined by some well-justified umbrage from Tales From the Hood. Because, you see, Childers's decided that his mission in life was not just to help the stricken children and stop child soldiering, he decided his mission was to hunt down and kill Joseph Kony. To that end he hired his own militia, claiming to join the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA, the SPLA disputes this), and began smuggling and selling arms in the country.
If you know something about that part of Africa, you probably just felt an odd sensation in your head. That was the lizard, primitive part of your brain uttering a plaintive "What the Fuck?" and then pressing the Caps Lock key about twenty million times, so the words are about the size of a coconut and are currently lodged between your hippocampus and your prefrontal cortex. Don't think about it too long, you'll give yourself an aneurysm. Just take deep, relaxing breaths and break it down into slightly smaller swear words.
Seriously? An officer in the SPLA? What the fuck? What the fucking fuck? The same SPLA that has a grudge match with Human Rights Watch? The same SPLA that first recruited thousands of child soldiers, and then didn't bother to get around demobilizing them until...oh...last year? The SPLA that is currently fighting to hold together as different warlords try to negotiate deals for themselves? The disorganized, undisiciplined mess that everyone seems to see as the lesser of two evils by a thin margin? This is who this guy is responsible to? How does he explain this? "We treat our child soldiers better then Kony treats his?" "We only hack off some limbs?" "I just work here?" If he really is part of the SPLA, how do we know where the money he raises goes? What if the SPLA decides to use him to go after some of their own renegade warlords? Is that what his charity works on then? Pacifying Sudan in the name of the SPLA? It's the SPLA for God's sake! There is no better testament to how fucked up, horrible, and utterly insane the government of northern Sudan is than to point at the SPLA and say "See these guys? These are the good guys". I feel like I've fallen into some kind of Bizarro-Universe, where everything is completely backwards and nothing makes sense, but even there this would probably blow someone's mind.
And then he sells weapons to people, like factions in Rwanda and the Congo, and seems to brag about it. Rwanda and the Congo? I mean, running weapons is bad enough (PROTIP: If you are storing weapons in an orphanage, you're probably the villain), but this? Really? What the fuck is this I don't even - I mean, seriously? You could count all the moral, well-trained, reputable armed groups in the Kivu theater and still have fingers left over after they've lopped off both of your hands with a machete. What the...you know what? I'm not even going to bother anymore. I mean, while people like Jason Stearns might yell at people for portraying Congo as the land of Rape and Lions, I don't think he could argue that you should start selling weapons to the armed groups in the Kivu theater. Who did he sell to? The FDLR, who instigated the Rwandan genocide? The RPF who ended the genocide, and in the process of repatriation, caused tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of Hutu to "disappear"? Did he sell to rapists who murder, or murderers who rape? Admittedly, to the victim having a knife shoved up their ass the question is probably academic, but shouldn't he at least tell his donors which group of crazed motherfuckers he sold weapons to? Depending on how many weapons he sold, they could have contributed to the torture and death of possibly hundreds of people - shouldn't they at least get to know which ones?
This isn't irresponsible - that would imply that some standard of responsibility applies in Bizarro-Universe. This isn't even well-intentioned but badly implemented. This, the entire idea of running a charity while fighting for a corrupt, election-defrauding, child-soldier using army and arming the world's largest morass of active grudges, is just plain, simple batshit fucking crazy.
But hey, at least he's doing something for the children, right? Maybe that'll make anything better.
(Everyone else who's posted on this has attracted his defenders. I wonder if they'll come here?)