Joseph Kony 2: this sequel is nothing more than mass entertainment for the boneheaded

Like all blockbuster movies that make a lot of cash or a big splash, Kony 2012 is getting its very own sequel. Invisible Children, the weird half humanitarian outfit, half PR machine that was behind the first hit Kony film, has announced that it will today release “Joseph Kony 2”. Presumably it will be a bit like Scream 2, only featuring a menacing-looking African warlord rather than a psychopath in a droopy mask for the YouTube generation to be terrified by.

The use of the word “sequel”, the nod to Hollywood contained in a title like “Joseph Kony 2”, confirms that the first Kony film, a half-hour hatefest against the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army that had Twitteryouth glued to their iPads, was little more than mass entertainment. It was less a serious humanitarian initiative than a titillating form of interactive entertainment, where you could be both outraged by a wicked man and then Do Something About Him by pressing a few buttons. It was a perfect outlet for self-regarding, ostentatious alms-giving in our videogame era, and so it’s fitting that it will now have a follow-up, yet another opportunity to be thrilled and take action.

In fact, sticking with the movie metaphor, the first Kony film was always more of a remake than an original work. There was a massive amount of commentariat sniffiness towards that online film, with columnists wondering why the hell Justin Bieber fans were suddenly taking an interest in African affairs. And yet that Kony campaign which so gripped Facebookers and celebs was only a rehash of the kind of campaigning that has been pursued by serious reporters, NGOs and politicians for the best part of 20 years. Yes, it might have been a pale imitation – just like Gus Van Sant’s remake of Pyscho wasn’t a patch on Hitchcock’s original – but with its handpicking and elevation of a foreign psycho whom we were all encouraged to hate, Kony 2012 was only the dumb logical conclusion to two decades of liberal grandstanding in foreign affairs.

The first Kony movie was most obviously a botched remake of Save Darfur, that global campaign that had celebs and columnists wetting themselves with excitement in 2005 and 2006 and which likewise reduced a complex African conflict to “a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims”. It was also heavily influenced by the earlier transformation of Slobodan Milosevic into the chattering classes’ hate figure du jour. Back in the 1990s, it was Milosevic who was labelled “the chilling embodiment of evil” by Western hacks in search of simplistic moral mission, culminating in Tony Blair’s Kosovo War of 1999, which Blair described as a “battle between good and evil”. That’s precisely the same sort of language now used by Invisible Children founder and public flasher Jason Russell.

If there is a retro feel to Kony 2012, that’s because it is a mishmash of the childish moralism and bone-headed outlook that motored those liberal campaigns for “wars against evil” in the Nineties and Noughties. We should all feel free to laugh at Joseph Kony 2 when it appears, but let’s remember that it is more than a follow-up to Joseph Kony 1 – it’s also the garish sequel to the pulp fiction about foreign affairs that has been promoted by serious activists and writers over the past 20 years.