Would you Fund a Mercenary / Documentary Film Maker?

“Have you want­ed to do some­thing to help the Arab Spring but weren’t sure how? This is your chance.

In Sep­tem­ber, 2012 two famous free­dom fight­ers from the Libyan rev­o­lu­tion, Amer­i­can Matthew VanDyke and Libyan Masood Bwisir, will trav­el togeth­er to Syr­ia and join the rebels on the front line against the dic­ta­tor Bashar al-Assad. ”

“What is the pur­pose of this project and what will VanDyke and Bwisir be doing in Syria?

[Among oth­er things, film­ing] Masood Bwisir enter­tain­ing and improv­ing rebel morale with his famous rev­o­lu­tion songs, includ­ing new ones or vari­a­tions of his Libya songs mod­i­fied for the Syr­i­an revolution”

This kick­starter appli­ca­tion reads like an audi­tion to be picked as a char­ac­ter in a first per­son shoot­er. Drop a coin and hit the space­bar to select this char­ac­ter for the Syr­ia level.

It feels as though the rewards should have been 25$ gets a mag­a­zine clip for AK. 100$ gets a new AK. 1$ buys chai on a hot Syr­i­an day.

I mean, I like crazy … I just think that this kick­starter is crazy in an both old and inter­est­ing­ly nov­el ways. I spent a lit­tle bit of time try­ing to relate to the mind that gen­er­at­ed this project proposal.

From here, it’s not such a dis­tant jump to imag­ine crowd­fund­ing mer­ce­nar­ies in third world places? Now imag­ine, two com­pet­ing fac­tions engag­ing in such fundrais­ing, eg “cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions”? I’m sur­prised Kick­starter has allowed this project up on the site, and I am glad that the fund­ing has begun to stall out at the final moments.

Matthew, if you read this, why don’t you just reach out to Vice Mag­a­zine and get an advance from them to cov­er your expenses?

On a relat­ed note, I high­ly rec­om­mend you read Cam­paign­ing on the Oxus by Jan­u­ar­ius Aloy­sius MacGahan.

He was an Amer­i­can reporter for the New York Her­ald Tri­bune who cov­ered the Russ­ian Army cam­paign in Cen­tral Asia in the late 1873 as a 29 year old. Start­ing from a remote Siber­ian town, he gal­loped 2,000 miles through the dessert to join the Russ­ian forces invad­ing Khi­va. His writ­ing is engross­ing.  On the way, he doc­u­ments a vis­it to a Khan’s harem, and when he final­ly arrives, his engaged jour­nal­ism takes him to the bat­tle­field, where he par­tic­i­pates in the slaugh­ter of the sword field­ing sav­ages with his own rifle.

You should in the least read the open­ing para­graphs of the preface.

Those were the good old days!