'The Interview' story - American hypocrisy towards North Korea

 

 

What better way to draw 2014 to a close than an international news story that positively bristles with hypocrisy and propagandising on an incendiary scale?  I refer to the decision taken by Sony Pictures to withdraw the distribution of a new comedy film ‘The Interview’ (starring Seth Rogan and James Franco) in the wake of a cyberattack by forces attributed by the FBI to come from North Korea, that hacked into Hollywood emails and threatened terrorist action were the film to be released.

In the wake of this story, the tone has been almost unilaterally apoplectic on the part of the US, with President Obama himself castigating Sony for their spineless backing-down under the threats from terrorists, and the likes of George Clooney extemporising over the very serious threat to freedom of speech that such a terrible precedent has enshrined. 

Far from being a dire and doom-laden constitutional threat, with just a modicum of deeper investigation and contextualising, it is possible to expose the hysterical chest-beating on the part of America’s liberal elite to be little more than arrogant short-sightedness, and a wilful ignorance of America’s culpability when it comes to North Korea’s status in the world.

 

 

 

Shortly after the Sony decision to withdraw their support for ‘The Interview’ (a film in which two journalists are sent by the CIA to assassinate Kim-Jong Un), Obama trotted out his trademark rhetoric about how “we can’t have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States”.  He also offered vague yet suitably ominous noises about how “they caused a lot of damage and we will respond proportionately and in a place and time we choose”.

 

Before examining the recent history between America and North Korea, it’s worth placing this story within the context of other recent developments, to realise just what a useful distraction it has been to latch onto. 

For America to pour scorn on North Korea for its attempts to impose censorship on an American film, is it not the most striking hypocrisy that this story emerged barely a week after the US released a heavily censored report damning the CIA for its collusion with the US military-industrial complex in instigating depraved and illegal acts of torture, rendition and incarceration without due process?  The report had taken years to emerge, with Obama trying to suppress its release on woolly grounds of ‘national security’, and in the end only around 400 pages surfaced out of approximately 6000.

Not only this, but the climate change talks in Lima were concluded with little-to-no positive action having been agreed, negligible (and in some respects, backwards) steps having been made, and a resounding shrug from the international news media.  Why were these far more important developments largely swept aside in favour of ramping up the hyperbole around ‘The Interview’ story?  Quite simple; because it concerned Hollywood – a key constituency amongst America’s elite – and allowed America to play the victim slighted by ‘some dictator someplace’.

It is interesting to note that only a couple of days earlier, in response to the UN Security Council getting set to issue a fresh batch of sanctions targeting North Korea’s ‘human rights abuses’, their UN ambassador Ja Song-Nam had formerly objected to such an inclusion and urged the Council to instead focus on the ‘CIA torture crimes committed by the US, which have been conducted worldwide in the most brutal medieval forms, [and] are the gravest human rights violations in the world.’  America, who utilised simulated drowning and improvised enemas amongst their many procedures, hold the ‘power of veto’ which means that such discussion is most unlikely to materialise.

 

 

 

Freedom of speech and Satire

It is also important to view this story in terms of its implications for freedom of speech and satire as a credible art form.  Those in the film industry have already raised grave concerns about what Sony’s precedent means for future film projects that may now struggle for studio backing.  (The development of a Hollywood thriller ‘Pyongyang’ has indeed been scrapped in recent days.) 

If you take satire, which is a very healthy arbiter in a functioning society, it can be said to truly be effective only if the intended ‘butt of the joke’ holds the higher position.  Jokes at the expense of weaker parties are more often than not distasteful and offensive, and seldom make for good satirical comedy.  If you take ‘Team America’, the reason the film is such a successful satire is because the overriding butt of the joke is America’s hubristic hegemonic ambitions as a ‘world police force’, depicted as a blundering military complex that smashes its way around the world with scant concern for anyone else.

I cannot comment on the intended satirical target in the case of ‘The Interview’, but if the nature of the film is the implied or explicit ridiculing of North Korea as a country, then such a threatening riposte must surely have been anticipated.  And if the film is a more sensitive and astute stab at satire, aimed at poking fun at America, then still the studio should have anticipated an inflammatory response and have formulated a plan to counteract it. 

 

Indeed, back in early-July North Korea had lodged a formal protest at the UN against the mooted release of the film, stating that it ‘constitutes the most undisguised sponsoring of terrorism as well as a war action’.  From what can be deduced, this legitimate concern was laughed of and/or ignored, yet the fact of it being made means that Sony should been well aware of the adverse reaction that was to come.

 

Free speech and the ability to ridicule power figures are absolutely integral tenets of the creative industries, and yet sensitivities must be appreciated and accounted for.  For instance, Salman Rushdie’s right to release ‘The Satanic Verses’ must rightly be defended, and yet when it involves highly provocative material likely to inflame religious or cultural sensitivities, there is a duty to fully expect a reaction, however unjustified or overblown it may be.

Many in recent days have drawn the comparison with Charlie Chaplin’s classic satire on Nazi Germany ‘The Great Dictator’.  And yet, the comparison and legacy of this film is not quite so straight-forward. 

 

 

 

 

It is worth noting that during the production of the film, the British government stated their intention to censor its release, since at the time they were still avidly appeasing Hitler’s regime.  By the time of the film’s release war had been declared and the film was gleefully promoted as propaganda against the tyrannical despot that the Allies were mobilising against.  After the war had ended and the full horrors of the Holocaust became known, Chaplin himself said that had he known of such atrocities, he would never have made the film.  Similarly, with Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’, a highly controversial film that was released to great opposition from those it purported to satirise; in this case the hierarchical forms of organised religion, a powerful and influential establishment body, and therefore a legitimate target.

America's legacy in North Korea

I would contend that given the 20^th-century’s history of American atrocities and continued provocation towards North Korea, the country (i.e. its innocent civilians), should be handled with sensitivity and empathy, rather than treated as a legitimate target for ridicule and demonization.  Because when you examine America’s record in North Korea with some objectivity, you begin to understand why a film like ‘The Interview’ might justifiably have been seen as profoundly insulting.

 

 

 

The Korean War of the early-1950s was intended by the US to ‘roll back Communism’ in the region, just as they would go on to attempt in South-east Asia and throughout the Cold War.  As the Korean War unfolded, the US officially adopted the policy of ‘destruction’ of North Korea, with atrocities that are as staggering as they are now largely forgotten.  Despite adopting policies of tacit support for despotic tyrants throughout the world, the US adopted an aggressive stance towards North Korea because it had overthrown capitalist rule and adopted a warped Stalinist socialism based on an extreme ‘personality cult’ in the form of their Dear Leader.

After WWII, the US-backed South Korean forces embarked on a brutal programme of communist repression, with several hundred-thousand suspects summarily tortured and executed whilst America stood by.  But this was only the beginning of the horrors meted out on the country by the US military, that set about carpet-bombing virtually every North Korean city under the aegis of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’.  The capital Pyongyang was almost completely levelled by US bombing.  By dropping tons of napalm, executing thousands of refugees (in massacres like No Gun Ri), and deliberately targeting civilian hubs, the US exterminated one-fifth of the entire North Korean population (approximately 1.5 million people), something the Pentagon went about suppressing and denying for decades thereafter.

 

 

 

Not only this, but when there were no targets left for the US Air Force in their ‘object lesson in air power to Communists worldwide’, they were sent to destroy irrigation dams that wiped out 75% of the controlled rice production supply of North Korea; a heinous crime that consigned many more to years of poverty, malnutrition and starvation.

But even these events pale in comparison when you consider the plans of US Commander General McArthur who oversaw the war.  In 1950, he made a formal request to President Truman for 38 atomic bombs which he proposed should be employed to render North Korea completely uninhabitable, a wasteland of contamination that would emphasise American strength and dominance to the Soviet Union and communism in general.  In light of this planned genocide, suddenly the indignant American response to ‘The Interview’ looks decidedly vulgar.

 

 

After the 1953 armistice, however, the tangible American threat did not dissipate.  Thousands of US troops have been stationed in South Korea ever since, and during the Nixon administration nuclear warheads were regularly primed on a '15-minute warning’ aimed straight at North Korea as an explicit threat of action.  Indeed, over recent decades North Korea has made several credible attempts to integrate with the international community; attempts that have been vetoed and spoiled by the US who have preferred to maintain a policy of provocation and propaganda.

For instance, in 1993 Israel was poised to strike a deal with North Korea to end missile exports to the Middle East in return for diplomatic recognition.  Lo and behold, America leaned heavily on Israel to call off the deal and dutifully they adhered to their paymasters’ demands.  In retaliation, North Korea carried out its first test of a medium-range missile.

Post-9/11, President Bush began touting his war against the ‘axis of evil’, in which he had firmly placed North Korea.  Due to the fact that North Korea offered little in the way of natural resources, Iraq was the nation prioritised for invasion. 

 

 

 

 

As Noam Chomsky wrote about the imminent 2003 invasion - ‘right now, Washington is teaching the world a very ugly and dangerous lesson: if you want to defend yourself from us, you had better mimic North Korea and pose a credible military threat.  Otherwise we will demolish you.’ 

 

Subsequent efforts at installing non-aggression pacts and removing economic sanctions on the part of America were all routinely scuppered by the Bush administration, whilst (as it did in China and Russia) provoking North Korea into renewed development of their nuclear arsenal as a defensive measure against facing Iraq-style invasion.

Still this response persists.  Upon his accession to power, Kim-Jong Un called for an end to confrontation between the North and South, inspiring hopes that frosty relations between the two nations may be beginning to thaw.  Yet in response to the launch of a satellite into orbit earlier that year, the UN Security Council issued more sanctions about North Korea, to which the predictably riled response was to threaten further missile tests and attacks on America.  All of this makes North Korea an increasingly difficult dilemma for America, who cannot abide the prospect of them forging closer ties with the rest of Asia and in the process becoming an increasingly powerful player in the global economy over which the US fear they will have little influence.

 

 

 

I am making no attempts to apologise for the regime in North Korea, which is undeniably a tyrannical force that seeks to brainwash civilians and suppress their rights as citizens.  And yet, reports document slowly improving conditions in the country, and a gradual awareness on the part of citizens of how to influence and shape their own lives.  I

 

n 2013, The Economist wrote of civilians increasingly relying on word-of-mouth and imported Western media, as well as a burgeoning ‘private market’ in which goods proliferate without regulation, helping to satiate growing materialism amongst the populace.  There are reports of a growing ‘nouveau riche’ who openly flaunt their wealth and who may prove to be a threat to the stability of the status quo, as inequalities become evermore visible.

With all of this in mind, it would seem that the most respectful attitude that America (and the West in general) could adopt when it comes to North Korea is to leave it alone.  In time, the civilian population will grow strong and engaged enough to call for significant regime change, in the guise of revolution or gradual modernisation away from the deranged contortion of socialism that holds sway there.  All America can do is try and encourage the leaders in from the cold, attempt a benign form of engagement and cooperation, acknowledging the dreadful wrongs inflicted on them in the past, and offering to help expand their country in positive ways, rather than inciting the build-up of arms defences.

Taking all this into consideration, suddenly it is difficult to have much sympathy with those ‘victims of censorship’ in their gilded towers nestled in the Hollywood Hills.  Because of course, free speech and satire are vitally important; but, as with any joke, there is a duty of sensitivity and compassion that must be exercised on the part of those telling the joke towards their intended target.  When it comes to American aggression, continual ridicule, the rhetoric of Obama and the ominous threats of a ‘response’, quite reasonably on the part of North Korea, that joke isn’t funny anymore.