by Jakob Pettersson
Monthly Review - 27.12.14
The haze of political chaos in America surrounding the Ferguson protests, the Torture Report, and the "relaxing" of US-Cuba relations has been broken by a media spectacle almost too ridiculous to comprehend. A hacker group called the "Guardians of Peace" conducted a "cyber attack" on Sony Pictures Entertainment, leaking emails, documents, presentations, and information about the company. The US government, and the vast majority of media, all agree that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) is behind the attack, as a direct retaliation to the production of the movie The Interview, a goofball comedy depicting Seth Rogen and James Franco attempting to assassinate Kim Jong Un. And given the general media narrative about the easily offended egos of the Kim family, such a story is perhaps not unbelievable to mainstream audiences. However, the evidence seems to be flimsy at best -- as a Wired article points out. Yet the media circus continues. The narrative is just too powerful: a ruthless, eccentric, and egomaniacal dictator out to silence any criticism of his good name, regardless of how silly and "innocent" that criticism is.
But The Interview is not an innocent movie. Originally, the movie didn't feature the DPRK, and was meant to portray a fake dictator and country, as in Sasha Baron Cohen's The Dictator. A leaked confidential email from the hack, however, revealed that Sony had been in contact with the US-funded RAND Corporation, a key think-tank of the US "national security" establishment. The movie was also, according to the leaked conversations, discussed with a "very senior [official] in [the] State." Apparently, Bruce Bennett, a senior analyst at the RAND Corporation, reviewed the script as well. The Sony executives expressed anxiety over North Korea's reaction to the movie's depiction of the brutal assassination of Kim Jong Un, but Bennett insisted that the assassination scene be left in:
READ MORE.....
No comments:
Post a Comment