|
FOCUS | 'The Interview' Is Propaganda Masquerading as Comedy |
 |
|
Friday, 02 January 2015 12:19 |
|
Excerpt: "It's pretty tasteless for the United States - a country complicit in so many assassinations of foreign leaders - to make a comedy movie about assassinating a foreign leader."
Screenshot of the scene in which Kim Jong-Un is assassinated, which the movie portrays in excruciating slow-motion. (image: Columbia Pictures)
'The Interview' Is Propaganda Masquerading as Comedy
By Ken Klippenstein and Paul Gottinger, Reader Supported News
02 January 15
 t’s pretty tasteless for the United States – a country complicit in so many assassinations of foreign leaders – to make a comedy movie about assassinating a foreign leader. Though Hollywood’s lack of tact wasn’t much surprise, it was shocking to learn that the State Department signed off on the film. If, say, the Venezuelan government formally approved a film about the assassination of Barack Obama, one suspects Washington would accuse them of quite a bit more than poor taste.
As easy as it is to dislike The Interview – a comedy about the CIA assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un – one must concede that it had its comic elements. For example, the film’s assertion that North Korea’s nukes can reach the U.S., when in reality, North Korea possesses “no real long-range missile threat,” to quote expert Markus Schiller of RAND. Or the fact that it is Brian Williams, the putative exemplar of journalistic objectivity, who reports this fiction about the nukes’ ability to reach the U.S., in a cameo he has as himself. Or the part where North Korea is ominously deemed the most dangerous country on earth, despite the fact that the North likely has only a few small nuclear weapons – quite unlike the U.S., which has thousands of far more destructive nuclear weapons (and is the only country to ever have used nukes).
No less farcical is the fact that the U.S. government expects Americans to fear North Korea, which has a military budget 74 times smaller than that of the U.S., and has military hardware so outdated that their planes are literally falling out of the sky.
To call the movie propaganda is hardly polemical; Bruce Bennett, a North Korea expert, himself praised the film’s value as propaganda to Sony, which consulted him about the movie. Bennett is a senior defense analyst at RAND, a respected think-tank with which the government frequently confers. Bennett told Sony’s CEO:
[A] story that talks about the removal of the Kim family regime and the creation of a new government by the North Korean people (well, at least the elites) will start some real thinking in South Korea and, I believe, in the North once the DVD leaks into the North (which it almost certainly will).
The fact that the State Department greenlighted the movie further suggests its value as propaganda. (That Sony would even ask for the government’s opinion is a fine illustration of the warmth of Hollywood’s relationship with Washington.)
Even by propaganda standards, The Interview was surprisingly racist. James Franco’s character says “Konnichi wa” (Japanese for “hello”) to Koreans. There are cracks about Koreans eating pet dogs, and about how a Chinese word resembles American slang for the penis. In this way the film fits nicely into the long tradition of orientalist bigotry the U.S. has shown toward enemies in Asia.
The jester is supposed to mock the king; Seth Rogen instead mocks his government’s avowed enemy, Kim Jong-Un. This should be seen for what it is: pandering.
Sixty years of threats, sanctions, and military buildup in the Pacific has neither removed the Kim family from power nor prevented the North from obtaining nuclear weapons. The only successful policy has been negotiation. For example, following negotiations with North Korea, the Clinton administration managed to freeze development of the North’s nuclear reactor and assist in opening relations between the two Koreas.
Contrary to widespread illusions, North Korea desires negotiations with both the U.S. and South Korea. Yesterday, Kim Jong-Un proposed talks with South Korea at the “highest level.” North Korea even offered to cooperate with a U.S. investigation into the Sony hack.
The FBI’s assertion that North Korea was behind the Sony hack is a convenient narrative for the U.S. government, as it justifies the standard policy of ratcheting up pressure on the North. However, many computer security experts are skeptical that North Korea was behind the attack.
Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security, has encountered North Korean hacking efforts in the past. He told RSN that it appears unlikely that North Korea was behind the hack. Hold stated:
[The hackers’] comments about social media, understanding value of Social Security numbers, good control of grammar (but use of poor English) are all indicators of someone who has exposure to our culture. Based on what we know about North Korea, it is not a likely scenario.
Rather than being a highly sophisticated attack, characteristic of state-sponsored hacks, Holden said the attack seemed “not ‘cutting edge’ but rather a typical abuse of stolen credentials.”
Holden also remarked that the computer security employed by Sony appeared flimsy:
[It] is hard to imagine good security when the hackers spent so much time inside Sony’s network undetected and downloaded so much data without triggering any alarms. This access, duration of the breach, and amount of network traffic caused by siphoning all the data should have been noticed – hence it casts my doubts about Sony Pictures’ state of security.
Despite growing evidence challenging the belief that North Korea executed the attack, the establishment media’s dutiful reporting of the U.S. government narrative has had its effect. A CNN/ORC poll from December 21, 2014, reports that 61% of Americans believe the Sony hack was an act of terrorism, and 76% of Americans would support increasing economic sanctions on North Korea – which could harm the already impoverished North Korean people.
The Interview’s depiction of the North Korean government makes it seem worthy of Bush’s “axis of evil” epithet. This portrayal serves to prevent an understanding of the context for the tension between the two Koreas.
It is worth considering why North Korea developed nuclear weapons in the first place. While it’s not possible to be completely certain, the timing of the North Korea’s announcement that it possessed a nuclear weapon gives some hints. The Bush administration had cut off negotiations with the North and in 2002 included North Korea in the “Axis of Evil.” A little over a year after Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, the North announced it had a nuclear weapon. And while nuclear development had been ongoing, its announcement came just over a month after the U.S. invaded Iraq.
For these reasons, Korea expert Bruce Cumings has called the North’s nuclear weapon “Bush’s bomb.”
George Orwell’s “1984” contains a passage about how people are routinely made to watch a video depicting their totalitarian government’s most loathed enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein. For two minutes each day, they’re compelled to yell hysterically at the video, expressing their contempt for Goldstein. The ritual is clearly designed to reinforce the people’s hatred of the official enemy and distract them from their grievances with their own abusive government.
The Interview is basically Orwell’s ‘Two Minutes Hate’ expanded into 112 minutes and directed at one of the U.S. government’s many Emmanuel Goldsteins – Kim Jong-Un.
Paul Gottinger is a journalist based in Madison, WI. He can be reached
on Twitter @paulgottinger or email:
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Ken Klippenstein is a staff journalist at Reader Supported News. He can
be reached on Twitter @kenklippenstein or email:
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
 |
|
A Curse, a Blessing, and a Good Food Movement |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=15060"><span class="small">Jim Hightower, Jim Hightower's Blog</span></a>
|
|
Friday, 02 January 2015 09:59 |
|
Hightower writes: "Butz had risen to prominence in the world of agriculture by devoting himself to the corporate takeover of the global food economy. He openly promoted the preeminence of middleman food manufacturers over family farmers."
Former Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower. (photo: jimhightower.com)
A Curse, a Blessing, and a Good Food Movement
By Jim Hightower, Jim Hightower's Blog
02 January 15
n 1972, I was part of a nationwide campaign that came close to getting the US Senate to reject Earl Butz, Richard Nixon's choice for secretary of agriculture.
A coalition of grassroots farmers, consumers, and public interest organizations teamed up with progressive senators to undertake the almost impossible challenge of defeating the cabinet nominee.
The 51 to 44 Senate vote was so close, because we were able to expose Butz as... well, as butt-ugly. We brought the abusive power of corporate agribusiness into the public consciousness for the first time. We had won a moral victory, but it turned out to be a curse and a blessing.
First, the curse. Butz had risen to prominence in the world of agriculture by devoting himself to the corporate takeover of the global food economy. He openly promoted the preeminence of middleman food manufacturers over family farmers.
"Agriculture is no longer a way of life," he barked, "it's a business." He instructed farmers to "Get big or get out" – and proceeded to shove tens of thousands of them out by promoting an export-based, corporate-run food economy. "Adapt," he warned, "or die." The ruination of farms and rural communities, Butz added, "releases people to do something useful in our society."
The curse of Butz, however, spun off a blessing. Small farmers and food artisans practically threw up at the resulting Twinkieization of America's food. They were sickened that nature's own contribution to human culture was being turned into another plasticized product of corporate profiteers. They threw themselves into creating and sustaining a viable alternative. Linking locally with consumers, environmentalists, community activists, marketers, and others, the Good Food rebellion has since sprouted, spread, and blossomed from coast to coast. To find farmers markets and other expressions of this movement right where you live, go to www.LocalHarvest.org.
|
|
|
Postscript: Mario Cuomo (1932-2015) |
|
|
Friday, 02 January 2015 09:58 |
|
Kolbert writes: "Mario Cuomo, who died today at the age of eighty-two, believed deeply in the power of words."
Former New York governor Mario Cuomo. (photo: Sgt. Tracy Santee/US Air Force)
Postscript: Mario Cuomo (1932-2015)
By Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker
02 January 15
 ario Cuomo, who died today at the age of eighty-two, believed deeply in the power of words—too deeply, perhaps. I covered him for the Times in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties. For much of that period, I was convinced—as was just about everyone else in Albany—that he’d be the next President. The last time I called him up was in 1994, after he’d been defeated for a fourth term by an inarticulate backbencher named George Pataki. I’d been assigned to write about his legacy as governor. I asked him what he thought that would be. “Whatever you write,” he told me.
There were a lot of phrases that Cuomo liked to repeat, and most had a melancholy cast. “You go from stone to stone across the morass” was one. “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose” was another. Cuomo’s dark broodiness, his affinity for suffering, lent him moral gravity. His great gift—and it was an important one at the time—was to make listeners feel that politics was a serious business and that civic life matters.
Cuomo entered politics through the side door. He was a relatively obscure lawyer in Queens when Mayor John V. Lindsay asked him to mediate a conflict over a proposed low-income-housing project. After Cuomo settled the dispute, Lindsay called to congratulate him. Cuomo didn’t know how to respond, he later reported, because he couldn’t make up his mind about whether the settlement he’d arrived at was just. “It is difficult not to care about the future of any public man who when being congratulated for a success isn’t sure that it was not a failure,” the Newsday columnist Murray Kempton once observed.
Cuomo lost his first campaign, for lieutenant governor, and then lost his second, a mayoral primary against Ed Koch. Koch and Cuomo faced off again, in a gubernatorial primary in 1982, and that time Cuomo prevailed. The two men always disliked each other, and weren’t afraid to show it. After Koch died, last year, Cuomo told New York that the biggest difference between them was that “I did not have the same regard for myself as he had for himself.”
What would turn out to be the high point of Cuomo’s political career came in the summer of 1984, when, at the Democratic National Convention, he delivered his “shining city on a hill” speech. It called attention to the left out and the left behind—the “people who sleep in the city streets, in the gutter, where the glitter doesn’t show.” Cuomo’s indictment of Ronald Reagan’s sunny callousness was, to a dispirited Democratic Party, deeply inspiring. On the strength of it, he became the voice of the Party and the next presumptive Presidential nominee. Everyone assumed that that was what he wanted, including, it seemed, Cuomo himself. When he decided not to run in 1988, it appeared to be a political calculation. His son—now governor—Andrew said as much. “This was not the pitch to swing at,” he told reporters.
In the next election cycle, Cuomo flirted with running until—indeed, even beyond—the last possible moment. The day filings were due for the 1992 New Hampshire primary, New York’s Democratic Party, at great expense, hired a pair of planes to ferry the governor and a throng of reporters to Concord. But, instead of taking off, the planes sat on the tarmac. Ninety minutes before the filing deadline, Cuomo announced that he couldn’t leave the capital while state budget negotiations were going on. (It’s worth noting that, in Albany, budget negotiations are always going on.) Two years later, Cuomo was again offered a place in national politics—one he didn’t even need to campaign for—when President Bill Clinton wanted to nominate him to the U.S. Supreme Court. It seemed the perfect post for Cuomo—he loved the law, and loved arguing about it. But, again, he turned it down. He later told this magazine that didn’t feel he could leave the state in the hands of the lieutenant governor he had chosen.
Cuomo stayed in New York because—well, it was never clear. For all his eloquence and intensity, as governor he was strangely aimless. He had trouble setting priorities and managing the legislature. As the years went on, the state budget was finalized later and later and later. (Cuomo once bet me that the budget would be on time; when he lost the bet, he walked to the press room to pay up.) Beyond just embarrassing, the delays were consequential; they cost school districts and local governments millions in borrowing fees.
During Cuomo’s tenure, the murder rate in New York City reached a record high and the state’s inmate population more than doubled. The major building project of his three terms, as he himself sometimes ruefully noted, was prisons: he added more beds to the system than all his predecessors combined. In a bitterly ironic turn, New York took to financing prison construction through its Urban Development Corporation, which had been set up for low-income housing. At one point, to patch a budget hole, Cuomo arranged for U.D.C. to “buy” the Attica Correctional Facility for two hundred million dollars and then lease it back to the Department of Corrections. The deal, designed to make use of U.D.C.’s bonding authority, ended up costing New Yorkers something like seven hundred million dollars.
After his 1994 defeat, Cuomo went to work for Willkie Farr & Gallagher, the kind of “white shoe” law firm that had refused to hire him when he graduated from law school, because, he always said, of his Italian ethnicity. He mostly stayed out of public view. He rarely spoke about his son, even as Andrew ran, first unsuccessfully and then successfully, for his old job. But, this past summer, when Andrew, in the middle of a reëlection campaign, faced accusations that he’d tampered with a state ethics commission, Cuomo came to his defense. “I wish I were as good a man as my son is,” he told the Daily News.
One of the phrases that Cuomo liked to repeat concerned his own death. Many times, I heard him say that the inscription on his gravestone should be a short one: “He tried.”
|
|
House Majority Whip Calls for Clearer Labelling of White Supremacists |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
|
|
Thursday, 01 January 2015 15:37 |
|
Borowitz writes: "House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said on Tuesday that he would introduce a new bill requiring clearer labelling of white supremacists."
Representative Steve Scalise. (photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images)
House Majority Whip Calls for Clearer Labelling of White Supremacists
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
01 January 15
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
 ouse Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said on Tuesday that he would introduce a new bill requiring clearer labelling of white supremacists.
The White Supremacist Labelling Act of 2015 would require white supremacists to wear 4-inch-by-6-inch name tags clearly designating them as members of an official hate group.
“Right now, it’s impossible to tell the difference between neo-Nazis and collectors of WWII memorabilia,” Scalise said.
The Louisiana congressman said that proper labelling for white supremacists should make it easier for lawmakers to know what kind of organizations they are addressing in the future. “Sometimes it’s hard to see through all that smoke from the burning crosses,” he acknowledged.
|
|
hat’s the old saying about life being what happens while you’re busy making other plans? Right. Well, that came to mind this week as I was taking stock of Grist’s coverage of cities in 2014. Suffice it to say that the stories that unfolded this year were not the ones we thought we’d be writing.
