Furor Over Canceling The Interview
Global Mega Thugs Rail at Supposed North Korean Hackers
December 22, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
Have you heard about the biggest human rights outrage on the planet right now?
Am I referring to the gruesome facts—censored and whitewashed as they were—revealed in the Senate torture report on the massive, sadistic torture inflicted on people seized around the world after 9/11? No, not that. The 2+ million people in the U.S. locked down in prisons—the highest rate of incarceration in the world? No. The fact that over and over and over again Black people are shot and killed for no reason and the police who kill them walk free? No again. The global epidemic of rape and violence against women? That’s not it.
The big “outrage” that is eliciting scathing denunciations from ruling class public opinion-making machinery and indignant demands for retaliation is that hackers—who the FBI claims are associated with North Korea—reportedly broke into computers at Sony Pictures and released data embarrassing to Sony. Personal information about people who work with Sony was also reportedly made public. In the wake of the incident, Sony cancelled the theatrical release of a movie called The Interview.
Barack Obama threatened to respond with some kind of action against North Korea “in a place and time and manner that we choose.” He added, ominously, “It is not something that I will announce here today at a press conference.” And Obama indignantly declared: “We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States.”
After which, Obama should have added: “Only WE—the rulers of the USA—can hack into everyone’s email, impose censorship in the United States and beyond, and torture or assassinate anyone who says or does anything we don’t like anywhere else in the world, when it suits OUR interests.”
At this point, there is no serious or scientific basis to say who was behind all this. North Korea denied involvement and offered to conduct a joint investigation with the U.S. into who was responsible. The North Korean government statement said, “We have a way to prove that we have nothing to do with the case without resorting to torture, as what the CIA does.”
* * *
The Interview, according to press reports, is a “comedy” about the CIA enlisting a couple gossip reporters to help blow up the head of North Korea. There is nothing positive about the small-time exploiters who rule North Korea, but anyone who knows anything about the real history of the USA will have a sense as to why a movie about the CIA assassinating the ruler of another country might be taken as a serious threat.
The U.S. has an unparalleled record of attempting to assassinate, assassinating, or arranging for the assassination of political figures that get in the way of its global networks of exploitation and oppression. Look up CIA attempts to kill Fidel Castro in Cuba. Look up the U.S. role in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in Congo. Or the role of the CIA in the coup that overthrew and killed Salvador Allende in Chile.
Funny?
Had the people who made The Interview aimed the plot and message in another direction—like at the United States—they might have ended up with a lot more problems than their movie going straight to video-on-demand. In 2011, Barack Obama ordered U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki assassinated without trial or any due process for producing what was repeatedly characterized in the U.S. accounts of his assassination as “anti-American propaganda.” Not only was Anwar al-Awlaki assassinated (not just censored, or banned, but assassinated) for this, two weeks later, U.S. drones assassinated his 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman, who had no connection at all to his father’s propaganda activities.
If you’re living in the USA, you’re living in the country that became the world’s sole superpower in part by incinerating 200,000 Japanese civilians at the end of World War 2 and after that, bombed every building of two stories or more in the north of Korea in the Korean War and where a U.S. general called for bombing North Vietnam “into the Stone Age.” You’re living in a country that has installed regimes that have slaughtered millions of people, from Chile to Iran to Vietnam to Indonesia. These regimes imposed draconian censorship of dissident cultural expression, including the murder of Chilean musician Victor Jara by the CIA-installed regime after the 1974 coup in that country. Don’t believe me? Look any of this up and you’ll find this is only the lightest scratch on the surface of what the U.S. has done to people around the world. I’m sure revcom.us would be interested in hearing what you find. (Editors’ note: send to revolution.reports@yahoo.com.)
Whatever the real story behind the hacking of Sony, U.S. accusations of North Korean bullying are absurd and obscene hypocrisy. They come from, and serve, enforcing a world of slums, sweatshops, and environmental devastation enforced with violence. And nothing justifies enlisting as a cheerleading chump for these chauvinist threats by the U.S., under any pretext.
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