stardust-rain:

I find it funny (and by funny I mean I want to bash someone’s face in) that there is a sort of compartmentalisation that happens when it comes to making NK into an international enemy. Kim Jong Un and Kim Jong Il can simultaneously be overweight manchildren who mispronounce english and eat weird food (a la Team America) while the state itself is full of terrifying, powerful assasins with sights on destroying American Freedom ™ (Olympus Has Fallen/Red Dawn).

Kim Jong Un is the perfect anti-Asian stereotype and he fits neatly into the mould of Hollywood’s racialised fictional enemies so in a mix of American arrogance and neo-imperialism, this film decided to use build on those sentiments and use the world’s most powerful media platform to further reinforce that.

Hollywood needs a stock villain, and as a result North Korea was turned into the Face of the Ultimate Enemy as a by-product of anti-communism, misplaced patriotism and a mutated Yellow Peril that couldn’t be directed at China.

People are already forming the narrative about NK giving ‘retaliation’ and ‘revenge’ and throwing shitfits about ‘WHAT IF THEY KILL US IF THE MOVIE GETS LEAKED’ as if this were a fucking spy movie and not just another result of imperialistic cock-fighting. If you think this is actually something that’s going to happen, I hope you take a long look at the type of media you consume and reflect on the fact that you’re personally complicit in the fun new trend of creating imperialistic, anti-Asian media.

Americans who are angry about about the interview being pulled are not getting angry because of the precious freedom of speech and if half of them knew jackshit about their own laws and constitution they would know that the First Amendment doesn’t protect you from private companies censoring/deleting/editing their own content.

People are angry about the interview being pulled because in their arrogance and self-righteousness they think that American mass media has the right to dehumanise and make light of the suffering of an entire nation - and be protected from consequences because their media is the single most influential platform.

People are not angry about North Korea being a dictatorship - they have never given two fucks about the country, or its people, or the fact that American policy during the Cold War helped create it.

They’re angry about the fact that they’re not allowed to capitalise, humiliate, dehumanise and mock that dictatorship in a cloud of comfortable self-righteous patriotic judgement while ignoring the people who suffer under it.

America has been complicit in the oppression of NK and SK for years, through their politics, their foreign policy, through their media, through the way they talk about them.

By all means, be angry at the Interview and the gigantic sack of shit that is James Franco, but let’s not forget that this film was the result of neo-imperialism of the ugliest sort, one that deliberately and strategically used long-circulated tropes to form a racist meta-narrative.