Our View: Nothing funny about Korea’s attack on Sony
The Seth Rogen movie quashed by a terrorist threat against Sony Pictures isn’t the first to assassinate a dictator for laughs.
A decade ago, “Team America: World Police” impaled a puppet Kim Jong Il on the spike of a military helmet. Five years earlier, in “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut,” Satan impaled a cartoon Saddam Hussein on a stalagmite in Hell. Six years before that, in “Hot Shots: Part Deux,” a live-action Saddam Hussein was smashed to smithereens, resurrected then crushed by a piano.
Dictators get killed all the time in movies. So it’s understandable that, until this week, few people believed North Korea would actually launch a cyberattack over “The Interview,” in which North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s character explodes.
U.S. officials on Friday blamed North Korea for hacking Sony’s computers, a massive assault that, for non-Sony employees, seemed amusing until threats escalated to the possibility of attacks on theaters showing the movie. As those threats arrived, the nation’s four largest theater chains started canceling showings of the movie. Sony does not own theaters, so it scrapped its planned Christmas Day release.
By Friday, President Barack Obama had gotten in on the act, chastising Sony for caving in to North Korea’s threats. “That’s not who we are,” he said. “That’s not what America’s about. We cannot have a society in which some dictatorship someplace can start imposing censorship.”
He’s right. It’s one thing to attack computers, it’s another to even threaten the American people. If any American theater were actually attacked, it is safe to assume the response would be significant. Perhaps we hold the lives of our citizens a little more dearly than Kim Jong Un does those of his citizens.
Now the debate has shifted from whether or not Sony’s surrender signals something dangerous for the First Amendment. It does.
The pre-emption of a silly movie featuring exploding despots might not sound like much of a loss. But it sends a signal: We negotiate with terrorists – at least one of the companies doing business here does. And we’re willing to let our freedom of speech be the currency.
At this point, little can be done. Theaters can hardly be blamed for exercising caution just two years after the movie-house massacre in Aurora, Colo. And Sony’s priorities as a Japanese mega-corporation owe no particular fealty to the U.S. Constitution. (Though we find it strange that Sony has pulled back from releasing the film online.)
But this sets a terrible precedent. It almost guarantees that some other despot, terrorists or criminal will try to influence what passes for entertainment, or try to coerce elected leaders into halting the dissemination of information.
The FBI is certain North Korea masterminded this threat, citing telltale pieces of evidence gleaned from its technical investigation.
What we do about this poses an interesting dilemma. North Korea has been spoiling for a fight for generations. It has bombed islands off the coast of South Korea, taken American sailors and citizens captive, killed the people of our ally and made bellicose threats on what appears to be a cycle of every few years.
No one likes the idea of giving them the kind of fight they apparently long for. But this can’t happen again.
Dictators will kill free expression only if we let them. America has never let them do it here. As President Obama said, it’s not who we are.
This story was originally published December 19, 2014 at 2:18 PM with the headline "Our View: Nothing funny about Korea’s attack on Sony."