National Security Porn: North Korea in Hollywood

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National Security Porn: North Korea in Hollywood

by Binoy Kampmark / July 8th, 2013

Sad it is to see a superpower recoil in paranoia at the perceived threats posed by its smaller enemies. The quality of a foe determines the quality of the character who responds. In the mad mash of suppositions and fantasies compiled in Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen, North Korea – or at the very least North Korean turncoats in the South Korean regime riding on the wings of nationalist vengefulness – become their American mirrors. Their technology is supreme; their stamina and means to take control of such a structure as the White House is demonstrated. They can even keep the President in a bunker under threat of execution.

These wicked Koreans also boast a few American defectors (believe it or not this is a war for fluffy minds and confused hearts) – one of the President’s secret service staff finds himself at some point in the film speaking of the ills of globalisation and the starvation of the DPRK. Yes, apparently they talk like that.

Gerard Butler, who professed on British television that he has a toilet named after him in Michigan, has muscled in on the action as the patriotic hard man Michael Banning who ultimately rescues President Benjamin Asher, played by Aaron Eckhart in a severely trimmed role. Banning so happens to be walking through the front door of the White House when the Korean terror cell launches its audacious strike in the capital. He was, after all, a former secret agent shadowing the President.

What is troubling about the film is not the nonsensical violence, that great staple of the mindless macho. It is, rather, the mammoth insecurity it seemingly bases itself upon, a screaming inner voice that the republic is brittle and up for grabs. It is the terrorist fantasy made real, a sickly projection of what might happen to the “leader” of the free world if Brutus and Cassius, albeit of the oriental persuasion, got together to do a bit of killing. It is not a film about strength so much as celebrated weakness, a psychotic pageantry of what might happen if the enemy within releases its poison. Trust no one, though if you did, best make sure he or she is draped in the stars and stripes.

Interestingly enough, the North Korean mastermind (the distinction is never clear) in this case is played by Rick Yune, an actor who made an effort most unconvincing in the Bond film Die Another Day as the villain Zao. The North Koreans were not particularly convincing there either, but then again, nor are the opponents Butler faces. Might this be an unconscious exposure of bumbling ineptitude on the part of Washington, typified by failed calculations of such magnitude as those of the Pentagon general played by Robert Forster? These people are not only fantasists fearing internal insurrection. They are also stumblers into the chasm of careless oblivion.

Other reviewers have their theories on how to read the film, though reading might be stretching the term. The film, for The Guardian’s Philip French, satisfied “the American audience’s rampant masochism and the foreign fans’ sadism” (Apr 21). French has a point. Such films do well even in countries with populations keen to mock the American brute. After all, we all know when the cavalry shall arrive. This is well shown by a review such as Peter Osteried at gamona.de, who goes to far as to claim that Bruce Willis might have taken a few tips from the film. Dare we ask?

Then there is the issue of where audiences will watch such a “brainless, brawny action thriller” in the words of Elizabeth Weitzman (New York Daily News, March 21). Such films tend to thrive in air-conditioning. Evidently, Weitzman had herself been affected by the air conditioning, claiming the siege to be “frighteningly real”. To be fair, reason is restored by the end of the review, in which she notes that “every generation gets the move stars it deserves.”

The current crop of Hollywood films finds solace in a pressing condition of superhero masturbation in the face of improbable threat. Enemies are hard to find, so they need a singular streak of gifted villainy. GI Joe troops launch interventionist missions as physically taut and moral policemen (and women). Bruce Willis persists in not dying harder than ever, a permanently indestructible celluloid presence. Even his on screen offspring are heading for the Kleenex in the name of president and country.

As for the North Koreans, they also re-appear as the incorrigible invaders in the recently released Red Dawn (2012), a shameless remake of the 1984 film by the same name. The Soviets have long left the psyche, but their protoplasmic traces find their way into desperate American moviemaking. The ultranationalist Slav provides the ideal counter to the well-meaning American altruist who drinks the fluids of democracy for breakfast. Let us ignore how the starved state, a terrified brutal regime in Pyongyang can keen to keep the motor running even as it takes US leaders hostage.

If enemies are to be invented, or found, let them at least be vaguely credible. What audiences are instead seeing is an Uncle Sam on the couch nursing masochistic nightmares and indignant insecurity. What follows is surely, like the quality of acting, to be deserved, a vile sort of national security and terrorism porn, to use an apt expression‎ coined by critic Till Kadritzke.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne and can be reached at: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

This article was posted on Monday, July 8th, 2013 at 8:01am and is filed under Culture, Film Review, Korea, Propaganda.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/07/national-security-porn-north-korea-in-hollywood/

War against the “Axis of Evil”. How Hollywood Smears North Koreans

The New“Argo:” Evil North Koreans Trash the White House In Latest Hollywood Fear Vehicle

By Danny Schechter

Global Research, April 03, 2013

Region: Asia

 

Olympus Has Fallen - Official Trailer (HD) - YouTube

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwx1f0kyNwI

2013. 1. 22. - 업로더: joblomovienetwork

http://www.joblo.com - "Olympus Has Fallen" - Official Trailer Source: http://trailers .apple.com/trailers ...

The trend towards movies ripped from the news, or perhaps ripping off the news continues.

Olympus Has Fallen is the latest in the popular  “learn to fear thy enemy even more than you did before” category,  as director Antoine Fuqua visualizes a story that can’t be more topical with the White House (Secret Service Code: “Olympus”) occupied by a North Korean terrorist fanatic and his barbaric followers.

The President is held hostage, the building is trashed, and its defenses shredded while our hero, a disgraced former Presidential guard, becomes the savior despite the mounting body count including a massacre of civilians and military responders as well as the near capture of top secret nuclear codes.

Of course, at the last moment, Mr. America fights off the incompetent Pentagon bureaucracy, repels the invaders and singlehandedly saves the President’s son, before rescuing the commander in chief and averting the war to end all wars.

(Didn’t we see a similar scenario recently set in the White House Bunker/command module in Salt starring Angelina Jolie? That was an actionmovie that started  with her rescue from a grim North Korean torture chamber.)

With patriotic music swelling and flags waving, the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave is liberated once again to stand by its values and invade more countries.

When I returned to my computer, fiction had morphed into ‘faction’ amidst reports that the Obama Administration sent a new armada to the region while North Korea apparently decided to ramp up its only feared defenses: its nuclear capacity.

The United States has denied that its recent maneuvers with the new right-wing government in South Korea was provocative or a stalking horse for an invasion, but the North Koreans were not convinced and restarted a shuttered nuclear plant to be on the safe side.

Is war on the horizon? The emergence of war propaganda like Olympus Has Fallen and earlier demonizations of the North certainly shows there is a market for cultural products about the Evil Empire.

It’s worth recalling that books about Hitler were in a best selling back in the days when people read books.

If entertainment about the Korean bad guys—devoid of any real history about how Korea was divided and the million North Koreans who died in that “police action” (not even a war in US parlance) is now boffo box office the real conflict is beginning to feel more like show biz than news biz.

Is it just more “militainment?”

Olympus Has Fallen will do more to frighten Americans than the “bluster” coming out of Pyonyang, Recall that the North Korean “supreme leader” Kim Jong Un, is the son of a man who was obsessed about movies and wanted to look like Elvis.

Notes the New York Times, “Despite a drumbeat of increasingly bellicose threats from North Korea, the White House said Monday that there was no evidence that the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, was mobilizing troops or other military forces for any imminent attack.

“Though American officials said they remained concerned about the invective flowing from North Korea — and South Korea’s president ordered military commanders to carry out a swift and strong response to any provocations — the Obama administration took pains to emphasize the “disconnect” between Mr. Kim’s “rhetoric and action.”

Here’s a country that routinely denounces the United States and yet seems fascinated with it, recently inviting a Google executive and basketball star/weirdo Dennis Rodman to visit.

CNN reported, “ Not only did the American basketball star — known for his over-the-top publicity stunts — visit North Korea, but he also was joined by three members of the famed Harlem Globetrotters, who played against North Korea’s “Dream Team” (no surprise, the game ended in a tie). Rodman proclaimed Kim “a friend for life,” and appeared courtside with the North Korean leader.”

Wining a tie with The Globe trotters is no easy feat . but it also shows that there may be a joke here that we are not getting.  North Korea has managed to put itself on the world “stage” once again at a little cost

All the alarmism in the movies and the headlines miss a counter trend that a CIA analyst raised on PBS News Hour. Listen to this:

ROBERT CARLIN, Former CIA and State Department Intelligence Analyst: I think the rhetoric is at a high level.

I would hope that the events over the past couple of days in North Korea would provide an opportunity for us to lower the temperature a little bit. We had some pretty important developments in terms of policy and personnel from the North Koreans over the last two days. I think we should step back.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What are you referring to?

ROBERT CARLIN: I’m referring to the lower profile that the military now has in the top-level leadership in North Korea.

I’m referring to something that the North Koreans — they don’t use this term, but I will. It’s the nuclear dividend. It’s the ability now that they have nuclear weapons, they say, to divert more money for their civilian economy. And the question is, is there an opening there? Does that provide some element of stability in this situation that we can use?

JUDY WOODRUFF: You mean because they feel more secure about their nuclear capability, they then have the space to expand in the economic front?

ROBERT CARLIN: Yes. Yes.

Ach so, a note of rationality in a media story that so easily escalates with the rhetoric. As usual, Democracy Now featured a more informed assessment in an interview with University of Chicago Historian Bruce Cumings who notes that the last place to find out what is really going on is in the media:

“So, the media — I should say the mainstream media, not Democracy Now! — they pay no attention. Along comes North Korea trying to get our attention. They do a bunch of provocative things. And there’s no question that what they’re doing is provocative, but it’s nothing new for them. And then people pay attention, but without the context that’s so essential to understand this.

The Obama administration,and especially Secretary of State Clinton, are running on the same tracks as George Bush did in ’07 and ’08. They’re even talking about the Proliferation Security Initiative, PSI, which is something that was handcrafted by John Bolton to put pressure on North Korea. So President Obama needs to pay attention to a situation that he actually might be able to solve if he paid attention, get back to talks with North Korea. And if he can solve this problem, as his predecessors did, at least temporarily, he would put tremendous pressure on Iran also to give up its enriched uranium program. So I think that’s what’s going on.

But you really — I mean, you have to read the fine print of even our paper of record to find any of this out. For example, this morning we learn, of course, they’ve raised the alert to high levels, but our commanders say there’s no unusual military activity in North Korea. North Korea doesn’t want a war. But this train wreck could have been seen coming from a mile away, or two years away, at least, and the Obama administration is just not paying attention.”

Not paying attention? Nothing new about that! Maybe the Obamas are in the screening room at the White House coming up with options to defend against an attack like the one dramatized in “Olympus Has Fallen.”

It’s not clear these days who is the more dangerous adversary—North Korea or Hollywood?

News Dissector Danny Schechter edits the new Mediachannel.org and blogs at Newsdissector.net. His latest book is “Lighting The Fuse & Dissecting the News. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

Articles by: Danny Schechter

 

http://www.globalresearch.ca/war-against-the-axis-of-evil-how-hollywood-smears-north-koreans/5329570

Western Media Set up North Korea for War

by Finian Cunningham / March 13th, 2013

Western so-called news media coverage of the escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula is like watching a cross between a bad James Bond movie and a cheap horror flick about flesh-eating zombies.

It would be funny if the danger of war was not so serious and imminent. The disturbing direction of the Western media coverage is to set up North Korea – a poor impoverished country – for an all-out military attack by the world’s nuclear superpower psychopath – the
United States.

Paradoxically, this danger is being incited by “news” corporations that pompously claim to be free-thinking bastions of independent journalism, when in reality they are nothing more than progenitors of the worst kind of pulp fiction.

Kim Jong-un, the young leader of North Korea who took over from his late father in 2011, is being cast as an insane villain whose Western media persona resembles that of a putative Doctor Evil. His projected character is fit for a role in an early 007 movie.

Days ago, Kim was reported as threatening “preemptive nuclear war” against South Korea and its patron the United States. How evil!

Scarcely mentioned were the facts that Kim was forced into this position of making a staunch defense of his country, under immense pressure of relentless imperialist aggression. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has been slapped with yet more US-led sanctions aimed at ostracizing the country from any international contact.

It’s the equivalent of solitary confinement of a prisoner, subjected to sensory deprivation. But this is torture of an entire nation with no reprieve.

Yes, North Korea conducted an underground nuclear weapons test in mid-February.

This was after the US tightened the thumb-screws with yet more sanctions; and after years of Washington refusing to reciprocate with a negotiated settlement to end more than six decades of crippling trade embargoes in addition to the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation against North Korea following the 1950-53 war with its American-backed Southern neighbor.

No other country has been threatened with nuclear Armageddon as often as North Korea – and always by the US – for more than 60 years.

Western media have now highlighted the North Korean leader ordering his massed troops to prepare for “wiping out” a South Korean island by turning a craggy maritime outpost into “a sea of flames.”

Do you see the innuendo here? Wiping out an island? Well, Kim must be an insane megalomaniac, right?

The island in question is the disputed territory of Baengnyeong, which is actually located off the North Korean mainland, but which the US forced into South Korea’s possession following the 1950-53 war. It has been used since, provocatively, as a staging post for American surveillance and forward planning for attack against North Korea.

No doubt the island will be used this week during the US perennial war planning maneuvers that simulate the invasion of North Korea, but which Washington euphemistically calls “defensive measures.”

Befitting the caricature of arch-villain, photographs and footage have abounded in Western media showing Kim Jong-un clad in black long overcoat and black gloves, peering through binoculars apparently towards South Korean and American forces across the Demilitarized Zone of the 38th parallel.

Just in case the Western public fail to pick up on the demonic Dr Evil caricature, there is another sub-plot being instilled – the North Korean flesh-eating zombies.

In recent weeks, there has been a rash of stories regurgitated by the same Western media of outbreaks of cannibalism among the allegedly starving people of North Korea. These stories of cannibalistic gore and nihilism have not just been printed by the voyeuristic tabloid gutter press. They have also been published prominently by supposed quality outlets, such as Britain’s Sunday Times and Independent, as well as one of America’s paper of record, The Washington Post.

Significantly, these macabre stories began circulating in Western media outlets at the end of January – some two weeks before North Korea conducted its underground nuclear explosion.

That suggests that the flesh-eating horror claims in North Korea are the work of a Western intel psychological campaign aimed at adding pejorative technicolor to the present crisis.

It makes for difficult reading. Not because of the alleged gruesome details, but because these stories are so obviously concocted and regurgitated in reflex manner by supposed news organizations. The horror claims all come from one source: allegedly an undercover team of journalists from an outfit called the Asia Press, based in Japan, who were allegedly spirited secretly into North Korea and allegedly interviewed various anonymous farmers and Communist party officials.

It’s so bad you could not make it up.

Yet the Western media presses have gone into overdrive to pump out these unconfirmed and unverifiable accounts of purported bloodcurdling cannibalism among the North Korean population.

In one version published by Britain’s Daily Mail, the headline runs, “North Korean parents ‘eating their own children’ after being driven mad by hunger in famine-hit pariah state.”

Daily Mail readers are told of how starving adults are kidnapping and murdering children. One man was allegedly executed by firing squad after his wife found out that he had killed their young daughter and son “while she was away on business;” when she returned to the starving family homestead her husband greeted her with the welcome news that “they had meat” to eat.

In another ghoulish tale, printed as serious news, an elderly man is reported to have dug up the graves of his grandchildren and eaten their rotten flesh.

The truly disturbing thing about these reports is that not only are they sordid sensationalism passed off as credible reports by supposedly serious news organizations, but worse is that this propaganda is apparently believed by droves of the Western public who read or watch such media. Check out some of the readers’ comments below the stories printed in the above mentioned media and you will find all sorts of denunciations of North Korea and its “sick people.”

But it’s not the people of North Korea who are depraved: it’s the Western media and their gullible subscribers who indulge in this odious character assassination of an entire nation.

The Western media coverage of North Korea recalls stories of babies being ripped from hospital incubators by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait, which was a crucial tipping point for Western public opinion to support the American-led war on Iraq in 1991. More than a decade later, the same Western media ran scare stories of weapons of mass destruction that paved the way of the American genocide in Iraq from 2003-2012.

The same Western propaganda press repeats endless claims about “sinister Iranian nuclear ambitions” that serve to justify a criminal American-led trade embargo on Iran that may result in a US/Israeli military attack on the Islamic Republic.

The same Western propaganda press is now doing the same hatchet job on North Korea. A nation of flesh-eating zombies led by an evil personality cult who wants to blow up islands? “Yeah, go on Chuck, nuke those mothers!”

The Western public are being played like fools to go along with the most depraved behaviour of military barbarism – a nuclear superpower itching to destroy an impoverished nation that threatens no-one.

Truly, Western imperialist reality is more perverse and sick than the Western fiction.

Finian Cunningham is a frequent contributor to PressTV where this article appeared. Read other articles by Finian.

This article was posted on Wednesday, March 13th, 2013 at 8:00am and is filed under Iran, Iraq, Korea, Media, Military/Militarism, Propaganda, Sanctions.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/03/western-media-set-up-north-korea-for-war/