It's time to stop laughing about North Korea (Globe & Mail)
We are all missing the point about The Interview, a movie no one can see.
Of course, since we can’t see the film, it’s hard to say much about its content. From the snippets online, it appears to hew to the decades-old formula of a screwball buddy comedy. The movie’s plot revolves around a couple of doofuses, on a secret mission for the CIA, trying to assassinate North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-Un.
<snip>
It’s time to put the guffaws behind us, ignore the inane antics of its leaders, and state the obvious: North Korea is the world’s most repressive, vindictive and menacing police state. There is nothing funny about this gigantic gulag of a country.
Take just one example: in North Korea, punishment for some crimes – such as daring to escape the country – includes life imprisonment in concentration camps. However, a life sentence applies not only to the convicts. In some cases, the country’s Three Generations of Punishment policy kicks in and convicts’ children and grandchildren will also be sent to the camps. In other cases, convicts will conceive children in the prison camps. Those children and their children’s children will be born in and live their entire lives in these camps, lives fraught with starvation and unspeakable brutality. They are slaves, but we go on laughing at their leader’s haircut.
Link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/lets-use-the-interview-fiasco-to-focus-a-harsher-lens-on-north-korea/article22157146/?cmpid=rss1
Good article.