The increasingly bizarre story of the terrorist threats against movie theaters showing the now effectively banned film The Interview continues. Shortly after the movie – which depicts the assassination of loony North Korean leader Kim Jong Un - was pulled from distribution the 2004 flick Team America: World Police was also yanked. The stomping on the latter, that a few theaters chose to show in place of The Interview is notable because the movie has been out for ten years now and is widely available on DVD and streaming video. It is typical in the land of fear that is post September 11, 2001 America that such overreactions so often occur. The federal government has battered the populace into a quivering mass of jelly in order to justify their gutting of the Constitution and aiding and abetting the creation of a massive and lucrative surveillance industrial complex.
While the terrorist threats against theaters were never really substantiated outside of inferences by the lie factory that is the US government that North Korea -and now Iran, China and Russia according to a FOX exclusive- (har har) were behind them, The Interview movie has now been pretty much permanently shelved by Sony but the movie likely would have been a disaster anyway. This would seem to be not only caving in to the “terrorists” but also setting a precedent that any borderline whacko group can bring American business to a screeching halt. The new era of cyber-warfare has now officially begun with the Sony hacking being the first shot. Former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich says as much with his damning comments from a CNN op-ed entitled “America lost the cyberwar over Sony: Now what?”:
No one should underestimate the historic importance of the North Korean cyberwar against America and the collapse of American defenses in the Sony Pictures attack.
This was not some amusing pop culture event in which a few "hackers" played games with celebrities.
This was not an entertaining series of embarrassing leaks that allowed us to learn how viciously and nastily some senior Hollywood bosses write about famous movie stars in internal emails.
This was a deliberate assault on sovereign American soil against an American company, costing it millions of dollars in direct damages and hundreds of millions in reputational damages while blocking most of its employees from using their internal systems to get routine work done.
This was a threatened physical assault against moviegoers and movie theaters nationwide if they ignored the cyberattack and dared to laugh at the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
Some commentators criticized the movie theaters for their "cowardice" in not standing up to the threats. Others criticized the rest of the movie industry for not coming to the defense of Sony.
The column is vintage Gingrich and is chock full of the type of bombastic rhetoric that the former Speaker of the House always whips around like shovels of bloody red meat. While what Gingrich seems to be calling for are even more Draconian forms of a big government surveillance state - and a chilling smackdown of critics of censorship- he does have one thing dead right. If the North Korean regime is behind the Sony hacking as well as the threats against movie theaters then America has indeed lost the first cyber-war. Gingrich is as full of shit as anyone in this country but you have begrudgingly give him credit on this one even if it is drenched in a trough of fascist pigshit.
This is what happens when the NSA is more interested in spying and data-mining every detail on millions of loyal, law-abiding American citizens instead of defending against foreign threats. Perhaps Obama’s Stasi should have spent less time filling that massive data storage facility out in Utah and more time focusing on defending those American companies that Gingrich is wailing about. Never mind that Sony America is a subsidiary of a Japanese corporation but hey, like Bluto in Animal House why stop him when he is on a roll.
Give the media credit for getting The Interview and Team America effectively banned in a blow to freedom of speech and expression. The sleazy 24/7 cable driven news cycle and the armies of talking heads and big-haired bimbos staring into teleprompters are great at scaring the bejesus out of the sheeple. Quite frankly, at the end of the day their very jobs depend on it and they understand that. Americans must have whiplash from the onslaught of hyped up “terrorist” threats and dread that they are subjected to by the government, former government figures now making their coin as “experts” (like Newt Gingrich) and a propaganda machine that would make Joseph Goebbels himself proud.
It is almost like the mainstream media acts as a public relations front for any and all anti-American groups - ISIS for example - and is able to spread their hateful messages far more effectively than the groups themselves ever could. The P.R. is all free of charge too and arguably only serves to enable a continuation of threats and beheadings given the saturation coverage they are provided with.
Fear is home for Christmas. America FUCK YEAH!
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