Sony Panics and North Korea Tries to Avenge an Insult

I want to say right off the bat, that seeing a freakin’ movie is not standing up for your freedom.  Sitting down for it, maybe.  I have been trying to write about the Sony/North Korea/hack/panic fiasco since the story broke, but it evolves so quickly I felt compelled to re-write everything.  I think we’ve about reached the endgame.  Sony staff may be scared out of their wits, but now that The Interview has been released, one would think Sony Pictures could not have asked for better publicity.  All of this panic was unnecessary.  North Korean violence tends to come without prior warning, but vocal threats from Pyongyang are mere bluster.  I discussed this tendency last Spring.  We in the biz call it calculated madness.  North Korea effects the appearance of irrationality in order to scare the rest of us.  ‘They are unpredictable!’ we say, ‘who knows what they can do!’  And then the rest of us give North Korea something they want out of fear.  You see that in the initial response to “the Guardians of Peace” threats. 

Making Sense of North Korea: How We Know Anything

North Korean is in the news again.  Lately, the stories about the impossible state have been relatively normal, even by the DPRK’s standards: the secretive leader Kim Jong-un may have health problems, he may be purging the country’s leadership.  National rulers develop health problems, same as the rest of us, and dictators conduct purges to protect themselves.  With all things North Korean, some skepticism is warranted.  The first question we need to ask: how do we know about this?  How do we know anything about North Korea in general?  Most of the outside world’s knowledge about North Korea comes from defectors.  Another important source of information on the DPRK were the negotiations conducted under the auspices of the Six Party Talks, or the Agreed Framework talks of the 1990s. 

Next Verse, Same as the First

              There is a noticeable tendency for tensions between Pyongyang and Seoul to flare up in the spring.  Last year North Korea sealed the border, closed factories in the Kaesong Industrial Zone and denounced US-ROKA exercises as a provocation.  Said military exercises occur every year.  Two years ago, North Korea announced it would resume nuclear tests, and the US Navy dispatched Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George Washington to South Korea in response.  Well, last week, on Sunday March 30, North Korea fired artillery into the ocean, over the armistice line, and the Southern Navy responded in kind.  Then on Monday March 31 the South Korean Defense Ministry announced they had recovered a crashed North Korean drone.  These events are nothing new, but later in the week Prime Minister of Japan Abe Shinzo ordered the Marine Self-Defense Force to patrol the Sea of Japan with an AEGIS-equipped destroyer and shoot down any North Korean missiles bringing a new factor into the mix: the Japanese might actually do something.  Previously, Japan was the least powerful party interested in the tension on the Korean peninsula.  However, if the Japanese were to actually shoot down a North Korean device the rest of the region would have to take them more seriously.