Yesterday I talked about the cancelling of New York’s premier of the movie The Interview. Then Carmike theaters pulled the plug. In the 20 some hours since I wrote that blog, the situation has gotten a lot worse. The final score: tyranny 1, freedom 0.
As most of you probably know by now,the Sony movie house and all the major theater chains have pulled The Interview. That means on Christmas Day, you will not be able to see this movie anywhere in the US. You can thank Guardians of Peace for this. They made threats of a 9/11 level event ?and everyone got so cautions that they all pulled the plug, despite Department of Homeland Security’s insistence these threats aren’t even credible. Though some intelligence agents believe North Korea is involved behind the hacking, there is no hard evidence to prove this. But Sony went further: they removed The Interview from their website. ?Some suggest Sony should put it on DVDs and on streaming sites like Netflix. But Sony says they have,”No further release plans”. Nonetheless, The Interview is expected to be released in international markets starting in late January 2015.
What more is there to say? This is the first time, well, at least in my lifetime, that a movie has been cut because of international political concerns. If someone knows of a recent incident like this, let us know about it. So we’re looking at world history here, and it’s not good. Remember the early 2000s, when everyone said phrases like: “We won’t negotiate with terrorist”, “We won’t surrender to terrorist”, and “We won’t cave in to terrorist.” With this move that Sony did, and the movie theaters did, they negotiated, surrendered, and caved in. It made our whole nation looks weak. And there’s no hard evidence North Korea is behind this. For all we know, these could be teenagers in some basement in rural Mississippi. How foolish would these mega conglomerates look if they surrendered to a bunch of teenage hackers? ?And when you open the door for censorship like this, where do you stop?