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Jan. 2, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

32:18

2876 The Interview | What Is It Really About?

The Interview is a Sony Pictures Entertainment film starring Seth Rogen and James Franco - who are journalists instructed to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un after booking an interview with him. In a review of the controversial film - Stefan Molyneux looks at the real history and principles which are relevant to the story and the swirling news surrounding the film.

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	Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux for Freedom Aid Radio.
	I hope you're doing well.
	This is the philosophical review of Seth Rogen's controversial film The Interview, which was supposed to be released and then not released, and now it's been released online.
	It's made about $15 million over its first couple of days online.
	Making it Sony's most lucrative online offering, and I'm sure will change the face of how movies are delivered, given how much money could be made from not delaying the digital release until well after the movie release, but releasing it at the same time.
	So, there's going to be spoilers in this.
	Sorry, it's the only way I can talk in depth about the movie, so if you haven't seen it, you can go and check it out.
	It's on iTunes and Google+.
	And other places.
	And I would recommend watching it, although it is hyper-violent towards the end in a way that was certainly stomach-turning for me.
	But it's worth watching.
	I think it's never quite seen anything like it before.
	And I certainly admire the courage and fortitude and some of the humor.
	Some of the jokes are actually very funny, if they do involve quite a few bits of things that go up.
	But, well, you know, I guess they know their audience.
	better than I do.
	And of course, it's strange to see a Japanese corporations movie made by a Canadian director mocking the dictator of North Korea.
	The performances are kind of uneven.
	Seth Rogen does his growling, bear, bumbly, confused, moral, incisive character okay.
	James Franco seems to be more of a kabuki caricature than an actual person.
	I think that really harms the movie.
	I mean, the fact is that the Kim Jean-Hu is more sympathetically portrayed even than the American interviewer.
	And I found it really hard to get into his character.
	Thank you.
	You know, hyperbolic non-character.
	And I think that really did not help a lot.
	Because I think the purpose of the movie in some ways was or could have been to get the audience to learn something about evil, to learn something about the flattery of sociopathy.
	Because the North Korean dictator, of course, is very friendly and shy and starstruck, or at least pretends to be, when he first meets James Franco's character, who is the interviewer who's come to interview him.
	And then later become sort of murderous when he's crossed and so on.
	So I thought that was, potentially the audience could have been drawn into that kind of charisma, realized the murderous rage on the other side of it, could have actually educated them about the flattery of evildoers, which I think would have been helpful.
	But because James Franco's character was so distorted and...
	Unsympathetic and such a caricature, I think it was really hard for people to go on that emotional journey with him, which I think would have been an interesting and instructive motivational journey to go on.
	I mean, the movie has been criticized for not really portraying much about North Korea other than saying there are concentration camps and starvation.
	You didn't really see any of it.
	In the movie, you see, oh, all of North Korea will be watching on these little TVs.
	But the reality is that in North Korea, just about anybody who's outside the main capital doesn't really have any access to electricity anyway.
	You can see these chilling photos online of...
	The view from space of this area of the world, that's called South Korea and other countries around all lit up with lights at nighttime.
	North Korea is this giant black void with a tiny sprinkling of lights around the city.
	So, I think, but my criticism of the portrayal of North Korea is that it's never talked about as a communist system.
	And this, to me, can you imagine a movie set in Second World War Germany that never referenced Nazism in any way, shape, or form?
	This is just one of these things that happens from people on the left.
	They simply cannot associate communism with dictatorships.
	I mean, it's the same thing where whenever you hear about people reporting on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that Lee Harvey Oswald was a left-wing communist Soviet dictator.
	I'm a trained operative, but you don't ever hear about that in the same way that when Joseph McCarthy was digging into the number of Soviet spies in the American government, of which there were hundreds later confirmed by decrypted cables in the 90s from the Soviet archives, when Joseph McCarthy was diving into how many Soviets There were Soviet spies.
	There were in particularly the State Department in the post-war period when America was in a Cold War with the United States.
	He, of course, roundly lambasted and called ridiculous and paranoid and so on.
	So there is, and Seth Rogen is, I don't know what his politics are, but this is something he said.
	He said, my mom's a social worker and my dad works in non-profit organizations, but they seem very radical in American terms, embracing a form of socialism.
	That really doesn't even exist here.
	I mean, where I come from, communism is not a terrible word.
	Now, that's, of course, partly the left coast in Canada is BC, just like the left coast in America is California.
	So there's that aspect.
	Of course, his Jewish background and communism and Judaism have had, let's just say, a somewhat complicated emotional relationship and intellectual relationship since the...
	Since the 19th century, I've done a bunch of shows on that.
	You can look at the truth about Karl Marx for more on that.
	But the fact that North Korea is never referred to as a communist dictatorship is...
	I mean, there are some oblique references.
	And there is one actually very funny joke about Stalin.
	But there is no mention of communism throughout the entire film, which is, I think, a very instructive omission, I suppose you can say.
	It's fascinating as well to see that Kim Jong-un is given some rebuttals, right?
	So he talks about the sanctions, U.S.-led sanctions against North Korea that are supposed to starve the country into submission.
	Of course, that didn't work with Cuba.
	That doesn't generally work.
	It didn't work with South Africa as a whole.
	And when the U.S. was involved in the Korean War, the U.S. killed one-tenth of the population there.
	290,000 North Korean soldiers and nearly 3 million civilians.
	That is a staggering amount.
	That would be the equivalent of a country a generation and a half ago, or maybe two generations ago, A country killing, I don't know, 20 million, 15, 20 million Americans.
	That would last.
	That would be burned into the brain.
	So when the movie opens with a little North Korean girl singing about, you know, let's kill America, Americans should die and so on.
	Well, it was an unbelievable slaughterhouse in North Korea in the U.S.-led war.
	Now, as far as the war goes, you can look it up.
	I don't need to go into much detail here.
	It was, of course, a porn war, right, in that there was this domino theory in the post-war period that...
	If the Soviet Union takes over this country and this country and this country, then next thing you know, the whole world is going to be communist.
	And so wherever the Soviets attempted to expand, then the Americans would attempt to push back.
	So this is what led to a lot of conflicts.
	This is still what's leading to a lot of conflicts.
	So it comes out of Woodrow Wilson's idea that America should be the world's policeman.
	You know, if a policeman is walking down the street and sees two guys, like one guy jump another guy, he's obliged to go in and intervene because whatever.
	The idea that this is a world's policeman, that you can be a world's policeman is really not valid, not valid at all.
	I mean, if you wanted to make that valid, then Americans who are overseas should be able to make citizens arrests wherever they want.
	But this is not generally how the law works, at least in the modern world.
	So I think it's important to understand that in North Korea, there is starvation.
	Part of the starvation is from sanctions.
	And of course, it's an evil dictatorship and so on.
	They have weapons of mass destruction.
	They have nuclear weapons.
	It is a brutal dictatorship.
	Of course, there are over 30,000 people in prison.
	Such as printing Kim Il-sung's portrait on insufficient quality paper or using newspapers with his pictures to wrap parcels and so on.
	The country, North Korea, spends about a quarter of its gross domestic product on armaments.
	It has developed, of course, as I mentioned, nuclear weapons.
	And there's a military draft where almost all able-bodied Males between 18 to 30 are in uniform, and more than 13 million people, over half the population of the country, suffer from malnutrition in 2003.
	North Korea is dependent on international food aid to feed its population.
	Now, in the movie, of course, there's a lot of rebellion, a lot of, we hate this guy, let's have a rebellion.
	But there's not a lot of evidence that North Koreans are massively opposed to the regime.
	So a lot of North Koreans flee to China.
	They're sort of called food refugees.
	They flee to China because they can't eat.
	But...
	When they're in China and making money and getting food, they still show a lot of support for their homeland, a lot of pride in their people.
	They support the current government.
	And many of the food refugees return, according to reports, return to North Korea after earning sufficient money.
	So it's the Stockholm Syndrome, nationalism to the nth degree and so on.
	That is a big problem.
	Now, it's not just the sanctions.
	Of course, it's a communist or central planned economy.
	There's been some liberalization lately, but it's not the most heavily sanctioned country in the world, North Korea.
	They're far more pervasive and compelling.
	Sanctions against Iran and Washington has targeted fewer North Korean entities than the Balkans, Burma, Cuba, Iran, and Zimbabwe.
	So...
	So the question is, of course, is the nuclear weapons seem to be the big problem, the big bugaboo in the film?
	And we'll talk more about how that shows up and how essential it is to really understanding what's being talked about in the film, whether consciously or not, I don't know.
	But after North Korea ran a second nuclear bomb test, Well, the question is, where did it get its weapons?
	Where did North Korea get its weapons?
	Well, there was, of course, the old rather grim joke about Saddam Hussein, which is, how does Washington know that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction because they have the receipts?
	In other words, they sold them to him.
	Well...
	A lot of the weapons development in North Korea was paid for by the U.S. government.
	Both the Clinton and Bush administrations played key roles in helping Kim Jong-il develop North Korea's nuclear programs from the mid-1990s onwards.
	Donald Rumsfeld, you know, we know they're to the north, the east, the west, the south, check my gum line.
	Also presided over a $200 million contract to deliver the material and equipment to build two light water reactor stations in North Korea.
	This is in January 2000, when he was executive director of ABB. A spokesman for ABB has confirmed that Rumsfeld was at nearly all of the board meetings due to his involvement with the country, and we'll put links to all these below.
	But he was really continuing the policies of the Clinton administration.
	In 1994, the Clinton administration agreed to replace North Korea's domestically built nuclear reactors with these light water nuclear reactors.
	Now, of course, the government said, no, no, no, don't worry.
	It's true that we're helping them build these light water nuclear reactors, but you can't use that material to make bombs.
	Well, according to Henry Solosky, head of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, he said...
	Light water reactors could be used to produce dozens of bombs worth of weapons-grade plutonium in both North Korea and Iran.
	This is true of all LWRs, a depressing fact U.S. policymakers have managed to block out.
	So the U.S. State Department says, no, no, don't worry, light water reactors can't be used to produce bomb-grade material, so let's ship them off and help North Korea.
	But in 2002, the very same State Department urged Russia to stop its nuclear cooperation with Iran because Americans, the State Department said, well, we don't want Iran with weapons of mass destruction.
	And what was Russia building at the time in Iran?
	Yes, indeed.
	Light water reactors.
	So, according to the State Department, the light water reactors that they sold and built in North Korea can't be used to make nuclear weapons.
	But when Russia does it in Iran, they can.
	So, good luck unraveling that, Monsieur Le Kafka.
	April 2002, the Bush administration announced it would release $95 million of Americans Taxpayer cashola to begin construction of these light water reactors in North Korea.
	Bush argued that arming the megalomaniac dictator Kim Jong-il with the potential to produce 100 nukes a year was, quote, vital to the national security interests of the United States.
	And according to Bloomberg News, even more money was released in January 2003.
	Now, South Korean newspapers reported that a North Korean missile warhead had been found in Alaska.
	I don't think it had been couriered.
	A CIA asset, according to Pakistani President Purvas Musharraf in 2005, a CIA asset named Khan had also provided centrifuges and their designs to North Korea.
	So, they are concerned, of course, that North Koreans might have weapons of mass destruction while having done quite a bit to help provide them the raw materials and possibly the training for all of that.
	Now, according to some sources, the movie makers, the Sony Studio, did run the movie through the State Department.
	State Department seemed to be quite keen on the assassination sequence of Kim Jong-un.
	And so this is a long tradition that Hollywood has of consulting with the government in return for expertise and the use of military hardware for making things.
	The movies and, you know, I mean, American journalists are quite often suspected of being spies anyway.
	This isn't exactly going to help that.
	The CIA has over 600 times tried to murder Fidel Castro when he was in power.
	Exploding mollusk shells, lethal fungus-infected diving suit, poisonous pens, exploding cigars, bacterial poisons designed to be dissolved in his coffee or tea, and so on.
	The CIA has attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders has been successful in about half of those.
	and I don't know how many of those operatives were posing as journalists, but I guess we shall see.
	So one of the things that's interesting is the idea, of course, that if you kill the leader of a dictatorship, what?
	You're going to suddenly transmogrify the whole country into a democratic paradise of drive-thrus and movie theaters.
	Well, fortunately, Sook, who is one of the characters in North Korea, says, no, you kill him, he's got brothers, he's got generals, other people will just take over and it will be the same.
	So then the theory is, of course, well, if you just reveal him to be human or, you know, to get him to cry or whatever, then he will lose all of his political power.
	Yeah.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	What happened in Iraq quite the opposite.
	It's massive destruction, millions of refugees, hundreds of thousands of people dead, infrastructure destroyed, roving bands of fundamentalist militants on the loose doing god-awful things to everyone that they can find.
	So there is this wish fulfillment, I think, that comes really out of the Iraq war that drives this, which is if we decapitate an evil leader, like decapitate the state, take off the evil leader, then peace and prosperity and happiness and democracy and all these good things will result.
	And this is really a dangerous notion.
	It's an incredibly dangerous notion.
	This is pointed to in the film itself.
	In the film itself, after Kim Jong-un is humiliated in an interview, he wants to launch his nuclear weapons, which I assume would cause the deaths of tens or maybe even hundreds of millions of people, lay waste to a continent, depopulate cities, and so on.
	And so the CIA, by instructing these journalists to murder the dictator, Put events in motion which could have resulted in a nuclear war, and if a ridiculously lucky and improbable shot for the tank shell had not ended things, then there would have been a nuclear war.
	This doesn't really seem to have been commented on much.
	much like I know it raises the stakes and of the movie and so on but I think there's an important lesson in there as well which is you never know what is going to happen when you start meddling in the affairs of other nations heck you don't even know what's going to happen you start meddling in the affairs of other people let alone nations and so I thought it was very instructive that there was a grim brutal totalitarian stability to North Korea Yeah.
	And when the CIA went in to try and meddle with that, it was within like half a second of causing the deaths of tens of millions of people and starting a nuclear war, the end of which would have been what?
	Well, of course, if North Korea launched a bunch of nuclear weapons, then all of the surrounding countries that had nuclear weapons or any kind of weapons would have poured them all in.
	You know, like a bucket of crap down a toilet would have poured them all into North Korea, wiping out significant portions of the population and rendering the locale uninhabitable for a certain amount of time, depending on the half-life of whatever god-awful stuff they've got stuffed up, those dildos from hell.
	So, this is fascinating that...
	In a goal or in an attempt to prevent the use of nuclear weapons, the American government triggered almost.
	I mean, it's as close to it actually happening because then again, there was this literally deus ex machina shot.
	But in order to prevent or because they were afraid of nuclear weapons, which they themselves had supplied to North Korea, the American government put events in motion that almost caused the deployment, the launch of those nuclear weapons.
	And not only that, but you could also say that in an attempt to liberate the North Koreans, the American government put a set of events in motion in the movie that almost wiped them out completely through retaliation for nuclear weapons.
	Nuclear weapons.
	So I thought that is a very important lesson to understand.
	And I'm not saying that's conscious in the movie.
	It was just a way of raising the stakes and so on.
	But that is a very important issue to recognize.
	I mean, people in Washington think that they can go and fix problems in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria and Lebanon and Iran.
	And they think that they can solve all of these problems all over the world where they have precious little power or influence other than threats and bribery.
	But the reality is that Washington remains pretty much the murder capital of the United States.
	I'd be more content if these paragons of human nobility, courage and wisdom could, say, eliminate murder in the city that they have direct power over that is right outside their windows.
	If they can calm those troubled waters, you know, then maybe they can start working on Washington state and turn all those schools into paradises and getting rid of deficits and accumulating a surplus.
	And then they can start working their way outwards.
	You know, I'm always suspicious.
	Of people who claim that the measure of their virtue is in things beyond their power.
	That is always a very, very dangerous thing to say and certainly to accept.
	If American politicians are so great at solving problems, let them start with Washington, D.C., turn that into a paradise, or at least maybe not the murder capital of the United States.
	And from there, they can start to work their way outward.
	But if you can't even solve a war level of murders outside your own windows, I don't imagine that you can liberate the Iraqi people.
	I mean, this is just ridiculous.
	So I thought that was important and interesting as well.
	And the last thing I wanted to mention, there's a lot to talk about in the film, but the last thing that I'll mention is the natural, oh, dare I say it, seemingly inevitable, rampant sexism throughout the movie.
	The men are idiots, and the men are shallow, and the men are homicidal, and the men are murderous.
	And when a man is in charge, he launches nuclear weapons.
	But when a woman is in charge, like the sook, the woman who then stays and transitions the country to a democracy, when women are in charge, you get democracy, and so on.
	And there's a woman in charge of the CIA. That gets them going.
	Agent Lacey, played by Lizzie Kaplan, who barely seems to blink.
	But when women are in charge, things are good.
	And when men are in charge, they're idiots.
	They fight a lot.
	They're irresolute.
	They're fools.
	This is just inevitable and such a cliche these days that at some point people are just going to start eye rolling and then we will get egalitarian idiocy in the movie world and in the art world as a whole.
	And there also seems it's kind of fundamental thing that people seem to not understand.
	You know, in the human world, in human society, wisdom that is accumulated over thousands or tens of thousands of years can literally be wiped out.
	virtually wiped out in a generation or two.
	Like you think of these, it's all over the West and other places too, but you think of these families where it's been two generations since someone's had a job that they could be fired from, maybe non-welfare or whatever.
	Well, you know how to...
	Look for a job, how to write a resume, how to do an interview, how to get a job, how to keep a job, how to grow, how to negotiate workplace conflicts, when to fight, when to back down.
	All of this is very complex knowledge.
	And it can be wiped out within a generation or two once people are not part of that workforce.
	You know, my family spoke Gaelic on one side and German on the other.
	I speak neither.
	I guess I spoke German when I was a kid, but not anymore.
	So this knowledge can be erased.
	And the vulnerability of men to the sexual manipulation of women It's very important.
	There are two major female characters who sexually manipulate the man, the CIA agent and Suk, the North Korean woman.
	Again, the acting, at least from the non-leads, I thought the acting was just stellar.
	In particular, Randall Parker's Kim Jong-un was great, and the woman who played Linda or Lydia Bang, who played Suk, was also just fantastic.
	Fantastic acting.
	But...
	The degree to which these men can just be led around by their dicks, you know, like when Agent Lacey comes in to try and recruit these two guys to kill the North Korean dictator, she's got bangs, she's got glasses, she's got big tits, and this apparently is what, these are sort of three things that Dave Scarlock, the James Franco character, really likes.
	And then, of course, she's offended that, you know, after using her sexual wiles, she's offended that she would ever be accused of honeypotting or using her sexual wiles and so on.
	And the degree to which female sexuality can be manipulative is something that was hard-won knowledge.
	Women can be dangerous.
	It was hard-won knowledge that was pushed forward by writers as diverse as Auguste Trimberg and William Shakespeare and Dickens, even to some degree, that women can be dangerous.
	And we all know men can be dangerous.
	That's constantly reinforced.
	In fact, the idea that men can't be dangerous is kind of becoming an imaginary forgotten trope these days.
	So the degree to which men are just led by their dicks by manipulative, sexy women in the movie is, I think, really fascinating.
	fascinating and I think it speaks to an entire generation growing up without dads, without fathers, without dads who chose a good woman to be his wife, to be the mother of his children and they see positive reactions and so on.
	And also a good father and a good mother, but we're just talking about fatherlessness at the moment.
	A good father sits down with his son and says, yes, there are very sexually attractive women out there.
	There are women who put themselves front and center.
	Through their sexuality and those women are often very dangerous people to get to know, to become subject to.
	Female sexuality has great power over men.
	There are studies that show that even when a man is thinking about talking to a woman, Not insignificant sections of his brain shut down, and men become, you know, dribbling idiots to some degree, particularly around sexually fertile and available women.
	So to me, these men don't seem to have any clue of the degree of sexual manipulation they're subjected to, and I think this is a very common, a very common aspect of male youth these days.
	Young men, let me tell you!
	This is the sexodus.
	This is men bailing out of dating and relationships.
	This is men not getting married, going galt on marriage as a whole and contenting themselves, you know, porn and video games and so on.
	And I think that's happened because there's not like the wisdom that men had developed over thousands of difficult and painful years of saying, here are the good women, and here are the bad women.
	Here's how you find and hold on to and treasure and love the great women, and here's how you avoid shun and penis ostracize the dangerous women, right?
	You know, here is the wife of Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction and here's the Glenn Close character and here's how you differentiate between the two.
	So there doesn't seem to be any consciousness of the men.
	They only sort of really figure it out after the fact or they're told but they don't listen and so on.
	And I think that's really, really important.
	If you look at the degree of...
	Homosexual references, again, I mean, homosexual references, butt jokes, and sexual manipulation.
	This all seems to me to be men uncertain of masculinity.
	And I think that the audience of these types of movies is growing up either with no father around or no father they can respect or a father who's not emotionally available sits down with them and tells them about dangerous women and how to avoid them.
	Which when you know that, when you know dangerous women and how to avoid them, you can date with much more confidence.
	I myself happily married for 12 years and we're going to the grave pinky in pinky.
	But it took me a long time to figure out how to separate the great women from the dangerous women.
	And this is kind of something that has been lost, I think, intergenerationally.
	And I'm going to work on a show in the new year with at least my thoughts on that topic.
	Because once you can go into the dating world confident of your ability to find a good woman, then it becomes much less of a Russian roulette.
	I won't even say where the gun is pointed, but let's just say you wouldn't be riding any horses if you lost.
	So I think that aspect, you know, this sort of bromance, these man boys, these perpetual adolescents and so on, who use women sexually, and this is referenced in the film when Agent Lacey comes over.
	I won't get into the jokes other than to say I will not be eating any cream cheese for a while.
	But...
	There is, they use women sexually and they are used by women sexually.
	And this, I think, comes out of a, you know, the general disintegration of the family structure that has occurred over the last couple of generations from the post-war period, in particular from the welfare period onwards.
	And I think that a huge amount of wisdom has been lost, and that's only to the benefit of bad people.
	When you're no longer able to differentiate between good women and bad women, well, that just serves the bad women.
	And further erodes the traditional family unit, which I believe is our biggest and strongest bulwark against the ever-expanding state and its powers.
	So, I'm not sure how to rate.
	I don't really do ratings.
	I'm not really sure how to rate the movie.
	But I will say that it's worth watching.
	I will say that there's a lot that is packed into the movie.
	I do think that the fantasy that violence can produce paradise is still a very seductive idea, and of course something that the state enjoys.
	You know, give us more power, surrender more of your rights, give us more of your property and civil rights and legal rights, and we will produce for you A paradise that is the fundamental lie of the state.
	Surrender to me and all will be paradise.
	And I think that the movie dances around that.
	Again, they're comedians and actors and writers, not philosophers and political thinkers, but I think that there's enough in there that we can really question.
	That idea, that argument that violence can produce paradise.
	Although it's shown in the movie, I think that the risk of the nuclear war and destruction of the region was too high a price to pay.
	So this is Stefan Molyneux saying thank you so much for watching.
	Please let me know what you think of the movie below.
	Like and subscribe and share if you find the video helpful.
	And Happy New Year.

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