Archive for Censorship

Samsung Tries to Sue Its Way to Mohammunity

May 10, 2010 Censorship, Humor/Satire, Korean Law 4 comments

Recently, a friend approached me about the idea of writing a column for a South Korean newspaper. I declined on the basis that I’m already overtaxed by the burden of writing this blog, but perhaps I should have added “the defense of personal jurisdiction” as another reason:

In his Christmas Day 2009 column for the Korea Times, Michael Breen decided to lampoon such national newsmakers as President Lee Myung-bak and the pop idol Rain.

Headlined “What People Got for Christmas,” the English-language column also poked fun at global technology giant Samsung Electronics, referring to past bribery scandals as well as perceptions that its leaders are arrogant. [....]

Breen’s column ran as local media reported that President Lee would soon pardon Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee on a 2008 conviction for tax evasion. Chairman Lee, 68, had already received a federal pardon in the 1990s on a conviction for bribing two former presidents while he was with the firm.

On Dec. 29, the day of Lee’s pardon, Samsung sued the freelance columnist, the newspaper and its top editor for $1 million, claiming damage to its reputation and potential earnings. After the Korea Times ran clarifications, the newspaper and its editor were dropped from the suit.

And people wonder why corporate corruption is so common in South Korea. I guess it just goes to show that you never know what you’re not reading:

“In South Korea, it’s considered taboo to criticize the chaebols,” said Kim Ky-won, professor of economics at Korea National Open University. “They hold very close to absolute power.”

Most critical stories run in smaller media less dependent on ads from big companies. Major media reports are mostly limited to breaking news of prosecutions of chaebol leaders but seldom probe deeper, critics say.

“Samsung has financial power over the press. They’re their own sanctuary where no one can intervene or criticize them,” said Kim Keon-ho, an official at the Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice.

With special guest appearance by Brendon Carr:

“In South Korea, injury to one’s reputation is the key element, not the truth,” he said. “The fact that a statement is true is not an absolute defense. Satire is not a defense. That’s different from the American definition. America is a free speech society, whereas Korea is not. It has historically been a ‘sit down and shut up’ society.”

Punishment here is tougher if the statement is not true. “But you’re punished in all cases for revealing things that injure someone’s reputation,” Carr said. “If you say, ‘Look out for Jim. He’s a crook. He swindled me,’ that’s a crime in South Korea. And people use it. Defamation may be the No. 1 criminal complaint here.”

Suddenly, Robert Koehler’s hypervigilance about libel suits doesn’t seem so hypervigilant. I wonder if a South Korean judge or lawyer (or Samsung) can now sue Mr. Carr. I wonder where this stops. I especially wonder if any of the many South Korean plaintiffs I’ve criticized or ridiculed would try to assert personal jurisdiction over a U.S.-based blog whose only footprint in Korea is the fact of not being blocked there. Yet.

I’ve always enjoyed Mr. Breen’s writing, even if I often disagree with his views. I find it tasteless of Samsung to persecute him for satirizing press reports that it paid bribes to prosecutors. I find it especially tasteless that my profession is being misused to censor public criticism and suppress freedom of speech notwithstanding the truth of the matter asserted. As a small gesture of solidarity with Mr. Breen, whom I’ve never met, here are some links to other people’s reports on what the scandal is all about, just in case you didn’t really know, either.

* Former Samsung lawyer “Kim Yong-chul claimed that Samsung has a large network of government officials, politicians, journalists and academics in its pay,” a network that doesn’t include one presidential aide who photographed and then refused a W5 million “holiday gift.”

* This NYT blog post notes that Mr. Kim even managed to get Catholic priests to act as his mouthpieces. That’s some trick.

* Someone alleged that Samsung had also paid off Roh Moo Hyun.

If you ask me, the suppression of legitimate criticism is a greater scandal than any of this. Admittedly, I wasn’t a major consumer of Samsung products before this, but I sure as hell won’t be one now.

Who Is Still Free Not to Be Muslim?

January 26, 2010 Censorship, Islam 7 comments

Let’s begin by dispensing with the moot question of whether I agree with all that Geert Wilders has said. I don’t, and I specifically disagree with statements by Wilders, such as his call for the Koran to be banned, that are themselves incompatible with the freedom of speech Wilders now defends so articulately. But almost by definition, people who become the state’s first targets for censorship have inevitably expressed views that are controversial, even indefensible.

Wilders is now facing prosecution in The Netherlands, the historic refuge of Europe’s dissidents and free-thinkers, for his words criticizing the intolerance of Islam. Wilders, who I hope has learned a more consistent view of free speech from his own experience with petty despotism, answers a Dutch court this way:

A quote:

It is not only the right, but also the duty of free people to speak out against any ideology that threatens freedom. Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, was right: “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” I hope with all I have in me that freedom of expression will prevail in this trial. Not only that I will be acquitted, but that freedom of expression will continue to exist…. This trial, of course, is about freedom of expression, but this trial is also about finding the truth. The statements I have made — the comparisons I have drawn — are they true, as mentioned in the summons? Because if something is true, how can it be illegal?

It would be one thing if the state’s objective was to stultify all discussion of religion and theocracy, but it isn’t. The state is simply betting that it’s easier to silence critics of extremist Islam than it would be to expect Muslim extremists to tolerate free discourse. Wilders’s argument, which I believe paints with too broad a brush, is that Islam is fascist. The state, by prosecuting Wilders for the expression of his ideas, now means to confer protected status not over all religions, but only the one whose adherents — or rather, some of them — tend to react to free speech with stabbings, fatwas, and riots.

Sure, you say, but Europe is far away. Well, Canada isn’t:

That this could happen so close to us suggests that it could happen here, too.

“Chutzpah” in Korean = “막무가내”

January 14, 2010 Censorship, Democracy, Propaganda, Subversion 2 comments

North Korea, which is ironically quite fond of accusing South Korea of the “suppression” of its puppets in South Korea, is demanding that South Korea prosecute the activists who’ve resumed showering its countryside with anti-Kim Jong Il leaflets:

The chief delegate to inter-Korean military talks was quoted as saying by the Korean Central News Agency that “South Korean organizations, swept by anti-communism, caused a disturbance by flying tens of thousands of leaflets from Paju, Gyeonggi Province on Jan. 1. “South Korean authorities have to immediately take steps against those conservative groups and punish the main culprits,” he said.

The Chosun Ilbo has some even better quotes:

He said, “The ‘people’s coalition for sending leaflets to the North,’ a federation of far right conservative groups, created another round of commotion by sending hundreds of thousands of propaganda leaflets to our side from the Imjingak Pavilion” in Paju, Gyeonggi Province on Jan. 1 in an “anticommunist frenzy.”

The North “will never tolerate the slightest acts undermining our leadership’s absolute authority and the socialist fatherland’s dignity, no matter how precious and urgent the improvement of North-South Korean relations is,” the message said. The North “must take a serious look at the provocative leaflet dissemination… instigated by South Korean authorities, which are leading inter-Korean relations to a confrontation behind our back while calling for dialogue and improvement of ties to our face,” it added.

President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Discuss among yourselves.

And of course, we know that Roh Moo Hyun was willing to do their bidding. During his term as President, North Korean puppets ran wild in the South and intimidated their opponents with violence — and even got government subsidies while they did it — while opponents of North Korea’s dictatorship were harassed and beaten up by state and non-state actors, who were almost never arrested or prosecuted for the actions.

I happen to agree that the South shouldn’t prosecute imbiciles like Shin Hae Chul especially when the marketplace of ideas could address this sort of stupidity so much more effectively with shame, satire, and ridicule. Sadly, people without (a) a sense that government should be restrained, (b) strong logical reasoning skills, or (c) a sense of humor tend to resort to petty despotism in the form of “human rights” commissions, “truth and reconciliation” commissions, national security laws, and anti-blasphemy laws. And if that can happen in supposedly libertine places like Canada, it’s a significant threat to free societies everywhere.

The North Korean Freedom Coalition supports the balloon launches. If you’d like to f^ ©k with Kim Jong Il’s blood pressure a little, you can contribute to them here. I would like to offer this humble suggestion: with the value of a Choco Pie approaching ten dollars on the black market in North Korea, I would propose carpet-bombing North Korea with them. Just imagine the headlines, and I don’t doubt that the Orion people would love to have their product enshrined in Korea’s history as an instrument of unification. It could be the most stunningly effective, legitimately subversive, and liberating guerrilla marketing campaign in human history. Hell, not even the soldiers ordered to gather them could resist eating one … and who could eat just one ChocoPie?

More on Australia’s Denial of Visas to N. Korean Propaganda Artists

December 10, 2009 "United" Nations, Censorship, Propaganda, Sanctions One comment

In Australia, five artists from the Mansudae Art Studio were invited to the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Queensland state to talk about 15 pieces the organizers commissioned for the exhibition, which includes work from more than 100 artists from 25 countries.

Foreign Minister Stephen Smith rejected the artists’ applications for an exception to a visa ban on North Korea, part of targeted sanctions imposed in 2006 in response to the country’s steps to develop atomic weapons.

Organizers first spoke out about the ban as the exhibition opened on Saturday.

Smith’s department said in a statement released Tuesday that issuing visas for Mansudae studio artists would have sent the wrong message.

“The studio reportedly produces almost all of the official artworks in North Korea, including works that clearly constitute propaganda aimed at glorifying and supporting the North Korean regime,” the statement said. [AP]

I have to say that Dan’s points shifted my view of this story to a degree. I would now say that there are two questions here. One is the question of bringing North Korean artists to visit Australia and spend some quality time gazing at the store fronts and the traffic through the windows of their air-conditioned bus (good) and the separate issue of exhibiting propaganda for a repressive state while it publicly executes defectors and dissidents, murders racially impure infants, starves its people, and maintains a string of hideous concentration camps (bad). The visit’s backers insist that not all of the art is propaganda, which may well be true, because I haven’t seen the art itself.

Unfortunately, the government’s ultimate decision appears to be the worst of both: the “art” will still be exhibited, but the artists won’t be allowed to visit. Regardless of what the art depicts, of course, no government should ban it, although I’d oppose government sponsorship of its exhibition, and I’d also question the taste and morals of anyone who would choose to exhibit it without putting it in the context of how North Korea treats its people. We’d expect as much from any TV station that would broadcast “Birth of a Nation” or “Triumph of the Will.”

The accusation of censorship is ridiculous. Here, the Australian government (led by the very liberal Prime Minister Kevin Rudd) had made a decision not to sponsor the only forms of art permitted by the world’s most repressive state. How can it be censorship for one state to refuse to sponsor something that is sponsored and mandated by another state, to the exclusion of all other artistic perspectives? The accusation is hypocritical when coming from the operators of Koyro Tours, who are financial partners of the North Korean regime and therefore sponsors of its repressive system.

A final point on Koyro — the Australian government denied the artists’ visas because of its desire to comply with UNSCR 1874. I’m glad to see governments taking 1874 more seriously than they took 1718 or 1695, although it’s hardly clear to me how granting visas to a few artists violates any of those resolutions. What seems much more clear is that Koryo Tours gives the North Korean government a big cut of its profits by selling overpriced tours to see propaganda spectacles in Pyongyang. Unless — and this seems exceedingly unlikely — Koryo knows for a fact that Kim Jong Il is spending that money on activities not banned under 1874, Koryo itself is in violation of the resolution. I look forward to the day when the British government recognizes this and freezes Koryo Tours’s bank accounts. One self-serving argument we can dispense with is Koryo’s suggestion that tourists gain any useful knowledge of North Korea by watching hundreds of thousands of kids as they’re forced to hold up colored cardboard squares forming juche propaganda slogans.

Update: This looks a bit more like censorship to me.

Henceforth, All Art Must Serve the State

August 8, 2009 Censorship, Democracy, U.S. Politics 20 comments

obama-socialism.jpgobamahope.jpgIn a world fully possessed of its senses, Lanny Davis would have marked himself indelibly as a national laughingstock by now.  It worries me that as one, the “artistic community” has wheeled from near-unanimous opposition to the state to near-unanimous opposition to any dissent against it.  And now that I mull it some, it may be the very term “artistic community” that scares and confuses me the most:

Consider the recent flurry of debate over the Obama “Joker” posters that have been appearing in Los Angeles. This image represents the only substantial counterpoint to Obama’s current agenda from the art community. What’s been the response?

One writer from the LA Weekly declared of the image, “The only thing missing is a noose.” Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post stated, “So why the anonymity? Perhaps because the poster is ultimately a racially charged image.” Bedlam magazine, the first to comment on the poster back in April, argued, “The Joker white-face imposed on Obama’s visage has a sort of malicious, racist, Jim Crow quality to it.”  [....]

To give some perspective, remember that the “noose” comment came from a publication that once presented a cover image of George W. Bush as a bloodthirsty vampire.  [Reason, Patrick Courrielche]

It’s time to revisit our usage of the word “liberal” when it becomes associated with ostracizing and suppressing dissenting thought. I can hardly imagine a more pernicious and potentially effective way to intimidate dissenters in our society than to label them as racists for no better reason than the race of the sitting president.  By definition, is the coddling infantilization of the President of the United States ever a necessary thing, notwithstanding the fact that he is of African descent?  If the mandatory infantilization of our president means that he’s above criticism, then we must suspend this acquired reflex.  If we can’t do even this, can we say that his election represents meaningful progress for our society?

The power of art, in combination with the suppression of free speech or a free press, has been used as a tool by authoritarian governments to control their citizens. From Hitler, Stalin, and Mao to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il, art has been used to deify leaders while preserving the position of the ruling class. Most artists would not want to be referred to as tools of the state, but in the case of Obama’s administration, that’s exactly what they’ve been so far.

“Hope” to me is a modest thing — it means having a president with the maturity to be a heart-breaking disappointment to those who worship him as a post-spiritual deity.  For the record, I’m hopeful that Obama is fundamentally much more practical and self-interested than ideological, and that he knows that embracing this cult’s basest Trotskyist impulses would cost him reelection.

The Jackboot Is on the Other Foot

June 23, 2009 Censorship, Democracy, Korean Politics, Korean Society, Media Criticism No comments

For years, Roh Moo Hyun’s government funded a host of habitually violent left-wing unions and “civic” groups, and we never heard a peep from the Hankyoreh about that outrage against democracy.  But that was then:

It has been revealed that of the 14.1 billion Won in subsidies for social groups to be provided by the 25 district offices of Seoul City this year, about half, 7 billion won, will go to three major government-initiated community development project groups and 10 veterans groups, including the conservative right-wing Korea Freedom Federation and the Korea Veterans Association, respectively. In particular, criticism has been sparked over improving the screening and evaluation processes for grants to social groups as it has been made known that district offices are paying the management costs of these groups or giving subsidies for unclear projects.  [The Hankyoreh]

Let me be clear:  it’s unhealthy for democracy when governments subsidize political speech in a discriminatory manner to favor sympathetic points of view, and it’s especially dangerous when they fund (and fail to prosecute members of) organizations engaging in violence.  I still wish the Hanky would stop its pretentious grandstanding as though it were the klaxon of liberty.  It certainly took no issue when Roh was funding violent left-wing thugs, when he was using the power of the state to drive money and readership to the Hanky at the expense of the opposition press, or when the government and groups it funded tried to censor free speech critical of North Korea’s regime.  The Hanky was no mere bystander to this.  By passively accepting Roh’s ad money and subscription drive, the Hanky became a part of this conspiracy to stifle freedom of the press.

Yet reading the Hanky these days, you might believe that South Korean democracy is in imminent mortal peril.  But it survived ten years of the government trying to make the Hanky South Korea’s paper of record.  Frankly, I’m not seeing anything dictatorial about President Lee’s media policy, which favors less, not more, government control, regulation, and ownership of the media.  In this particular part of the debate, Lee is absolutely right.  The government shouldn’t be in the news business, because inevitably, government news becomes the state’s propaganda.

Hey DJ, What’s That Big Pink Animal With the Prehensile Trunk? (Updated)

June 14, 2009 Appeasement, Censorship, Democracy, Media Criticism 2 comments

Admittedly, I don’t have high expectations of NPR, but I would expect that even they would at least mention the circumstances surrounding the summit that bought Kim Dae Jung his Nobel Peace Prize.  Instead, NPR lets his grandiose claims go unchallenged:

“The Sunshine Policy has been and still is supported by the majority of South Koreans and the whole world,” Kim says, sitting in his living room. “It’s the reason I won the Nobel Peace Prize. People are telling President Lee Myung-bak to return to the Sunshine Policy, but it isn’t clear whether he will or not.”  [NPR]

Since the point of the interview is to let DJ sell the plausibility of creating a kindler, gentler North Korea by paying extortion money — despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary — honest journalism would seem to demand raising the single most obvious question about DJ’s single most prominent claim of accomplishment.

Update:   DJ calls President Lee a “dictator,” and Kim Young Sam calls DJ a “communist.”   Both charges are baseless and needlessly inflammatory.  President Lee has done some authoritarian things, to be sure, though the one that has the left up in arms is the firing of the managers of government-run media who broadcast the infamous “mad cow” reports that were inflammatory, false, and done with reckless disregard for the truth.  Most on the left who were exploiting the effect of those reports hardly cared if they were false, or whether news media might possibly exist for a higher purpose than the dissemination of anti-American agitprop.

Quite rightly, Lee has been intolerant of the violent demonstrations that Roh not only allowed to run wild and subvert the democratic process, but fueled with government funding.  The sum total of Lee’s departures from the principles of free expression, though deserving of more sincere condemnation than they’re received, still don’t add up to as much authoritarianism as Roh demonstrated against opposition media or North Korean defectors.  So let’s call the Korean left’s hypocrisy about dictatorship for what it is.

Equally, I think Kim Dae Jung’s policies toward North Korea were disastrous for the people of both Koreas, but I doubt that Kim Young Sam, if pressed, could cite any evidence that DJ believes in placing the means of production under the control of a state managed by a vanguard elite and a Supreme Leader.  Maybe DJ and Kim Young Sam are too partisan to see it, but rhetoric like this doesn’t protect democracy, it brings mobs of thugs into the streets to destroy it.

June 4, 2009 Censorship, China, Democracy 3 comments

tienanmen1989_man_vs_tank.jpg

KCNA Stands Up for Press Freedom!

April 2, 2009 Censorship, Media Criticism, Unintended Humor No comments

North Korea, which was ranked 172nd out of 173 countries on last year’s survey of world press freedom and which is currently holding two journalists hostage, has lent its moral authority to the oppressed purveyors of the fraudulent P.D. Diary in South Korea, which inspired last year’s violent mad cow demonstrations.

The Citizens Federation for Democratic Media of south Korea issued a statement on March 27 denouncing the present “government” and the ruling party for their undisguised moves to put broadcasting services and other media under their control.

The statement accused the Lee “government” of letting a large number of his confidants hold responsible posts at Yonhap TV News and other media organizations and their related institutions. It deplored that the media persons of conscience are fired for chiding the “government” policies and even thrown behind bars. [KCNA]

Yes, North Korea is criticizing the South Korean “government” (those scare quotes are a nice touch) for putting government-owned media under government control. I hope this helps you understand why blogging about Korea can be so compulsive for anyone with a well developed sense of irony.

This is one of those moments when I could mount my soapbox and demand of some fictitious Korean presidential advisor — whom I imagine in my more delusional moments to be reading this — whether this is the freedom I fought for from the harshness of a rather badly furnished, mold-scented legal office in Pyongytaek. Or, I could be truthful.

Truthfully, I have no sympathy for these defendants, who, while working on the government’s dime, recklessly (at best) provoked weeks of violent mass hysteria, hysteria that included the ransacking of media that didn’t echo the bleating herd. The report in question stood at the intersection of tabloid journalism and political disinformation, both of which would be legal but scorned in a more mature society. If there were evidence that a foreign power put PD Diary’s producers up to it, I’d see the basis for a prosecution. Because I see no such evidence, I think the South Korean government is taking a pernicious path. (Another pernicious idea: government subsidized news media in general.) And with my duty to disapprove of this duly discharged, this is one of those Many Bad Things in the world that I just can’t get terribly stirred up about.

The Safety Dance

November 20, 2008 Activism, Censorship, Deprogramming 3 comments

In my scrapbook from my Army days in Korea, I still have a leaflet, courtesy of “the protector of our race’s destiny,” declaring that “North and South shall bask together in the glow of General Kim Jong Il’s embrace.”  That leaflet was given to me by a sergeant in my unit, who found it outside Gate 7 of Yongsan Garrison in Seoul found one day after morning PT formation.  Where in the Armistice agreement does it say that only one side gets to drop leaflets on the other’s territory?

My possession of this small scrap of paper is a useful illustration of North Korea’s audacious hypocrisy in theatening to turn Seoul into “debris” over a few leaflets being floated into its territory, in large part by South Koreans whose family members the North Koreans stole from them in their own country or its waters.

Yet rather than demand the return of these hostages or stand up to the North’s terrorism, South Korean President Lee Myung Bak is going forward with plans to find some legal basis — whatever it may be — to legally bar activists from launching leaflet balloons into North Korea.  If this is the best basis they can find, they really need to find better lawyers:

He said the government is seeking legal grounds since the leaflets “are harming inter-Korean relations. It is apparently investigating whether it can prevent the civic groups on charges of violating gas safety laws — the leaflets are typically attached to hydrogen balloons and then float across the border. But experts say the law should not apply to those involved in sending the propaganda leaflets since it only temporarily prohibits use of high-pressure gas when it is feared it might cause damage. [Chosun Ilbo]

Here’s what still makes no sense to me:  surely thousands of North Koreans must be able to hear Open Radio and Radio Free NK, to say nothing of the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.  What about these leaflets — whatever small number of them are actually found and read by North Koreans, that is — could be more subversive, destabilizing, or offensive than the content of those broadcasts?  If the answer is “nothing,” it’s reasonable to suspect that the true reasons for North Korea’s present tantrum are (a) the convenience of the timing, because they have other reasons for wanting to scale back relations with the South, and (b) this is a test, and they will soon ask the South Koreans to ban other kinds of speech that threaten their totalitarian rule.

Odder still is Lee’s motive for betraying principle this way:  he seeks to preserve the privilege of pouring South Korean won into the money pit called Pyongyang, despite knowing that much of that money will assuredly be used to build deadlier weapons to terrorize his country.

Park Sang-hak, head of the Fighters for Free North Korea, said, “We’ve been sending leaflets to the North since the Roh Moo-hyun administration. It’s strange that they said nothing at the time but suddenly made an issue of it today. And it’s also strange that the Lee Myung-bak administration, which is advocating human rights for North Koreans, is trying to ban us from doing it.”

I’m not so simplistic as to suggest that all speech is worth the risk of lives in every circumstance — for example, the busing of missionaries, who turned out not to want to be martyrs after all, to the middle of Talibanistan.  Some reasonable weighing of risks and rewards must be done.  The rewards here are hard to argue with.  If the leaflets really have managed to shut down Kaesong and deprive the regime of a multi-billion-dollar source of South Korean money — though I admit to having some doubts about this — one can say that these balloons have been more effective than a few dozen J-DAMS.  (Send your tax-deductible contributions to the North Korean Freedom Coalition!)   The activists have also brought much publicity to their cause.

Lee’s actions, on the other hand, are a disgraceful and preemptive surrender of South Koreans’ freedom to speak in the face of terroristic yet patently empty threats.  But if South Korea is unwilling to defend the freedom of its citizens to speak and to engage with the North Korean people, he’s surrendering principles for which many good men ostensibly fought and died.

It won’t end with leaflets, either.  The precedent this sets won’t have to extend far before North Korea demands the end of defector radio broadcasts, too.  As the brilliant and insightful Brian R. Myers reminds us, the North Koreans long ago managed, through Kim Dae Jung, to get South Korean TV anchors to refer to His Porcine Majesty as “National Defense Commission Chairman Kim Jong Il.“  Who believes that this regime will be satisfied at keeping free speech from the eyes and ears of its subjects, when it claims South Korea as its territory, too?

How should the activists react to this?  By seizing on the opportunity this creates.  I admit to having my reservations about launching these leaflets from the sea when the Pueblo incident taught us all how creatively North Korea interprets the limits of its territorial waters.  A North Korean seizure of a leaflet boat won’t endear those activists to South Koreans and would probably result in a ransom demand.  A safer and more effective answer would be to start launching these things from South Korea itself, inviting reporters to clandestine launches and playing a well publicized cat-and-mouse game with the South Korean police.  That would have the advantage of making Lee pay a political price for his cowardice.  If activists were arrested and put on trial, the activists would have another venue to generate publicity for their cause.

A few leaflets, after all, aren’t going to overthrow the rule of the Cult.  They may, however, modify the behavior of governments through humiliation, help derail policies that amount to appeasement, and capture the attention of the press — and the publc — through imagination.

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