laughingsquid:

Propaganda, A Mysterious Anti-Western Film Allegedly by North Korea

If you want to go into the weekend feeling like absolute shit about the entire planet, check this out. 

Honestly, there’s some points in this that are hard to argue with, like what it says about consumerism and religion and the idea of democracy as a brand, but what it leaves out is the idea that a lot Americans already know this stuff. No one really believes what they see on TV unless they’re teenage girls or republicans. In fact, a lot of this video could have just as easily been the product of the Occupy movement or even freaking Michael Moore. That’s the thing, in America it’s okay to talk about this stuff, we’re allowed to openly question our society and we’re allowed to make videos like this one. We do it all the time. We’re not all zombies to corporate America. In fact, there’re many different pocket groups and sub-cultures in America who stand against it.

Which is really more than you can say about people in North Korea, where, from what I’ve seen, people aren’t allowed to do or believe anything on their own. The fascism in that country isn’t in the form of a television commercial, it’s everything that surrounds them, it’s something they wake up to every day. Sure they might not be in the position to invade anybody at the moment, and they might not have the cult of celebrity that the rest of the world does, but they’re slavish devotion to their Dear Leader is utterly terrifying and it absolutely imprisons them. He is their religion.

America is fucked up right now, the world is fucked up right now, the past is fucked up, and if you’re even a little bit smart you’re aware of all this and it’s probably pretty unsettling to you. But if we put our heads together as a species we can definitely figure this shit out. I have no doubt about that. It might already be happening. The answer is certainly not to trade one form of fascism for another, and actually any movie that wants to explore the horrors of greed and fascism without including North Korea in the mix is, at the end of the day, mere propaganda.