Editor’s Note: Ranier Maningding is a copywriter and mastermind behind the social justice page “The Love Life of an Asian Guy”. The opinions expressed in this piece are solely his own.
Trigger Warning: Violence
There is nothing funny about North Korea.
The firing squads in North Korea aren’t funny.
The political censorship and social oppression of North Korean civilians isn’t funny.
The prolonged torture of North Korean prisoners isn’t funny either.
Despite all of these human rights violations, white Hollywood execs managed to sink lower than low and satirize the concentration camps of North Korea with the controversial 2015 film “The Interview”.
Starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, “The Interview” was a comedy about two white American spies tasked with assassinating Kim Jong-Un. The entire film was infested with tacky Asian stereotype jokes, yellow peril, and dragon lady characters, making it both insensitive to the current crimes of North Korea and racist as hell.
“The Interview” was definitely the movie for White edgelords and ‘Murrican Patriots’ who wanted to say make a political statement. I mean, fuck the bloodshed and torture of actual North Koreans murdered by Kim Jong-Un, and let’s ignore the thousands of Korean-Americans who still have relatives living under the North Korean regime. Forget the strident criticisms from Asian-Americans who repeatedly said, DO NOT MAKE THIS RACIST, INSENSITIVE-AS-FUCK MOVIE!
Nah. We made a movie about North Korea anyways because “fuck political correctness and fuck those Korean g***ks, we’re Americans and we do what we want!”
Welp. Guess what?
Otto Warmbier, the White student sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor for stealing a propaganda poster from a North Korean hotel lobby, also thought he could do whatever the fuck he wanted.
So he thought.
In the year that he was taken in, he was tortured, sustained neurological injuries, and fell into a coma as the alleged result of botulism. He died yesterday.
But I mean… didn’t Asians tell you this shit would happen? We told you the dog in the neighbor’s yard was vicious, that it bit us, our cousin, and sister, and you still wedged your pale face through the fence to see for yourself.
OH, now you want to take North Korea seriously? Now you want to talk about the human rights violations of North Korea? Now you want to tell us to have compassion for the lives lost under the Kim Jong-Un regime? Now that a White man died at the hands of North Korea you want us to shed a salty tear and give you a piece of our sympathy?
No thanks, I’ll pass.
This country continues to dehumanize people of color. Our pain and suffering is constantly humiliated, mocked, and satirized for white American entertainment. You’ve dressed up in Blackface to humiliate Trayvon Martin, disrespected the severity of the Dakota Access Pipeline with racist outfits, and you made a fucking movie about North Korea, despite us telling you not to.
We’ve reached a point where our humanity has been stripped to the bone, and we have nothing left for you, or Otto Warmbier.
Find sympathy elsewhere.
Feature Image via YouTube / ABCNews
