The Yellow Peril is an old frienemy of ours. We officially made its acquaintance for the first time at the end of the nineteenth century, when the catchy comic book villain-esque name was coined as a popular term for underpaid Chinese laborers in the United States, playing on the fear that an influx of Asian immigrants would destroy Western civilization and values. The phrase came back swinging roughly half a century later, during World War II. This time, of course, the Yellow Peril was Japanese. The basic story remained the same, though, painting people of color – specifically those of Asian descent – as an inscrutable and exotic threat to the “true” America, otherwise known as white America. And stories, as we know, have consequences. Fear of the Yellow Peril fueled the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which placed some of the heaviest bans on free immigration in U.S. history. That same brand of fear inspired the internment of more than 100,000 Americans in 1942 – for the great and terrible crime of being born with Japanese ancestry.
Phil May, The Mongolian Octopus
Fast forward to the twenty-first century. November 2012 saw the release of action-adventure blockbuster Red Dawn, the thrilling tale of evil North Korean terrorists invading an American town, where they’re fought off by a bunch of white kids. Barely four months later, in March 2013, the theaters treated us to Olympus Has Fallen, the thrilling tale of evil North Korean terrorists invading the White House, where they’re fought off by the white President and his white Secret Service buddy.
Now, this narrative premise – although a bit tired and recycled by now – isn’t inherently a bad one. The Korean War, a distant memory for most Americans, is technically still alive and well on the Korean penninsula. The past year has seen some alarmingly aggressive rhetoric from Pyongyang, culminating in its third nuclear test in February 2013, along with threats of military action against both its South Korean neighbor and the United States. The art of storytelling – whether on paper, stage, or the silver screen – makes an excellent vehicle for examining the nuances and complexities of real life tensions, and the current North Korean government definitely serves up plenty of fodder for discussion.
The trouble is, movies like Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen aren’t interested in nuances or complexities. They just want to rehash the tale of the Yellow Peril for a modern audience, and North Korea makes a convenient vehicle. A secretive totalitarian state with nominal Communist sensibilities and nuclear ambitions? It’s practically a Hollywood wet dream. Never mind that even fueled by its pervasively militaristic culture, North Korea’s standing army remains both under-trained and under-equipped. Never mind that the North Korean governments’s infamous human rights abuses – ranging from slave labor to public executions – have been overwhelmingly directed toward actual North Korean people, not foreign enemies. Never mind that North Korea can barely afford to feed itself, and in fact relies heavily on aid from the U.S., South Korea, Japan, and a plethora of other foreign nations, just to stave off starvation. North Korea is far from the friendliest kid on the international block, but the vast majority of victims on the receiving end of North Korea-related atrocities aren’t American, or even South Korean. They’re North Korean.
You wouldn’t know any of that, from watching either of these movies. The North Korean antagonists are monstrously powerful, utterly unrepentent, and have somehow magically gained the resources overnight to go from starving and insular to suddenly, invading Washington, D.C. with top-of-the-line weapons tech. You’d think that – having apparently unearthed the goose that lays the golden egg – their first order of business would be to fix that pesky yet rampant malnourishment problem, but Hollywood logic will be Hollywood logic.
Now, Hollywood has never exactly been a beacon of accuracy. We go to the movies for entertainment, and if entertainment means larger-than-life fight sequences and gun fu, so be it. But there’s a difference between handwaving the laws of physics and promoting white nativism and race-based fearmongering. These are the facts: the main heroes of both Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen are white, and the villains are people of color. The heroes are played, respectively, by Chris Hemsworth and Gerard Butler. The villains are played, respectively, by Will Yun Lee and Rick Yune.
Here’s the thing. Chris Hemsworth is Australian. Gerard Butler is Scottish. Meanwhile, Will Yun Lee and Rick Yune? Both born and bred Americans. In a movie that’s all about patrotism and standing up for the United States, we’ve got the hometown heroes played by foreigners and the villainous invaders played by Americans. That in itself might not be so bad – after all, stepping into someone else’s shoes is what actors are paid to do, and Butler and Hemsworth wouldn’t be the first to play outside their nationalities – except that the lines are drawn so very starkly. Asian-Americans don’t exist in the world of these movies. No, Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen teach us that real American heroes are white, even when they spend the whole movie awkwardly trying to conceal non-American accents. On the other hand, if you’re Asian, you’re obviously some inscrutable foreign Other, concerned with nothing but tearing down the good old USA. At best, you might be a really sneaky evil Asian guy pretending to be a nice Asian ally – a la Rick Yune the North Korean terrorist posing as a South Korean diplomat – but by the end of the film, you’ll inevitably show your true colors as a scary anti-American evil-doer of supervillainous proportions.
Ironically, the recent release that arguably best deconstructs the problems with the whole “beware the non-Caucasian” narrative is a fellow member of the action-adventure genre – and initially looked like it had all the trappings of yet another Yellow Peril film. Iron Man 3 hit theaters in May 2013, a couple months after Olympus Has Fallen, and featured the villain known as – you guessed it – the Mandarin. Here we go again, we thought. We all saw the previews of half-Indian Ben Kingsley in the samurai topknot and the ambiguously foreign-looking robe, playing the ambiguously brown terrorist. We braced ourselves. What else were we supposed to expect?
Except, it turns out, the Mandarin is a sham. The Mandarin persona is quite literally the creation of Aldrich Killian, the true antagonist of the piece: a white guy who invents a fictional, scary brown villain – complete with a hodgepodge set of “Oriental” iconography and props – so that Killian himself can profit from the ensuing public panic. It’s a deliciously meta-filled plot twist straight out of Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism, published in 1979, in which the Palestinian-American scholar wrote, “The imaginative examination of all things Oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world arose.” In short, says Said, the idea of the “Orient” – that unfathomable, exotic Other – is nothing but a fanciful product of Western imagination.
The Mandarin of Iron Man 3 is the Orient personified. Like the cartoonish North Korean villains of Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen, he’s an elusive fiction who inspires fear and panic, but to no productive end. Similarly, in the wake of Dawn and Olympus, we saw such gems on Twitter as, “I now hate all Chinese, Japanses, Asian, Korean people. Thanks” and “Just saw Olympus has fallen. I wanna go buy a gun and kill every fucking Asian.” Those tweets are just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds – maybe more – comments just like them, all spouting the same antipathy toward anyone who might trace their heritage to the other side of the Pacific. Spelling and grammar issues aside, these reactions point to a disturbing trend of xenophobia, jingoism, and ultimately, ignorance-fueled racism.
That’s not patriotism. That’s hate. We may be more than fifty years past Japanese-American internment, and more than a century past the Chinese Exclusion Act, but we obviously haven’t moved past the myth of the Yellow Peril. Korean-American actor John Cho, of Harold and Kumar and Star Trek fame, has remarked, “It’s very difficult to find an original thinker in terms of casting when you’re talking about race at all. And really, although more egregious versions of Asians have fallen by the wayside and become unfashionable, new Asian stereotypes [continue to] pop up.”
Given the political climate on today’s world stage, a North Korea-centric film isn’t necessarily a bad idea. A thoughtful, well-written, and well-performed North Korea movie – rather than fueling ignorance, which fuels fear – has the potential to enlighten and educate the American public on a real and pertinent topic. Such a film could, moreover, easily contain a place for Asian-American heroes, shelving that damaging, long-overused “white man versus the man of color” trope, in favor of something fresher, bolder, and ultimately, a far more interesting tale to tell.
We need stories that speak to a broader American identity, reminding us that we are a nation of immigrants, that so many of us began as the poor, the tired, the huddled masses, before finding our way home to American shores. We need stories that remind us that the “true” America isn’t just white; it’s white and brown and black and yellow and red and a technicolor mix of everything in between, a country full of hyphen identities and roots stretching far across the globe. It’s a legacy of diversity that infuses our cultural traditions with richer flavors, and offers us the gift of variety. And in today’s world, where globalization pushes the borders of disparate cultures closer and closer together, we – with our varied roots, our many languages and entwined histories – are uniquely placed to communicate across those borders. We are in a position not merely to tolerate that which is different, but to understand it. We are in a position to offer empathy instead of fear. That’s not something that deserves our scorn and resentment. That’s something that deserves our pride.
I supposed it’s good to be reminded how little has changed in 60 years (July 27 being the Korean War armistice day). I don’t think the understanding of that war or North Koreans has changed that much over the decades. I think many (if not most) would flatly deny that there’s any need to change their views at all. Whether this filters down to what are perceived in the West as the “good” Asians is anyone’s guess.
I’m not going to watch Olympus Has Fallen or the new Red Dawn but I’m sure they could be prefaced with some choice quotes from Bruce Cumings book about North Korea (to very little protest from the audience):
“…military editor of the Times, Hanson Baldwin, three weeks into the war:
“We are facing an army of barbarians in Korea, but they are barbarians as trained, as relentless, as reckless of life, and as skilled in the tactics of the kind of war they fight as the bandits of Genghis Khan…They have taken a leaf from the Nazi book of blitzkreig and are employing all the weapons of fear and terror.”
…not far behind might be “Mongolians, Soviet Asiatics and a variety of races” – some of “the most primitive of peoples.” Elsewhere Baldwin likened the Koreans to invading locusts; he ended by recommending that Americans be given “more realistic training to meet the barbarian discipline of the armored horde.”
An American who worked in the occupation told the Far Eastern Economic Review that Koreans were “a hard, fierce and cruel people,” possessed of “a ferociousness and a wildness.” Korea was a “hotbed of scoundrels, wildmen, semi-barbarians.” American missionaries…thought that too much inbreeding had led to “an arrested mental development.”
_____
Don’t you think most Americans would agree even today?
I like the point that you could really easily have Asian good guys in Olympus Has Fallen if you weren’t dead set on deliberately exploiting racial divisions. Those tweets are perhaps even more repulsive when you realize that generating that kind of filth is part of the film’s marketing strategy.
Interesting that you found the revelation of the Mandarin’s identity in Iron Man 3 to be a ‘deliciously meta-filled plot twist’ – I had the opposite reaction, and found it actually subtly racist. It’s the same plot twist used in Batman Begins: both set up a sinister, mysterious Asian villain, then revealed that he’s a fake and the real villain is a white guy. The original Iron Man also initially suggests Asian terrorists are the vilains, then reveals a white guy behind them. And the most recent Star Trek movie did something similar – Khan, a villain who should by all logic be Asian, also turns out to be a white guy.
This plot device may seem superficially progressive, but consider the message it sends – only white men have the smarts to be international supervillains. Non-white characters can be junior villains, puppets or fakes, but are never the ones really in control. Every organisation needs a white guy in charge to get anything done.
From this perspective, movies like Olympus Has Fallen and Red Dawn are actually the exceptions – or, they suggest that non-white villains are only acceptable when portrayed as faceless hordes, and not as individual characters. Personally, I can’t recall the last Hollywood movie I watched that didn’t have a white man as the lead villain (and the hero). That’s not something to be happy about.
Andrea — The original “Red Dawn” was a stupid concept even when the Soviets were the bad guys.
The re-make was even dumber, because, despite having by far the world’s largest military on paper (1.1 million active; 8.9 million reserve, and 189,000 paramilitary), North Korea has no ability to project those numbers even in the Pacific region.
When I was stationed in South Korea in 1998, I had the opportunity one night to view the on-screen air traffic of the entire Korean peninsula. In the south, there were scores (maybe a hundred or more) aircraft all over the place, coming and going. However, north of the 38th parallel was a totally different story. There was almost no air traffic.
Why? Simple. North Korea had no extra fuel for their military aircraft to fly combat patrols, let alone punch holes in the sky for training; and their commercial air traffic was almost nil. I doubt much has changed in the intervening years.
Now, to be fair, in the newest version of “Red Dawn,” the bad guys were originally going to be Chinese. But, contrary to your assertion, I think the producers realized that even most right-wingers couldn’t swallow the premise of villainous Chinese hordes, so when the Chinese started making noise about the studio’s plans, the producers made the North Koreans the villains. But that was problematic because it inflated North Korea’s military power to unbelievable levels. To make the switch even remotely plausible, they created some vague, evil communist coalition — inferring the North Koreans got equipment and other help from their regional pals. But it didn’t help. It was still a dumb movie.
By the way, I smile every time someone cries Asian racism in America in this day and age. I know it occasionally happens, but the fact is, comparing today’s attitudes in America towards Asians to attitudes 60-70 years ago is pretty silly. There simply is no comparison. Yet, if one were to visit contemporary South Korea, Japan, China, etc., wide-spread racism is still alive and well — even, remarkably enough, among the various Asian communities. It is still perceived by many Asians as a grievous insult to mistake their actual nationality for that of another Asian nation.
“Every organisation needs a white guy in charge to get anything done.”
Not exactly correct, a stern but well intended black male commanding officer is also acceptable as long as he delegates the important work to the white guy main hero. (Pacific Rim, Avengers)
Russ, have you seen those tweets Andrea mentioned? It’s pretty clear that there’s a fair amount of anti-Asian sentiment out there, not too far below the surface.
I think the issue with asian villains is interesting. I think it’s correct that people enjoy having bad guys to root for. The problem, as Andrea points out, is that if you always consider foreignness to be based on white skin, then you never have options other than being the villain.
FWIW, there’s just no way Olympus Has Fallen is anything but a vile big of racist garbage. The villains aren’t especially distinguishable or fun (much less so than in Die Hard, for example), and the movie encourages you to laugh and cheer when they’re captured and tortured. The main character is American only because he’s white. I just don’t see much way to get around its basic racism and repulsiveness.
Very good article, rational and balanced.
Note that the “Red Dawn” remake and “Olympus has Fallen” were both flops, while “Iron Man 3” has grossed one billion three hundred million theatrical worldwide, with the same sum at least coming up in ancillary markets.
This is all the more remarkable because Iron Man 3 revealed the average spectator to be a passive racist dope — this was the engine of its surprise twist.
BTW, I had my own HU post on yellow perilism, only far more ‘shrill’ and amateur than this one:
https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/09/spirou-and-fantasio-racism-for-kids/
I had thought Olympus Has Fallen did okay; glad to hear it was a flop. Restores my faith in my fellow Americans.
It made back its money and then some. And that’s before DVD sales are counted in. So not a flop.
Ah, well. Too bad. Back to hating America then.
“Made back its money and then some is a tricky proposition.” Its reported budget was $70 million, and domestically it managed to pull down just shy of $100, so that looks profitable. But then marketing costs are rarely factored into reported budgets, so the actual cost could have been well above $100 – though I didn’t see a lot of ads for Olympus, so it may have been more a word of mouth film…it did open small, and it is from a smaller independent. That said, it’s also, I think, among the biggest budgets Millenium has ever produced, which may mean that as a smaller company they needed it to pay off much bigger than it has…or vice versa. There are a lot of floating variables that go into Box Office Watching.
Of course, I’m also holding back on one variable, which is international box office, where Olympus gained another $60 million, probably putting the film overall well into profitable territory…and as Suat points out, that’s before DVD sales. But I think international box office complicates (though certainly doesn’t erase) the racist/nationalist discussion around the film. Certainly, though, if the film is profitable, it’s not solely because it was popular with Americans…at the end of the year, it’ll be considered a minor film domestically. Though, Millenium and others will surely be looking at who the film was popular with. They did do targeted marketing for it at CPAC…
Whoops, my quotes are misplaced there…”is a tricky proposition” is supposed to be my addendum, not implied as part of the quote.
you want to see some yellow perilism alive and kicking, come on down under. it’s not as overtly gross here as “the mongolian octopus”, but, on the plus side, it’s been reborn as a constant and crucial election issue since two prime ministers ago. throw in the fact that our nearest asian neighbour, indonesia, is predominantly muslim, and you get s good dose of islamophobia up in the mix…
Noah — I know there are contemporary anti-Asian racists in America. There are racists in every single ethnic community here against every other imaginable community. But those folks are the minority.
The fact is, there simply IS no comparison between today’s attitudes and those from the World War II era and prior. Back then, there was not just individual racism against many Asians, institutional racism was widespread in the government, media, educational community, business community, etc.
In fact, compared to the 1940s, I’d argue that the US is making remarkable headway against ALL forms of racism. I’d also argue that many of America’s most fervent critics abroad need to get their own houses in order before they start criticizing ours.
Hey Russ. If everybody got their own house in order before they criticized anyone else, nobody would ever have their house in order or criticize anyone. Folks abroad do us a service when they point out how we can do better. That was true of the Soviet Union on race relations, and it’s true of Russia now with Edward Snowden. Sure, their motives aren’t pure…but our motives often aren’t entirely pure when we talk about human rights abroad either.
I would agree that we’ve made progress on racial equality in a lot of ways since the 1940s…though we’ve arguably still failed to match the racial idealism and hopes of the Reconstruction era. Nonetheless, the fact that we’ve made progress, or that places abroad often have their own problems, doesn’t seem to me either here or there when pointing out that there’s still a wellspring of animosity against asian-americans. It’s true that that wellspring is not actually weaponized into violence at the moment, despite the best efforts of Olympus Has Fallen. If you think that there are no circumstances in which it could be though, I would say that you are naive.
Criticism is fine — provided it comes with some perspective.
If perspective is omitted simply to make one’s argument stronger, it undermines the validity of the criticism.
Are things much better for Asian-Americans in America today compared to the 1940s? Oh hell yes.
But sometimes “perspective” can be an excuse, Russ.
In the 40s we were putting Asian Americans in concentration camps. Let’s not break our arms patting ourselves on the back for doing better than that, huh?
Noah — An excuse for what? As a society, we’ve progressed remarkably since the 1940s in Asian and Asian-American relations.
Why is it so hard to speak the entire truth about an issue? Why must important facts and whole swaths of history be ignored simply to enhance some contemporary sociopolitical hypothesis?
I’m a student of history. I KNOW how things used to be, and how they are now. And since I spent seven years living in Asia, for an American, I have a pretty good idea how the US compares with the major Asian cultures where it comes to tolerance.
We’re not perfect, but we’re much further along than our Asian counterparts.
An excuse to do exactly what you’re doing; bluster and hand wave and say that really there isn’t a problem because other people somewhere else are worse.
And it’s difficult to speak the entire truth about history because history is really complicated and big, and no one really knows what the truth is entire to speak it.
Nobody who is actually a student of history ever claims to be able to give you the entire truth. Claiming to know everything about history is a sure sign that you don’t actually know what you’re talking about. (Or that you’re typing quickly in blog comments.)
Noah — I never said there wasn’t racism in the US. I just said framing the racism issue in such a way that the true picture is distorted is a problem.
It’s a cop out to say the racial progress is too “complicated” to discuss, and since no one knows the entire truth, anyone like me who speaks of it doesn’t know what they are talking about.
I know how things were, and I know how things are now. Anyone else who wishes to seek out that information is free to do so.
And it ain’t rocket science.
Thanks for the article! I really appreciate the added in commentary of glorifying foreign “heroes” as long as they are white while vilifying Americans for “not looking American enough.” This is important for people who do not understand how casting could possibly be racist and how it is not simply “the best actor for the job.”
R. Maheras – you are not contributing to the topic by saying that the US supposedly “tolerates” Northeast Asians better than actual Northeast Asian people do. (I say Northeast Asians because I assume you mean China, Japan, and Korea when you say “major” Asian countries and I refuse to use your arbitrary ranking system.) This article is about the both obvious and passive racism found in Western films made for a (mostly) white audience. For you as a foreigner in Asian countries it is very difficult for you to understand that history behind these countries and their animosity towards each other unless you have grown up with that culture. Unless you by some chance know the entire history of NE Asian relations and have lived as a NE Asian in a NE Asian country, you cannot possibly understand why these countries have such a rough history with each other and therefore have little to no right to comment on it.
The article does not compare the treatment of how Asian Americans are being treated currently to how they were being treated in the past. The mention of the Chinese Exclusion act and the Japanese Internment is meant to serve as a sort of framework for the historical background of the “Yellow Peril” phenomenon. As Noah says, you should not be praising America just yet for not putting people in concentration camps. There are still many other micro-aggressions and other racial barriers that Asian Americans face everyday.
Instead, perhaps you should consider why you are being defensive about how the article discusses the actions of white Americans (in Hollywood and otherwise) and why you feel the need to deflect to talk about Northeast Asia.You should also consider why do you feel like you can measure what is progress as opposed to an Asian American.
By the way, it is hard to take anyone seriously who “smiles” at racism against Asians.
I know how things were and how things are. And part of how racism works now is anti-anti-racism; the insistent argument that racism is no longer relevant, or that it’s all better, or mostly better, or that we don’t need to talk about it anymore.
I didn’t say racism was too complicated to talk about. I said that your statements about history aren’t especially thoughtful. I’ll stand by that.
Jen — You say “tolerance.” I say acceptance.
In my opinion, the article should have reflected on how attitudes in this country have changed towards Asians in the past 50 years. I think it is ridiculous to claim that the “Yellow Peril” mindset of the early part of the 20th Century is alive and well because of two recent crappy movies where the North Koreans are the heavies.
It isn’t racism driving fear and loathing against the North Koreans, because it isn’t just “white people” who think they are batshit crazy, to quote Noah. We are also the allies of 48 million South Koreans — most of whom also think the North Koreans are batshit crazy. The Japanese do as well, as do even many Chinese. Last time I looked, all of the latter groups were Asians as well, so I think the racism argument pretty much falls apart under even a modicum of scrutiny.
As someone who spent a year in South Korea living under the constant threats and saber-rattling from the wacky fascists living north of the 38th parallel, and has a pretty good understanding of the history of the peninsula, when I read two essays in short succession here that attempt to re-write history and portray the North Koreans as hapless victims, it makes my blood boil.
Noah — AGAIN you distort my words. I did NOT say racism did not exist and was thus no longer necessary to discuss. What I said, is that discussions of racism should include all of the facts — not just the selective facts that strengthen one’s hypothesis.
I could just as easily say you’re distorting my words, inasmuch as I didn’t say what you’re saying I said. But this is silly. I’ll stand by my statement that including all facts is impossible, and that the demand for completeness in this case is a stalking-horse for minimizing facts you happen to not want to think about.
The person who wrote this essay was just living in South Korea. I think she wrote it on the plane back. Not that that’s here or there necessarily, but you might want to consider that it’s possible that your first person experience is not necessarily a final arbiter of everything in this discussion.
Everybody pretty much agrees that North Korea is a really unpleasant regime. However, as the post points out, there is a difference between seeing North Korea as an unpleasant regime and seeing them as some sort of super-predatory vortex of absolute evil which is able to mount a sustained and successful assault inside the American homeland. There’s also a difference between seeing North Korea as an unpleasant regime and seeing all white people whatever their nationality as American, and all Asian people whatever their nationality as foreign.
The article was pointing out that racist attitudes of longstanding persist. It did not say, nor do I think it even implied, that things now are exactly the same as things then. It pointed out racist tropes and contextualized them. In response, you say that other people in Asia don’t like the North Korean regime. Which is both true and completely irrelevant, except as handwaving.
Russ Maheras: “We are also the allies of 48 million South Koreans — most of whom also think the North Koreans are batshit crazy.”
No they don’t. Let’s see the poll that says that South Koreans feel that North Koreans are “batshit crazy”.
And since we’re talking about movie representations: I know you were in South Korea for a while but when was the last time you saw North Koreans portrayed by South Koreans in popular (and I do mean popular/primetime) culture? It’s quite far from how they’re portrayed by the American media I assure you. The ire is reserved for the North Korean taskmasters whose place in the pantheon of evil is challenged only by South Korean businessmen (the chaebol guys).
I would say that your hero – that maniacal, blowhard Douglas MacArthur – certainly deserves a place in that temple of nastiness. There’s certainly some evidence that he was “batshit crazy”.
R Maheras – I agree with Noah that the issue that this article is trying to discuss is the idea that white people, regardless of nationality or ethnicity, are seen as Americans while Asians, regardless of nationality, are foreigners in recent movies. You seem to also have this problem as you keep discussing issues in NE Asia and not the issues in America, which there are plenty of.
“In my opinion, the article should have reflected on how attitudes in this country have changed towards Asians in the past 50 years.” Then write this article. Andrea is not obligated to write this article for you. Nor is anyone else obligated to write this article at all. You also seem to think that all that should be discussed are the ways in which white Americans /have improved/ (past tense) in their attitudes towards Asians and Asian Americans as opposed to ways in which they /can improve/. Why do you feel this is important? Especially in regards to these movies in this article, why is discussing them that important?
While in South Korea have you met with North Korean people? Have you talked with them? The North Korean people I have met are not “batshit crazy” nor did the South Korean people I met think that NK people are crazy. I don’t think you are making the important distinction between the North Korean government, who are cruel and tyrannical, and the North Korean people, many of whom are suffering under their government and have little power to stop them. This is distinction is what is stopping people from helping those that need help.
“You say “tolerance.” I say acceptance.” You have also misquoted me. If you read carefully, I quoted your usage of the word.
I too have just lived in South Korea for a year and I too have knowledge in NE Asian history. I am also Asian American. I think I know racism against Asians in America a lot more than you do.
In my view, the North Korean regime is no different than Hitler’s regime.
I find it remarkable how apologetic people are trying to be for an “oppressed” fascist dictatorship.
It’s always going to be another München when discussing the dictators that aren’t ours sons of a bitches isn’t it.
Everybody hates the North Korean dictatorship, pretty much. You seem to have trouble distinguishing between sympathy for the dictatorship and sympathy for the people who are living under it, Russ.
One of the important ways that the North Korean dictatorship is different than Hitler’s is that Hitler’s Germany was one of the most powerful nations on earth. That’s thankfully, not so much the case for North Korea, despite the dreams of Hollywood scriptwriters.
Ormur, I’m just reading about the Indonesian genocide against Communists in ’65-’66. Our sons of bitches, indeed.
Have you just watched The Act of Killing? I was telling a friend that the Singapore Army wouldn’t need to make any more propaganda-recruitment advertisements once they show that doc to the new recruits. An unexpected side effect.
Nope; haven’t seen the Act of Killing…don’t even know what it is!
Well get thee hence and watch it then! It’s one of the best documentaries in years.
Hey Chinese Expat. I’m banning you. Please don’t post here again.
Act of Killing was really good. And I think it’s available on Netflix streaming.
The Return of the Yellow Peril? It never went away. The Japanese and the Yakuza used to be the villains of choice when I first moved to Japan back in 1990’s (think Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun or Johnny Mnemonic)and there have been constant iterations in the decades prior (for instance, Hollywood decided that the Vietnamese were still holding American POW’s back in the 1980’s that Stallone’s Rambo and Chuck Norris’ generic Chuck Norris character had to free) and the Chinese communist threat was a bête noire since the ’60’s.
I think Hollywood started using North Koreans as the generic Yellow Peril villain after NK was designated as part of the Axis of Evil by the Bush Admin at the beginning of his presidency. Maybe the first one was one of the Brosnan-era James Bond flicks (forget the title). Rambo, I remember, also took on the North Koreans (who looked and acted pretty much like the Vietnamese) in that sequel that came out toward the end the Bush Admin’s second term in office. (Team America, on the other hand, took the piss out of the trope quite well, came out sometime between those two. America! Fuck Yeah!)
Interestingly, living in Japan, I’ve experienced the reverse, “the American peril.” For example, Americans were the villains in the very amusing Godzilla vs King Ghidorah (they were time travelers who came to 1990’s era Japan to prevent it from becoming a world dominating economic juggernaut in perpetuity (a sort of judo reversal of the Rising Sun theme). Likewise, a Korean monster movie that came out in the early to mid oughts, (in English, I think was called “The Host” in English but in Japanese it ws called Guemaru), featured creatures that were created when the American military dumped chemicals into the Han River (?) (the story obviously reflected the hostility many Koreans feel at hosting American forces in their country all these years). Further, the Japanese and Chinese continually show each other to be villains in their own movies (Suat and I have previously talked about an early Bruce Lee movie, Fists of Fury perhaps, where the Japanese villains had a sign reading “No dogs or Chinese allowed”).
None of that diminishes the validity of the criticisms of “Yellow Peril” tropes in American cinema which do have an effect. I remember working in factories and a trucking dock back in college in the ’80’s, and I had actual conversations with people who believed that Vietnam still actually held American POW’s because they saw Rambo. More recently, Donald Trump has added China and Japan to his list of threats to, specifically, white America and even suggested “disappearing” Kim Jong Un. With that in mind, those Twitter comments mentioned by the author seem more than just the drunken tweets of random American racists to me.
Regarding the movies in question, I saw all three on TV rather than in the cinema, even the Iron Man movie. I couldn’t make it through Red Dawn and, while I did make it through Olympus has Fallen, I can’t remember a damn thing about it other than it was a Die Hard copy and the villains had virtually no personality. The movie Mandarin was a clever twist however, his comic book counterpart, created in the ’60’s, was simply a Yellow/Red Peril trope with a few Doctor Doom characteristics added on for good measure).