North Korea’s Finest Hour

This is a glorious week indeed for Kim Jong Un’s dwindling little family business in Pyongyang. Finally, finally—to be taken seriously. To get people to pay attention and not laugh at the same time (not too much, anyway). The North Korean regime—which is to say three generations of Kims—has spent its entire, bizarre existence on earth trying to get people to notice them. And rarely succeeding, at least since the Korean War ended 61 years ago. It can hardly be an accident that the very thing that apparently set the young great-and-dear leader off this time was a movie that took him so unseriously it decided that the idea of his assassination was a great premise for a comedy.
Now the enemies of the regime—the “running dogs,” “jackals” and “militarist maniacs” decried for decades by the North’s ever-creative news agency—are paying dearly. Not only did Pyongyang reportedly manage to threaten a major multinational corporation into pulling its film, and embarrass the hell out of Hollywood royalty by publishing their emails for weeks, the North’s “Unit 121”—the cyberhacking outfit reportedly working out of North Korea’s military spy agency, the General Bureau of Reconnaissance—was able to simultaneously one-up two countries Pyongyang hates most, the United States and Japan, where of course Sony