Kang blames America for the famines back home and the destitution of his people, but doesn't talk about immediate and rectifiable concerns like the regular South Korean/U.S. drills against North Korea -- which look very much like real invasions, send fleets into the adjoining waters, involve tens of thousands troops , and fly Stealth B-2 and B-52 bombers which enact simulated nuclear bombing attacks on the edge of North Korean territory. By not mentioning this kind of provocation, Olympus, like the mainstream news media, can make everything the other guy's fault, like the U.S. would be minding its own business if Pyongyang just wasn't so aggressive.
Moreover, Kang's ambition to unify the two Koreas is part of his dream of "one-world government." However much the terminology might please Libertarians, it obviously vilifies the actual unification sentiments on the peninsula, a region which after all used to be one country before it was divided between the Soviets and Americans in 1945. "No one really asked any Koreans, do you want to be divided and stay like that for over 60 years?" The Guardian of Britain quotes a Seoul professor in an article this May. And the article's author explains: "The peaceful pursuit of unification is inscribed in South Korea's constitution. Questioning it would be political suicide for public figures, say analysts, because ethnic nationalism is a key element of political belief across the spectrum." There's nothing underground about dreams of re-unifying the two Koreas, the way Olympus implies. Both sides at least pay lip service to it: Pyongyang has an official Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea and Seoul has a Unification Ministry. The cost of reunifying would be most expensive for South Korea, and young South Koreans tell pollsters they're not that keen on the idea, but the goal of reunification is far from a one-sided Communist plot to dominate the region as the movie suggests.
That MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell would participate in this movie (he has a brief cameo on a TV as a news anchor announcing the invasion) is especially galling because he was in Washington -- as Chief of Staff of two key Senate committees -- during the Clinton Administration, and ought to know full well that there was a time when Washington diplomacy was actually working with Pyongyang. In 1994 North Korea had only one nuke, and Clinton got them to sign an Agreed Framework, which was effective for 8 years. That's right, the Clinton Administration actually got North Korea to cease producing plutonium. They began again because Bush Jr. cancelled the treaty in 2002. Thanks to Bush's approach, North Korea's arsenal grew to 8 -- 10 nukes.
In Olympus Has Fallen, serious, professional, highly-trained men and women like Angela Bassett's Secret Service Director and Robert Forster's General Clegg discuss the crisis with Freeman's acting president and paint North Korea as incomprehensible, with off-hand remarks like "assuming that the Koreans are rational, which isn't at all certain..." They express bafflement about what North Korea could possibly want. But given the indelible illustration in Iraq of what the U.S. was willing to do to countries that didn't have nuclear defenses, it's not hard to fathom why Pyongyang pursued a nuclear arsenal, nor is it a mystery why they've responded negatively to negative stimuli, like the demonstrations of bad faith in the cancellation of treaties, or the massive displays of force in the threatening military drills. Noam Chomsky states in an article this summer: "North Korea may be the craziest country in the world. It's certainly a good competitor for that title." But he also adds that "it does make sense to try to figure out what's in the minds of people when they're acting in crazy ways. Why would they behave the way they do? " And he notes a recognizable pattern in postures from Pyongyang: "You can read it in straight, mainstream American scholarship. What they say is: it's a pretty crazy regime, but it's also following a kind of tit-for-tat policy. You make a hostile gesture and we'll respond with some crazy gesture of our own. You make an accommodating gesture and we'll reciprocate in some way."
Tit-for-tat has no place in Fuqua's film, however, because it's a movie without context. Kang angrily condemns the U.S. for interfering in their "civil war," by which he obviously means the Korean War of 1950-1953. This implies that Kang still wishes (60 years later) that North Korea could just finish what it started. Such an assumption completely ignores the fact that 3.5 million North Koreans were killed in that asymmetrical war and that the vast majority of those deaths were civilians. As Chomsky has put it: the country was "totally leveled, everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing." It also ignores the fact that North Korea has asked repeatedly for a real peace treaty -- the armistice which brought a halt to the Korean War is a mere ceasefire. (It leaves the entire area in a holding pattern, even though the terms of the agreement stipulated that a proper treaty would be negotiated in 3 months time, and that all foreign forces would be withdrawn from the Peninsula. China did in fact remove theirs, but the U.S. maintains 40 bases and almost 30,000 troops in South Korea.)
One can't expect such facts to occur to the filmmakers of a movie which wallows in a bombastic orgy of self-pity with images of the Washington monument crumbling and a tattered American flag falling to the ground. You can't expect a movie with as stereotypically nationalistic a soundtrack as Fuqua has chosen for Olympus to care that, for instance, credible commentators like the former Ambassador to South Korea have deemed North Korea's message of friendship, dismissed by the Obama Administration, as a serious overture.
You can, however, interpret a movie which paints one of Washington's official enemies as brutal and crazed as war propaganda. You can conclude that a film which dehumanizes an entire people is an effort to make it acceptable to kill them.
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