Meet the “Libertarians” who would surrender our liberty & our security to Kim Jong-un’s censors

I doubt that America has fully come to terms with the damage done to its freedom of expression by the Sony cyberterrorist attack of 2014, or by the increasing willingness of Muslim supremacists to extinguish our civil liberties through violence. It is an easy thing to be a civil libertarian when the subject is, say, the limits of a proposed law allowing the FBI or NSA to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists’ communications or monitor their social media posts. Even if we acknowledge the legitimacy of these debates, it is a modern marvel of hypocrisy to watch ardent, self-described civil libertarians quietly slink away from the defense of our civil liberties from greater and less restrained threats, particularly when doing so requires actual courage, whether physical, political, or professional.

Some would cede to the censorship of “Islamophobia” or “hate speech” or blame the targets and victims of terrorism for inciting attacks against themselves. Others still deny North Korea’s responsibility for cyberattacks that the FBI and the NSA watched unfold. Next time you meet one, ask a Sony conspiracy theorist (among whom we may count David Duke) what incentive President Obama had to blame North Korea for an attack on the United States. So that he would have an excuse to do nothing about it, and to face criticism from both political parties for the inadequacy of his response? To corner the market in North Korea’s vast riches of coal, meth, and refugees? In which case, why not secure an endless supply of two of those things by invading Wyoming?

To see a free society yield to its most cowardly impulses is to realize that our liberty will never be taken from us without the help of collaborators among us. Sadly, North Korea’s injury to our freedom to express ourselves in our own country has healed slowly. It may last as long as North Korea does.

The Museum of Modern Art has acknowledged it wrongly canceled the New York debut of “Under the Sun,” a documentary about North Korea that has been criticized by that country and Russia.

A slyly subversive look at the reclusive state by the Russian filmmaker Vitaly Mansky, the film had been scheduled to be shown at the museum’s 2016 Doc Fortnight festival on Feb. 19-29. But an email exchange provided by the film’s German producer to The New York Times shows that a festival organizer, Sally Berger, an assistant curator at MoMA, expressed concern in late January about screening the film after reading an article suggesting that any organization that did so risked retribution from North Korea.

In the emails, Ms. Berger referred to a major hacking attack on Sony Pictures that the United States has described as retaliation by North Korea for a 2014 film satire of the country, “The Interview.”

She followed up a few days later to tell the documentary’s distributor that it would not be included in the festival. “It just simply came in too late to review all the possible ramifications of showing it here at MoMA,” she wrote.

Asked about the decision to withdraw the film, Rajendra Roy, the chief curator of MoMA’s film department, said Thursday in a written statement: “‘Under the Sun’ is a remarkable documentary that was wrongly disinvited.” He added that the decision was “made by the festival’s curator without my knowledge or input.”

The museum said on Friday that Ms. Berger was no longer working there. Margaret Doyle, a spokeswoman for the museum, declined to elaborate, and Ms. Berger, reached by telephone, said she would not comment. [Robert Boynton, New York Times]

Kudos to the MoMA for firing this quisling, although it gives me little comfort to wonder how many other galleries, publishers, and film studios have quietly and vicariously surrendered our freedom. If our choices are to live in a society where North Korea controls what we are allowed to see and read, or to live in a world without North Korea, please record my vote for the latter option. North Korea acknowledges no such concept as freedom of political expression. It does not respect our borders as inviolable. Its censorship knows no limits or boundaries, and to surrender to it is to forfeit our freedom. Judging by the frequency of North Korea’s cyberattacks since then, nothing President Obama has done since 2014 has persuaded Kim Jong-un otherwise.

Which brings us to some of America’s most ostentatious and uncompromising civil libertarians, who are also among the first to slink away from the greatest threats to our security, our liberty, and our rights to speak, live, and love as we choose. Take the case of some fellow called Jacob Hornberger, a lawyer, Fox News contributor, and collaborator of Ron Paul’s racist muse Lew Rockwell:

There are all sorts of suggestions as to how to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program, but all of them involve one form of interventionism or another. A popular idea of late is for the U.S. government to pressure China to induce North Korea to comply with U.S. wishes. How can the U.S. pressure China? Well, maybe by threatening to impose sanctions on China or maybe by threatening a trade war.

I’ve got a different idea: How about just leaving North Korea alone for the first time in more than 50 years? How about immediately lifting all sanctions against the North Korean people and immediately bringing home all U.S. troops stationed in Korea?

No negotiations.  Just unilateral withdrawal. Just unilaterally lifting all sanctions? How about establishing normal diplomatic relations with North Korea and leaving Americans and the rest of the world to trade with and visit that country?

In other words, how about treating North Korea in much the same way that the U.S. government is now treating the communist regime of Vietnam? . [Jacob G. Hornberger]

Hornberger then proceeds to explain that the tongue bath he would thus give Kim Jong is not a literal one:

No, I’m not suggesting that U.S. officials have to kiss, hug, and make nice with the North Korean communist officials, as they are currently doing with Vietnamese communist officials. And no, I’m not suggesting that the Pentagon plead with the North Korean communist regime to establish U.S. military bases there, as Pentagon officials are doing with the Vietnamese communist regime.

I’m just suggesting that the U.S. government leave North Korea alone. No more U.S. troops in South Korea. No more sanctions. No more B-52 flyovers. No more joint military exercise with South Korea. No more U.S. warships in the area. No more insults. No more provocations. Just come home and leave them alone. [Jacob G. Hornberger]

How Hornberger proposes to get North Korea to leave us alone, he does not specify. Specifically, I want to call your attention to where Hornberger calls for “[n]o more insults.” He manages to get through his entire argument without using the words “cyber” or “Sony,” neatly avoiding denialism and conspiracy theories by conceding that even if one accepts North Korea’s responsibility for the attacks, he’d still shake the hand at the end of the long arm of Kim Jong-un’s censors. I wonder what “insults” he might possibly mean if he doesn’t mean films and books that offend His Porcine Majesty. Would he censor the statements of our leaders and allies that Kim Jong-un should feed North Korea’s children? Votes in the U.N. General Assembly condemning his crimes against humanity, or investigations of those crimes by U.N. field offices? Academic conferences about government policy toward North Korea? Or what if, as a private citizen, I were to simply ask you to picture Kim Jong-un trying to put his own socks on? 

Which of these things does Hornberger suppose to be inviolable rights of citizens in free societies, and why does he suppose that Kim Jong-un would recognize the same fine distinctions? Why does Hornberger suppose that His Corpulency would be more respectful of our rights and boundaries after we cede him an effective nuclear arsenal?

Thankfully, Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson does not appear to share Hornberger’s view of North Korea policy, although I can’t say much for his coherence on the subject, either. Still, it’s concerning that most of the diverse viewpoints that fit inside the “Libertarian” circus tent advocate some form of surrender to Kim Jong-un. Take, for example, noted sanctions not-at-all-expert Doug Bandow, who is ready to pronounce sanctions a failure in the very same month that U.N. member states and banks around world have finally begun to implement them in earnest — something that never happened in the case of Cuba. 

Washington could intervene by maximizing unilateral sanctions. However, such penalties have yet to force political change in any nation. For a half century, Cuba resisted U.S. pressure, even after the U.S. imposed secondary controls. Sudan survived decades of financial isolation. North Korea almost certainly would do the same, especially if the China continued to support its frenemy. [Doug Bandow, The National Interest]

Why, it’s almost as if Bandow enters the discussion with a preconceived conclusion before the evidence comes in! So how, then, does Bandow propose to secure our vital domestic and international interests, such as our freedom of expression and the global nuclear nonproliferation framework? Spoiler: he doesn’t:

One is to initiate both bilateral and multilateral talks, and determine if there is any kind of deal to strike. Forget convincing North Korea to give up its existing arsenal. Instead, consider limits on future production, proliferation activities and conventional threats. At the same time the U.S. and its allies should emphasize steps which would reduce any perceived threat to North Korea. [Bandow]

Bandow never explains how he’d defend our civil liberties from North Korean censorship from afar, although he has previously written that we should do so by — wait for it — canceling annual military exercises in South Korea, and withdrawing from Korea. That would create a sudden power vacuum in a region that has long been stabilized by our alliances and which has, consequently, become an engine of economic growth that employs millions of Americans.

Not that I would deny that the force structure of U.S. Forces Korea should change, by withdrawing more ground forces while raising our stand-off air and naval power in the region, our capacity to supply our allies logistically, and by building a Pacific analog of NATO. Not that it would be a bad thing for South Korea and Japan to spend a greater share of their GDPs on their own defense. Not that it’s a bad thing for South Korea, in particular, so see that America feels taken for granted, or that the anti-American rhetoric of some of its own demagogues has costs. That is a far different thing from abandoning allies that have recently started acting like allies again.

Look — I can see why big-“L” Libertarians and Paulies get the idea that Americans want isolationist foreign policies in the post-Iraq era. Ask Americans a sufficiently simplistic, reductive, and loaded question, and most of them will agree that “we should mind our own business.” From this, some academics and politicians conclude that isolationism is politically profitable, but such abstract agreements almost never survive contact with specific crises.

Jacksonians who want us to mind our own business in the abstract are the first ones to demand that we bomb something when they feel provoked by something concrete. Liberals who take quasi-pacifist positions in the abstract will (if only briefly) support interventions in response to specific humanitarian crises, such as in Bosnia, Libya, Rwanda, or even Mount Sinjar in Iraq. And in the case of North Korea, while almost no one wants war, the strongly negative sentiment Americans harbor toward its government suggests that they don’t favor the Hornberger or Bandow “solutions,” which would effectively recognize it as a nuclear power. 

Americans don’t like paying for alliances, but they like the alliances themselves, and they’re capable of calculating the consequences of letting totalitarianism go unchecked. We’ve just finished eight years of the most non-interventionist foreign policy the American electorate would tolerate. It currently burdens President Obama with an approval rating of minus eight points, although it has usually been between minus ten and minus twenty points. If Obama’s foreign policy has done us a service, however inadvertently, it has been to temporarily dispel the idea that you can solve great and complex international problems by ignoring them (much less by just letting in everyone who arrives at your doorstep, including the terrorists among them). Syria is gone. Maybe Iraq and Jordan can be saved, and maybe they can’t. Now, the question is whether Europe will survive. Who thinks that a similar crisis couldn’t happen in Japan and South Korea five or ten years from now if America withdraws from Asia and leaves Kim Jong-un with an effective nuclear arsenal? Or that the consequent crisis wouldn’t come to our shores, too?