Pyongyang, evidence shows, effected a spectacular data breach of Sony Pictures to express its wrath over Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogan’s The Interview, a movie about an attempt to assassinate Kim Jong-un. Neither the United States Secret Service nor the North Korean authorities take portrayals of the assassination of our respective incumbent supreme leaders lightly. But there is something more going on here.
North Korea’s actions were characterized by RedState as “unequivocally an act of 21st-century state-sponsored cyberwarfare and, indeed, state-sponsored terrorism.” This is overstated. North Korea really upped the ante by vigilante (rather than vandalism) action.
The lashing out against The Interview presents as an “occult war” by the pre-modern culture (and government) of Pyongyang. The InterviewIncident has strong echoes of an almost forgotten event, from the 1960s, when Indonesia’s President Sukarno also acted out. As recounted by the late (and very wise) British career civil servant Austin Coates, in his book China, India and the Ruins of Washington:
Konfrontasi consisted principally of creating continuous threatening uproar by radio, by hostile speeches and clamor in the Indonesian newspapers. Minor disturbances were created along the frontiers of Sarawak and Sabah … and acts of sabotage occurred…. … … The entire thing was in fact a modern version of the medieval practice whereby kings endeavored to overcome their rivals by occult means; and in that Sukarno succeeded by these occult means (radio, press, and speeches in the United Nations) in restoring Irian Barat, or West New Guinea, to Indonesia, the method revealed itself as being not entirely ineffective in the twentieth century.
In fact, Sukarno is the most interesting survival phenomenon in the contemporary Orient. His speeches at the time ofKonfrontasi were so imbued with the simulated concept of centrality as to sound like an echo from another age.
It would be flying in the face of historical evidence to imagine that this will be the last attempt to imitate the center. … But all such endeavors will be pointless.
Without, in any way, exonerating international vigilantism — by the modern “occult” means of black hat hacking and “threatening uproar” — this implies, among other things, that Sony Pictures acted responsibly. It had not intended, and was not prepared to fight, an “occult war” with Pyongyang.
“Occult” — primarily, here, meaning symbolic, or psychological — warfare hardly is unknown in the West, ballots having replaced bullets. For instance, an “occult war” has been and continues to be waged by a “threatening uproar” in the media over the gold standard. Entirely coincidentally, around the time the donnybrook over The Interview began North Korea itself briefly enlisted, sotto voce, in the “occult war” against the gold standard.
The North Korea Times (the “Oldest online newspaper in North Korea”) engaged under the dramatic headline Spectre of gold standard banished on December 2, 2014. The Times republished this letter from Thailand’s The Nation:
Thanong Khanthong delivers an excellent insight on gold but offers the scary conclusion that “Europe is tilting towards a gold standard of some sort [and] the days of the fiat currency regime could be numbered”.
Fortunately, on Sunday, 77 per cent of Swiss voters overwhelmingly rejected the call for their currency to be anchored by gold reserves. Switzerland’s finance minister hailed the vote as a show of confidence in the central bank and a realisation that “gold is no longer as important as it once was as a tool to back up paper money”. In other words, gold is important only if people do not trust their central bank. In the modern world, trust is the basis of the fiat currency regime that superseded the long-gone gold standard. The return of that standard will come only when the end of the world is nigh.
Thanong Khanthong, managing editor of the Nation Multimedia Group in Thailand, had written a column entitled Gold rush in Europe as concern over money printing rises, subheadlined “Many European countries are now moving to repatriate their gold holdings from storage abroad. They are also looking to increase the proportion of gold in their international reserves to assure currency and financial stability.” TheNorth Korean Times‘s echo of a riposte against a growing trend away from central, to decentralized, monetary policy assuredly was meant to help exorcise this phenomenon.
Kim Jong-un’s regime quietly adds its voice to that of other potent “occult” adversaries on the left of the gold standard. These adversaries include Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Nouriel Roubini, Charles Postel, Thomas Frank, Think Progress’s Marie Diamond, the Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal, Brookings Institutions’ Barry Bosworth, The New York Times’s economics blogger Bruce Bartlett, the Washington Post’s Matt O’Brien, Slate’s Christopher Beam, and US News & World Report’s Pat Garofalo, and … 40 out of 40 elite academic economists polled some time ago by the Booth School.
It is not unfair to call the left’s opposition to gold “occult.” Our elite intelligentsia, relying on dogma, unleashes hostile words in the media — rather than engaging in reasoned argument — to assassinate the reputation of the gold standard. Our own culture is not always so modern as usually supposed.
In a recent interview at the Lehrman Institute’s gold standard website, which I edit, the estimable economic historian Prof. Brian Domitrovic made these observations:
Academic economic history has hitched its wagon to a particular star, the trashing of the gold standard. The funny thing is that this stuff really didn’t intensify, in academic economic history, until the 1980s, when the conditions were actually beautiful for a return to the gold standard. Students of economic history were not so foolish as to endorse fiat currency in the 1940s, as Bretton Woods was gathering, even though Keynes was urging just that. Paul Samuleson and a few others were trashing gold in the 1950s and 60s, but that was not the norm. …
The publication of Barry Eichengreen’s Golden Fetters, his essays from the 1980s, was a decisive event in cementing the anti-gold standard position in the academy. And Ben Bernanke was such a lionizer of Eichengreen’s that it would prove very fateful if he were accorded high governmental office, which happened twice (Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors and the Fed). So the anti-gold view became part of the dominant political culture.
The central command and control management of the dollar by the Fed, in place since President Nixon, has done and is doing vastly more damage to the American (and world) economy than the hacking and harassment of Hollywood by another command-and-control power. This does not exonerate Pyongyang, nor does it imply that Paul Krugman is receiving secret overnight telegrams from Kim Jong-un. It simply observes that our own intelligentsia consistently ignores the empirical data and behaves in pre-modern ways.
The left, whether based in Pyongyang or City College, too often relies very much on “occult means” — such as vituperation — to make its points. “But all such endeavors will be pointless.”
Meanwhile, back in the realm of the “occult,” skirmishing continues. The Hobbit’s dragon Smaug — from Peter Jackson’s movie — recently gave Steven Colbert his endorsement of the gold standard (and Rand Paul):
Stephen Colbert: Now Smaug, I think that we both have a lot in common. We both live in gated communities, and we’re both fiscal conservatives who sleep on giant piles of money.
Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch): Quite right! Time to return to the gold standard. Rand Paul 2016 Yea! Get some Rand!
While this was meant as public ridicule — am “occult” technique — by Colbert it bears an interesting subtext. As Kenneth Schortgen Jr wrote of this exchange in examiner.com:
Although scripted and made for television, the interview between a fictional dragon from ancient times and a comedic pundit in the 21st century was fascinating in many aspects, and in many ways showed that the real time events we experience in our modern world are no different than similar events that were played out by different characters and plot lines from hundreds or thousands of years ago. …
They say that history doesn’t just repeat itself, but it also rhymes, and watching this fictional made for television interview shows that indeed, there is nothing new under the sun. And while technologies may be different, and the stock of human existence may be better or worse today than in the past, what occurred during the lifetime of a storybook dragon and civilization proves the old axiom that truth is quite often stranger than fiction, or perhaps, it simply mirrors it in imagination and reality.
Back in the real world, The Nation‘s Mr. Khanthong has written about another “dragon,” China, quoting the president of the China Gold Association in a piece headlined The gold standard bandwagon is rolling — Thailand must climb aboard:
“The word is slowly, if almost unnoticeably, moving back to embrace the gold standard. Russia, China and India are leading the drive by accumulating gold reserves” and Song Xin, president of the China gold Association … wrote in Sina Finance in July this year: ‘Gold is money par excellence in all circumstances and will help support the renminbi [yuan] to become an international currency, as gold forms the very material basis for modern fiat currencies.’”
Dogma really is medieval. Reality — the very fine track record of the gold standard in establishing equitable prosperity — surely will, in time, prevail. “The world is slowly, if almost unnoticeably, moving back to embrace the gold standard.”
“Occult” means will not for long prevail.