Charlie Hebdo, 'The Interview' and Seoul

By Andrew Salmon

The Islamic-inspired terrorist attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has resounded around the world. In the aftermath of the bloodbath, Charlie Hebdo, in a bold and principled move, responded to the murder of its staffers by publishing a multi-lingual edition featuring a cartoon of the prophet on its front cover.

By championing free speech and free expression, Charlie Hebdo's action rallied the democratic world, while simultaneously raising a firm finger to the terrorists by showing that when it came to these principles, at least one media organization refused to be intimidated.

It was one of the finest moments in journalism I can recall.

The Charlie Hebdo tragedy followed a recent free speech controversy that is more specific to this peninsula: ''The Interview." When news broke that an inane American comedy featuring the offing of its leader was soon to be screened across America, North Korea's inane state media reacted predictably, threatening apocalyptic consequences.

It was not just North Korea. Some North Korean fellow travelers went into fits of indignation, on the grounds that a fictional portrayal of the assassination of a living political leader is insulting, unreasonable and/or aggressive. The argument of these dolts ― that fiction should be censored to avoid damaging the pride and/or prestige of active political leaders and/or their followers ― is so imbecilic that it deserves no refutation.)

Subsequently, hackers ― who may or may not be affiliated with The Kimdom ― infiltrated the systems of the film's distributor, Sony Pictures, unleashing cyber mayhem.

Sony got the vapors and in a fit of pusillanimous panic, withdrew the film. This rampant cowardice, which would contrast starkly with the spirited defiance soon to be displayed by Charlie Hebdo, set in motion a snowballing PR disaster for the company. Even U.S. President Barrack Obama waded in, citing the importance of freedom of expression and of not being cowed by dictatorships.

In a U-turn, Sony's simpering management got a grip on their cojones and made ''The Interview" widely available: Those who wish to watch it are now free to do so via Internet download. (At least those with access to free cyberscapes are able to watch it. My understanding is that the film is not being widely streamed over the North Korean Intranet)

Closer to home, a wider but lower-key erosion of freedom of speech, expression and information has been underway for some time.

Websites featuring pornography and North Korea have customarily been firewalled by this nation's nanny-state government, but more worrisomely, top-down attacks by the powers that be on opponents are becoming increasingly common.

These were regular occurrences during the Lee Myung-bak administration; the judicial assaults on economic blogger ''Minerva" and on left-wing satirical troupe Naneun Ggomsuda prime examples. Under the current government, a leftist political party, the Unified Progressive Party, has been dissolved ― the first time such a step has been taken since South Korea's Constitution was drawn up in 1948.

Alarmingly, the grounds for the party's dissolution were aired by the National Intelligence Service at a time when the NIS itself was under attack from the UPP for its 2012 electoral meddling.

Meanwhile, the Seoul bureau chief of the Sankei Shinmun is on trial for defamation after reporting a story the Blue House took offense to, and a Korean-American author has been deporting after delivering lectures that allegedly praised North Korea.

Personally, I find Naneun Ggomsuda crass; I think the UPP are lefties who have lost the plot; in praising North Korea, the Korean-American lecturer is (at best) a naif and possibly a looney; and I find the Sankei a dull and outdated organ.

But those are merely my personal opinions and ― although this is an op-ed column ― these are not the point: What is at stake here is principle. While none of these developments spell the end of Korean democracy, taken together, they are worrisome, for they show a rising intolerance for divergent opinion.

In her 1906 biography of Voltaire, English author Evelyn Beatrice Hall (under the pseudonym ''S G Tallentyre") wrote: ''I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Hall's quote, designed to sum up Voltaire's beliefs on free speech and tolerance, have since been widely misattributed to the great French philosopher himself. But regardless of its authorship, the quote has won immortality as a pithy statement of principle: That in a society composed of individuals empowered with rights, the primacy of free expression overrides difference of opinion.

It is a condemnation of South Korea's democracy that it is still unable to accept any hint of pro-North Korean voice. And it is a condemnation of South Korea's polity that so few conservatives seem able to see beyond ideology and echo Hall in criticizing the suppression of voices critical of the administration.

Andrew Salmon is a Seoul-based reporter and author. Reach him at andrewcsalmon@yahoo.co.uk.