As the end of the year approaches I have been striving to finish Salman Rushdie's great novel Midnight's Children, a fanciful account of Indian independence and national identity. It is my second Rushdie novel, having read The Enchantress of Florence last year.
But I digress. In the conversation about Sony Picture's decision to cancel the release of the movie The Interview, I am reminded of Rushdie's book Satanic Verses. As you may remember, this 1988 novel was denounced as blasphemous by the Ayatollah Khomeini the year after it was pubished. Khomeini issued a fatwah against Rushdie, effectively a call for Rushdie to be assassinated in the name of Islam. This death threat lasted until 1998 when Iran issued a conciliatory statement that for all practical purposes ended the fatwah (although it sleazily added that it could not officially withdraw it because Khomeini was dead, and only the person who issued it could withdraw it).
During the fatwah, Rushdie went into hiding. But his book was not withdrawn from the shelves and neither Rushdie nor its publisher have retracted its contents. This is despite the fact that several translators of the book and at least two publishers were targets of assassination attempts.
Corporations, we are told, are people, too. But actual people seem to have a lot more guts than the financial kind.
The real problem here is that, while violent reprisals against Sony and people who are associated with this movie are possible, what is definite is that we have seen the last attempt at public ridicule of Kim Jong-un. A violent dictator has silenced his critics. This means every violent dictator out there now has a playbook for intimidating the American media.
Certainly Vladimir Putin has gotten the message.