In an act of true cowardice, the five biggest movie-theater chains in America have declined to play Seth Rogen and James Franco's The Interview, and now Sony has canceled its planned wide release of the film on Christmas Day. A craven legalistic spirit of conflict aversion has overturned the core American principle that you get to say whatever you want to whomever you want however you want to. I'll be frank. It's a gutless act, unworthy of Americans. (Incidentally, Jimmy Kimmel and Judd Apatow agree with me.) In 1941, Hitler had submarines in the North Atlantic, but U.S. theaters still played The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin. The North Korean regime is starving. It has nothing but its own insanity to sustain it. Nonetheless, the North Korean government has won the Ridiculous War of 2014.

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I give this war—a strange war fought through popular culture—the title of the Ridiculous War for two reasons. The first is that the war is, on the face of it, ridiculous. A totalitarian leader lives on the strength of his iconography. North Korea has always taken that maxim to its most absurd extreme. Therefore the nuclear tests, the massive statues, the bragging about world record-setting golf scores. Kim Jong-un does not have the confidence of his father, apparently. Kim Jong-il let Team America: World Police slide. What could be more pathetic than a dictator obsessed with Seth Rogen and James Franco? I guess a bunch of executives at Sony caring about what dictators think.

The second reason to call this strange Black Mirror-like encounter of technology and terrorism with celebrity culture the Ridiculous War is the nature of the conflict itself: The struggle is over who is ridiculous and who isn't. The hacks against Sony were an attempt, now linked to the North Korean government*, at ridiculing the people who made a film that ridicules Kim Jong-un (which we now can't watch in theaters). And I suppose on one level Jong-un has succeeded. He certainly succeeded in making the media who covered the hacks look ridiculous. So shocked were we by the details revealed in the Sony hacks. The worst the hackers could find was a semi-nasty comment about Angelina Jolie and a remark that an agent was being greedy? I had no idea that executives were so cautious in their e-mails. Either that, or they're all just genuinely nice people. Whose e-mails, if downloaded en masse, would not contain more damaging revelations than those?

Then there is the question of how seriously we should take the terrorist threats. The "Guardians of Peace" have issued remarks that included the following lines: "The world will be full of fear. Remember the 11th of September 2001." These are anonymous threats, remember. I don't mean to be glib, because terrorism is real and we live in a world of madmen. But the correct response to threats of random violence is not to cave. Not only does that cowardice make it impossible to live, because there are just so many threats in this world, but ultimately the political system does not work unless corporations, and not just individuals, exhibit some basic guts. Our society is only worth living in because of its fundamental freedoms, particularly its freedom from the depredations of batshit-lunatic dictators.

All of this has proven Seth Rogen and James Franco right. They clearly saw, from the beginning, what the monster in North Korea fears most: to be ridiculed. They will no doubt soon be venting their rage against the companies that have blocked and delayed their movie, and their rage will be justified. Everyone is ridiculous except them. That may turn out to be the deepest irony of the Ridiculous War of 2014: that Seth Rogen and James Franco, a couple of Hollywood stars in a gross-out comedy, are the only two people involved in the whole affair who have emerged with their dignity intact.

*The post has been updated to reflect that the Sony hacks have been linked to the North Korean government.