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Four Cases of Disney’s Rank Political Hypocrisy

disney, hipocresia, carano

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Disney’s hypocrisy is nowadays as great as its box office successes. Like the rest of the big companies, Disney applies a double standard to its public and its ties with authoritarian regimes such as China.

The creators of classics such as Hercules, Tarzan, and The Lion King are now being criticized for their recent actions towards one of their stars Gina Carano. However, this attitude of the conglomerate is not recent and, in fact, it has already reacted in this way in the past.

Disney vs Gina Carano

This week saw the firing of Gina Carano, star of The Mandalorian, for posts the actress had made on her social networks. Establishment media outlets such as NBC called Carano’s posts controversial or inflammatory.

NBC, for example, commented that “Carano made offensive comments on her Instagram stories Tuesday night, including one that compared contemporary political differences to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany.”

One of the posts referenced the mysterious conditions in which pedophile mogul Jeffrey Epstein died. “Jeff Epstein didn’t kill himself” read an alphabet soup Carano shared.

Lucasfilm said in a statement that Gina Carano “is not currently employed by Lucasfilm,” after controversy erupted over The Mandalorian star’s social media posts.

Gina Carano “is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future,” a Lucasfilm spokesperson revealed in a statement. Lucasfilm still took the license to weigh in on Carano’s posts asserting that they denigrate people based on their cultural and religious identities and are abhorrent and unacceptable.

What They Ignore: Disney vs. John Boyega

However, Lucasfilm deliberately ignores the attitudes Disney had towards the Star Wars posters.The measures Disney (and Lucasfilm) took for the publicity material they used for the first installment of the new Star Wars trilogy in China leave much to be desired.

Apparently “cultural” and, further, racial identities are not that important in China. In the poster made for the rest of the world, you can see a John Boyega (who played Finn) is proportional to the rest of the protagonists.

Disney - Star Wars- John Boyega - El American
(Photo: Variety)

Yet in the poster they used for China, the image changes radically. In the Chinese poster, you notice how John Boyega is noticeably shrunken and his position in the illustration is minimal. Boyega, who starred alongside Daisy Ridley (Rey) and Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), is now under BB-8, Harrison Ford (Han Solo) and Carrie Fisher (Leia), supporting characters.

Disney and Lucasfilm’s mega-inclusive woke also decided to remove from the flyer Poe Dameron, played by Guatemalan Oscar Isaac and Mexican-Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o, whose role is that of the pirate Maz Kanata. Why was that?

If we delve a little deeper into Chinese advertising, we can quickly find out how they feel about African-Americans. In a detergent commercial we can see how a Chinese woman literally washes an African-American in a washing machine.

The owners of Qiaobi, which is the brand of the detergent, defended their commercial by saying that “whatever racism there may be is in the eye of the beholder.” So far, no boycott has been launched against the company.

What they denounce: Disney vs Georgia

In 2019, Disney CEO Bob Iger hinted that the company might be forced to cut ties with Georgia after the state passed an anti-abortion law. Iger told Reuters that “it would be “very difficult” to do business in the state of Georgia after Republican Governor Brian Kemp signed a law banning abortion if a doctor can detect a fetal heartbeat.”

Disney has made also several films in Georgia, including Black Panther and Avengers: Endgame. This is partly because Georgia offers tax credits to movie studios and the film industry is responsible for creating more than 92,000 jobs in the state, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

Questions about the relationship between abortion and film production have yet to be answered by Iger or Disney. However, the CEO commented that he believes “a lot of people who work for us won’t want to work there and we’ll have to address their wishes in that regard. We’re looking at it very carefully right now.”

Disney and the Uyghurs

The worst thing about Disney is not their incoherence, or their double standards, or their hysteria; it’s their twisted celebration in the face of the genocide and enslavement of Uyghur Muslims occurring in China.

In the credits of the live-action version of Mulan, Disney thanked the Chinese agency called the “Turpan Municipal Public Security Bureau,” which is responsible for administering concentration camps that house people from the country’s Muslim minority groups.

They filmed the movie in Xinjiang, China, where Uyghur Muslims suffer forced labor and systematic rape. In other words, Disney agreed to humiliate its actors, was outraged when a U.S. state banned abortion but had no problem thanking Chinese authorities in charge of raping women with electrified rods and forcibly sterilizing and aborting Uyghur Muslims.

Disney’s hypocrisy is so high that they cancel actors for expressing opinions that are not so far from reality, but applaud the work of a regime that murders, enslaves, tortures and rapes minorities in their country. The ” inclusion” that Disney calls for, far from being a real request, is a hypocritical letter of introduction with which they achieve business at the expense of the Uyghur genocide.

Rafael Valera, Venezuelan, student of Political Science, political exile in São Paulo, Brazil since 2017 // Rafael Valera, venezolano, es estudiante de Ciencias Políticas y exiliado político en São Paulo, Brasil desde 2017

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