One hopes there’s
a hidden punchline here, that Rodman’s North Korea trip isn’t just
the strange publicity grab of a faded celebrity and an irreverent media
enterprise. one hopes that—in between the lavish 10-course meals at Kim’s palace
and “paying tribute” to the statues of late despots Kim Il Sung and
Kim Jong Il—Rodman may have actually learned something about
North Korea and the people he says he loves. There’s certainly a lot that
demands his attention. Five key lessons we hope he brings back to share with his
American fans:
1. North Koreans are
starving. Chronic food shortages—which followed the fall of the U.S.S.R. and
are the result of the avarice and mismanagement of the military-first
dictatorship in Pyongyang—are a fact of life, especially in rural areas. Two
thirds of the country (some 16 million people) depends on meager government
handouts. Refugees who escape have spoken of subsisting on grass and field mice. A U.N. report last year claims millions suffer from
malnourishment and inadequate health services: a third of children under the age
of five show signs of stunting. Because of poor sanitation, diarrhoea is a
leading killer of children. “I’ve seen babies … who should have been sitting up
who were not sitting up, and can hardly hold a baby bottle,” said the U.N. rapporteur in a Beijing press conference last year. A
pantomime Marie Antoinette, Kim Jong Un reportedly sent out two pounds of candy to each child in his famine-stricken country in
January to mark the young dictator’s birthday.
(MORE: Dennis Rodman May Not Know Which Korea He’s
In)
2. North Korea keeps its
starving people HOSTAGE to its belligerent nuclear policies. The
international community, including the U.S., has offered hundreds of thousands
of tons of food aid to Pyongyang. But the aid has been stymied by bargaining
over North Korea’s illicit nuclear weapons program—in 2009, for example,
shipments were stalled after Pyongyang decided to test a rocket.
This month’s recent underground nuclear blast, the country’s third, makes
diplomacy even harder.
3. North Korea is a land
of prison camps — lots of prison camps. The dominant image of North Korea in
the minds of outsiders is that of the eerie spectacle of the Mass Games and
other rituals of totalitarian pageantry that its government seems to obsessively
enact. But beyond that is a world of abuse and injustice. Tens of thousands
languish in prison camps across the country. With the aid of citizen
cartographers, Google recently pointed some of these sites on its maps—here is
TIME Beijing correspondent Austin Ramzy piece on Google’s grim revelations.
(PHOTOS: A New Look at North Korea)
4. North Korea’s not just
a Stalinist dictatorship—it’s a mafia
state. The regime the Kims built doesn’t just oppress its people,
censor everything and make daily life a never-ending propaganda play. It has
also carried out illegal business operations that have a global reach, raking in
an estimated $1 billion a year through activities such as drug trafficking,
counterfeiting goods and money laundering, according to a 2007 TIME expose which
branded the late Kim Jong Il “the Tony Soprano of North
Korea.”
5. North Korea’s not just
a mafia state—it’s a FASCIST, RACIST
STATE. While nominally Communist, North Korea has become something
else altogether after decades of force-feeding its population a steady diet of
xenophobia and militarist nationalism. In an article in Foreign Policy, B.R. Myers, a South Korea-based academic and
author of The
Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, says
the state’s ideology “is a race-based worldview utterly at odds with the
teachings of Marx and Lenin.” Propaganda celebrates with slavish devotion the
glory of the Kim bloodline as well as the general purity of blood of the North
Korean race. An understanding of that fascist fervor led the late Christopher
Hitchens to dub North Korea a “nation of racist dwarfs”—dwarfs because so many are stunted from
malnourishment. In the state’s worldview, everyone else—the Chinese, the
Japanese, the hated Americans, and yes, even Dennis Rodman—is
suspect.
We hope he learned these things.
Then again, maybe Rodman just talked hoops.
MORE:
North Korea Confirms ‘Successful’ Nuclear
Test
