Dennis Rodman's North Korea Diplomacy

Awesome.

From Rick Morrissey, at the Chicago Sun-Times, "Dennis Rodman in North Korea: Diplomat or dingbat?"

And from Jonathan Kay, at the National Post, "A look inside the monstrous North Korean gulag system that Dennis Rodman will never see":

Dennis Rodman — former basketball player, pro wrestler, cross-dresser, boyfriend to Madonna, B-movie performer and reality-show star — is man who will play to any audience. That apparently includes North Korea’s government, the world’s last truly totalitarian regime.

This week, Rodman was in Pyongyang shooting hoops with local teenagers, and providing state media with propaganda fodder as he made the tour of communist shrines. It is all part of a vaguely defined “basketball diplomacy” TV project, and Rodman is Tweeting the usual bromides expected of celebrities out of their depth, such as “Looking forward to sitting down with [leader] Kim Jong Un. I love the people of North Korea.”

Rodman’s ignorant inanities (another Tweet declared “Maybe I’ll run into the Gangnam Style dude while I’m here”) are especially insulting to victims of North Korea’s gulags — whom Rodman will never meet or see, and whose very existence is denied by the North Korean regime. Just this week, as Rodman was being led around by his North Korean hosts, a new satellite-imagery analysis released by the Committee of Human Rights in North Korea showed that the regime is expanding its gulag network dramatically, even as it struggles to ward off another round of mass national starvation.

The term “gulag” is thrown around liberally in the post-Soviet era to describe any sort of remote prison facility. But the North Korean gulags are the real Siberian-styled deal: sprawling work camps where political prisoners spend years being tortured and worked to death. Only a few dozen former gulag prisoners have made it out of the country, and it is only thanks to their eyewitness reports that we know anything about life in these medieval prison camps.

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