In Feburary 2013 the flamboyant “Worm” (ex-hall of fame professional basketball player Dennis Rodman) visited North Korea with Vice Media with the aim of hosting a basketball exhibition, stating on his first visit “I come in peace. I love the people of North Korea!” A week ago, he visited Pyongyang again, this time coming back defensive of “The Marshall” insisting that Kim only wants to have a more diplomatic and friendly relationship with the USA.
“He has to do his job, but he’s a very good guy,” says Rodman, speaking about a man who presides over the most repressive and volatile countries in the world, a man who only a week ago executed his ex-girlfriend among a dozen well-known North Korean performers by firing squad over a sex tape.
Rodman isn’t the greatest political journalist of our times and so there is a vague innocence in Rodman’s statements about North Korea and Kim Jung-Un, which can easily give the US an opportunity to use Rodman as a diplomatic tool or a bargaining chip for Kenneth Bae’s release and a line of knowledge of the otherwise closed North Korea. He has in this sense possibly started ”basketball diplomacy”, but whether the US will want to utilize him is doubtful. However this may be damaging to the public’s views on Kim, and harmful to the real issues of human rights violations in North Korea in which Rodman would be a tool of propaganda to continue this repression. In the media this has definitely been the predominant view.
I will let you be the judge of Dennis Rodman’s desire to “bridge a gap”:
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