Another American in North Korea

Besides Dennis Rodman and his basketball buddies, Will Scott is another of the few Americans who can actually say that he’s been to North Korea. A former Google employee and current graduate student at the University of Washington, Will spent last fall teaching courses on Databases and Operating Systems at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. Some insightful highlights from an interview Will did:

Business Insider: Could you talk about the “Supreme Leader” with anyone? Is their stereotypical love for him as displayed in the western media real? 

Scott: The leader is certainly loved and revered. People live normal lives for the most part, maybe 5-10% is the stereotype. Like, before meals the students would march to the cafeteria while singing patriotic songs. That’s the stereotype that you’ll see in the media, but then they eat meals and chat normally, and play basketball, and go to class.

Was it possible to discuss politics or other sensitive topics?

Scott: Military stuff did get talked about some, as did some other topics. In the spring the understanding was that they were at war with the US, there were cars driving around with netting to prevent detection from satellites, and the media reported that there was a US intrusion into the country that the army repelled. The students would ask the professors why they were still there when their countries were actively at war.

Scott: Very rarely. If you were just on the street people would smile and wave at you.

Did you have ‘handlers’ like visitors on organized trips? 

Scott: We called them ‘guides’, but yeah, the campus had a pool of representatives from the ministry of education. Foreigners in our group had to be accompanied by one of those guides when we were off campus.

Could you elaborate on what that news was like in North Korea compared to the US? 

Scott: There are 3 TV stations, newspaper, and radio as primary means of media distribution. Newspapers got delivered to the campus every morning, and were at the reception desk, and the students when they were free would stop by and you would see huddles of them reading the news. Radio didn’t get used much on campus as far as I could tell, but seemed more used elsewhere in the country. You’d hear it sometimes in the car, or in shops.

Sunday evenings there’s a foreign section on TV, where individual segments taken from other countries news media are played. They learn about foreign affairs largely from this – the selection ranges from almost immediate on items that are good news, to up to a 6 month delay on things that are neutral or negative. Things like the economic issues in Greece took a long time to hit the news here (only this fall), while the satellite reaching the edge of the solar system got reported the same week. The rest ends up being a combination of rebroadcasts of sports games, some Chinese dramas, and local news segments.

Did you accidentally say “Just Google it,” and then realise that it wasn’t available to your students?

Scott: Yeah! A lot of CS education really breaks down without access to the Internet.

Rodman and Kim Jong Un – Ego or diplomacy?

Two needy men are using each other to maintain their own fantasies about themselves. The fantasy of one of them is that he is justified in his role as the “supreme leader” of a military reign of totalitarian fear over nearly 25 million people. The much less dangerous fantasy of the other is that he’s still a star. Which raises the question: is there a force on earth more strange, sad and frightening than the human ego in full spate?

It’s easy to see what Kim Jong Un is getting out of the relationship. He was obsessed with US basketball as a child, and has been a long-standing admirer of Rodman. The fact that he can persuade this man to visit, to declare to the world that they are friends, to sing him happy birthday, to defend his grisly human rights record, can only be gratifying to his monstrous, childish, grotesquely swollen sense of self. No doubt, he will believe – probably with some justification – that an association with this famous American will only burnish him in the eyes of the population. The state propaganda machine is certainly doing its best to help with that, by supplying fawning headlines describing Rodman’s great admiration and respect for Kim.

Rodman’s own propaganda is not going so well. Presumably, he enjoys the publicity these trips afford him, even though it’s all negative. One can only assume that Rodman is able to ignore everything except the personal kick he must get from his association with Kim. Rodman, on these trips, is being feted by a world leader and treated as a visitor of immense importance, even if that world leader is despicable. How terrible to have such a craving for personal validation and flattery that you can dismiss in your search for it the suffering of an entire population and the disapprobation of the rest of the world.

There are many reasons why Rodman’s friendship with Kim is laughable, and all of them revolve around the idea of Rodman’s absurdity, as a trusting creature who is proud to have been selected to polish the crocodile’s teeth. Rodman longs for the days when he was at the center of a personality cult, and it has made him vulnerable. It has delivered him into the hands of a man who heads his own, far more sinister personality cult.

This strange relationship, this folie a deux, between a hereditary dictator and a world-famous sportsman, is almost poignant in its revelation of the emptiness and dysfunctionality that is so often at the root of a search for power and acclaim.

[Deborah Orr, writing in The Guardian]

If we were to give Dennis Rodman the benefit of the doubt

This week, we’ve been treated to the increasingly familiar sight of former NBA star and provocateur Dennis Rodman attending events in Pyongyang, North Korea. It’s his fourth trip in less than 12 months.

The Weird American Athlete Goes to Weird Country story is just too easy not to cover. The most passive player in this tragicomedy is Rodman’s home country, the United States. The U.S. State Department has deployed the rhetorical equivalent of an embarrassed teenager whose dad has shown up to dance at his prom. Something along the lines of “this has nothing to do with us” is what the State Department has said with every one of Rodman’s trip.

This is an understandably cautious position. After all, Rodman has professed his love and undying affection for Kim, and he is probably not a canny enough operator to spearhead any form of political outreach along the lines of the “Ping-Pong diplomacy.”

On this trip, Rodman addressed the unavoidably political nature of a relationship with North Korea, saying his visits could “open the doors” to “talk about certain things.” In the CNN interview, he argued that it’s a “great idea for the world.”

Rodman’s celebrity status and sporting prowess has given him access to Kim. At some point, when both the U.S. and North Korean governments are feeling a little brave, perhaps they can try to thaw the ice with more professional diplomats tagging along on cultural or sporting exchanges.

There are precedents. For example, the U.S.-China Ping-Pong diplomacy of the 1970s had its genesis in table tennis player by the name of Glen Cowan. Once he broke the ice, the governments began talking.

The kind of engagement that Rodman is pushing cannot always be seen as merely rewards for a naughty regime, as much as we appear locked into a carrot-and-stick way of thinking about relations with North Korea. It can be mutually beneficial. We have the potential to gain as much as they do. Breakthroughs might be sudden and surprising, but they are usually underpinned by creative thinking, dialogue and the mutual acceptance that no one can get exactly what they want.

Domestically, it is great PR for Kim Jong Un. He gets to appear gregarious and inclusive in front of his people. Notwithstanding his uncle Jang Song-thaek’s execution, this is the image he has been assiduously cultivating. He’s eager to promote his friendly, approachable image while at the same time enjoying watching some former stars play his favorite sport.

For now, little will come out of Rodman’s visits other than extraneous news. But as Pyongyang continues to devote resources and energy to sports development, its appetite for athletic exchanges will increase. Let’s warily hope, to use Rodman’s phrase, that this can “open the doors” to other things.

[Excerpts from a CNN opinion piece by Andray Abrahamian, executive director of a nonprofit that provides educational training in business and economics for young North Koreans.]

 

Reaction to Dennis Rodman statements on Kim Jong Un and Kenneth Bae

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Bill Richardson told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Tuesday that he was “disappointed” with Rodman’s basketball trip because it was “being used propaganda-wise by the regime.”

“I think Dennis has drank a little too much of the Kool-Aid from the North Koreans,” said Richardson, who has traveled to the country several times.

On Monday, before boarding a flight in China for North Korea, Rodman told CNN, “I’m going to try and interact with him (Kim) on that point of love for sports … He loves sports. I like the guy, and he’s an awesome guy to me.”

Concerning Korean-American missionary Kenneth Bae, Rodman suggested in a CNN interview Tuesday that had done something wrong but did not say what that was. Bae has been held prisoner for more than a year for reasons that are not clear.

Rodman “crossed the line” by implying Bae might be guilty of a crime that justified his detention, Richardson said.

Rep. Eliot Engel, a New York Democrat, held a news conference Monday to call on Rodman to call off the game. With a mother and daughter who escaped North Korea standing next to him, Engel called it “very ill-conceived,” according to Time.com. “I don’t think we should ignore the real suffering in this gulag state,” Engel said. “And Dennis Rodman wants to go there and play basketball. It would be like inviting Adolf Hitler to lunch.”

Georgetown University Professor Victor Cha, a former director for Asian affairs at the White House, told CNN Rodman’s trips could be helpful to experts and analysts who study Kim. “In spite of all the criticism of Dennis Rodman, every time he meets with the North Korean leader, that’s more information that we know about him because we know so little about him,” Cha said.

Given the unpredictability of the Kim regime, it’s possible North Korea could decide to release Bae as a favor to Rodman. Cha said. “It’s entirely possible that he (Kim) could do something like that, and if he did all of us would stop criticizing Dennis Rodman,” he said.

[CNN]