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North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un: Basketball Fan, Closet Liberal?

Mar. 5, 2013 12:17pm

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, specializing in foreign policy and civil liberties. He worked as special assistant to President Reagan […]

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, specializing in foreign policy and civil liberties. He worked as special assistant to President Reagan and editor of the political magazine Inquiry. He writes regularly for leading publications such as Fortune magazine, National Interest, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Times. Bandow speaks frequently at academic conferences, on college campuses, and to business groups. Bandow has been a regular commentator on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. He holds a J.D. from Stanford University.

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dbandow@cato.org

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North Korea’s Kim Jong Un: Basketball Fan, Closet Liberal?

Kim Jong Un with Dennis Rodman watch an exhibition basketbal game in North Korea last week (AP Photo)

KGB director Yuri Andropov was a jazz aficionado and collector of abstract art, so he must be a liberal, it was said. Great change was expected when he took over as the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1982.

Well, no. It turns out that he did not use the KGB as a clever cover for his secret liberal soul. Brutal repression continued apace. The U.S.S.R. had to wait for Mikhail Gorbachev, who did have a secret liberal soul.

Much the same blather continues to be spread about North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. After all, he attended prep school in Switzerland. He likes Disney characters. And he is a fan of American basketball.

Not just any basketball player. According to the BBC:

Mathew Syed, [London] Times sports columnist, told the Today programme: “When I heard that [Dennis] Rodman had gone to North Korea, I was genuinely shocked.

But it turns out that Kim Jong-un is a lifelong fan, apparently enjoyed it enormously, and sport being used as a potential tool for political rapprochement has a very long history.”

So forget “ping-pong diplomacy” with Mao’s China. Dennis Rodman is the vehicle for the Kim dynasty as it inaugurates democracy, establishes capitalism, and protects human rights. Perhaps Rodman and Kim will share the next Nobel Peace Prize.

It would be a wonderful story. But as yet there is no hint of serious reform in the North. Kim is younger and more open, attending events with his attractive, designer-handbag-toting wife. However, the labor camps remain full, controls on the border with China have been tightened, rumored economic reforms remain just rumors, and Pyongyang has moved ahead with rocket and nuclear tests.

Reform may—indeed, must—eventually come. But in the meantime it is important to remember the essential character of the North Korean regime. The Kim family empire’s power is built upon a comprehensive system of pervasive discrimination and repression built on social classification, through which entire extended families are punished for an individual’s transgressions. Like Stalin’s Soviet Union, Kim’s North Korea is a gulag state, with citizens facing punishment and death for any number of transgressions. For decades Pyongyang even turned kidnapping into state policy, both enticing and forcing other peoples into what probably is the worst, most brutally repressive system on earth.

Kim Jong-un likes basketball. Unfortunately, that does not make him a reformer, but only a dictator who happens to like basketball.

Cato Institute / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

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Comments (4)

justa_thought
Posted on March 6, 2013 at 12:41pm
Rodman should have checked to see if the bar b q he was eating wasnt a slow running child while he was there. If he was eating what most of the poor were eating it probably would have been a child.

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shorelineliz
Posted on March 6, 2013 at 12:20pm
Cannabilism in North Korea
http://www.dailymail.co.uk

A starving man in North Korea has been executed after murdering his two children for food, reports from inside the secretive state claim.
A ‘hidden famine’ in the farming provinces of North and South Hwanghae is believed to have killed up to 10,000 people and there are fears that incidents of cannibalism have risen.
The grim story is just one to emerge as residents battle starvation after a drought hit farms and shortages were compounded by party officials confiscating food.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has spent vast sums of money on two rocket launches despite reports of desperate food shortages in the country and concerns that 10,000 people have died in a famine. Undercover reporters from Asia Press told the Sunday Times that one man dug up his grandchild’s corpse and ate it. Another, boiled his own child for food.

More…
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Despite reports of the widespread famine, Kim Jong Un, 30, has spent vast sums of money on two rocket launches in recent months.
One informant was quoted as saying: ‘In my village in May a man who killed his own two children and tried to eat them was executed.

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shorelineliz
Posted on March 6, 2013 at 12:17pm
North Korean parents ‘eating their own children’ after being driven mad by hunger in famine-hit pariah state
Undercover reporters found a ‘shocking’ number of cannibalism incidents
Up to 10,000 people feared dead after ‘hidden famine’ in farming provinces
Drought and confiscated food contribute to desperate shortage, reports say
Reports of men digging up corpses for food and murdering children

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2269094/North-Korean-parents-eat-children-driven-mad-hunger-famine-hit-pariah-state.html#ixzz2MmVtojkS

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shorelineliz
Posted on March 6, 2013 at 12:15pm
And Dennis Rodman said:

“He just love basketball. He just wants a call from Obama.”

Meanwhile:

North Korean parents are starving so much they have started to BBQ their own children.

But……

Do call the little Dictator won’t you Barry? Do call him and do set up a little PLAY DATE with the fellow dictator. Maybe he will serve you North Korean BBQ. Yum. The little ones are so tender.

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