And North Korea’s old guard, including now deceased Uncle Jang, may have missed an ominous hint of things to come, when the official newspaper, Rodong Shinmun, published photos of Kim scolding senior officials, all of them old.
How can this tyrant rebound from the bad PR?
Enter friend Dennis Rodman, an ex-NBA defensive specialist, who these days specializes in helping to whitewash the brutal reality of the world’s most repressive regime.
When he landed at Pyongyang International Airport on December 21, Rodman wasted no time in redirecting the media’s narrative. He confirmed that he was going to train North Korean basketball players for next month’s exhibition game with 12 as-of-yet unnamed former NBA players. The game will be played on Kim Jong Un’s birthday, January 8th. Rodman to the Associated Press: that if after the 12 former NBA players go home they say, “some really, really nice things, some really cool things about this country,” then he has done his job.
“North Korea has given me the opportunity to bring these players and their families over here, so people can actually see, that this country is actually not as bad as people project it to be in the media,” Rodman added.
You can be sure neither Rodman, nor any ex-NBA player desperate enough for the money to play an exhibition game on the Kim Jon Un’s birthday, January 8th, will ever see the real North Korea!
On his last birthday, Kim Jong Un reportedly may have given out copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Other sources asserted that Kim was heard saying that North Korea’s Ministry of Public Security should be a force even stronger than the Korean People’s Army, “similar to the Gestapo.”
Whether he uttered those exact words or not, no one should be fooled by the photo-ops Dennis Rodman provides for his brutal friend. The missile-rattling, nuclear-armed novice in Pyongyang – with friends in in Tehran and Damascus – should deeply concern any rational person in South Korea, Japan, China, the U.S., and Israel.
