Have you heard? Dennis Rodman is back in North Korea! It's hilarious and bizarre, and the Internet at large has had plenty a good laugh over the whole thing in recent days.
But a powerful open letter penned by a former prisoner in a North Korean labor camp balances the fatuous lark we all mock on Twitter against the harsh reality of life in Kim Jong-un's secretive dictatorship.
See also: North Korea Threatens South Korea — With a Fax
The details of the letter, which was published by the Washington Post this week, are sad, grim and unsettling. We'll get into the them soon, but first some backstory on Rodman's trip and why it holds such bizarre appeal.
Rodman first visited North Korea this February on a trip billed as a "basketball diplomacy mission" by sponsoring media company Vice, which used the surreal voyage to produce an episode of its HBO news magazine. Kim — who had his uncle and former trusted mentor executed for insubordination and debauchery just last week — grew up as a big fan of Rodman's championship Chicago Bulls teams. Rodman now calls Kim a "friend."
The NBA Hall of Famer's current trip to North Korea has to do with an exhibition basketball match planned to celebrate the dictator's upcoming birthday. (It's believed to be his 31st, but nobody is 100% sure of his age.) Rodman will train a North Korean team that will go up against a team of as-yet-unnamed Americans hyped to be former NBA stars. Photos this week have shown Rodman smoking a Cuban cigar while coaching North Korean basketball players.
Vice told Mashable it is not at all involved in this trip, which is instead sponsored by an Irish online betting company called Paddy Power. A Beijing-based company called Koryo Tours, meanwhile, is offering a 6,500-Euro, "all inclusive," multi-day travel package to North Korea for the game taking place on "on the auspicious date of Jan. 8 (DPRK Leader Kim Jong Un’s birthday)."
So everybody wins here, right? Vice got its popular story. Rodman gets a return to the limelight, as well as — one assumes — some monetary compensation. Paddy Power sponsors the whole thing. Koryo sells its tour packages. Kim gets his basketball-themed birthday party, and the rest of us get a smug snicker or two.
Not so fast, says Shin Dong-hyuk, who wrote this week's letter to Rodman. Shin is the only known person to have escaped to the West after being born in a North Korean labor camp, which he chronicled in a book called Escape From Camp 14. He says he was born in the camp in 1982 because his father had been imprisoned there after a brother fled to South Korea. He paints an ugly portrait of North Korean life, a reminder that our online yuk-fest comes against a ghastly backdrop.
"I happen to be about the same age as your friend Kim Jong Un. But if you ask him about me, he is likely to refer to me as 'human scum,'" Shin writes. "That is how his state-controlled press refers to me and all other North Koreans who have risked death by fleeing the country."
Shin also writes that he saw his own mother executed by hanging in Camp 14, and provides more chilling details about life inside the camps and in North Korea generally.
"The U.N. World Food Programme says four out of five North Koreans are hungry," he writes. "Severe malnutrition has stunted and cognitively impaired hundreds of thousands of children. Young North Korean women fleeing the country in search of food are often sold into human-trafficking rings in China and beyond."
He finishes up with a powerful plea: "I end this letter in the hope that you can use your friendship with the dictator to be a friend to the North Korean people."
Rodman, for his part, maintains an air of optimism about the whole thing. He told the Associated Press that — although an American was just this month released and repatriated after being held against his will for weeks — analysts' concerns and warnings about traveling to North Korea are overblown.
"You know, they're still afraid to come here, but I'm just telling them, you know, don't be afraid man, it's all love, it's all love here," Rodman said from Pyongyang, North Korea's capital. "I understand what's going on with the political stuff, and I say, I don't go into that venture, I'm just doing one thing for these kids here, and for this country, and for my country, and for the world pretty much."
And what a world it is.
Image: Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images