Basketball Diplomacy - Hope in North Korea
Sports
are more than excitement. The pure surge of exhilaration when a NBA player
slams a basketball exists everywhere, not only in the court but also across
oceans. This illustrates the power of sports:
the power to unify strangers. Dennis Rodman just proved this point when he
visited North Korea and had fun time with the lunatic dictator Kim Jeong Eun.
Now, there are a lot of suprising elements in this one trip. Let’s put aside
who he met for a second. The fact that he entered one of the most censored,
secretive, and dangerous places on Earth and came back alive is unusual. But
the fact that Kim Jeong Eun was the one who invited Rodman is outright
shocking. It turned out that he was an avid fan of basketball.
Rodman,
in his interviews, talked about how Kim Jeong Eun is a ‘good guy’. When asked
about how he has sent 20000 people to prisoner camps, he responded that that
was politics, and U.S. is no different in essence. He furthermore trivialized
the atrocities of the lunatic. Now Rodman’s interview stroke many people as a
blasphemous, and a lot of the public opinion seemed to lose interest in the
event.
However,
Rodman’s meeting with the dictator holds vast meanings and possibilities that
might even be the key to the futile attempts the world had made towards North
Korea. Many NBA stars are not just sports celebrities anymore, they have become
exemplars of role models, contributing to community problems, traveling around
the globe, and representing the sports of basketball of U.S. which far
dominates that of any other country. In this sense, basketball has a tremendous
potential to reopen communication with North Korea, through methods of trading
culture. Inviting North Korean basketball players to the U.S. to teach them
play will also be possible. One noticeable fact is that Obama is also an avid
fan of basketball, as the visit of Miami Heat players to the White House
illustrates.
Sports
have already succeeded in stopping a war for a day in WW1. Why can’t it work in
North Korea?
Glad to see someone wrote about this. It was interesting, and leads us to wonder about "the lunatic." Is he crazy? We don't really know enough about him yet, and whether or not it is actually HIM who sends people to prison camps. He is young, and might actually have less power than we think, used more as a symbol than a true leader. My guess is that there are a few very clever and very evil men operating behind the scenes, and they will do anything to keep their status-quo intact. Good stuff. Rodman is kind of a lunactic himself, actually.
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