Dennis Rodman's Visit to North Korea

On Friday, Time magazine posted this article about Dennis Rodman's visit to North Korea with the Harlem Globetrotters.  In this article, Ishaan Tharoor provides a very conventional, biased view of North Korea, quoting Christopher Hitchens saying that North Korea is a country full of "racist dwarfs."  Tharoor also conceals the U.S.'s politicization of food aid through a linguistic sleight of hand, using a passive voice to defer the U.S's agency.  When I first read this article, a few minutes after it was posted, the title of Tharoor's fifth point read: "5. North Korea’s not just a mafia state—it’s a FASCIST, RACIST state." "Fascist and racist" were written in all caps and underlined, an attempt to make the state more emotionally visceral for the reader and emphasize the the dangerousness of North Korea. It also made the article sound juvenile; typically, Time magazine does not rely on this excess of metalinguistic emotion in their articles.  A few hours later, the article was edited, and "fascist" and "racist" were changed to lowercase, and the underlining was removed, making the article appear a little more emotionally detached from the subject.  I think this reflects the U.S.'s hostility towards North Korea in a very interesting way, because it hints at the existence of violent aggression beneath the façade of cool logic.

For the sake of this blog post, I wanted to focus specifically on the deferral of agency in Tharoor's article.  Tharoor writes:

2. North Korea keeps its starving people hostage to its belligerent nuclear policies. The international community, including the U.S., has offered hundreds of thousands of tons of food aid to Pyongyang. But the aid has been stymied by bargaining over North Korea’s illicit nuclear weapons program—in 2009, for example, shipments were stalled after Pyongyang decided to test a rocket. This month’s recent underground nuclear blast, the country’s third, makes diplomacy even harder.

Tharoor proposes that North Korea is starving its people despite the generosity of the U.S.  He says that the U.S. aid "has been stymied" and "shipments were stalled" after North Korea tested a rocket.  So who stymied the aid and who stalled the shipments?  If you read this article, you wouldn't know.  If you read the article that Tharoor linked to from USA Today, you might not catch it.  It's the U.S.  One could argue that, actually, the U.S. is holding North Korea hostage by using food aid as an incentive for denuclearization.  Ironically (as we discussed in class), the U.S. has conducted 1,054 nuclear tests while North Korea has just completed its third.  This reveals the incredibly asymmetrical power dynamic between the U.S. and North Korea, which is further deepened by the U.S. media's portrayal of North Korea as a dangerous hermit kingdom.  Between this politicization of food aid and excessive sanctions, North Korea's resources are limited by outside powers.  But in this article, Tharoor absolves the U.S. of all blame, instead demonizing North Korea and, through association, Dennis Rodman.