Harry's Place: The famine you won't hear about this Christmas is an important reminder of the horrors of living under a communist system. As Harry's Place points out:
The worst human rights abuses in the world - including government engineered famines - are unfolding in North Korea today. Since the US isn't involved, the Chomskyites aren't interested. But the pro-intervention left - if we are serious about human rights - cannot take the same morally blank position. I've tried to talk in my column today about a sane approach to the world's last Stalinist state:More than 13 million people (out of a population of 20 million) are suffering from malnutrition, and the United Nations is predicting a winter famine on a vast scale. Nearly half of this country's children are suffering from such severe hunger that their physical and mental development is being seriously retarded. This is not unfolding in Africa, but instead just a few miles from a prosperous industrial economy.
It is happening in North Korea, and you haven't seen many reports because a vast range of vested interests find it convenient for the world to forget about the North Korean people.
South Koreans don't want to talk about it, because they dread the massive cost of reunification - a process that will make Germany's recent history look smooth and affordable. Western governments don't want to talk about it, because they are too busy haggling over Kim Jong II's weapons of mass destruction to act against his programme of deliberate starvation.
Most aid agencies don't want to talk about it, because there is nothing they can do: the massive amounts of aid pumped into North Korea over the past decade seem to have been stolen by the regime and made very little dent in the pandemic rates of chronic malnutrition and hunger. French aid agency Médicins Sans Frontières has completely disengaged for this reason. The world's "peace" movement don't want us to talk about it, because in this instance the United States is opposed to a horrific dictatorship, and that doesn't fit their script.
Link via The Buzz Machine.
NOTE: I've got better things to do than erase the childish, immature, psychotic, obscene comments from looney Roger Weidner and his gang of illiterate morons, so just put your opinions at the Johnhays.net Forum.