By Robert Laurie ——Bio and Archives--March 30, 2016
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Ahhh North Korea - that glorious land of rice, jungle, James Franco comedies, and possible nuclear weapons. It truly is the kind of paradise that only the twin boogeymen of dictatorship and communism could create. Unless, of course, you get hungry.
If you live under the thumb of fearless leader Kim Jong Un, and you're a human being who requires food to survive, you have a problem. Famine is coming and, while he likes Katy Perry, margaritas, building WMD's, and threatening the west, Supreme Leader isn't particularly interested in feeding his people.
As the Daily Meal reports, citizens of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea are being warned that it's time to start chewing on roots if they wish to survive. Yes, you read that right. Gnaw on the roots, because another "arduous march" is at hand.“We may have to go on an arduous march, during which we will have to chew the roots of plants once again,” the paper warned grimly, evoking the language used during an earlier famine in North Korean history.Lest you think that the term "arduous march" is a term used lightly, you should know: the dictatorship's last arduous march killed millions.
In what became known as the “arduous march,” up to 3.5 million people died from hunger or related illnesses between 1994 and 1998, when the loss of outside support, as well as the severe mismanagement of resources by the North Korean government, crippled the country’s food supply."Mismanagement" is a polite way of saying that the very ronery Kim Jong-Il "enjoyed a steady diet of caviar and western pornography while his people starved." Sadly, it appears nothing has changed.
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According to the South Korean paper Chosun Ilbo, the upcoming “road to revolution” will require every citizen in the nation’s capital of Pyongyang to donate 2.2 pounds of rice to the state supply every month. As with the 1994 famine, North Korean farmers will also be required to donate additional supplies to the military, the welfare of which has historically been the country’s highest priority. Kim Jong Un’s regime has also begun to crack down on open-air markets, where citizens have been able to purchase supplies with relatively little interference from the state, until now.In other words, the portly dictator is saying: no one's going to have any food, so you'll have to give me all your food, which means you'll have less food to give me. ...But you'd better figure out how to give me some food, or else. He's got to maintain that rotund physique somehow. The sad thing is that, as always, there will be a cadre of leftists lining up to shout that this isn't "real communism." They'll claim that real communism, and real socialism, works - it's just never been properly implemented. The problem is that this is always the end result when it's tried. North Korean communism "isn't communism" just like "radical Islam isn't really Islam." You can try to rebrand it, but you always end up in the same place.
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