North Korea is Starving.......Again

Once again the feckless UN is running the guilt trip regarding North Korea, which seems to be in a perpetual state of starvation.

North Korea's government food distribution programme will run dry in May and put one-quarter of the country's 24 million people at risk of starvation, the United Nations has warned.

The UN World Food Programme, which resumed sending food aid to North Korea in 2006, blamed flooding, foot-and-mouth disease, and an unusually cold winter for devastating food supplies to the country.

"Vulnerable members of society are currently facing increasing shocks to their daily coping strategies, leaving them on a knife edge," the WFP said in a statement.

Yeah, I'm sure that Kim Jong Il's insatiable quest more for more sophisticated weapons has nothing to do with the dire straits in which his country finds itself. So nice of the UN to blame flooding and foot-and-mouth disease for North Korea's starvation. The truth is that this is their natural state.

The hermit police state is tragic, indeed, but at what point does this starvation cease being the the responsibility of the West? China is all of the rage now with their "booming" economy and their boasts of overtaking the U.S. as the world's pre-eminent financial power. Considering that China is within a stone's throw of North Korea (and they have occupied the position as North Korea's "big brother"), one has to wonder why they don't rush in with aid.

People are starving, being murdered by despots and generally being persecuted all over the globe. The UN looks the other way when North Korea builds and tests nukes, they are uninterested when they launch attacks on the South, yet when North Koreans starve as a result of their government's adventurism and investment in WMDs, it's time to render assistance.

If we continue to rescue this odious country from revolution, or oblivion, we simply delay the inevitable as we have been doing for decades. In a sense, we are effectively prolonging the suffering of the people of North Korea by accepting the responsibility for its people's survival - a responsibility that belongs to their own government.

Maybe leaving countries like this to their own devices would be the best course of action. I say this not because we cannot afford it; even in the poor state in which we now find ourselves, we can certainly can. I say his because by "allowing nature to take it's course", perhaps it will bring North Korea to the brink. An empty belly is a powerful incentive for the people to rise up against those who enslave them. North Korea doesn't need to be stabilized, it needs to be destabilized.