The Seattle Times brings  stunning information on the suffering of North Korea's people under the brutal hereditary tyranny of the Kims. So severe and long—lasting has been the politically manufactured famine imposed on the North Koreans by their own government's refusal to allow international relief agencies to verify the distribution of food to those in need, that children from the North have physically shrunk dramatically. Communist tyranny, not floods, droughts, or pestilence, has imposed this disaster:

South Korean anthropologists who measured North Korean refugees here in Yanji, a city 15 miles from the North Korean border, found that most of the teenage boys stood less than 5 feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds. In contrast, the average 17—year—old South Korean boy is 5—feet—8, slightly shorter than an American boy of the same age.

The height disparities are stunning because Koreans were more or less the same size — if anything, people in the North were slightly taller — until the abrupt partitioning of the country after World War II.

Always willing to go to extraordinary lengths to present a fa軋de of normality to the outside world, North Korea reportedly chooses members of international delegations and other groups sent overseas on the basis of height. The Dear Leader, Kim Jong—il, is himself only five feet three inches tall, and wears elevator shoes to conceal his shortness of stature.

School children are instructed to hang upside down from parallel bars and other gym equipment for thirty minutes a day or longer, in the hope of stretching their frames, so as to conceal their chronic malnutrition. But the North Korean Army is unable to maintain its height requirements. Foreign observers have reported that troops appear almost comically short, barely over five feet tall.

Even worse, there is very likely to be long term effects on the brain development of North Korea's children. Chronic malnutrition is known to lead to permanent mental retardations.

In all of human history, it is difficult to think of a single example of a regime which has deliberately starved its people for long enough to stunt their growth and impair their mentation on a mass basis. This is a crime which defies categorization or even comprehension. Were it not for the fact that South Koreans are ethnically and genetically indistinguishable from their brothers and sisters to the north, it could be stated that the Kims have committed slow motion genocide on their own subjects.

The crime continues today, as North Koreans experience extreme hunger every day. Reportedly, human flesh can be found for sale in rural marketplaces. It is a blot on the very concept of civilization that the world passively allows the most evil regime to function as a member of the United Nations, and does not rise up as one, to scream, 'no more!'

Posted by Thomas   03 05 04