The Australian reports:
MILLIONS of people have taken to the city streets in North Korea, not in protest at the country's isolated dictatorship but to march to the countryside to help with the spring planting and stave off summer starvation.
In a mass mobilisation reminiscent of the dark days of China's 1960s Cultural
Revolution, when Mao Zedong banished the middle classes from the cities so they could learn from peasants on farms, squads of North Korean office workers are heading out of the cities armed with shovels and hoes.
Even workers with the UN's World Food Program, who would normally be helping to distribute rations to the country's poorest and hungriest, left their posts in Pyongyang on Sunday to dig the dirt.
Richard Ragan, director of WFP operations in Pyongyang, said yesterday he was seeing "children, busloads of people from urban areas, soldiers, you name it -- people from all stripes of life are working in the fields".
Beijing-based WFP spokesman Gerald Bourke said that on a recent visit he saw "tens of thousands" of people walking out of Wonsan, a port city in the country's southeast, with picks and shovels.
"I saw them a couple of hours later, a huge mass of people in an agricultural area adjacent to the city, digging out irrigation channels in preparation for the rice planting season," Mr Bourke said.Mass mobilisation for farm work is usual in North Korea's command economy, but this year it appears to be happening on a much larger scale.
Oh yes, we've seen this before. Whether it was Stalinist collectivization, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's killing fields, or Mugabe's racist redistribution, the results of agrarian socialism have time and again been tragic and horrific beyond belief. But we never learn, and left-wing ideologues continue to inflict horrendous suffering upon the people who are unfortunate enough to come under their control. This is just the latest chapter in a long legacy of leftist terror.
Read the report here.
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