A rule strictly from hunger

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Three communist countries are responsible for the world's most devastating famines.

Forcible collectivization of agriculture by Mao Tse-tung caused a famine in the early 1960s, which cost the lives of between 27 million and 40 million Chinese people. V.I. Lenin and Josef Stalin between them created two famines in the Soviet Union that cost the lives of at least 12 million people.

The third communist dictatorship where a government-induced famine endures to this very day is North Korea. So far at least 3 million Korean men, women and children have died of starvation in a population of some 22 million, although no one really knows what the actual population is.

Dictator Kim Jong-il doesn't believe in censuses. In any case, were it not for foreign aid, the death toll of the prisoners who live in this giant prison camp of a country would be much higher.

Emeritus Professor B. J. Rummel, Nobel Peace Prize finalist and a leading expert on genocide, writes in a special study about North Korea:

"As I write this, people are dying by the thousands everyday, due to the regime. ... [T]hey die because of the ideological fanaticism of the small gang of thugs who hold power over them with their guns."

North Korea, says Professor Rummel, is one of the few countries in which population mortality rates have been increasing, especially infant mortality.

According to London's Economist, North Korea's unending famine has "produced seven-year-olds who are on average 8 inches shorter and 22 pounds lighter than their potential South Korean playmates."

Professor Rummel is the framer of what I have called "Rummel's Law": "The less freedom a people have, the more likely their rulers are to murder them." He has shown that more people in the 20th century have been killed in cold blood by their own dictatorial governments right and left -- 3 times as many -- than have been killed in the heat of battle.