The people of North Korea are starving.

Frank Crimi writes at Front Page:

While North Korea’s leadership solicits the world’s nations for food aid, the despotic regime continues to deliberately starve its own people. …

The US House of Representatives… voted last week to entirely bar any US food aid to North Korea. The denial of assistance brought cries of humanitarian neglect from some quarters, the most notable being from Jimmy Carter who called the US action a “human-rights violation.” Yet as Republican Representative Ed Royce said, “Let’s be clear, the aid we provide would prop up Kim Jong ll’s regime, a brutal and dangerous dictatorship.”

While that reason alone may have been enough to deny North Korea food aid, there was still an extended list of other justifications. Perhaps chief among these grounds was the growing belief that the North Korean government had actually manufactured its current food crisis. …

North Korea has been manufacturing a food crisis ever since it turned communist. “Communist” is shorthand for “severe shortage of all things that sustain life and make it bearable”.

A recently leaked North Korean police manual … confirmed cases of cannibalism. In one particular instance, a North Korean guard killed his roommate with an axe when he was sleeping, ate part of the corpse and then sold the rest at the market where he described it as lamb meat.

In fact, the situation has become so severe that it has even led to small pockets of public anger, no small feat in this tightly controlled country. Various reports of public resistance springing up in North Korea have arisen over the past year, with some protests turning violent. The outbreak was serious enough for the North Korean government to actually form a special riot control force in 2010 to quell public demonstrations.

These isolated events have led some to speculate that North Korea may soon experience an uprising similar to what has transpired in various Middle East countries, given the similar conditions between the two situations: corrupt leadership, overwhelming poverty, and brutal repression.

However, despite these similarities, it isn’t likely that the North Korean people … will be rioting anytime soon.

For starters, North Koreans may actually be too weak from hunger to sustain a long-term protest movement. Moreover, they have no means of communication by which to share their anger and organize. … North Korea’s lack of the Internet and other social networking infrastructure make a public uprising “quite slim.”

Yet, even if they could organize, North Korean protesters would face a regime that is armed to the teeth and more than willing to use those artillery, bombs and fighter jets on them …

And in any case they need to understand that North Korea is the second happiest country on earth.

Their government recently drew up a “Happiness Index” on which Number One, the land where people live in the greatest bliss possible to humankind, is [North Korea’s staunch friend and supporter] China. Next comes North Korea.

However much their existence may feel like prolonged suffering, the North Koreans have been informed that in almost every other country people are worse off than they are.

So at least they’re saved from the pangs of envy while they endure those of hunger. A great relief and consolation, wouldn’t you say?