North Korea, one of the world’s few remaining bastions of communism, is desperately struggling just to feed its people.

In its second year of famine, the country seems to be begging for aid from the capitalist nations, such as neighbor South Korea and the United States, which it has reviled and scorned in the past.

Even North Korea’s huge military, which supposedly has first-call on scarce food supplies, is being weakened by hunger. South Korea is reluctant to help its failing neighbor for fear that it will be helping current dictator Kim Jong hang on to power.

During a tour of the Demilitarized Zone, US Defense Secretary William Cohen called on North Korea to give up “communist
theology, an economic system, which is decaying and dying.” (And this from a Clinton administration official!)

The major former-communist states, China and Russia, have timidly begun the awkward and difficult transitions to market
economies. All that remains to be seen is which of the remaining workers’ paradises — North Korea, Cuba, Belarus, Albania, all teetering on the brink of starvation — will be the first to disintegrate.

(Source: Fox News.)