Trouble in North Korea

Mick Hartley reports of North Korea that "The Current Situation is Unspeakably Terrible".

"As predicted by experts on North Korea’s economy, since the authorities have yet to officially release state prices, the North Korean people are now surviving by bartering.

A defector, who spoke with his family in North Hamkyung Province on Tuesday, reported the news to the Daily NK, “I called my family to send some money to them as I had heard they were in trouble, and they told me that the current situation is unspeakably terrible. They live only by bartering with others.”"

Meanwhile the Korean Central News Agency report that:

"A fierce struggle should be waged against the class enemies within the socialist society.

All those who try to destabilize the socialist society are the enemies of socialism. They include remnants of the exploiting classes who harbor antipathy towards the socialist system, those who work hard overtly and covertly to bring down the socialist system after being greased by imperialists, those who have degenerated ideologically and morally, taken in by the imperialists' ideological and cultural poisoning and those who are introducing corrupt bourgeois way of life into society. Only when a fierce struggle is waged against them is it possible to protect and reinforce the position of socialism."

Chilling for anyone who remembers what happened in Russia in the war against the kulaks, when millions perished in the famines and the gulag, in Mao's Cultural Revolution and of course in Pol Pot's Year Zero.