Recent reports from North Korea state that between five hundred thousand and one million people per year are now literally dying of starvation in that miserable country. You won't read much about it in the newspapers, just as you didn't read much about the unspeakable horror of Democratic Kampuchea, even though hundreds of witnesses affirmed the horror of Pol Pot's regime long before the Vietnamese relieved him of rule. The reason is that it is very embarrassing for the left to be confronted with what centralized economic management a la Karl Marx really means.

Certainly the reality is in violent contrast with the fantasy presented in North Korean journals, published to dupe the Jane Fondas and Noam Chomskys in America and elsewhere. My nephew is a keen professional student of Asian Marxist affairs, and in his travels in that region has sent me examples of this genre — I have a couple on my desk as I write. They are glossy, well-produced, color magazines very like the sort that I used to read in the 1960s from Mao's China and the Soviet Union. Everybody is smiling, and this is clearly a land of great joy and plenty, unlike South Korea, where, according to one of these publications, chronic shortages and famine are the rule. The latest project — which has the support of the whole population — is the construction of a vast granite statue of the late Kim Il Sung ("Great Leader of People") which, at least from the rendered drawings, will dwarf the World Trade Center. He has been succeeded by his son, Kim Jong Il ("Great Teacher of Journalists") of whom the kindest thing one could say is that he is the world's largest consumer of Hennessy cognac.

Kim Il Sung's regime was feted by a long procession of Western dupes from the 1940s right up to his death more than forty years later. But it will surely not be long before this particular iron curtain collapses from rust and internal corruption, and the world will be presented with a spectacle that will make Kampuchea look tame.

The news is coming through in some quarters. At my local Catholic Church there are pamphlets requesting donations for aid to North Korea. They speak of famine, of crop failures, of cold, of the plight of the North Korean children, but there is one absolutely vital fact that these flyers decline to mention. They will not tell you that North Korea is a Marxist dictatorship, even though this is undoubtedly the most germane fact explaining the human disaster taking place there. Similarly, when Pol Pot was on his deathbed, the media were careful to avoid mention of his Marxist philosophy: he was simply described as "the ailing dictator", or "the now decrepit mass murderer", and so on.

I believe that this is consciously dishonest reporting, and is, in fact, a form of lying. If we are to avoid similar disasters in the next century, shouldn't we be closely examining the record of the socialist experiment and asking ourselves what can explain human catastrophe on such an unimaginable scale? I know what the answer of the left is — Pol Pot (for example) was an evil man, and that it was all his fault, not that of the ideology. But all socialist death traps, where the principle of centralized social and economic control has been carried through with complete consistency, have much the same story to tell. Are we to believe that it was all some tragic mistake, that the principle is moral and right, but, by some unforeseen accident, the leaders happened to be ALL evil men? Isn't there even one person in the strongholds of the left (the teachers, the journalists, the churchmen) who is capable of asking whether the socialist principle itself might be thoroughly immoral and wrong, and is certain to lead to disaster irrespective of who is in charge? Don't the 100 million innocent dead of the great socialist "experiment" deserve at least that much thought?

It is interesting to follow the twists and wrigglings of socialist apologists through the years. After the truth about the Soviet Union began to seep under the iron curtain, it turned out that it was all because of the dark Russian character, that that is what they were like (racism, anyone?), but that China was quite different, the socialism there was a kind of applied Confucianism, all wise philosophy and scholarly peace. Then later on, Castro was not a gray, totalitarian communist; his brand of socialism was "socialism with a calypso beat", a kind of Marxist version of "Beach Blanket Bingo".

In Australia, the Communist Party was not life threatening or unfriendly at all, their socialism was in reality a kind of mateship flavored with the scent of eucalyptus leaves. Kampuchea was the finest, most scholarly experiment of all; the practical application of the existentialist ideals of Jean Paul Sartre by Sorbonne educated intellectuals; its aim to produce a new kind of Man, entirely free of greed and avarice.

Where did it go wrong, and why does it always go wrong? There are myriad reasons. In a devastating insult to Mankind, the left will try to tell you that it is our fault, not the fault of their philosophy. Socialism is a beautiful, intensely moral, idea, but we are too evil in our natures to practice it. The left deny that it is a profoundly immoral and utterly corrupt system for beings of intelligence and individual judgment to live by, that it does not work because it is contradictory to the best in human nature; the independent, creative side of Man which it stifles and destroys, not by accident, but by necessity.

Industrial development and a high standard of living require creative freedom, and creative freedom requires free minds and private property, otherwise the ideas of the creative and inventive who keep us all alive can never be translated into action. No matter how well intentioned are the socialist leaders (hardly ever in my opinion), the fact that they must impose an authoritarian rule that cannot tolerate any opposition ensures the moral and economic failure of their regime. For socialism is a determinitely perfectionist ideology, and as Ludwig von Mises pointed out, every socialist is a potential dictator, absolutely without exception.

This perfectionism always impressed the left liberal satraps from the West. There was no rubbish in the streets of Moscow, and no graffiti on the Moscow subway, even though the Al Gores and Pat Schroeders regard it as "the people's art". Ever wondered why? And to return to North Korea, you might see literal starvation on the streets of Pyongyang, but you would never see any cripples. People with chronic musculoskeletal problems might suggest that the magical power of socialism was limited, and so they were forcibly sent to the countryside to rot in government hovels until they died.

As you read these words, the rest of the North Korean population is joining them.