It is a regime under which 30 million died of famine between 1958 and 1960 alone'to say nothing of the millions of others put to death as enemies of the state.
The sprawling Kumsusan Palace, its mausoleum lined with expensive marble, is thought to have cost hundreds of millions of dollars, factoring in extensive renovations and an expansion during the 1990s, when tens of thousands of North Koreans died of famine.
Mr. Kim, who has kept his people in isolation and fearful of prison gulags, has outlived previous predictions of the collapse of his government, even after an estimated two million North Koreans died of famine in the mid-1990s.
As one contemporary observer wrote, "Insane mothers began to eat their young children who died of famine before them; and still fleets of ships were sailing with every tide, carrying Irish cattle and corn to England".
That many died of famine due to forced collectivisation in Ukraine and elsewhere in 1928-33, in deportations of entire peoples later, or, at all times, in inhuman labour camps, rather than by overt execution, lessens his guilt not a jot.
— Nick Fox The Economist: After a million or so North Koreans died of famine under Kim Jong Il, his heir, Kim Jong Un — whose embonpoint betrays no nutritional dearth — has inherited the whole mass-starvation problem.
As a result of British interventions, up to 29 million Indians died of famine during the last few decades of the 19th century in what historian Mike Davis calls the "late Victorian holocaust".
