North Korea
"This isn't my hair-dryer!"
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is such an exhibition of bureaucratic incompetence and human cruelty that it would be difficult to pick one single blunder for this list. Since its official establishment in 1948 DPRK has run up a laundry list human right abuses. Economic mismanagement caused a massive famine between 1994 and 1998 in which 3 million people died. Even today, long after the famine officially ended, food is still scarce throughout the country—especially in the countryside. Peasants regularly starve to death in the hundreds. In 2013, the UN estimated that 84 percent of the country had “poor” levels of food consumption. Meanwhile, the current dictator of DPRK, Kim Jong-Un does not want for anything; in 2012 alone, he spent nearly 7 million dollars on goods like handbags, luxury watches, cosmetics, and alcohol. In that same year, he also spent 1.3 billion dollars on ballistic missile programs.[15] The North Korean Army, which is the fourth largest in the world, has an annual budget of 6 billion dollars.
The most appalling side of North Korea is not its gross economic mismanagement, but its unsympathetic brutality towards its populace. Those who have escaped the many prison camps throughout the country testify to acts of extreme cruelty and barbarity. Inmates in these prisons face constant threats of arbitrary beatings and executions by the guards, who reportedly enjoy torturing inmates with cattle prods. Women are regularly raped and given forced abortions.[16]The number of political prisoners within North Korea has grown dramatically over the past five years, with an estimated quarter million imprisoned in 2011.[17] Considering the North Korean government does not release statistics to this effect leads one to wonder how much abuse is happening in the country that we don’t even know about yet.
Such a disgraceful track record of abuse as that of DPRK is not uncommon for most other collectivist countries on this list. DPRK is but a single entry in the long list of failed socialist states. It is a sad reflection on the mental development of the west that some delinquents still apologize for the crimes of this regime.
