My professor was assistant to the man that came up with the statistic that one million Koreans died in the Arduous March

I’m a “political science” major about to graduate from an American public university. This semester I took a class on politics in Asia and today we started Korea. To my surprise, my professor told the class that he was the assistant to Andrew Natsios, the man that came up with the statistic that one million Koreans had died in the DPRK from the famine in the 90s. It turns out that Natsios was dedicated to bringing the number of total dead to one million because he figured anything less would go unnoticed. He wanted his research to be front page material on the New York Times etc. My professor said that in order to come up with such a number, Natsios found a statistic from some monks in a village in the DPRK where 20% of the village had died as a result of the famine. Natsios of course completely trusts this source and doesn't question whether the monks had any training in demography whatsoever. Natsios goes on to multiply that percentage by the number of villages/towns in the DPRK to come up with a large enough number that could be added to his other statistics to bring the total up to one million dead.The reason my professor even brought this up was because he remembers very vividly the day Natsios was finally able to justify claiming that one million had died because he was there. My professor said Natsios was an ideologically driven anti-communist dedicated to arguing that communism causes famines. When Natsios played with the numbers enough to finally reach one million, he saw Natsios gleefully jump for joy in excitement. Natsios went around the office exclaiming that he had done it! He had proven that one million had died as a result of communism in the DPRK!Just imagine being this excited to find out that one million had died in a famine. As I heard this, I immediately recognized how similar it sounded to the other famines we hear about. A disaster happens that results in vast numbers of people dyeing but instead of empathizing with the dead, the famine is politicized and used as a statistic for anti-communists. Let’s be clear here, these people don’t give a shit about those who died. They’re simply interested in using their deaths as a card to play in their fight against communism."Americans accuse me through global media of causing starvation in this country, but they somehow forget to tell the world that their embargo stopped us from importing food." – Kim Jong-IlNatsios later went on to be head of USAID. via /r/communism https://ift.tt/2XZLAUb