Jose Gracchus

Check this out.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/nuisance-t...07#post2171807

http://www.revleft.com/vb/socialism-...37#post2162337

David

You know, just for you, I flipped through the book to see what it said :P

"During the winter holidays, there was also a dung quota to fulfil. To do this we had to carry six whole carts of faecal matter to the school, collected from public or private latrines. But we had to be careful not to choose just any old excrement. We needed human turds, the only ones that bore the label 'manure' in the eyes of our teachers. In extremis, dog turds were tolerated as well. But cowpats, horse manure and the liquid feaces of pigs or poultry were not acceptable. That said, we weren't adverse to adding small quantities of forbidden excrement to bulk up our quotas because, scour the streets of the city though we did, dog poo was not easy to find, not least because adults collected it to fertilize their own private pots of land. Once I nearly came to blows with a neighbor over a piece of dog shit!"

Hyok Kang, This Is Paradise! (2005), p. 56.

I hope you weren't just about to have a meal...

Well, it's a true story in the sense that I didn't make it up out of the blue! I remember reading it in one of those books by refugees (This is Paradise!, by Hyok Kang) that are published on quite a regular basis. Whilst there are, even without being a Stalinist supporter of North Korea, good reasons to question the veracity of those accounts, as well as their ability to represent conditions across the entire country, I think it's pretty believable that kids would be organized to do such a thing. Tbh, I think it speaks more to the desperation of the government to avoid total economic collapse, and in that sense is a sensible emergency measure.