Again, the World’s socialist tyrants demonstrate their contempt for humanity.

What the world should be learning from this terrible loss of at least 60,000 people in the cyclone that hit Burma last week is that tyrannies kill more surely than any freak of weather.

If Cyclone Nargis had struck not Rangoon, but Melbourne or Tokyo, it is unlikely more than a few dozen people, if that, would have died. And that’s because we are free, and rich - as free people tend to be with capitalism. Even Bangkok would have survived this far, far easier. But in Burma as many as 100,000 are now feared dead - victims… of a tyranny that has left them poor and defenceless.

Burma… was once the rice-bowl of South-East Asia, but in 1962 a bunch of generals took over with a misty-eyed plan to impose on their 50 million people the “Burmese Way to Socialism”. Their brand of politics was of the kind still distressingly popular at [universities], and produced exactly the misery it’s inflicted from Cuba to Russia. The economy collapsed, and Burma went from bread-basket to basket-case. No wonder so many people today still live in shacks and shanties that were no protection against last Friday’s high winds and storm surge.

But Burma’s state-owned media, one of the crudest propaganda outfits I’ve seen, issued no mass alerts. Indeed, illegal Voice of America broadcasts probably did more to warn Burma’s civilians to take shelter than did Burma’s own radio station.

Even now, the junta is killing people with its paranoia. Disaster assessment teams and helicopters from the United States have been blocked from coming in to prepare a huge rescue, and foreign aid teams not already in-country had their applications for visas stalled and aid shipments stopped.

So slow has the junta been to let in help, that French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, founder of aid group Medicins Sans Frontieres, suggested the UN Security Council adopt a resolution allowing aid to be flown into the country by force.