A North Korean Perspective on Woke America. By Auguste Meyrat.
North Korean refugee/YouTuber Yeonmi Park has written her second book While Time Remains. While her first book In Order to Live tells the harrowing story of how she escaped North Korea, While Time Remains checks back with Park 10 years later as she lives the life of a high-profile activist in the United States. …
Park starts her book by describing her experience as a student at Columbia University. …
Whereas in North Korea, people were starving, ugly, and desperately poor, Americans in New York struggled with overeating and beauty standards, and had so much money that simply managing it was an industry in itself. …
Park encounters a good number of snowflakes seeking “safe spaces” to vent their grievances and attends workshops on sexual consent. Seen from the eyes of a former sex slave who has suffered all kinds of privations, Park describes this environment as nothing less than a tool of propaganda: “Columbia’s ‘safe space’ was elite code language for restrictions on ideological heterogeneity.” In the interest of safeguarding feelings, nonconformity is treated as aggression and thus must be erased. Instead of a “marketplace of ideas where students had unlimited possibilities to think differently and push the boundaries of the status quo,” the university felt more like “a cult.”
Somehow, Park is able to make it through the woke nonsense of college, get married, have a child, and move to Chicago. … Despite hearing the constant drumbeat about the evils of Trump and racism in the United States, she finds these positions challenged as she observes the George Floyd riots on her block, and she herself becomes the victim of a mugging. Because her assailants were black women, bystanders simply accused her of racism when she cried out for help.
This event moved Park to question many of the leftist narratives she had come to adopt, prompting her to consider the perils of socialism and the elite class that hypocritically promotes it: “[the elite] apparently don’t see the United States as the predominantly middle-class country it is . . . but as a caste system in which it’s possible to accumulate wealth only through privilege and systemic abuse of the lower classes, never through hard work or innovation.” As she witnessed in North Korea, this is exactly what happens in a socialist system where elites really do make it to the top through political intrigue and exploiting the lower classes. Presumably, this is much easier than actually working and innovating, which is why the main beneficiaries of capitalism continue endorsing socialism.
Then there is the matter of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has paid off the majority of American elites. … They are the ones who keep the Kim regime in power. Time and again, Park would give speeches to the world’s most powerful people, all of whom said they wanted to help her, but she held back because of their economic and political commitments with China: “The fact is, a large segment of America’s elite classes and most productive industries have been purchased by the Chinese.”
Park’s criticisms of the CCP caused her to lose speaking engagements and have her YouTube videos demonetized: “As I became more publicly critical of the Chinese government—mostly for its role in the sexual enslavement of North Korean women, hardly a ‘controversial’ position — there was increasing pressure for previously friendly organizations to shut me out, on the basis that I was too controversial.”
And just like that, what was once a powerful voice against a mass crime against humanity was snuffed out and relegated to the margins.
