My VIP for this week is Yeonmi Park, a defector from North Korea. Park was only 13 years old when she and her family fled North Korea in 2007. They went to China and South Korea before she enrolled at Columbia University in New York in 2016. Now 27-years old, Park is talking about the lack of freedom that she found in America. “I literally crossed the Gobi Desert to be free and I realized I’m not free, America’s not free.”
Park was shocked when she realized
the amount of anti-Western sentiment in the classroom as well as the focus on
political correctness. Her immediate thought was “even North Korea isn’t this
nuts.”
I expected that I was paying this fortune,
all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to
think the way they want you to think…. I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought
America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North
Kore that I started worrying.
In an interview with the New York
Post, Park admitted that she was surprised that she was asked to do “this much
censoring of myself” at a university in the United States. Students at Columbia
were so sensitive that professors gave “trigger warnings” – sharing the possibly
offensive words from the readings in advance – to help students decide if it
was safe for them to do the reading or even be in class during the discussions
about it.
Going to Columbia, the first thing I learned was “safe space.” Every problem, they explained [to] us, is because of white men.
The discussions about white
privilege reminded her of the caste system in North Korea, which categorized
people according to their ancestors. A teacher discussing Western Civilization
asked if the students were sensitive to the topic, and most of the students
raised their hands. Some were offended by the “colonial” slant in the
discussion. Even though Park speaks at least three languages, the idea of preferred
pronouns caused her to panic. Park was even chided for her enjoyment of the
writings of Jane Austen.
I said, “I love those books.” I thought it
was a good thing. Then she said, “Did you know those writers had a colonial
mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.
Park thought that “North Koreans were
the only people who hated Americans, but turns out there are a lot of people
hating this country in this country.” She likens cancel culture and shouting
down opposing voices to self-censorship. In 2015, Park wrote a book about her
life in North Korea and her escape from her native country – In Order to
Live. She said that Americans are giving up their rights without realizing
that they may never get them back. “Voluntarily, these people are censoring
each other, silencing each other, no force behind it.”
Other times (in history) there’s a
military coup d’etat, like a force comes in taking your rights away and
silencing you. But this country is choosing to be silenced, choosing to give
their rights away….
This [is] completely nuts, this is
unbelievable. I don’t know why people are collectively going crazy like this or
together at the same time.
Park has a difficult time understanding
how people can give up their rights when they have so much information
available to them. It is different in North Korea because the people do not
have access to the internet and limited exposure to the world. “In some ways
they (in the US) are brainwashed. Even though there’s evidence so clearly in
front of their eyes they can’t see it.”
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