“Voluntarily, these people are censoring each other, silencing each other, no force behind it. …this country is choosing to be silenced, choosing to give their rights away without any external force.”
~ Yeonmi Park
A North Korean defector said she viewed the US as a country of free thought and free speech – until she went to college here.
She has written a book, In Order to Live, about her journey to freedom as a 13-year-old with her family, crossing the Gobi desert to China and to South Korea. She went to school in the US in 2016.
The 27-year-old North Korean defector Yeonmi Park fears the United States’ future “is as bleak as North Korea” after she attended one of the country’s most prestigious universities, Columbia University.
The anti-Western sentiment in the class and the focus on political correctness made her think “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,” Park told Fox News. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”
She couldn’t believe how much censoring of herself that she had to do.
“I literally crossed the Gobi Desert to be free and I realized I’m not free, America’s not free,” she said.
Yeonmi Park fled North Korea at age 13 in 2007, a voyage that took her and her family to China and South Korea before she went to school in New York in 2016.
-
The Importance of Prayer: How a Christian Gold Company Stands Out by Defending Americans’ Retirement
Professors gave “trigger warnings,” and the first thing they taught her about was ‘safe spaces.’
“Every problem, they explained us, is because of white men.” Some of the discussions of white privilege reminded her of the caste system in her native country, where people were categorized based on their ancestors, she said.
Colonialism, preferred pronouns, great authors described as racists and bigots, filled her days at CU.
In North Korea, she learned about the “American Bastard.”
“I thought 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 told The Post.
Cancel culture and shouting down opposing voices is becoming an issue of self-censorship.
Park, who chronicled her escape from North Korea and life in the repressive regime in the 2015 memoir, said Americans seem willing to give their rights away not realizing they may never come back.
“Voluntarily, these people are censoring each other, silencing each other, no force behind it,” she said.
“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.”
“North Korea was pretty insane,” she said. “Like the first thing my mom taught me was don’t even whisper, the birds and mice could hear me.”
She told me the most dangerous thing that I had in my body was my tongue,” Park said. “So I knew how dangerous it was to say wrong things in a country.”
PEOPLE IN THE US ARE COLLECTIVELY GOING CRAZY
What she said about America is even more shocking.
“This a completely nuts, this is unbelievable,” she said. “I don’t know why people are collectively going crazy like this or together at the same time.”
“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.”
In North Korea, they didn’t have access to the truth, but Americans do.
wpDiscuz
