Having learned of Yeonmi Park via Bari Weiss’ Free Press a couple of weeks ago, I was eager to relate her story, but my computer crashed and I was forced into silence. Back on line now, I’m sure you will find her as inspiring as have I.
Born in North Korea in 1993, her childhood was a never ending horror story. As famine took the lives of over three million North Koreans in the late 90s, she recounts how she would look for cockroaches to eat while on the way to school. At age 9, she witnessed the execution of a friend’s mother who had violated government imposed rules of political correctness by daring to watch a Hollywood movie! A few years later she was sold into sex slavery in China where she was raped repeatedly. Escaping to South Korea, she was ultimately able to make it to the U.S. in 2014. Now a citizen of that country, she just recently published her second book, “While Time Remains.” It’s theme and her intellectual evolution over the last 9 years are truly instructive.
Curious and eager to learn, Yeonmi at first avidly embraced the narrative endorsed by both her Columbia University instructors and such mainstream papers as the N.Y. Times and Washington Post which she read religiously. When awakened by a friend and told that Donald Trump had won the 2016 election, she wept, convinced that her adopted country was now destined to become a fascist dictatorship no more evolved than the one she had just escaped! Yet in the years since, her exposure to the woke Left and her extensive reading of Western literature have led her to so radically alter her views that she now contends everything she had naively accepted as truth upon her arrival in America was actually propaganda no less obnoxious than the self-serving lies endlessly repeated by the dictators of North Korea. In a recent interview with the N.Y. Post, she expressed her outrage with the tendency of “progressives” to evade rational debate with their opponents by simply dismissing or indeed cancelling them in a volley of insulting epithets: “Of course, we’re not putting people in front of a firing squad in America now, but their livelihoods, their dignity, their reputations, and their humanity are under attack. When we tell people not to talk, we’re censoring their thinking as well. And when you can’t think, you’re a slave, a brainwashed puppet.” Such, she says, is the status to which the West’s contemporary “intellectual elites” would reduce all those they simplistically denounce as populists.
Befuddled by the anti-Western, anti-Capitalist, anti-Patriarchal rhetoric that pervades most “progressive” discourse, Yeonmi points out the irony of the fact that while she was sold into sexual slavery as a young girl in Communist China, many of her classmates at Columbia felt victimized by the refusal of others to address them with the pronouns of their choice! They seemed, she said, more intent on earning “oppression points” than doing the work necessary to the achievement of their goals. Now a staunch opponent of the “woke” mentality, she insists in her book that the Left’s exploitation of Identity Politics and the notion of Collective Guilt is ominously similar to the tactics used by the North Korean government to demonize if not oppress those it considers a threat to its dictatorship.
The point of “While Time Remains” is that America is going through a cultural revolution antagonistic to many of the fundamental Principles upon which it was founded. While certainly not idealizing the country’s history, Yeonmi seems baffled by the Left’s inability to acknowledge that it was respect for those very Principles which has ultimately been responsible for the enormous progress made in the realm of Social Justice over the last 250 years, progress utterly unavailable to hundreds of millions in other parts of the world. Traditional Humanists [“conservatives”], she insists, must fight to expose the intellectual and moral vacuity of “woke” self-indulgence and those too stupid or cowardly to challenge it, even though it may cost them their reputations or, indeed, their jobs. Her thesis is of course no less true here in Canada. As I have said in previous blogs, I have a number of thoughtful, intelligent friends employed in the public arena who dare not express their views on a variety of issues for fear of being fired. That those responsible for this Ideological Dictatorship call themselves liberals, is horribly ironic. That a courageous young woman who grew up in an Absolute Dictatorship and was ultimately sold into sexual slavery, refuses to view herself as a mere victim, is compelling evidence of the sort of moral and intellectual transcendence to which each of us ought to aspire.