It is Imperative a North Korean Refugee’s Voice is Heard

“It (her time in the Ivy League) was chaos. It felt like the regression in civilization.”

(Yeonmi Park)

 

Yeonmi Park doesn’t call herself a refugee because she doesn’t believe in victimhood, but if anyone deserves to be a legitimate refugee, she fits the bill.

She is a defector from North Korea who is blowing the whistle on American universities, and America’s direction these days toward a political system she risked her life to escape as a young teen.

Frankly, she is risking her life again by speaking so forcefully against the educational system ruling America right now.

Before I read this story at Fox News this morning, I had plans to write something else.  However, Park’s story contrasts so sharply with the post I wrote yesterday about a Somali refugee victim, a social justice warrior, who wants to turn America into Somalia, the hellhole country she supposedly escaped.

Seattle: A Decade after Threatening to Blow Up a School Bus, Somali Refugee Running for County Council

Honestly I fear for Park in the present climate where xenophobic and racist African Americans are attacking Asians on the streets most especially in New York City.

From Fox News (hat tip: Paul):

North Korean defector says ‘even North Korea was not this nuts’ after attending Ivy League school

As American educational institutions continue to be called into question, a North Korean defector fears the United States’ future “is as bleak as North Korea” after she attended one of the country’s most prestigious universities.

Yeonmi Park has experienced plenty of struggle and hardship, but she does not call herself a victim.

In her 2015 memoir “she described what it took to survive in one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships and the harrowing journey to freedom.”

One of several hundred North Korean defectors settled in the United States, Park, 27, transferred to Columbia University from a South Korean university in 2016 and was deeply disturbed by what she found.

“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 said in an interview with 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.”

Those similarities include anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness.

Yeonmi saw red flags immediately upon arriving at the school.

During orientation, she was scolded by a university staff member for admitting she enjoyed classic literature such as Jane Austen.

“I said ‘I love those books.’ I thought it was a good thing,” recalled Park.

“Then she said, ‘Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.’”

[….]

After getting into a number of arguments with professors and students, eventually Yeonmi “learned how to just shut up” in order to maintain a good GPA and graduate.

[….]

Having come to America with high hopes and expectations, Yeonmi expressed her disappointment.

“You guys have lost common sense to degree that I as a North Korean cannot even comprehend,” she said.

“Where are we going from here?” she wondered. “There’s no rule of law, no morality, nothing is good or bad anymore, it’s complete chaos.”

“I guess that’s what they want, to destroy every single thing and rebuild into a Communist paradise.”

There is more, read it all.