Topics: North Korea, World News, US News
A North Korean defector and human rights activist has lashed out over recent systematic oppression of free ideas and speech.
But Yeonmi Park not pointing the finger where you'd think.
She's not aiming her claims at autocrat North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.This time she is accusing America of the same sort of folly as her homeland.
Park defected from North Korea as a child in 2007 with her mother and sister.
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She's lived in the United States since 2014 and has published two books.
Her memoir about getting out of the repressive North is called In Order To Live and her second title, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America, dropped in February.
It's the latter that is ruffling feathers on social media as the human rights activist is calling into question America's own 'woke' culture and what that means for freedom.
In her latest works, she writes: "I draw on my knowledge and experience of North Korea to illuminate — not exaggerate — threats to liberty in America. And I do see threats on the horizon."
She says she needs people 'to help save our country', before claiming 'woke' ideals are destroying American life.
She expressed similar concerns in her memoir, revealing to her readers and fans that students in the US were being told what to think the same way North Korean children are.
In her follow-up book, Park maintains that an American education is similar to a North Korean one in the way that children are taught to 'accept something so obviously idiotic and untrue as nevertheless being a fact'.
She adds that children in both the US and North Korea are taught 'that they are no individuals'.
Park writes: "I can already hear my American friends’ eyes rolling into the backs of their heads, but I ask you, dear reader, how much more insane is all that than what they teach 18-year-olds in the Ivy League?"
Park, who graduated from Columbia University in 2020 adds: "And, like the elite in North Korea, the American elite used their new ideology to cancel and de-platform political and ideological dissidents."
Speaking to The New York Post, Park said she never could quite understand that not having a problem can be a problem.
"They need to make injustice out of thin air or a problem out of nowhere, because they haven’t experienced anything like what other people are facing in the world," she said of her Ivy League cohort.
Americans aren't taking her point of view too well on social media.
very confused at the infantilization and memeing of yeonmi park as some sort of girlboss grifter when she’s compared “woke culture” in America to totalitarianism in N. Korea unironically. she’s a conservative puppet and knows exactly what she’s doing to incite fear and division
— y a z h i ٩( 'ω' )و ℓ ⁷ (@sugapearls) May 14, 2023
I loved Yeonmi Park's first book so much I just checked out her second book and... She's drunk the Fox News Kool aid. Absolute weapon of the conservatives, now. Transphobic, homophobic, pro-gun, anti-'woke'. She escaped brainwashing in NK just to go to America & get brainwashed.
— A. E. Dooland ✍️📚🏳️🌈 (@Asynca) May 13, 2023
This is Yeonmi Park. She’s a North Korean refugee who lies about her experience to grift for conservatives by saying the woke left is more insane than North Korea
— Kenny🔆 (@gaslightyourmom) May 13, 2023
It has reached a point that she's been turned into a meme; designed to poke fun and shed doubt on her stories of growing up in North Korea.
One social media user slammed her, writing: "Very confused at the infantilization and meme-ing of Yeonmi Park as some sort of girlboss grifter when she compared 'woke culture' in America to totalitarianism in N. Korea unironically. She’s a conservative puppet and knows exactly what she’s doing to incite fear and division."
A second added: "She’s a North Korean refugee who lies about her experience to grift for conservatives by saying the woke left is more insane than North Korea."
A third commented: "I loved Yeonmi Park's first book so much I just checked out her second book and... She's drunk the Fox News Kool Aid. Absolute weapon of the conservatives, now. Transphobic, homophobic, pro-gun, anti-'woke'. She escaped brainwashing in North Korea just to go to America and get brainwashed."
Well, it sounds like her anti-woke ideas are going down like a lead balloon.
But at least she can say them in the 'Land of the Free'. Or can she?
