North Korean defector says ‘even North Korea was not this nuts’ after attending Ivy League school
Thomas McDonald
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A North Korean defector has issued a warning to the United States that communist ideology being taught in school is going to ruin the nation’s future after she attended Columbia University.
“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. “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.”
On her trek out of North Korea to come to America, Park and her mother were sold into slavery, Yeonmi for roughly $300 and her mother for $100. She says there are so many others who fought harder to get out of North Korea who did not make it.
“I literally crossed through the middle of the Gobi Desert to be free. But what I did was nothing, so many people fought harder than me and didn’t make it,” Yeonmi Park, who fled North Korea at the age of 13, said.
Upon arriving in the United States she transferred to Columbia University and says she immediately saw red flags.
Park recalled being scolded during orientation by a faculty member for admitting she enjoyed the classic literary works of authors such as Jane Austen. “I said ‘I love those books.’ I thought it was a good thing,” Park said.
“Then she [the faculty member] said, ‘Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.’”
She also was shocked and confused by the students and faculty’s obsession with gender and “preferred pronouns.”
“English is my third language. I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say ‘he’ or ‘she’ by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them ‘they’? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?” “It was chaos,” she said. “It felt like the regression in civilization.”
“Even North Korea is not this nuts,” she proclaimed. “North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.”
Yeonmi says she eventually learned to just “shut up” in order to retain her good grades and high GPA. She says she got into numerous arguments with professors and students before coming to that realization.
In 2015, Park published her memoir entitled “In Order To Live,” where she goes into detail about her struggle to survive in North Korea under leader Kim Jong-Un and her journey to freedom in the United States.
“The people here are just dying to give their rights and power to the government. That is what scares me the most,” she said. She also accused American colleges and universities of stripping people’s ability to think critically.
“In North Korea, I literally believed that my Dear Leader [Kim Jong-un] was starving,” she recalled. “He’s the fattest guy – how can anyone believe that? And then somebody showed me a photo and said ‘Look at him, he’s the fattest guy. Other people are all thin.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God, why did I not notice that he was fat?’ Because I never learned how to think critically.”
“That is what is happening in America,” she added. “People see things but they’ve just completely lost the ability to think critically.”
“North Koreans, we don’t have Internet, we don’t have access to any of these great thinkers, we don’t know anything. But here, while having everything, people choose to be brainwashed. And they deny it.”
“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 asked. “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.”