A North Korean defector warns that ‘wokeism’ in American Universities is suppressing the freedom of speech in the country.
Yeon-mi Park, 27, is a North Korean rebel and political commentator whose family fled the economic policies of North Korea to China in 2007 and settled in South Korea in 2009, before moving to the United States in 2014.
Yeon-mi was just a teenager when they escaped North Korea and now she was attending Columbia University and says that she is seeing a lot of resemblances between the dictatorial government she grew up in and the education she is now receiving in the United States.
The North Korean rebel and her mother fled North Korea to China over the frozen Yalu River in 2007, when she was just 13, and the two were sold into slavery by human traffickers.
They were able to run away to Mongolia with the help of Christian missionaries and marched through the Gobi Desert to find refuge in South Korea, where Park, now 27, attended college before transferring to Columbia in 2016.
“I literally crossed the Gobi Desert to be free and I realized I’m not free, America’s not free,” she told Fox News. “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.”
“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.”
The 27-year-old shares that her professors would give them “trigger warnings” and let them choose readings and discussions.
“Going to Columbia, the first thing I learned was “safe space,” she told the New York Post.
Yeon-mi said that she was excited to learn more about history when she attended school at Columbia because that subject was discouraged in North Korea.
But when the discussion went on about Western Civilization and when her professor asked if her classmates had a problem with the class topic, her fellow students said that there was a “colonial” perspective.
“Every problem, they explained us, is because of white men,” Yeon-mi said, and it reminded her of her home country where people were labeled based on their ancestors.
Yeon-mi told FOX News that during her orientation, the class was asked who likes classical books.
“I said, “I love those books,” I thought it was a good thing,” Yeon-mi recalled.
Then her professor responded: “Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.”
Yeon-mi claims that her courses were filled with “anti-American sentiment” that reminds her of her childhood in North Korea, where students are allowed to refer to Americans as “American bastard.”
“The math problems would say, “there are four American bastards, you kill two of them, how many American bastards are left to kill?” she described.
“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,” Yeon-mi said.
She also added that she was confused using “preferred pronouns” and would sometimes say “he” or “she” by mistake but claims that she didn’t mean to be disrespectful to her colleagues.
“It felt like the regression in civilization,” she said.
Eventually, she said that she “learned how to just shut up” and focused on getting good grades to graduate, however, she said that “even North Korea is not this nuts.”
“North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy,” Yeon-mi added. “I don’t know why people are collectively going crazy like this or together at the same time.”
Yeon-mi told that most of the classes at Columbia would teach the students about how white men have ruined everything.
“Because I have seen oppression, I know what it looks like,” she said, adding that when she was 13, she saw people dying of starvation.
“These kids keep saying how they’re oppressed, how much injustice they’ve experienced, they don’t know how hard it is to be free,” she said of her classmates. “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.”
Yeon-mi also explained that in America, people are dying to give their rights and power to the administration.
“That is what scares me the most,” she said. “Power can corrupt, that’s just the nature of power.”
“In North Korea, I literally believed that my Dear Leader was starving,” she added. “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,” she explained. “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,” Yeon-mi concluded. “People see things, but they’ve just completely lost the ability to think critically.”
She stated that she cannot comprehend how could it possibly happen in the United States.
“North Koreans, we don’t have Internet, we don’t have access to any of these great thinkers, we don’t know anything,” she said. “But here, while having everything, people choose to be brainwashed. And they deny it.”
In her article, Yeon-mi advised that the Americans were censoring and silencing each other through cancel culture.
“Voluntarily, these people are censoring each other, silencing each other, no force behind it,” she added. “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.”
Yeon-mi fears that America will end up just like North Korea.
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