North Korean Defector on the Fragility of Freedom

Is America on the road to ruin?

North Korean defector Yeonmi Park. (Jack Wang/The Epoch Times)

“The tactics used here to control people are the same tactics the North Korean regime used to control and enslave us,” North Korean defector Yeonmi Park says.

In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek spoke with Park, author of the new book “While Time Remains: A North Korean Girl’s Search for Freedom in America.” They discussed the victimhood pseudo-religion that she sees taking over America, the manipulation of language, and the fight to preserve the ideals of this country.

Jan Jekielek: Yeonmi, congratulations on your new book, “While Time Remains.” Please tell our viewers what you mean by time running out.

Yeonmi Park: The subtitle of the book is “A North Korean Defector’s Search for Freedom in America.” I actually didn’t expect to come to America and have to look for freedom. America was the land of the free and the home of the brave. Unfortunately, I went to Columbia University, where I was reminded of a lot of things that I saw in North Korea. Americans can’t recognize those threats because they’ve never lived in a truly oppressive country.

So I wrote this book to wake up America to see these threats. The tactics used here to control people are the same tactics the North Korean regime used to control and enslave us.

Mr. Jekielek: In our last interview, I asked if you think it’s possible for America to become like North Korea. Do you still think that’s possible?

Ms. Park: It’s very possible. Living through the pandemic, that’s when I really understood that America is not immune to oppression. This country can totally become like China or North Korea if individuals stop defending their liberty.

Mr. Jekielek: In your book, you reference Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s quote, “The line between good and evil cuts through every human heart.” In 1978, he gave the Harvard Commencement speech. He had exposed the Soviet Union for what it was and had won the Nobel Prize. He was this hero coming out of a very despotic regime. But after this Harvard address, he wasn’t so popular anymore. The people running the show were expecting him to tell them how great they were and thank them for helping him. Instead, he basically said, “You have some great things here, but I don’t think I would wish your system on my home country.” People were shocked.

In your case, you could have easily been popular as well, going to the Met Gala every year. You talk about that in this book and what a surreal experience that was. But you chose to be a truth teller, and that caused you some trouble.

Ms. Park: You’re saying I could be the darling of this movement of victimhood. I’m a woman. I was raped. I was sold and I could complain all day about how horrible men are. Because the men I met then were rapists. I can totally make the case for the world that men are truly horrible.

When I was trying to write my second book, a lot of people were trying to force me to write a book on how hard it is to be a woman or on how horrible America’s treatment is toward black men, and compare the American prison system with the North Korean concentration system to show how America is brutal towards black men. Of course, if I had written that book, I would be on the New York Times Best Seller list right now.

When I was trying to do my audiobook, we couldn’t find a narrator. They would keep bailing out, and they would not want to narrate my book. Eventually, we got a lady and she wanted to use a pseudonym, after we went through 11 people. Just finding a narrator who wanted to narrate the book, not even the writing of the book, was a real challenge.

This is a really shocking thing to see how Americans are afraid and not acknowledging they are living in a somewhat oppressive country. Of course, the extent is not like North Korea and China. I’m not saying that. But we are on that path if we don’t turn back. We are getting closer every day, especially with the education system, and especially in the current climate where they can say your speech is violence. If it’s politically incorrect, then you are spreading hate.

Mr. Jekielek: You say, “My life’s purpose is to fight for human rights, especially for North Koreans.” A number of the people at Columbia where you went to school and many other places would say: “We’re fighting for human rights. We need to be safe and secure in our thoughts. We don’t want to be exposed to dangerous things.” They might imagine themselves as fighting for human rights. What do you think about that?

Ms. Park: I was studying economics for the first two years. For the remaining two years, I studied human rights and then got a human rights degree. It was really shocking sitting in the classroom. The professors or students would say that health care is a human right, the rights of LGBTQ+ are human rights, [and] universal income is a human right.

What human rights mean to me has currently lost meaning. I’m so sorry to say that. When people say I’m a human rights activist, that’s not what I mean. Human rights for me are the right to pursue your life in a land where there is no infringement of your speech, your religion, your movement, and your thoughts. It isn’t about me demanding that the country give me free education, free health care, free housing, and free universal income. It isn’t about entitlement.

But now in America, human rights means that feelings rise over facts, that if I feel gender fluid or like some unicorn or a cat, then I have a right to be respected for that. I don’t even know what to say to that. It’s a mental condition.

If you go against political correctness, you lose your dignity, your character is assassinated, and you lose your livelihood. The elite decides what we can talk about and what we need to believe.

Mr. Jekielek: A few days ago, The New York Times published an op-ed, “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?” Anyone following actual scientific papers already knew this was the case. But there were a lot of people out there enforcing compliance. You have a child in the New York school system, so you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Ms. Park: My son was 2 years old when these lockdowns began. I couldn’t afford not to be working, and he had to go to day care. They would demand that he wear a mask for up to eight hours a day in the day care.

Then they would open dog parks, but they would shut down the children’s playgrounds in the summer when there’s a warm breeze and sunshine. They said, “We need to stay safe.” I was thinking, “Dogs have more rights than my son right now.”

Many people were shunned during that time. If you asked a single question about mainstream orthodoxy, then you were marked as a conspiracy theorist, a danger to public health. You lose your job, you get banned, you get censored. We did this to our own people in the name of public health and the public good. In the name of this one thing, the government destroyed so many lives.

Mr. Jekielek: I’m reminded of the power of propaganda in North Korea, which is really unbelievable.

Ms. Park: The North Korean policies are beyond evil, beyond anything that we have seen. They chose to starve their own population. They would choose to let them die from starvation, even though they had every resource to feed them. Until this day, Kim Jong-un uses the same tactic to control the population.

Of course, government is a necessary evil. We need it to keep us safe. We need it to protect us, and we give them power for our military and some public things that we need to run. But we need to keep it as limited as we can.

The thing is, a lot of people think that somehow the government looks out for the best interest for all of us. As long as we give them more power and let them keep growing, somehow they’re going to bring us a paradise, which is exactly what the North Korean regime promised. But they took everything and gave nothing back and made us slaves.

Right now, there are so many Biden promises, like the student debt forgiveness, similar to the same tactics that Kim Il-sung used to buy the votes and become a dictator. When the government keeps promising free things, that becomes very dangerous.

Mr. Jekielek: Years ago, someone told me that when you’re getting Facebook for free, the reason is you’re the product.

Ms. Park: You’re the product, yes.

Mr. Jekielek: I want to finish up about the masks. It feels like we’re going to cruise right through the accountability for what was done.

Ms. Park: Yes, suddenly they’re like: “Oops, we made a mistake. Let’s move on.”

This can be a pattern if we let them go like this. There should be consequences for harming people, and they actually harmed so many people.

Mr. Jekielek: What this really speaks to is the cozy relationship between big government, Big Tech, and big education, all these different structures, including big business.

Ms. Park: And mainstream media.

Mr. Jekielek: Mainstream media, yes, and Big Pharma, and all of them working together. It really amounts to a massive amount of power and the ability to shape our perceptions.

Ms. Park: And it’s getting harder to find the truth. They keep burying the truth. That’s what they do in schools, and even in universities. And if you look for truth, then you are a bigot.

In any dictatorship, the first thing they go for is the media and education. Every country did that during this kind of revolution. This is what people don’t understand or are just starting to understand—this is our moment of cultural revolution in America.

The tactics are the same. The media gets compromised. The education system gets compromised. Hollywood produces propaganda, and scientists cannot question the science. That completely defeats the purpose of science.

We don’t have a lot of time left. What institution is there right now that is not under a threat from the unification of all these institutions who demand that we follow their commandments?

Mr. Jekielek: A lot of people have been what you would call black-pilled, which means they are thinking to themselves, “What’s the point? I’ve tried.”

Ms. Park: Americans are the freest individuals in human history. No citizens of a country have ever been this prosperous and had this many rights and a bigger voice. There are people in North Korea who do not even know what it means to have a voice. Americans certainly do.

If a North Korean can come to America not speaking a word of English, can become who I am today, anybody in America can make a difference. But that mind of perseverance is lacking. That’s why so many people become pessimistic and nihilistic. Somehow, the world becomes pointless. Fighting for truth and justice is somehow a pointless game.

There’s so much to be grateful for, so much to be excited about, and so many ways to make a difference, but this current culture is so negative, especially to young minds. It’s horrifying.

You can complain about a million different things and the list will never run out. But if you decide to be thankful today, to be grateful, that list is never going to run out either. This is like what the Bible taught us. When I asked God how to be happy, he asked me to learn gratitude. Happiness only comes when you’re grateful.

Americans have lost that gratitude. In this culture, they almost demand that you be a victim. They ask you to be oppressed and miserable. This is like when people were asking me: “Why are you so normal? Why are you so functional?”

We’re not celebrating the victorious life; we’re celebrating the misery. We’ve stopped telling people: “You are strong. You can persevere and be resilient.” Instead, we’re teaching them to be victims and to complain about literally everything and anything, and how not always having a problem is a problem.

Mr. Jekielek: In your book, you said that an increased Chinese Communist Party influence around the world translates into an increase of North Korean reality around the world. Can you explain what you mean here?

Ms. Park: People really don’t understand the danger of the CCP. The Chinese regime has been expanding through America, Africa, to the Middle East in Iran, and to all these other countries. They started giving them scholarships. They are offering to build roads and companies and factories, they make them indebted, and then they move in.

For example, in North Korea, the mining towns gave the CCP a 200-year lease, or a 300-year lease. Do you really think 300 years later, North Korea will have anything left when they take back the land? No way—it has become Chinese. Their agenda is really to make the North Korean reality a norm in the world.

Right now, as long as America stands as the defending democracy, people still understand an alternative way of life is possible. A lot of Chinese people want to come to America. They know a superior system exists here. But once the American system goes down, then what do we have? China is left with all this influence, and the entire world is under its power.

Then, what is going to be the norm of our world is going to be the way of China and the way of North Korea. That will truly be a time when humanity will forget that this American kind of life was ever possible. When I was born in North Korea, I didn’t even know that I was oppressed. I did not know that life could be different, because that’s all I knew. In a few generations, that is easily possible.

China has given money to Harvard, Columbia, MIT, and all the schools, so they cannot criticize China. After I wrote my new book, there was a producer in Hollywood who was trying to make a movie about my first book, and he sent me a script. I was reading the script, and I could not believe it. It says that when I got to China, they gave me refuge, and that was my promised land. They protected me.

So I called up the producer: “What are you talking about? This is not what happened.” He said, “This is the only way we can make a movie about North Korea in the current Hollywood.” That’s when I understood how many messages had to be altered.

The depth of this infiltration from China is so deep that I can’t even fathom it. I don’t think most Americans really understand how deep this is, the infiltration into our system, and it’s a perfect time for China to infiltrate because Americans are so divided and have lost perspective on what’s important in life.

Mr. Jekielek: You have this one term in the book, “The warriors of light.” Tell us about that.

Ms. Park: An individual is beautiful. I really believe we are unique, and all of us have warriors inside with that beautiful light that we can carry if we recognize it and get in touch with ourselves.

You can stop looking at social media and read more books and find your community. If you are not going to church, create your community. Stay connected to your family and look after each other, and really get back to reading books. There are so many great Western minds. John Stuart Mill wrote “On Liberty.” These books still move my heart, but nobody else seems to read them. No other system, no civilization ever thought that individuals deserve rights like we have now.

Mr. Jekielek: Some people who feel demoralized might say, “Sure, Yeonmi, this is all very interesting, but nothing I do is going to make a difference.” What’s your message to them?

Ms. Park: To me, saving the world doesn’t mean you will be a Spider-Man superhero. If you learn how to take care of yourself physically and mentally, then you can start taking care of your family. Once that is in order, then you can take care of your community, and then bigger things. But it starts within you. Maybe all you can handle is just yourself, and that’s fine. That’s what I teach my son.

We don’t need to be these virtuous beings who keep talking about how we need to save everybody and make everybody have equality of outcome. All that it takes is just taking care of yourself and not being a burden to somebody else, and that can be a noble cause.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.