While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

by Yeonmi Park

the American ruling class is also averse to letting good crises go to waste. Hence, when the Russiagate narrative collapsed, the anti-Trump coalition found a new way to maintain the state of emergency: racial wars, police brutality, and the various fronts of the woke war.

The right is ALL OVER the internet calling for race wars and discussing how to "train and prepare" for same, so not sure where Park gets off implying that's the left. Provably false. Police brutality is a thing just from a pure statistics standpoint, and people care about it. And as any normal person knows a lot of important things came out of the Russia investigation, so calling it Russiagate and implying it "collapsed" is throwing the baby out with the bathwater- again, purely in service of advancing the right's agenda to sweep absolutely everything about Trump under the rug and reinstall him as King dictator in totalum. Which prospect should frighten Park from firsthand experience and yet somehow she is more afraid of...something called a woke war-? Disingenuous in the extreme.

Critical race theory and antiracism share with Marxism-Leninism (and Juche, its North Korean offshoot) an arcane vocabulary and impenetrable set of ideas that serve less as a tool of political change than as a social sorting mechanism that keeps the governing class as separate as possible from ordinary people. In America after the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter revolution that followed, the elite started to force ordinary people and employees to take part in “diversity training” in order to internalize the official ideology of wokeism as a condition of education and employment. (In Mao’s China, these spectacles, in which ideological enemies were publicly humiliated and accused of crimes they didn’t commit, were called “struggle sessions” or “denunciation rallies.”)

Corporate diversity training is now akin to STRUGGLE SESSIONS where intellectuals were BEATEN TO DEATH by adolescents in front of their entire community! Does this person even strive to be taken seriously?? To allude to this comparison is to assume both that people have some passing familiarity enough to be horrified by the juxtaposition, but not enough to realize how UTTERLY WRONG it is. The 'impenetrable set of ideals' espoused by antiracism, to this reader's eye are: it's not enough to merely be "not" racist, in order to effect systemic change big enough to meaningfully undo literal centuries of oppression and injustice requires actively working in the opposite direction. Thus, *anti*racist, implying both direction and energized movement, rather than merely passive nonparticipation. ... and that idea is "impenetrable" to a Columbia graduate-? Let alone one who wrote that thing about truth in reporting being an "unaffordable luxury"-? Unhinged, truly.

The official American progressive ideology that went into overdrive in the summer of 2020 also shared with its North Korean counterpart a certain wild disingenuousness. In North Korea, it is not uncommon to see the well-fed son of a Party official lambast a farmer on the brink of starvation for insufficient loyalty to the Dear Leader. In America’s “racial reckoning” of 2020, it suddenly became possible, for example, for a white magazine editor to lecture a Black construction worker who planned to vote for the wrong presidential candidate for his “internalized racism.”

Again, who and where? The persistent intellectual dishonesty of MAKING UP these scenarios in service to vague trumped-up complaints cannot be borne. Point out this "white magazine editor"- and when you do, I'll also point out that he's very very likely talking down to that "black construction worker" on any and every topic because of *structural racism and systemic inequality* aka white supremacy, which is. a value of the RIGHT who you represent so willingly. In what universe is this "progressive ideology" stemming from the pandemic?!

“wokeness” now appears to be just an obnoxious rhetorical style that helps cover for something else: a coercive system administered by governing elites that demands adherence to an ever-expanding corpus of basically random sets of laws and regulations designed to keep the lower classes in check. If that doesn’t remind you of the communist dictatorship in North Korea, I don’t know what would.

What would? Excusing every proven fault and flaw and *actual crime* of an elected official and stumping tirelessly to reinstate him as ultimate power and authority when he has said repeatedly and often that he NEVER INTENDS TO STEP DOWN! That's what would remind me of North Korea, the literal same cult of personality emerging within america's borders. But sure, I guess to you it's diversity training. There's no even conversing with a mind this strange. Yet I feel duty-bound to point out, this incessant conflation of "wokeness" with "elites" which is the most ridiculous plank in the Republican platform ever. Anything you would call "woke" is absent in 95% of elected officials the country over, and very possibly more of the wealthy. While the left is pretty proud to be able to claim more actors/singers/entertainers than the right, it's still true that anyone with any kind of political or economic power is overwhelmingly likely to be fiscally if not socially conservative. So trying to leverage that into a worldview where, inexplicably, there's some massive governmental push to shove butterflies and rainbows down everyone's throat is again, unhinged. They just overturned Roe, did you not hear? Most conservative supreme court in our lifetime-? Literally how anyone can be out here complaining about "wokeness" is beyond me- unless it's just a smokescreen for 'I don't like how free all these plebes seem to feel lately and I want some boot to crush them'. Which it is.

What I still can’t understand is the behavior of the bystanders, none of whom thought to even vocally defend a young mother being assaulted in the street in front of her son, choosing instead to yell nonsense at her and egg on the attackers. For me, it was a sign of how far advanced the woke disease really was in America by that point,

You think that's because everyone around you assessed the situation and determined what, that a black girl being called a slur was more deserving of sympathy than an asian girl being mugged? You don't think it's far more likely, for instance, that the girl called you a racist to cover for her crime, and bystanders only took note of the yelling and not the non-obvious action of the mugging, which was over by the time the yelling started and they turned around? There's also something called the bystander effect, where people tend not to help if they see there are others around who also might help- something about not being sure whose responsibility it is and being afraid to stick their neck out. Studies show you get help in a crowd more effectively if you single out a person by pointing or using their name, make eye contact, and make a specific request like "You in the sweater, please call the police!" Really, do they not teach psychology at Columbia? Bc I learned that at a state school.

I have since reversed my position on these products, by the way, and now enjoy them both! And that’s the genius of capitalism. The secret behind all these seemingly silly products is that they wouldn’t exist in the first place unless they were meeting a need that ordinary people actually have. A demand exists in the market, producers meet that demand, and consumers benefit. A supply chain is set up, each node along it is compensated for its role, and businesses profit from the margin between the retail price and the cost of goods sold. An entire economic value chain, millions of little micro-economies, beautifully on display in every aisle and on every shelf of an American storefront.

The existence of multiple products in each category also meant that there was plenty of competition to fulfill the needs of American consumers. Most brands clearly competed with each other based not only on price but also on perceptions of quality, or additional features, or tactics, like savings through bulk purchasing.

Capitalism doesn’t just make products available to consumers, it has lifted billions of human beings out of poverty and starvation. It is also the most democratic and just system that human beings have so far invented.

If you don’t support child labor, for instance, you can refuse to purchase products that were made by children; if you want to support certain types of farming or manufacturing, you can buy products from companies that practice them; if you want to support an embattled foreign country, you can buy their imports.

underground economy, where human beings intuitively understand how to trade and barter like perfect capitalist merchants and captains of industry.

After a few weeks, I had enough money to pay back my mother, buy some candy, and buy another bottle of rice vodka to bribe the guard again. It was genius! I was eleven and had no education, and yet being an entrepreneur came naturally, as it does to many people, if given the freedom to do it.

learned something important from my short time as a market vendor: Once you start trading for yourself, you start thinking for yourself. And that is why capitalism is so inimical to authoritarianism. Self-professed enemies of capitalism claim that their opposition is to inequality, or to injustice, or to exploitation—all of which of course are worse in socialist systems than in capitalist ones. But the true aim of anticapitalism is not justice or social betterment—it is to narrow the boundaries within which people are capable of thinking for themselves.

Of course successful entrepreneurs should be rewarded with the monetary profits of the social goods and services they create, whether those rewards are in the millions or billions. To someone like me who was born in North Korea, but also to billions of other people around the world, the values of entrepreneurship, free enterprise, starting a business, and doing well are sacred—and there is no limit to how much good they can do.

Self-identified socialists in state and federal government and elsewhere criticize the American system for being too favorable to what they called the “millionaire class”

People ideologically aligned with Ocasio-Cortez and others like her often cite the vulnerability of capitalist economic systems to political lobbying, and thus corruption. This is, at best, 99 percent wrong. All economic and political systems are susceptible to corruption—but only capitalist systems are capable of self-correction. The railroad lobby was influential until the invention of the car. The

the vast, vast majority of American success stories are indeed built on the ethical treatment of workers and compliance within the boundaries of the law. Nor is anyone in America forced to work a job they don’t want, or keep a job they don’t like.

What is preferable: a society in which there is great inequality between the average person, who makes $65,000 per year, and the top 1 percent, who make $500,000 per year—or a society in which everyone is equal… at an annual income of $4,000? The answer is obvious, but the “wealth gap” is still demonized in America, as if the space that allows for upward mobility should itself be shrunk, leaving no room whatsoever for each generation to do better than the last.

the priority is never to actually improve the lives of individual people and families, but to simply increase the number of people who depend on new and existing government programs because they have nowhere else to turn. In other words, the solution to a bad hospital isn’t a good hospital, it’s two bad hospitals. This problem is, unfortunately, most evident in the cities dominated by a Democratic political machine—cities with endemic corruption and that effectively have no political opposition. Less surprisingly, it is most evident in cities with public officials who profess to in some way be socialist or anticapitalist. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Baltimore—it never quite works out that the bluer the city hall or the bluer the mayor’s mansion, the better the schools or the lower the crime.

an innovative, entrepreneurial idea like charter schools faces immediate and crushing opposition from teacher’s unions. In a state like California, creative medical innovations or solutions to the epidemic of homelessness are immediately crushed by public health and environmental bureaucracies. Keep them in the public schools, keep them in the public hospitals, keep them dependent on the government bureaucracies, and narrow all private options—that seems to be the program.

“We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled—doubled—since we were children. We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.” That was not an arch-conservative or Republican. That was Barack Obama speaking on Father’s Day in 2008. Then-senator Obama was describing an objective moral tragedy. But what he must have known from his time as a community organizer in Chicago was that this moral tragedy is not necessarily a problem for the state. In fact, it’s an opportunity: The destruction of the family creates more government clients.

“Hard censorship”—forcibly depriving someone of their living, or making their creative output disappear without any charge or trial or explanation—was a different matter entirely. It seemed so unthinkable to me that something like this could be possible and so routine in America that I figured I’d accidentally done something illegal, or broken a law without intending to. But only a couple of months later, when the president of the United States was kicked off Twitter and virtually every other social-media platform—even if it was for challenging the results of the election or for appearing to put the peaceful transition of power into question—I knew it probably wasn’t just me.

Thus, in official North Korean, there is no word for tyranny, trauma, depression, or love—there are only synonyms for “socialist paradise.” And so millions of North Koreans might be hungry and scared, but they don’t have the vocabulary to articulate or imagine a different way of living. At the end of the day, this is the object of cancel culture in America: to deprive people of the right or ability to express thoughts that run counter to official narratives, so that eventually, they won’t even know how.

it was effective in making people second-guess their own common sense, which told them that the virus probably leaked from the nearby virus-research lab, and think better of voicing their well-founded opinions out loud. Citing China’s supposedly low but clearly dishonest official case rates was also effective in convincing Americans that Chinese public health measures that the Left favored, such as mass lockdowns, actually worked.

With no trial, with no judge or jury, with no verdict, and with no sentence—in a word, with no due process—YouTube demonetized the video. Instagram has ostensibly shadow-banned my account at times. Organizations that had invited me to speak about my own life suddenly revoked the invitations, on account of my undesirable opinions. No charge, no conviction, but nevertheless stripped of my right to earn my honest living—with the push of a button.

Cancel culture is not just about trying to punish comedians for making occasionally tasteless jokes (which it is their right to do), it is about locking ordinary citizens out of social participation if their opinions are considered “undesirable” by the media, corporations, and government. It is as serious as serious gets.

It’s hard to say what we can do about this new marriage of corporate, financial, technological, and political power that threatens to supersede our judicial system.

prioritizing the law over our own feelings. And it means defending the rights of individuals—even ones we disagree with—from the mob. In other words, we must take the path of resistance. Like the pilgrims, we must take the road that makes us uncomfortable, that is uncertain and frightening, if that’s what the truth demands.

The Chinese Communist Party has locked in the country’s manufacturing dominance not simply through innovation but through low-cost production made possible by pitifully low wages and horrifying working conditions. It has mastered large-scale, low-cost shipping not only through efficient logistics but by manipulating global supply chains—often illegally—to give China an edge over the United States, Europe, and other major markets.

it’s worth taking a very brief look through Chinese history, which I first started to understand and appreciate by taking a course on it through Prager University.

scores of other women and girls in China. What gives their captives the power and control they need to keep them enslaved is a single threat: “If you don’t do what I tell you, I will report you to the police.”

estimates from the last decade show North Korea to be little more than a Chinese colony. Chinese aid in 2014 was about $4 billion (North Korea’s entire GDP was about $28 billion in 2016), China seems to account for approximately 95 percent of all North Korea’s imports, and China receives about two-thirds of North Korea’s exports. Without China, in other words, the North Korean regime literally would not exist. In exchange for its support of the Kim family, China receives only small amounts of ores and mineral fuels. So what’s in it for Beijing? The fact is, the existence of North Korea is good for China. It serves as a geographic buffer between China and the U.S. military forces stationed in South Korea, and North Korea’s nuclear weapons function as a reliable military deterrent to greater U.S., Korean, Japanese, and Australian action in the region.

sanctions on Russia’s economic system, have virtually ensured that the entire Russian Federation—the largest sovereign landmass in the world—will become a Chinese economic dependency. It is concerning enough that so much of the Earth’s surface and its population will be under the influence of a state dedicated to the overthrow of American power—what’s

Unfortunately, in recent years, America has become compromised. In 2020 alone, a year in which much of global trade was disrupted and GDP fell precipitously, the United States still managed to be the largest importer of Chinese goods in the world, sending the CCP a whopping $452 billion. The Chinese, moreover, have infiltrated American business and finance at nearly all levels, acquiring American companies, becoming the largest shareholders in many American industries, buying up American real estate, forcing the transfer to China of American technology, and luring away the vast majority of American manufacturing.

Big Tech, Wall Street, Hollywood, and the universities are all dependent on Chinese money and markets to keep their profits trending upward. Their behavior in the last two decades closely parallels Russia in the 1990s, when under Boris Yeltsin a handful of oligarchs looted and sold off the country’s resources to enrich themselves while ordinary Russian people were plunged into chaos and poverty.

The fact is, America’s China policy is not even really made by the American president anymore. It is made by the lobbying and interest groups and oligarchical classes that are dependent on the Chinese market, regardless of the effect on ordinary American workers and consumers.

The abject nightmare that has repeated itself every minute, every second, for seventy-four years within its borders is not the result of natural disaster, like in Haiti or Bangladesh, or colonialist imperialism, like in the Belgian Congo, or ethnic and religious factionalism, as in Syria or Iraq. It is the Earth’s longest-running experiment in deliberately managed human misery,

All regimes are capable of violence and abuse. But more than torture or imprisonment or corporal punishment, it is the mental enslavement of Kowon that remains for me the embodiment of socialism.

The type of breakdown in trust, social order, and services that can lead to political anarchy don’t always require civil or world wars or imperialist conquest. It can happen even in peacetime, simply by the slow erosion of institutions and mores.

historically low levels of voter participation in local and state politics, declining rates of church attendance and religious belief, and plummeting rates of family formation. Unwilling to take responsibility for any of these categories of national decline, American elites have resorted to insisting that all this is somehow the fault or responsibility of a particular political faction (almost always “conservatives” or “Republicans,” by which they simply mean “working-class” or “rural” or “white”), and that we must start banning certain books, censoring certain forms of speech, and kicking these “political enemies” off various free speech platforms.

We survived the Great Depression, two world wars, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic—but I worry about what will happen the next time a big surprise arrives on our shores. Will we have the cohesion, the belief in the rule of law, and the confidence in democracy to see us through? Or will we resort to trammeling the Bill of Rights, seeking to silence dissenters, muzzle freedom of speech, get rid of political enemies, and assent to the government assuming indefinite “emergency powers”?

social justice warriors, or whatever they’re called on any particular day, want to kick their ideological opponents off social media. They want to ban parents from having any say in what public schools teach their own children. They want to tell you what you can and can’t put into your own body, and they want the right to cut their perceived enemies off from financial services. They want education in basic subjects like math and science to reflect certain political preferences, rather than physical reality. Meanwhile, they want their own children to be able to buy their way into elite institutions, without having to take or perform well on standardized tests—a

As America becomes predominantly made up of people who didn’t have a hand in building the system in the first place, it is producing more and more people who want to destroy the system because they don’t understand it. They don’t appreciate how fragile their freedom is, how precious their system of government, how rare their way of life. And so they entertain fantasies of tearing it down.

Travel around the world, and you will notice how indecent life is for most people in most countries. In many cases, it’s not because a particular country has never built a functioning society before, it’s because whatever free, tolerant, and relatively prosperous society they did build in the past was destroyed at some point in a fit of madness.

Although slavery was abolished, the Jim Crow South still treated Black Americans as second-class citizens, and threatened them with unceasing violence. Meanwhile, the industrial economies of the North were leading to an era of untold inequality, reproducing Old World conditions of subjugated workers and indentured servants working for very little pay in harsh, dangerous conditions under the thumb of a wealthy oligarchy.

And immigration on a scale not seen since the beginning of the twentieth century—both legal and illegal—has flooded into the United States from Asia and Latin America, putting added stress on America’s ailing system of social services.

I’m very fond of a lesson taught by Jordan Peterson, which he calls “Choose Your Own Sacrifice.”

AT THIS point you’ve probably gleaned my admiration for Dr. Jordan Peterson, former Harvard professor of clinical psychology,

Hugely popular with a wide and demographically diverse audience, the Joe Rogan Experience has been the top podcast in the United States for some time.

ANOTHER WONDERFUL individual I was fortunate to meet was Candace Owens.