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

by Yeonmi Park

When you hear stories about the apathy and cruelty that ordinary people find themselves resorting to in socialist systems, don’t judge them: A human being alienated from her family and facing starvation has been robbed of her capacity to connect with the world around her.

The possibility of redemption is at the center of all great religions and societies. In North Korea, as in all communist dictatorships, it is inconceivable.

Many exceptions of course exist, but studies generally show that women are in fact better than men, by and large, at verbal fluency, perceptual speed, accuracy, and fine motor skills, while men outperform women in spatial awareness, working memory, and mathematical skills.

We had to be diligent in being woke—learning to locate the white male Bastards behind every crime, beneath every problem, in the air we breathed—otherwise we were no better than those who intentionally perpetuate social injustices.

When students sit patiently as “learnings” are dictated to them, and they’re asked to memorize and regurgitate them by rote, it doesn’t strike us as odd so long as the “learnings” are in math, biology, English, or American history. But all you have to do is change the material itself to “Kim Il Sung Thought,” and you can see the problem.

I couldn’t blame them for being so severed from reality that they felt entitled to talk to me as if I were a bigot, when I was just a very recent immigrant who made a mistake that, according to what I’d been taught, wasn’t actually a mistake. This person was simply lost, completely untethered from life, with no sense whatsoever of what either justice or injustice meant or looked like.

THE DAY my son was born was the happiest day of my life. In those early moments, and to this day, there was nothing else in the world that mattered to me.

That’s why I strongly believe that the great majority of the suffering we experience is actually caused by ourselves and the decisions we make (or don’t make). In other words, feelings of devastation mostly come from the way we think about “the problem,” rarely from the problem itself.

The conflation of leftism with liberalism is what allows many American leftists to advocate for the superiority of an authoritarian social and political system without ever having to actually live under or suffer the consequences of it.

Again, to believe that the answers to social problems lie not in innovation, creativity, and a certain measure of personal and communal responsibility, but rather in the centralization of state power and the eradication of private ownership, is just a variation on the leftist theme of victimhood and oppression, which really only serves to mask the emergence and power of an oligarchy.

Economists call this “revealed preference”—that people’s true beliefs (as opposed to the ones they merely claim to have) can be understood in how they choose to spend their money and where they choose to live.

Leftist ideology in America (as distinguished from liberalism or liberal causes) has become so self-contradictory and patently absurd that ordinary citizens—especially parents—have shown signs of exiting from it completely.

The real power of cancel culture is the fear that it instills in the minds of millions of ordinary people, convincing them to think twice about expressing themselves freely or else risk having their lives destroyed by real and/or online mobs.