Yeonmi Park is one of the few brave people to have managed to escape the Communist concentration camp that is North Korea.
The 27-year-old told her story in the book In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom, which recounted the hellish conditions most people live in. Often they have to eat grasshoppers just to survive – hunger is constant, and starvation is a way of life. There is no heating during the winter, and all the basic necessities of life that Westerners take for granted are totally absent.
The same is happening today. The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation reveals people are set to endure extreme shortages in August, as it battles with an estimated 860,000 tonne food shortfall. Nevertheless, Timothy Cho, another North Korean escapee, says that the nation’s secretive Christian community are ready to share with others what they call ‘holy rice’ – whatever they have, right down to their last meals.
But Yeonmi Park is equally concerned with the loss of freedom in the West, especially freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. Whilst studying at Columbia University, New York, the emphasis placed on ‘hate speech’ and ‘safe spaces’ was a chilling reminder to her of her former home, where neither free speech nor even free thought is permitted. She is now warning the US about how those precious freedoms are being eroded in the West as woke culture and indoctrination, such as gender-neutral pronouns, paint false visions of reality.
Speaking to Fox News she said: ‘I expected that I was spending all this time, money and energy to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think. I realised 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.’
