Yeonmi Park is one of the more famous defectors from North Korea. She studied at Dongguk University (where I taught from 2014 to 2015; I think she was there when I was there), then she moved to America, where she apparently attended Columbia University. The blog ROK Drop quotes an article in which Park describes the America she sees:
One of several hundred North Korean defectors settled in the United States, Park, 27, transferred to Columbia University from a South Korean university in 2016 and was deeply disturbed by what she found.
“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,” Park said in an interview with Fox News. “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.”
Those similarities include anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt, and suffocating political correctness.
One thing the American left constantly does is ignore the testimony—and it's always the same—coming from defectors and escapees from totalitarian regimes. The left ignores its own fascistic tendencies and ceaselessly accuses the right of being the fascists, all while denying the existence of things like cancel culture (the denial of something bad that's actually happening, especially with the intent to either delude or to pretend everything is all right, is called gaslighting). As long as this continues, American academe will keep dropping in prestige. At this point, I wouldn't recommend to any Korean students that they study in America; the value of a college education in which all your professors are woke stooges is nil. Even science education, the last bastion against wokeness, is crumbling under the weight of all this postmodernist political correctness. It's a sad thing to witness from afar. Meanwhile, defectors from various regimes warn again and again that America is going down a dark path, and these people all see the shades of the countries they escaped from rearing up in what is supposed to be the land of the free and the brave.
I had actually flagged that article to include on my blog, now I can just link to yours!
ReplyDeleteScary times! I often thought of how the left almost never goes after truly oppressive regimes like China, rather quite the opposite--it's more admiration. The cancel culture thing reminds me of China's social credit system--what you say, do, and think, dictates the level of "freedom" you are afforded.
To hear this NK defector call her university experience in the USA totalitarian ought to be a wake-up call for the so-called progressives. I'm afraid they consider that a feature, not a bug though.