Now even this North Korean warns we’re being brainwashed!
THE most bitterly funny story of the week is that a defector from North Korea thinks that even her homeland is ‘not as nuts’ as the indoctrination now forced on Western students. Yeonmi Park fled from the Hermit Kingdom when she was just 13, and endured horrible things during her escape. Eventually, she reached South Korea. But she thought she had truly begun a new life when, in 2016, she transferred to Columbia University in New York City, one of America’s finest colleges.
Almost immediately she met the new, sweet and sticky marshmallow totalitarianism which has taken over so many Western seats of learning. A staff member ticked her off when she revealed that she enjoyed classics such as the books of Jane Austen.
‘ I said, “I love those books.” I thought it was a good thing,’ she told Fox News in an interview. But the staff member replied: ‘Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.’
After encountering t he new requirement for the use of genderneutral pronouns, she concluded ‘Even North Korea is not this nuts… North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.’ She came to fear that making a fuss would affect her grades and her degree. Eventually, she learned to keep quiet, as people do when they try to live under intolerant regimes, and let the drivel wash over her.
ANYONE who has lived through the past two years in this country, especially the takeover of the National Trust by radicals, and the increasingly politically correct behaviour of major universities, will know that her account has the ring of truth. But what is important is that a survivor of North Korean terror is saying it. She is not claiming that the modern West is like the thuggish Kim regime. She is saying that we willingly give in to what has to be forced on to Koreans by police terror, sealed borders and labour camps. And we ought to be ashamed of ourselves.
As Ms Park says, at least North Koreans, who live under a regime of brainwashed fear and who are forcibly isolated from all news of the outside world, have an excuse for believing the mad bilge pumped out by their government. We don’t.
‘North Koreans, we don’t have the internet, we don’t have access to any of these great thinkers, we don’t know anything. But here, while having everything, people choose to be brainwashed. And they deny it.’
She warns: ‘You guys have lost common sense to a degree that I as a North Korean cannot even comprehend.’
You may think she is laying it on a bit thick. But I don’t. One of the strangest periods of my life came nearly three decades ago. I had returned to this country after several years living abroad, including more than two years in Moscow. When I had left England, in summer 1990, we had been almost euphoric about the accelerating fall of Communism in Europe.
I had expected to settle back into my own country with relief. But again and again, in my first few weeks back in Britain, I experienced behaviour, events or conversations which gave me an eerie feeling of familiarity.
For some time, I could not work out what it was. And then, suddenly, it became clear. I was reminded of t he stupidities, prejudices, obstructions and dogmas which I had experienced in Soviet Moscow – and seen defeated there.
Somehow, t hey had escaped through the gaps in the Berlin Wall and taken up residence here. Bit by bit, especially after the Blair victory of 1997, they hardened into a whole new political system, hostile to the traditional married family, scornful of tradition and patriotism, filled with hate for Christianity, dismissive towards the books, art and music that I liked, actively intolerant of dissent.
I had not come back to Britain but to somewhere else. I have not been able to find my way back to Britain since then, and do not know how to get there.