#yeonmi park
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With the publication of “In Order to Live” — a collaboration with Maryanne Vollers, a veteran ghostwriter for Billie Jean King, Hillary Clinton and Ashley Judd — Park began presenting a far more harrowing description of her North Korean life than she had shared with her South Korean TV fans.
In U.S. media appearances and her book, Park portrayed a childhood in which dead bodies were a frequent specter. In one particularly grotesque image, she described seeing starving children forced to eat rats, only to die because the rats were poisoned. Then, other rats devoured their corpses.
Experts on North Korea took note of the strikingly different bio that emerged when Park moved from reality TV to the international human rights conference circuit. Her “Paris Hilton” character was nowhere in this story. Park claimed that she never encountered eggs or indoor toilets until she left North Korea, that she resorted to eating grass and dragonflies to survive.
“She once presented herself as a top 1 percent North Korea elite, so she didn’t see any hunger or malnutrition when she was living there,” Song said. “She totally flipped the narrative when she was on to these conferences.”
ChristineHong, a literature professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a board member at the Korea Policy Institute who has studied defector narratives, noted that Park’s new account didn’t even jibe with her mother’s stories of ready access to food and luxuries. (In one “Now On My Way to Meet You” appearance, the mother explained that Park couldn’t comprehend that her less privileged co-stars came from the same country that she did.)
“But no one seems to care,” Hong told The Post. “And the reason that no one seems to care is that, when it comes to North Korea, it’s basically an informational free-for-all.”
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#yeonmi park#mia schem#political memes#political humor#political shitposting#leftist memes#socialist memes#memes#meme#tumblr memes#meme humor#memesdaily#lol#lol memes#free palestine#freepalastine🇵🇸#palestine#gaza#north korea#shitpost#dank memes#dank humor#from the river to the sea palestine will be free#best memes#social justice
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Is it a safe space for me to say that I think Yeonmi park is full of shit??? And that a lot of North Korean defectors are full of shit??? And That they are grifters? Kim Jong-un does not have national pleasure squads full of prostitutes who are constantly feeding him wine and massaging him and sucking his dick all day.  Is discussing the horrors of famine, not enough to garner international sympathy? Yeonmi Park conjuring the most vile torture porn you can imagine to describe her life in North Korea and then going on to say that American woke culture is more oppressive then what she faced in North Korea (allegedly starvation) on right wing media outlets is insane. These people are doing a service to the North Korean government writing these insane Kim Jong-un fan fictions. I would’ve have held the belief that North Korea is unquestionably hell on earth if I wasn’t exposed to the defector grift
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One of my favorite follows on Twitter right now is a smallish account run by an anti-imperialist activist who goes by “Left I on the News”, because he has a real knack for going through articles in the mainstream press and highlighting the mundane little manipulations we’re fed each day to shape our worldview in alignment with the US empire.
One story he singled out recently was a New York Times article titled “Russia Fires Drones and Missiles at Southern Ukraine,” which opens with the line, “Russian forces launched drones and missiles at cities in southern Ukraine from the Black Sea early Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said, a day after Moscow blamed Kyiv for an attack on a bridge linking the occupied Crimean Peninsula to Russia.”
Can you spot anything funny in that sentence? It’s not super obvious at first glance.
“Look how the NYT phrases this subhead to make Russia sound extra evil,” Left I tweeted with a screenshot of the article. “Not ‘a day after Kyiv attacked the Kerch Bridge’, but a day after Russia blamed them for doing it (as if it’s just some wild accusation). Remember — the most effective propaganda is the subtlest.”
“The most effective propaganda is the subtlest” is a phrase you should try to remember, because it’s so very true.
It is indeed ridiculous to try to frame this as some wild accusation by Russia, as though Moscow should have remained open to the possibility that the bridge was struck by Bolivia or Nepal. CNN reports that Ukrainian officials have taken credit for the attack, and just days ago Ukraine’s deputy defense minister publicly acknowledged that Ukraine was behind last year’s attack on the very same bridge. No serious person doubts that Ukraine was behind the attack, including those who support Ukraine.
But that subtle manipulation didn’t really stand out when you first saw it, did it?
As we’ve discussed previously, these subtle little adjustments of perception are what constitutes the vast majority of the propaganda westerners ingest through the news media from day to day. This is because the really overt, ham-fisted propaganda isn’t what’s effective; what’s effective is those sneaky little lies that slide in unchecked underneath people’s critical thinking faculties.
Contrast the above example with the response we’ve been seeing to Yeonmi Park, whose outlandish, larger-than-life propagandistic lies about what it’s like to live in North Korea have turned her into an internet meme. She’s become so widely mocked that even The Washington Post, among the first to help amplify her as a trustworthy North Korean defector after her arrival in the US in 2014, is now openly questioning her credibility.
This is because propaganda only works if it doesn’t ring people’s cognitive alarm bells. You can’t slide propaganda down people’s throats if it triggers their critical thinking gag reflex. If you want to poison someone’s food, you can only pull off the deed if they don’t taste the poison or throw it up before it takes effect.
So most propaganda isn’t of the Yeonmi Park “communists are so poor that they have to eat mud and get out of the train and push it because there’s no electricity” variety. It’s subtle. It’s these tiny little adjustments where US allies are reported on more sympathetically than US enemies, claims made by unaligned governments are reported with much more scrutiny and skepticism than aligned governments, and the sins which take place within the US-centralized power structure are overlooked while those outside it are amplified and condemned.
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We’ve been ingesting these tiny little manipulations all our lives like microplastics in our water supply, and they build up within our reality tunnels to significantly warp our perception of what’s going on in the world.
And the fact that it’s been so many tiny little lies over years and years means it’s a lot harder to extract all the perception management from our worldview once we’ve discovered that it’s happening. If it was just a few really big lies we could reorient ourselves toward truth fairly quickly just by recognizing them, but because it’s so very many tiny manipulations it takes years of sincere work to fully free yourself from all the distortions and false assumptions you grew up with.
But it’s worth doing, because positive change can only come from an awareness of what’s true, whether you’re talking about individuals or humanity as a whole. Our task as humans is to come to a truth-based relationship with reality to the furthest extent possible, and that means fearlessly diving headfirst into the long, hard slog of sorting out fact from fiction, one lie at a time, no matter how subtle.
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By: Rikki Schlott
Published: Feb 11, 2023
“They were in Manhattan, living in the freest country you can imagine, and they’re saying they’re oppressed? It doesn’t even compute,” Yeonmi Park told The Post of students at her alma mater, Columbia University. “I was sold for $200 as a sex slave in the 21st century under the same sky. And they say they’re oppressed because people can’t follow their pronouns they invent every day?”
The 29-year-old defected from North Korea as a young teen, only to be human-trafficked in China. In 2014, she became one of just 200 North Koreans to live in the United States — and, as of last year, is an American citizen.
Now, three years after she graduated from Columbia with a degree in human rights, Park is raising alarm bells about America’s cancel culture and woke ideology.
In her book “While Time Remains,” out February 14, Park writes how she made it all the way to the United States only to find some of the same encroachments on freedom that she thought she left behind in North Korea — from identity politics and victim mentality to elite hypocrisy.
“I escaped hell on earth and walked across the desert in search of freedom, and found it,” she writes. “I don’t want anything bad ever to happen to my new home … I want us — need us — to keep the darkness at bay.”
She implores readers: “I need your help to save our country, while time remains.”
Park first made headlines back in 2015 with her book “In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom” and for her bold claims that the woke environment she endured as a student at Columbia reminded her of North Korea.
In an interview this week with The Post, Park recalled what it was like to be a North Korean defector who escaped tyranny and oppression only to meet college students intent on claiming victim status and earning oppression points. She dubbed her alma mater a “pure indoctrination camp” and said many of her classmates at New York City’s most elite school were “brainwashed like North Korean students are.
“I never understood that not having a problem can be a problem,” Park said. “They need to make injustice out of thin air or a problem out of nowhere, because they haven’t experienced anything like what other people are facing in the world.”
She was born in Hyesan, North Korea, the second child of a civil servant, and grew up under the rule of then-Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il under the bleakest of conditions.
In the first five years of her life, an estimated 3.5 million North Koreans died of starvation. Park recalls hunting for cockroaches on the way to school to quell her hunger — even as the Kim’s regime banned the words “famine” and “hunger.”
“Darkness in Hyesan is total,” Park writes. ”It’s not just the absence of light, power, and food. It is the absence of dignity, sanctuary, and hope. Darkness in Hyesan is … watching your parents and neighbors hauled away by police for the crime of collecting insects and plants for their children to eat.”
After her father was arrested and sentenced to hard labor for the crime of trading dried fish, sugar, and metals, the Park family’s life in North Korea deteriorated even further. Finally, they planned their way out.
“I didn’t escape in search of freedom, or liberty, or safety. I escaped in search of a bowl of rice,” she writes.
Park’s sister fled North Korea first. Park, then 13, and her mother followed, crossing the freezing Yalu River into China. But rather than finding her sister, the pair fell into the hands of human traffickers who sold Park into sexual slavery.
After years of forced slave labor, a still-teenage Park was finally able to break free and travel across the Gobi Desert to Mongolia with the help of Christian missionaries. From there, she went to South Korea where she found refuge and was granted citizenship.
Seven years after they were first separated, Park also reunited with her older sister. But they found out that their father had died shortly after he managed to escape to China.
Losing him, Park said, made her “step into a different life: one dedicated to human rights, and improving the lives of people suffering under tyranny. A life of meaning. A life that would make my father proud.”
When Park was a young girl, her mother told her the most dangerous thing in her body was her tongue and warned her that, if she said the wrong thing or insulted the regime, her family could be imprisoned or even executed.
“That’s the end of cancel culture,” Park told the Post. “Of course, we’re not putting people in front of a firing squad in America now, but their livelihoods, their dignity, their reputations, and their humanity are under attack. When we tell people not to talk, we’re censoring their thinking as well. And when you can’t think, you’re a slave — a brainwashed puppet.”
Since her time at Columbia, the New York City-based author and activist has started a YouTube channel, “Voice of North Korea,” where she shares information about life under the regime. She also joined the board of the non-profit Human Rights Foundation, where she works with dissidents from around the world and, most recently, helped with efforts to drop anti-regime leaflets in North Korea.’
Recently divorced, Park is also now a mother to a five-year-old son. She wants him to have the same freedoms she found in America — but is afraid they’re under attack by pernicious woke ideology, and especially identity politics.
In North Korea, Park said, the government divides citizens into 51 classes based on whether their blood is “tainted” because their ancestors were “oppressive” landowners.
“That’s how the regime divided people. What an individual does doesn’t matter. It’s all about your ancestors and the collective,” she explained.
Now, when she sees Americans indulging in race essentialism and identity politics, she said, it feels eerily familiar.
“They say white people are privileged and guilty and oppressors,” Park said. “This is the tactic the North Korean regime used to divide people. In America it’s the same idea of collective guilt. This is the ideology that drove North Korea to be what it is today — and we’re putting it into young American minds.”
Park told the Post she hopes her second book serves as inspiration for Americans to fight back against false promises of “equity” while they still can.
“I really don’t think that we have that much time left,” she warned. “Already all our mainstream institutions have the same ideology that North Korea has: socialism, collectivism and equity. We are literally going through a cultural revolution in America. When we realize it, it might be too late.”
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When someone who escaped North Korea gives you a warning, you pay attention.
#Yeonmi Park#North Korea#woke authoritarianism#identity politics#imaginary oppression#first world problems#wokeness as religion#wokeism#cult of woke#wokeness#woke#race essentialism#cancel culture#collective guilt#religion is a mental illness
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YouTube short of Yeonmi Park popped up today and I lowkey lost my shit? I've only seen people making fun of her, and I thought they were being hyperbolic.
The rest of the video is as follows:
"In the summer time, we do eat more plants. But the thing IX after June 1st, like at the end of May, a lot of plants become poisonous. So until then, poison is not as high, so we can eat pretty much any plant if we want. Even tree leaves are fine. But after June 1st, we have to be a lot careful what mushroom that we pick up. You know what plants we eat. In the fall we eat a lot of grasshoppers and a lot of bugs. In the winter is the time when we eat a lot of frozen potatoes or a dried cabbage, like that. And spring is where we die. We call spring the season of death. And it's hard to find even any one single rat to eat. In the spring."
Like. ???????
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yeonmi park talking about how the universities are erasing the "glorious american past" or w/e............ girl you are not beating the 'worship the nation' mindset
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“The North Korean defectors interviewed for this article didn’t want to be identified because they feared for the safety of their families still living under the dictatorship or being ostracized for criticizing one of their own, but they do want their voices heard. Their overriding concern, the detrimental impact exaggeration and fabrication could have on the North Korean refugee cause and their own future opportunities. They worry that Park’s inconsistencies and flawed accounts will make the world start to doubt their stories.“
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Justice for Yeonmi Park honestly. She went through so much just to have her story used and manipulated by the right wing crazies. Now she's a site wide meme about lying and she probably doesn't even know. Why is it so impossible for you to believe that she is telling the truth AND that her story is being twisted and manipulated by people like Joe Rogan?
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i actually feel genuinely sad for yeonmi park even though there's 0 doubt in my mind that she's full of shit. north korea is basically a massive cult, and she escaped there only for the right to take advantage of her gratitude and turn her into a mouthpiece for their alt right cult agenda. like, as a cult survivor, i can so easily see and understand the pipeline despite my personal dislike of her. it's a sad story any way you slice it and i think we really should look at her with more nuance than "believe everything she says" or "she's a liar." it's also clear that her stories change a lot BOTH because she's told a lot of lies and because she has a lot of trauma-caused memory lapses. it's not one or the other. it's both.
#yeonmi park#cult stuff#shes harmful but not malicious imo#like. she was so vulnerable and had basically no education#but also she SHOULD have learned better by now#that's true#but did she have a choice?#no
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what drives me insane is how yeonmi park YEONMI FREAKING PARK is a zionist
like girl you escaped from the genocide in North Korea to do what exactly?
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