Columbia students ‘brainwashed’ like North Koreans, says defector

Students at Columbia University are as “brainwashed” by propaganda as their North Korean counterparts, a North Korean defector said this month.

Yeonmi Park defected to the United States in 2014 at the age of 21. When she was 13, she fled North Korea with her family and crossed the freezing Yalu River into China, where was sold into sex slavery. She eventually escaped, crossed the Gobi Desert into Mongolia, made her way to South Korea and then the United States, where she enrolled in Columbia University and graduated three years ago with a degree in human rights. 

Park was astonished by how “oppressed” Columbia’s students claimed to be while privileged with unprecedented freedom.

“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 New York Post. “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?”

“I never understood that not having a problem can be a problem,” Park added. “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.”

In her book titled “While Time Remains,” released last week, Park details how her experience at Columbia — which she calls a “pure indoctrination camp” — was similar to what she remembers from North Korea.

One of those main similarities is the allegiance to censorship. During the North Korean Famine in the 1990s which killed 3.5 million people, the government banned the words “famine” and “hunger” and made any suggestion that deaths were caused by starvation a punishable offense. 

When she was a young girl, Park’s mother told her that the most dangerous thing in her body was her tongue, which could get her into serious trouble; those who insulted or spoke ill of the regime could be imprisoned or executed.

“That’s the end of cancel culture,” Park said. “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."

The North Korean regime also keeps its power by dividing its people into 51 categories, with those whose ancestors were “oppressive landowners” and those considered to have “tainted blood” among the lower classes.

“That’s how the regime divided people. What an individual does doesn’t matter. It’s all about your ancestors and the collective,” Park said.

So when she was exposed to the Left’s racist ideologies and how it divides people based on what it calls “identity politics” it brought back stark memories.

“They say white people are privileged and guilty and oppressors,” she added. “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.”

In her book, Park begs readers to help her “save our country, while time remains.”

“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.”

Park has been speaking out for years about America’s educational institutions, whose diseased ideologies are why “America’s not free.”

When she first started at Columbia, Park was immediately taught about “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and how White men are the cause of all problems.

The North Korean defector said she was afraid of the social repercussions at Columbia if she failed to use “preferred pronouns” correctly.

Park remembers being a young girl in North Korea and believing that the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, was overworked and “starving” until she saw photos of the overweight dictator — but American students are so brainwashed no evidence can convince them.

“In some ways they (in the US) are brainwashed. Even though there’s evidence so clearly in front of their eyes they can’t see it."