On 08 Sep 2021, AlleyCat <alleycatsucksdick@trump.org> posted some
news:shbdee$oa8$3@news.dns-netz.com:

> American schools are building statues to Hitler.

A North Korean defector who sought refuge in the US said she was
"embarrassed" to study human rights in America because it had become
synonymous with socialism in universities.

Yeonmi Park, 29, who fled the hermit state as a young teenager in 2007,
became a US citizen last year.

Her memoir, In Order To Live, detailing her perilous journey to freedom,
gained her an international platform as a human rights activist.

However, since relocating to America, and earning a degree from Columbia
University, she has sounded the alarm over "cancel culture" and political
influences on the country's education system.

In her latest book, While Time Remains, she writes that she has discovered
some of the same encroachments on freedom in America as in North Korea,
from identity politics and authoritarian tendencies to elite hypocrisy.

'Racist' maths
In an interview with The Telegraph, Ms Park said she was shocked by the
political ideology promoted by professors and fellow students at the Ivy
League university.

She claimed that while studying for a human rights degree, she was taught
that Jane Austen "promoted white supremacy", maths was "racist" and debate
over trans issues were silenced.

"They were demonising capitalism, free markets and Western civilisation.
Anything that was white was bad," she said.
"I couldn't believe it. This is the same thing that I was learning in a
North Korean classroom".

Ms Park has faced criticism for her comparisons between life in America
and the brutality of life in North Korea, which they argue risks
undermining the severity of human rights abuses former compatriots endure.

Discussing it with The Telegraph, she conceded there was "no comparison"
between living standards and the level of freedom of people between North
Korea and the US.

"But what I am pointing out is the similarities with what is happening in
America. And that is scary and that is where Americans are not
understanding," she said.

"They don't understand that North Korea did not become that way just one
day. It began somewhere, it took a course of many, many bad decisions to
make it what it is today."

'Crazier than North Korea'
Ms Park was particularly critical of the way in which discussions around
sex and gender were policed on campus, calling it "crazier than North
Korea".

She said: "For instance, professors have to say that genders were a social
construct made up by white men to oppress minorities.

"In North Korea, we believe that men cannot get pregnant, they cannot
breastfeed... In Columbia [if you say that], you are a bigot."

She claimed that when she pushed back on discussions around gender, a
professor told her she had been "brainwashed".
"[We have] the best, brightest minds of Ivy League education in Columbia,
[but] they will literally say the same things" as you hear in a North
Korean classroom, she said.

She ridiculed the promotion of "safe spaces" on campus, comparing
students' cosseted existence and reluctance to discuss difficult issues to
her own life story, after being sex trafficked from North Korea into
China.

Ms Park initially studied economics and then switched to human rights,
said she was "embarrassed" by the way it was co-opted by left-wing
academics.

"For these people, human rights means free education, free health care,
universal income, free housing - which means a socialist state," she said.

"In North Korea, the regime promises the same thing."

She added: "Human rights doesn't mean these free things... Free [to me]
means that you have a right to pursue happiness, the right to start your
own business, the right to practice your own religion and freedom of
speech."

Woke ideology
Ms Park, who attended Columbia from 2016 to 2020, said her concerns about
"woke ideology" in the US were heightened by the national debate on racial
equality that erupted following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.

She argued that discussions around race had come to be the lens through
which other victims, like herself, were viewed.
And she argued that the focus on America's legacy of slavery had blinded
the country to the plight of modern slavery.

She said: "I realised, somehow in current America, based on your skin
colour, they decide who deserves justice and who deserves compassion.

"In America right now, even though I was actually a sex slave, my mother
was an actual slave and went through real oppression, they say I'm
privileged because I cannot understand oppression because I'm a white
passing person."

She added: "I think that's when I realised this ideology was not just on
college campus. It had spread to the public."

<https://news.yahoo.com/woke-us-schools-scarier-north-000000792.html>