A North Korean defector has said the anti-American sentiment in Ivy League universities reminded her of her childhood in North Korea. During an interview with Fox News, Yeonmi Park, who graduated from Columbia University, drew parallels between the so-called 'cancel culture' in US universities and Kim Jong Un’s regime, saying she couldn’t believe she was sitting “in North Korea's classroom or in America's classroom.”
Yeonmi claimed that North Korean children are instructed to equate the term and persona of "American" with "bastard", and memories of that society came flooding back when she enrolled at Columbia University in New York City's Morningside Heights. She further claimed that the professors at Columbia blamed the United States for the problems in Africa and Asia, which she “couldn’t believe.”
"Literally every professor was saying the problems that we have in today's world is because of White men [and] how they colonised Africa [and] Asia, that's how they mess up everything and they are the ones who needs to be blamed -- and I couldn't believe it,” Yeonmi told Fox News.
Also Read | Once ‘deeply-moved’ by K-Pop, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un calls it ‘vicious cancer’
The North Korean escapee said she found a lot of similarities between America, a democracy, and North Korea, a country under totalitarian dictatorship, including “anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness.” Expressing shock and confusion on issues surrounding gender and language, Yeonmi said that every class asked students to announce their preferred pronouns.
{{/usCountry}}The North Korean escapee said she found a lot of similarities between America, a democracy, and North Korea, a country under totalitarian dictatorship, including “anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness.” Expressing shock and confusion on issues surrounding gender and language, Yeonmi said that every class asked students to announce their preferred pronouns.
{{/usCountry}}"English is my third language. I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say 'he' or 'she' by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them 'they'? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?" she asked rhetorically.
"Even North Korea is not this nuts. North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy," she added.
The 27-year-old Columbia graduate said that after being sold into sex slavery and placed on Kim Jong Un’s “killing list”, she escaped North Korea and presumed she was in a free society in the United States. "My enemy used to be Kim Jong Un: I have been on Kim Jong Un's killing list of people for many years because I spoke out, and my original family got punished but now ironically enough, so many Marxists and Communists and Maoists and Leninists are now are sending me death threats," she claimed.