Park’s memoir about her escape from North Korea exposes a plethora of evil that is difficult to fathom. Only a couple of weeks past her thirteenth birthday, she was almost raped by a Chinese broker moments after Park and her mother crossed the Yalu River, fleeing the Hermit Kingdom. Had it not been for her mother insisting that the broker take her instead, an unspeakable horror would have taken place. Even so, the pair could not avoid being trafficked. They were sold repeatedly and, by Park’s own admission, had to do whatever they could to survive. The circumstances were dire for them and so many other North Korean defectors. All they wanted was freedom, yet they had to contend with a slew of nefarious individuals ready to exploit poor, starving, and terrified women and girls for profit. One detail she included continues to torment me. Men in a poor village pulled together their funds in order to buy a girl. They all had sex with her until she died, and then the villagers did it again. Another girl. Another heinous death.
Park eventually made it out of China and to freedom, but I will withhold the details here. The account is riveting, and I encourage all of my listeners to pick up a copy. I do, however, want to share a few thoughts about the human capacity for authoritarianism – a capacity that oftentimes sneaks up on us unawares.
Authoritarianism is something nobody would agree to at first, yet societies throughout the ages have succumbed to it. But how? How could anybody relinquish their God-given ability to think for themselves and defer to the state? Why would anybody willingly allow themselves to be bullied into submission?
It begins with rhetoric. It starts with a story. Get as many individuals as you can to buy into a certain narrative, and they will be puddy in your hands.
The dictators of North Korea told a story about themselves, fellow Koreans, and the rest of the world, and people bought it. The bastard Americans were the enemy. The Kims were the saviors. Once the die was cast, they didn’t need to tell the story anymore because the people did it for them.
And this is how ruthlessness begins. Nobody mattered but the Supreme Leader, which means that anybody could do anything to anybody else without remorse. There is only one lead character. Everyone else is expendable.
This, folks, is Communism. This is what Park fled from. But we have to wonder what kind of society she fled to.
A story is also being told in the West, and the militants and their dogmas are already falling in line like the good soldiers they are. They may not be the armed guards patrolling the border between North Korea and China, but they are those who would cancel a person for saying the wrong thing. They might not be traffickers, but they are champions of content that demeans women and girls. They may not be sending detractors to reeducation camps, but they are doing their very best to reeducate by frenetically changing the definitions of words, challenging all that is true, and shaming anybody who refuses to cease and desist when it comes to critical thinking.
In North Korea, there is only one answer to any question, and that would be what the state says it is. Are we in the West slipping toward that very same situation when a Supreme Court nominee can’t answer a simple question about what it means to be woman and university administrators can’t answer a simple question about genocide?
Read Park’s book. For what it tells us about North Korea now. For what it might tell us about ourselves in the near future.
https://www.amazon.com/Order-Live-Korean-Journey-Freedom/dp/014310974X
