%%last updated to match The Deprogram Wiki on 2024-07-02%%
Yeonmi Park, known as a "celebrity defector", is one of the most well-known defectors from the DPRK. By presenting some of the most extreme and absurd testimonies, she has been able to build a cult following and a very lucrative career as the posterchild for anti-Communism.
She is cited more than any other defector because she says exactly what anti-Communists want to hear about a closed-off, Communist country. Today, she is a culture warrior who weaponizes her background for personal gain.
An emblematic example of this in action from The Telegraph, a right-wing British media network:
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 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...
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".
— Rozina Sabur. (2023). 'Woke' US schools scarier than North Korea, says defector
Accustomed to privilege
Yeonmi Park has been called the Paris Hilton of North Korea, and lived a life of privilege and luxury among the upper echelon of society in the DPRK before leaving to begin her career as a celebrity defector in the West.
Buried in the shows archives [(“Now On My Way To Meet You”)] are some snapshots of Park’s childhood in North Korea that explain why she’s known on the show as the Paris Hilton of North Korea. They’re in sharp contrast to the story she’s now telling her international audience.
In one episode in early 2013 she appears with her mother. Family photographs are flashed on the screen and Park jokes, “That’s my Mum there. She’s beautiful right? To be honest, I’m not the Paris Hilton. My mum is the real Paris Hilton.”
Park then goes on to point out the top and chequered pants her mother is wearing “were all imported from Japan” and adds, “My mum even carried around a Chanel bag in North Korea,” to which the host responds incredulously, “There are Chanel bags in North Korea?” Park tells him there are and he then asks another woman if she’d classify Park’s family as “rich.” The woman answers, “Yes, that’s right.”
Park told us in her interview her father was a member of the Workers’ party, as were all the men in her family, and that she expected to study medicine at university and marry a man of the same ilk or higher.
— Mary Ann Jolley. (2014). The Strange Tale of Yeonmi Park
Inconsistencies
Citing her experiences as a student at Columbia University, Park styles herself as “the enemy of the woke,” warning that America is on the verge of liberal dictatorship and that “cancel culture” at U.S. colleges is the first step toward North Korean-style firing squads. It’s the theme of her new book, “While Time Remains,” published in February by a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster. As of early July, the book, which features a foreword from Canadian professor and conservative lifestyle guru Jordan Peterson, had sold at least 35,000 copies, according to sales-tracking service NPD BookScan.
...But while Park’s moral authority as political pundit rests on her experience as a refugee from an authoritarian pariah state, she has been dogged for years by accusations that some of her more lurid tales of state vengeance and extreme societal decay don’t add up.
Scholars on North Korea who are skeptical of Park say she’s symptomatic of a booming market for horror stories from the cloistered nation that they believe encourages some “celebrity” defectors to spin increasingly outlandish claims.
...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.”
Christine Hong, 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.”
...Cracks in Park’s story had already emerged even before her publishing debut. Mary Ann Jolley, a journalist who interviewed Park for an Australian documentary in 2014, pointed out multiple other inconsistencies in a story for the Diplomat, a news site focused on East Asia.
For example, Park claimed to have seen a friend’s mother executed in a stadium for the crime of watching a Hollywood movie. (In other accounts, it was a South Korean DVD.) But other defectors from Hyesan told Jolley that executions were never carried out in the stadium, and that no executions happened in the city during the time period she described.
The largest discrepancy highlighted by Jolley concerned the family’s departure from North Korea. In her initial accounts, Park claimed that she left the country with both of her parents, helped by Chinese contacts her father met while smuggling.
“There were cars to get us because of the connections with Chinese people, and then we went to China directly,” Park said in a 2014 appearance two months before her viral speech.
Park presented a different story in her Ireland speech, saying that only she and her mother fled the country, and that they did so on foot, joined later by her father, who eventually died in China. In this version of the story, repeated in her memoir and in many subsequent interviews, Park’s mother was raped by a human trafficker, sacrificing herself to save Park from the man, and both women were sexually abused and trafficked in China for years before ultimately escaping.
...She told the New York Times that she makes $6,600 a month working for the young-conservatives group Turning Point USA.
— Will Sommer. (2023). A North Korean defector captivated U.S. media. Some question her story.
Park has also received support from the Atlas Network, a conservative organisation which has received funding from the US State Department and the United States Congress.
An even harsher critic of Park’s has been Michael Bassett, a North Korea analyst who spent several years stationed at the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas for the U.S. military.
...he has called Park a liar and a “spinstress,” taking issue with her river anecdote and use of the word “holocaust” to describe the situation in the country. ...
He has also claimed that Park is being used to promote an agenda of sanctions against the country and economic liberalization by organizations such as Freedom Factory, a Seoul-based free market think tank where she is a media fellow.
“It sounds like she is being fed a narrative, it sounds like she is being told to perform,” Bassett said.
— John Power. (2014). North Korea: Defectors and Their Skeptics
Additional Resources
Video Essays:
Books, Articles, or Essays:
It's the race to build artificial general intelligence that all of the US capitalists can pay for to replace all workers, hack and destroy all other anti-imperialist countries, and then have it kill and oppress all of the poors in the world forever.
I made a previous post on this topic:
There's also the AI 2027 paper, which theorizes a world in which OpenAI and associates are able to create a self-improving AI for the USA by the year 2027. At that point, the AI will be able to improve its own intelligence ad infinitum until it becomes a god and can immediately defeat any and all other countries by hacking their infrastructure instantly or planning amazing color revolutions, thereby guaranteeing U.S. world domination forever.
US capitalists fear that if China can get to a comparable level of AI at the same time, then they won't be able to delete China with their own AI.