Yeonmi Park is in a unique position to see what others cannot. That the west, especially her adopted new home of the United States, is on a path from freedom to authoritarianism.
Many of those who have grown up in a free society have come to take it for granted. Even to the point where they now feel they can continue to enjoy that freedom while systematically working to deprive anyone they do not like of their freedom. And with a total obliviousness that they have now become the very enemy of freedom and democracy that they fancy themselves as champions of.
Yeonmi Park has lived the horrors of totalitarianism. It took her a long time after becoming free to even understand what freedom is. Now that she does understand, she knows what freedom is better than those of us who have grown up with it. Because she truly understands the alternative. She has LIVED it.
In contrast, the supporters of the political establishment in the west only know totalitarianism as some sort of abstraction. Their comprehension of it is so lacking that they fail to even recognize that they themselves have become perpetrators of it.
Yeonmi Park is the child who recognized that the emperor has no clothes.
Off the top of my head I only ran into one point I disagree with her on. Her concern about China becoming the dominant superpower is unfounded. This was a genuine concern until quite recently, so perhaps she has followed the more recent news and doesn't necessarily feel the same any more. The Chinese regime is deteriorating in numerous ways. Xi Jinping has sabotaged Chinese businesses whose executives he fears are rivals for power. He has adopted economic policies that are hostile to foreign business, even as many foreign companies are already leaving China. Those reasons include an increasingly hostile political environment as well as China no longer being very economically attractive for manufacturing. There are much lower cost countries to manufacture in today. China's only remaining advantage is the large existing base of manufacturing infrastructure there. That provides inertia to slow China's economic decline but it can't stop it. China's housing and banking sectors are in a massive debt crisis. Their local governments are in deep debt. They rely on land leases for their revenue, and with a declining population and a massive inventory of unoccupied overvalued housing, there is little need for new housing. Except perhaps to replace the many apartment buildings that collapse due to corrupt building practices. China's population is shrinking. The birthrate is very low, and most likely will go even lower. Economic despair deters people from having children. The unemployment rate for young people in China is 20% or higher. Key infrastructure such as the Three Gorges Dam is vulnerable to collapse due to slipshod construction methods. The Belt And Road initiative of loaning money to foreign nations is backfiring on China. Many of the projects are economically nonviable and thus the poor countries that took the loans to do the projects cannot pay back the loans. The people of countries with Chinese projects are becoming increasingly hostile to China. China typically exports their own workers to do the projects so there aren't even jobs created for the people of the host country. China's military belligerence is making its neighbors increasingly hostile to it. Japan is sharply increasing its military budget. South Korea has elected a China hawk as its leader. The Philippines have granted access to the US for more military bases, since a new leader replace the witless crackpot Duterte. Chinese aggression has made an enemy also out of Vietnam, and of course India, which is the country that will probably prove to be the new emerging superpower rather than China.
Got a bit on a tangent there. Anyway, it's an outstanding book.
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That’s why the subversion of critical thinking is so dangerous. It is the mechanism by which humans lose their faculties as individuals and succumb to groupthink, which is a precondition for every totalitarian society on Earth, and which ultimately felled my father.Highlighted by 279 Kindle readers- There is a reason why the great books of Western civilization are all banned in dictatorships.Highlighted by 250 Kindle readers
- Without words to describe an emotion or phenomenon, I discovered, it is easy enough to live your life not even knowing they exist. Totalitarian regimes understand this fact quite well.Highlighted by 210 Kindle readers
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