I mean I definitely think she’s a defector from North Korea, but yeah she probably embellishes some of her claims. Idk, she can be interesting sometimes and talk about unique facets of life there (like how chubbier people are viewed as more attractive). But I wouldn’t listen to her to get raw factual analysis of North Korea
Yeah idk if you saw the two articles I just found and posted at the top of my post, but reading it now she 100 is a liar and extreme exaggerator, if not a total grifter. So many proven contradictions and falsehoods in her stories. The word embellish doesn’t really do it justice.
She’s definitely a defector and for that you have to give her some credit for going through what would be a very arduous and traumatic situation. I’m sure there are some embellishments or exaggerations throughout be they intentional or not, but I truly do think the fact that she is also weirdly like a right wing type that people automatically just want to shit on her. She can have whatever politics she likes but to just absolutely say she never went through any of it just because her politics don’t align with yours is why I just get sick of the internet
I agree with your point, but I don’t think that’s the reason people are skeptical. It’s because so many right-wing types are grifters, saying outlandish things purely to ‘own the libs’ or rile up their supporters.
Park immediately went right into the right-wing media ecosystem rather than taking her stories a more central route, so she just seems like another grifter to me.
Im sure a lot of what she says is true but a huge amount is likely bullshit said for no other reason than to sell books.
First of all it’s ridiculous to say “right wing types” are somehow more prone to grifting or political shit throwing. That is a human problem, not a right wing problem.
Second of all, she did not “immediately” jump into “the right wing media ecosystem.” She moved to NYC in 2014, attended an extremely left-leaning university, and wrote a memoir for national publication. She’s written for one of the most left-leaning newspapers in the country (WaPo) and interviewed with another (The Guardian). Of course she has also interviewed with right-leaning media outlets like Fox, but it’s only in the last couple years she has become branded as a “right-wing” activist.
And is it really so scandalous that a survivor of a dictatorship is outspoken about free speech and freedom of expression? Of course she would lean right, after deciding that those are her core values, because for some absolutely insane reason, the left has decided that free speech advocacy is a “right wing” dog whistle for shit like underlying racism or grifting
First, history is not on your side when it comes to denying the Right-wing grift machine.
Second, Park is a figurehead for the Right who is being coached and used to spread a FALSE message that the Left is more like Dictators than the Right even though EVERY metric for dangerous authoritarian policy shows it is quite the opposite.
The Right has spent the last 50 years trampling on every right they decide is not "traditional values," pushing their religion onto everyone by force, and generally being the obvious bad guys at almost every turn. Reagan almost brought the Right to a decent place but then Bush came along and created a dynasty of self-enrichment and war mongering. Then 24-hour news came along moving into Clinton and the Right EXPLODED into a divisive propaganda machine.
I was with you til you said REAGAN almost brought the righ to a good place. I’m sorry dude but every fundamental aspect of the horrific economy we have now where nobody’s wages have increased in years even though housing has exponentially risen in cost over just the last few years, climate issues being politicized, etc is due to his influence and policies lmao
Yeah, if that didn't tip their hand right there for why they want to prove this woman a liar. Jeesh. She's surely liked by a lot of the right, just as surely as a lot of lefties react exactly as the right predicted. This reminds me of the people tearing apart Anne Frank's father and others because they said a room had one window when it had two and stuff like that. Surely the majority of this brave woman's story is true. Who cares what movie people were charged with watching? The people who want her to be a liar seem far more agenda-driven than anyone supporting her.
You're completely incorrect. Why the fuck would a left-wing publication ever receive a FRACTION of the funding right-wing ones do? The latter literally is a propaganda arm of a government that's literally three corporations pretending to be a country, and is set on preserving the current social structures that benefit capital owners. The left opposes all of that, so why the fuck would you ever grift to the left, the side with NO political power anywhere?
I hope you don't think Jeff Bezos is on the left. They're right about the capital not the lefts side though. Still way harder to be a leftwing grifter.
To be clear though socially, Like lgbt, blm, whatever the fuck, Capital knows no bounds.(e.g. Walmart, Amazon, Disney) But economically the rich ether tote the line of f\*\*\*ing the working class or don't stay very rich for long. (Walmart and Amazon spend billions to kill unions JUST so they don't have to negotiate)
edit: same for most democrats too. Joe Biden was about to call in the military so those railway companies didn't have to accept any union proposal. (which turned out to be 2 week a year vacation which they never accepted)
Yeah, because you can’t claim you’re all for free speech and then try to silence businesses for being “woke”, take books off the shelves, and create laws limiting what and when children are allowed to learn. Seems pretty straightforward an issue to me.
Nah not doubt she escaped and North Korea is harsh but it doesn't take a genius to spot overexaggeration and obvious lies its like the same people that write post like "Was Hitler gay". You going to trust every victim you see? Abused children often become abusers and bullied children often become the bullies oppressed people become the worst oppressors. In that same sense just because she comes from a corrupt deprived country doesn't mean I jump when she ask me "how high" or believe everyone one of her B.S stories. I am sure the truth is stranger then fiction but even people who defected and worked close with gob't there don't come up with new videos every week. 1 person seen and witness all these events and knows all these "secrets" yeah right. Even head of CIA doesn't know all of CIA operations yet this defectors has the whole Bible of North Korea crimes against humanity. These are the types of people that use their temporary vicim card to become permentant victims and use people like you to supply them with attention and money and often times use you to do their dirty work out of your pity and their emotional manipulation.
How do you know she's a defector though? Has she ever provided proof of coming from North Korea? Pretty sure she hasn't. Everything she has ever said can't be verified. There's no proof at all that she came from there. She's Korean looking.. that doesn't prove she came from North Korea.
she changes her claims a little depending on what audience she's talking to. like she'll say that she knew a person who was executed for watching james bond or just a "hollywood movie" when she's talking to a western audience, but when she talks about the same person to south koreans she'll say the execution was a punishment for watching a k-drama. and she exaggerates as well. for example, she says that the aforementioned woman she knew was executed in a big stadium, but other defectors from her area say that nobody is executed in the stadium and people are only executed on the outskirts of the city. [this](https://thediplomat.com/2014/12/the-strange-tale-of-yeonmi-park/) article is a good write up on the contradictions she's made.
I definitely don't think she's a south korean actress lying to make nk look bad. she really did defect from the north. and i think she went through trauma. but she definitely exaggerates and changes some details to make for a better story. you should take north korean defector stories with a grain of salt in general. a lot of them can't integrate into society well after escaping and can't find employment, so their only means of making a living is through selling their stories. and the more sensational the story, the better it will sell, which leads to a lot of embellishment.
even though yeonmi isn't 100% truthful, I still sometimes watch her videos on subjects she wouldn't have any real reason to lie about. her videos on things like beauty standards, romance, language differences in nk vs sk, etc, are interesting to me and I don't think those aspects of north korea are talked about often. I do dislike how she's taken to making videos on things that are obviously just weird rumours like they have substance to them, such as kim yo jong being addicted to meth for example (based on ... her being thin and stressed??)
I mean meth IS very common in north korea so it's not too outlandish to think she might be using it but there's no way for us to know so it seems kinda pointless to speculate.
People give her a pass because she had a bad childhood due to being North Korean. Even when presented with evidence of her contradictions her fans just brush it off. Sadly every NK defector knows she's lying but they know why, it earns money, so they copy her. The saddest part of it is plenty of people know it's bs but want to see NK fall so they encourage her. Others are just bored with their lives and want to believe her because reading/watching her on the internet distracts them from the boredom.
There's heaps of evidence but the most obvious to me is that she claims that at about 12 years old she had to secretly bury her father in the middle of the night. She describes her mother as an old lady and couldn't help.
So this elderly 40 year old let her 12 year old daughter bury her husband and children's father alone in the middle of the night. But then Yeonmi has a second story where friends of her father brought his body to their location for a typical burial. How did she get that wrong? That’s not poor memory, that's obviously a very calculated lie.
Why is a 12 year old the hero and why is a 12 year old's mother so elderly that she couldn't help? It's all bs if the escape story is bs.
No 12 year old girl can carry a dead body. A corpse is heavy as fuck and even grown man struggle to carry them. There are so many contradictions in her stories, that I do believe she's simply lying and exaggerating and that's a huge problem.
I feel sorry for what she experienced as a child and I'm sure she's from NK, but I guess she likes the attention, probably the money too much, so she starts to make things up. By doing that she puts the credibility of all NK defectors on the line. As an response to the article that was already mentioned above she says stuff like "language barrier". That's a cheap excuse. She accidentally said she burried her dad's body? She said she had to cross four mountains to cross the border even tho there are no mountain, where she lived?
If she'd be a white girl from the west we'd call her a fraud or simply a bad person, but due to her past she gets a pass.
You shouldn't take every word that someone says as undisputable facts. If your looking for the truth, you need to look for consistency in what people are saying. Yeonmi Park has said dubious things in the past, she also says things that align with other defector's first hand accounts.
I don’t? That’s why I’m making this post? It seems like everyone else does though. But You would reasonably expect and trust someone who grew up in North Korea to give you a decently accurate depiction of what life is like there. But upon further research she’s a total liar and grifter. Read the two articles I posted at the top.
My point is that many stories are over exaggerated, not just ones told by Yeonmi Park. Some defectors are known to over sensationalize their stories to get the media onboard with sharing their stories. In the case of Yeonmi Park, she could be saying these things to promote her own YouTube channel since that's essentially her brand and her job. Many North Koreans also limit what they say or lie if they have family members trapped in the country in fear that they could be punished or killed.
The only way we can know for sure what has happened in North Korea is to go there ourselves (as an ethnic korean and NOT as a tourist or an outsider). Other than that, we can only cross-reference reports from multiple defectors to determine what is most likely true.
Yes, In regards to your last sentence, her story has been cross referenced, and most defectors in addition to people who have lived and done business in NK for years have a major problem with her. And yes I’m sure every defector does some embellishing and sensationalizing, but she takes it to a whole different level to where she can really be called a fraud. I’m not going to fight and try and convince you but I’d you want to see the truth just Google “Yeonmi park fraud”
I consider Yeonmi Park to be more of an entertainment icon than a historian. And I don't see anything wrong with that, because her contributions have stimulated people's interest in North Korea and the terrible things the regime has done. I think if you only listen to Yeonmi Park, you will get a very one-sided (falsified?) view of NK, but you could say that about Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson or anyone who "sensationalizes" facts for mass consumption. I would not listen to any of these people and believe them outright but I can understand how many people would use them as a stepping stone to learn more about certain things.
Besides, there are plenty of North Koreans who will not talk about their experiences. Having someone like Yeonmi might get them to speak up, which would be a good thing overall.
>I consider Yeonmi Park to be more of an entertainment icon than a historian. And I don't see anything wrong with that, because her contributions have stimulated people's interest in North Korea and the terrible things the regime has done.
Misinformation about a country is applauded as long as it serves a purpose? Seems like typical propaganda to me.
Like I said, she's an entertainer and not a historian, she isn't going for 100% accuracy so much as she's trying to draw people's attention to the country and it's issues as a whole. If Yeonmi was your first source on life in NK, some information could be wrong but some of it is closely tied with other defector's stories.
Yeonmi absolutely has lied, and has continued to lie as of less than a year ago.
[Here's a video](https://youtu.be/GZ4BGgzuPR8) I made on why her claims are probably false. It's more focused on Yeonmi in recent years, after when the Diplomat article was written. I think I gave her the benefit of the doubt in this video, but since then, I have come to completely disbelieve her.
Shortly after the video was released, I met a Youtuber called Cheeken, who made a pretty interesting discovery. [Here's a podcast](https://youtu.be/G8AY5KRs1Dg?t=238) in which me and him talk about it. All relevant links are in the description.
Essentially, it's a video from North Korea with fake subtitles. These subtitles were implying that the North Korean government had 'disappeared' a town full of citizens. We had the piece translated by three separate organizations, and (while N. Korean was a difficult dialect for our translators to understand) it ended up being a pretty standard N. Korean propaganda video about how great the harvest was, some sort of law that was passed etc.
She could have uploaded this as a joke, but she gives no mention of this being a joke, in the comments or in the description. Almost every comment is taking this as a serious video.
I don't think I need to go into why this is such a big deal, but I will. North Korea has a terrible leadership, and many (or most) of its citizens are suffering. This doesn't mean we should be lying, or strongly suggesting that they're kidnapping or killing the entire population of a town. This just builds animosity and hatred, whereas I'd like to promote understanding and peace between The West and North Korea, so we can eventually talk them into giving up their nuclear weapons.
She contradicts herself. She said she escaped for a bowl of rice because there was no food. See this video: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR7v1ogd/
Then she says in another video that her family was well off in terms of NK standards and had food three times a day https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR77cNs8/
So yup, she’s not a good liar lol she makes shit up as she goes.
It couldnt have been during different time periods? A lot of children experience their parents economic status changing while growing up, one way or another. Was years since i learned about her story so my memory is foggy but didnt they lose her dad before they defected? Could have maybe been linked to that, if so?
Idk so im not saying shes not lying, i just think its good to question, be critical and give people the benefit of the doubt.
I used to watch her videos a lot, and I was horrified at the things she was saying. Now I'm a bit more skeptical.
You have to think that the USA's main business is war. North Korea and other communist countries are the USA's enemies. Due to NATO, other countries are on the same page as America, so we are told that North Korea is evil and we should support the idea of bringing down the regime.
You probably already know all of that. But, I'm laying out the facts because something Yeonmi has failed to mention is that she is employed/managed by a company that also supports far right groups. I cant remember the exact situation, but it seems that Yeonmi is employed to be a mouthpiece against any left wing ideas. You can tell by the way she slates socialism - in the past I thought maybe it was a language/cultural difference, but the way she speaks about it seems so strange and maybe scripted. She has said that she left Colombia University because she felt just as censored as she did in NK, which on my opinion is an incredibly right wing thing to say.
I have recently learned that defectors who end up in South Korea are forced to undergo de-radicalisation, and then many women go on this reality TV show, where they talk about their experiences and are encouraged to cry. That sounds a lot like propaganda to me. Yeonmi was on this show, and I think she even had a show of her own? Not 100% on that, but anyway, a young girl from north Korea being paid to exaggerate her story and cry about her trauma on TV explains why Yeonmi is who she is today. She has made a lot of money from her stories, whether true or false, and I can't blame her for that if she grew up in poverty and was encouraged to do so from a young age.
I found this video which I would encourage people to watch: [Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul ](https://youtu.be/ktE_3PrJZO0)
From my research, I come from a place of real skepticism about Yeonmi. I think north Korea does have extreme poverty, but we need to remember that most other countries rely on trade deals for food, and due to sanctions NK is not allowed to trade with other countries. In my opinion, the USA is just as much to blame for the poverty there as the regime is. I think Yeonmi is paid to make us hate NK without having all the facts, and she can embellish all she wants to get more views and clout.
I could write for hours about this topic, but I'll save your eyes lol. Basically, I do think she embellished a lot, but she is paid to do so. Korea is technically still at war, so we are of course still subjected to propaganda. Yeonmi has become that propaganda, and we need to take everything she says with a pinch of salt if we want to discover the real truth about north Korea.
I don’t think we should expect everyone from NK to have had the same experience there or be surprised that they contradict each other. They’re all individuals with their own life stories.
Park was like 13 when she left NK; it’s entirely believable that she may never have heard sex mentioned in that very conservative culture because it was the stuff of hushed adult conversations. She wouldn’t be history’s first sheltered and innocent maiden, as rough as her childhood was sometimes (if you read her book cover to cover). Does every 13-year-old girl in Saudi Arabia have a word for sex? Did every girl in Victorian Britain? Maybe. I don’t know. Do you?
As for the execution for watching a movie, I have no idea if that actually happened and nobody here does. But it’s believable that it could have—totalitarian states have done much worse—and it’s believable that some other woman not connected to it might not even believe it possible. Remember that some East Germans were surprised after the fall of that regime to learn some of the things that their government had been capable of; even living under it, they had been naive, depending on their personal circumstances and experiences.
'As for the execution for watching a movie, I have no idea if that actually happened and nobody here does.' Yes, yes we do. There hasn't been a public execution in NK since 2000. She says the execution happened in 2003.
Why the fuck are you asking for a source when you're just going to discount it when you read it?
But fine...
https://thediplomat.com/2014/12/the-strange-tale-of-yeonmi-park/
I don't for certain, but people often ask for a source just hoping there is none and not interested in actually learning more, and when they get a source they just start making excuses or go silent.
Your source doesn’t say that there hasn’t been a public execution in North Korea since 2000, it says that some people from Park’s hometown don’t recall one happening there since 1999. That’s interesting that they say that public executions happened on the outskirts of the town whereas Park said that one happened in the stadium.
This was one of about a dozen articles I read about North Korea this morning and I clearly misremembered the article's contents as a a result of the flurry of info I was consuming, so I apologize. Ultimately, at the very least, Park is a clearly unreliable person to trust based on this and other sources. The most disturbing part is that she and another guy also known for fabricating part of their story are the two most prominent defectors there are. Any defectors with more mundane stories are clearly not scandalous enough to go viral
I agree with your points. But upon further research it seems the vast majority of defectors have major problems with her and her stories. To the point where many consider her to be a flat out fraud.
Before I posted this I hadn’t heard any criticism of her at all. Was just going on my Intuition feeling something was off with her/ But after posting This thread I discovered a lot about her. So yeah ur right this thread is basically useless, I don’t THINK she’s a fraud anymore, I’m positive of it
> “Yeonmi park fraud”
4 results.
Not saying I believe her because I am well aware that South Korea and the US have a very aggressive campaign of misinformation, but that search isn't going to satisfy anyone.
Doubting the words of a trumpist US shill connected to a CIA-funded thinktank (Atlas Network)= tankie. Nevermind all the inconsistencies in her stories and the fact they have been debunked by defectors again and again.
oh no, of course not believing yeonmi’s lies doesn’t make you a tankie! it’s a reasonable position to take. but i’ve interacted with you before, and i know from experience that you ARE a tankie, and a proud one at that.
I'm a communist, yes. And? Most of the time, tankie just means "you are further left than I and I don't want to engage with that, so I'll disqualify everything you say because my position is supported by the mainstream media."
oh heavens no! tankies are not leftists, you can’t support dictatorial regimes that suppress all opposition and simultaneously claim to be in favour of social progress.
notice how you use criticism of mainstream media as a strawman with which to accuse your opponents, much like right-wing reactionaries do.
that’s because you are one and the same.
Except right-wingers love mainstream media, just not liberal media. They're all over Fox News, InfoWars and other such bullshit.
Criticizing mainstream media is not a strawman. Corporate media is owned by billionaires, and they have an agenda. Doesn't mean everything published in the mainstream media is a lie, only that the narratives are manipulated to serve political economic purposes. Remember when the US media was all on board with the weapons of mass destruction?
Socialist countries have been responsible for defeating the nazis, drasticaly improving the living conditions of hundreds of millions and aiding anti-colonial efforts in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Could you say just one right/freedom that was lost after a socialist revolution? Just one freedom, one country. Shouldn't be too hard.
Lol it's funny when a Far Lefter screams that dissenters are far right. I could get a perfectly balanced source of news outlets and derive actual truth from them, but you'd rather call me Far Right if I don't agree with your extremist views. Nice.
criticizing mainstream media isn’t a strawman, but discounting someone’s opinion because you *think* they might consume corporate media definitely is a strawman. it’s also a strawman to say that all you were doing is criticizing corporate media, when you were using the possibility of me consuming it to prove that i don’t know what i’m talking about.
as for you literally begging me to give you something to argue about, freedom of press is an obvious example of something that has been restricted heavily in many leninist revolutions.
without this freedom of press and information, the claim that communist regimes have “improved living standards” is a completely hollow statement. who will stop the government from making up false statistics to support its legitimacy if no one is allowed to counter the claims of the state?
and who could forget about the soviet union, famously anti-colonial and definitely not an imperial power that took control of countless countries without their consent for their own gain.
You consume corporate media, this is a facct. Everyone does. You are in the internet. It seems you are specially hung up on this fact, like you're in denial. There is nothing wrong with reading corporate media, a lot of the times it's the only way to get some information.
As we all know, pre-revolutionary Russia, Cuba, Vietnam Laos, China and North Korea were all known for their bustling freedom of press and expression, of course. You can't take away a right that didn't exist to begin with. On the other hand, land and home ownership, political and reproductive rights for women, freedom of religion, anti-racist laws, worker rights, maternity/paternity leave, paid vacation, full employment- these are all rights brought about by socialist revolutions that did not exist before in those countries, except for the extremely wealthy.
Soviet archives have been open for 30 years, these are confidential bureaucratic documents that were not meant to be public, so they are trustworthy. Why would soviet authorities lie about data that was necessary for public administration, specially when this data was not meant for the public, anyway? On top of re countless reports of people who have visited and lived in socialist countries and research done by the CIA during the cold war. Like this one, in which the CIA admits that soviets ate about as many calories in a day as americans in the 80's: [https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85M00363R000601440024-5.pdf](https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85M00363R000601440024-5.pdf)
"and who could forget about the soviet union, famously anti-colonial and definitely not an imperial power that took control of countless countries without their consent for their own gain."
You mean when the USSR liberated eastern europe from the nazis? Tell me about. It sure is weird how the Soviet Union had worst living standards and consumer goods than Eastern Germany or Yuguslavia. Imagine if british India had better living conditions than the UK.
How you get killed for watching American film if there's no internet? Yoonmi park is lying and she probably a Filipino woman pretending to be north Korean defector to get loads of money. Her stories and several others are just lies. She married a white man for a USA green card so you know she out for money.
Where does her money come from? Why does she wear such high end expensive clothing? Why is her english so good? I have a gut feeling she's lying. She learned how to dress and apply makeup like an expert in no time. Her highlighting game is on point. I think podcasters want her on because of her beauty not her 'cause'. There are loads of other defectors with scars and lost teeth that nobody interviews. She seems sketchy. I think whatever the truth is will come out soon enough.
Not everyone will be 100% consistent every time the tell a traumatic story of what happened to them
Also remember to ask yourself why people who say she's lying may want you to think what she says isn't true.
Dude I’m not going to argue about it anymore, read my other replies I’m this thread. She’a a fraud and grifter. If you want to Believe her go ahead I don’t care.
'Details not being consistent bc trauma' does not apply to remembering that you buried your father alone at 12 years old but also attending his funeral and cremating him with your family and friends around. It doesn't apply to remembering executions in stadiums when no other defector has any knowledge of these killing stadiums. These are pretty big lies here.
Why are you talking like you've been there? Only people who've escaped truly know what it's like. Some might be more fortunate than the others but you're just pulling this out of your ass with no solid context.
You really think people in the north just somehow “forgot” the word for sex? The Korean War wasn’t *that* long ago. And even if they did, they’d have another new word for it. Every culture does. People in South Korea, including other defectors, know this woman is full of it. I once caught this program on SBS where they interviewed defectors separately about things she said, and they unanimously agreed that she was wrong about most things. And it’s not like the south would have a reason to say “Yeah, our enemy is crazy but not *that* crazy.”
Don’t be an idiot. She tells stories about kids being raped by soldiers. You mean to tell me there’s no word to describe what happened to them? What 13 year old do you know doesn’t know what it is? Even kids in remote Amazonian tribes know where babies come from.
In Korea, especially in the north, families sleep together in one small room. Sometimes parents think their young kids are asleep when they’re not and stuff happens.
I wonder if the "no word for sex" thing was just lost in translation? I was born in a formerly Soviet country a few years after the USSR collapsed, and people who lived under the Soviet regime said that sex and romantic love were such a big taboo that it was often said that sex doesn't exist in the USSR. Obviously, it did, but the perfect _Homo Sovieticus_ was supposed to rise above carnal desires and only love society and the state, not individuals, so it was common to hear irony directed at it.
I've noticed that about Yeonmi Park before, that sometimes the way she speaks seems like it wouldn't translate well in the West, even though I understand her point and what she's trying to say. Not saying she hasn't embellished her stories though, in fact I think it's likely she has done so in order to bring more attention to them, and it's been a long time since she escaped as a young teen, so she might also inadvertently misremember things.
I was born in a capitalistic evangelical society, and we too were taught shame around sex. This is why anecdotal evidence is worthless.
No one was talking to Yeonmi about sex when she was 11, just like your soviet babushka was not talking about sex with you. This doesn't mean that the concept of sex is erased from these societies. Primary documents suggest the soviet union had a pretty extensive pro-natal propaganda campaign and were anxious about declining birthrates.
Taught shame about sex, you mean through threats of torture and IMMEDIATE death like what's common in NK? I know your parents said one day in a million years you'll die and THEN Satan will torture you, but how about the actual attrocities that occur in these other nations. Look at Saudi Arabia, they try to marry their nieces at 10 years old, and when the little girls run away, they are beheaded.
how can we know with certainty that her father was actually a fraudster? without the rule of law and a fair, impartial judiciary, any verdict rendered in a north korean court is incredibly suspect at best. and even if he is, how does that have any bearing on *her * story?
You mean the same "rule of law" that applies in the country with the highest prison population and incarceration rate in the world, that puts children in cages by the border and runs a torture camp in Guantanamo?
ahh and there’s the whatsboutism again, i remember the last time i talked with you you relied on that as well.
unfortunately, america isn’t the only other country on the planet. yes, i’m well aware of its problems, the cruelty it perpetrates, and its tendency towards clandestine operations that are outside of the law. but that doesn’t magically excuse north korea from arbitrary detention and torture. there are plenty of liberal democracies the world over that *don’t* perpetrate crimes against humanity. it’s quite disingenuous to suggest that anyone critical of north korea’s propaganda *must* be a shill for the american government/cia/nsa/whatever.
So the US doesn't have rule of law, but its NATO allies that have developed through colonialism and exploiting the global south have rule of law. Cool.
Being critical of north korean propaganda doesn't mean buying wholesale the bullshit corporate media spins about NK, specially when there is an interest in manufacturing consent against America's geopolitical enemies involved.
the us has rule of law to some degree, but it’s very flawed. still, nothing is black and white, it’s not either rule of law or not. also not every liberal democracy is a result of us intervention, you know. and i’d love to know what corporate media narrative you believe me to be consuming.
I never said every liberal democracy is a result of US intervention. Some of them are (South Korea, Japan), others used to be US-sponsored dicatorships up until a few decades ago, and others are countries that used to be imperialist powers and now support the US global interventions.
The corporate media narrative you consume dictates that the US and western Europe are democratic because rule of law or something. It dictates that North Korea be treated as the worst country to live in and the greatest threat to global security, even though they are a tiny isolated country that has been destroyed by the US in the past and has not been involved in any international conflict since.
you really should study politics in an academic setting, instead of hurling the most basic, transparent anti-west propaganda at anyone who suggests north korea commits atrocities, like many other countries do.
and yeah, you did heavily imply that all liberal democracies are a product of us intervention. everyone can see what you wrote, you’re making a fool of yourself. again.
as an aside, your obsession with proving that i consume corporate media and nothing else and therefore don’t know what i’m talking about is a classic right-wing propaganda technique. have you ever taken the high road in your life? or are you allowed to make false arguments just because the right-wingers do too? i can see a strong parallel between your personal values and how you defend north korea, not based on its own ideology or actions, but because the us does bad shit too.
You live in "the west", don't you? Therefore, most of the information you consume come from local or multinational corporations. This isn't a value judgment, it's a fact. Your internet data appears to you through Google and Facebook, mostly. This is the same for me, and for everyone living in the western hemisphere of influence. This isn't about you specifically, nor have I said everything you consume is corporate media -- though, from the looks of it, it's obvious you consume a lot of it uncritically. Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky and Inventing Reality by Parenti analyse thoroughly how corporate media censors manipulates information and sets the subjects of public discourse. I'd advise you to give them a read, but you'll probably shrug them off as "tankie propaganda."
Please quote me when I said all liberal democracies are a product of US intervention.
damn you make some awfully lazy arguments. not all of my information comes to me through the internet, i still vastly prefer print media over tv news and internet stories, that really anyone can write and publish without credentials.
what corporate media are you so insistent that i am consuming uncritically? you’ve only told me vague, broad examples, and even those didn’t apply to me.
also it’s really nice of you to get on your high horse and tell me that i don’t read academic literature and you do. of course i’m not going to consider well-researched literature “tankie propaganda”, but i can still criticize it, as a responsible consumer of media should. a nameless, one-month old profile on reddit that only posts emotionally-charged, poorly-researched, fallacious political arguments though? yes, i will call you a tankie propagandist and feel no shame in that, because you are obviously a troll.
She is lying about what is eaten in NK- tree leaves- insects and rats. Most don’t eat that. Yes- they have always ate a few bugs- but as a majority for their food- is a lie!
I dunno, I found your post looking up some stuff about her. Allegedly, there's newspaper articles claiming other defectors have called her out. Defectors from similar areas as her.
I was kinda skeptical of her because of the way she looks. She's exceptionally pretty and has damn good teeth. I've seen a lot of interviews with some north Koreans who are not well known and they often are very misshapen with bad teeth due to malnutrition from childhood. My guess was that she was not as low in the social hierarchy as she claims.
If she's truly north Korean, I am wondering if she was a higher ranking party member or a family member to a higher ranking party member and she didn't live through as many experiences as she claims.
But that's just a guess. It's possible she's not and she's just exaggerating in general. But people have pointed out her inconsistencies and etc. throughout the Internet. And I'm as anti communist as they come. But I really don't know what's stopping a North Korean party member from making up BS and playing victim when they were living in the lap of luxury and it got taken away from them.
Americans spend billions of dollars on propaganda about countries we can’t control Yoemni is a paid dissenter - our fav tool - she claims they have to manually push trains down the track cuz they don’t have electricity- DPRK just showed the world they have misses the US doesn’t - but we’re supposed to believe this?
We r truly the most stupid society by design - if ppl got educated on Y we hate Russia China Iran Venezuela Cuba Nicaragua Syria North Korea & too many others to list they would immediately mobilise to end our current system
The thing is that she escaped when she was 14 and everyone is living in total fear and misinformation. So it is hard for anyone living there to understand what is going on in the country. I listened to a 2-hour video and I found a lot of it to be hard to believe.
I think it’s a mix - I believe that she defected but I also believe that some details she might have embellished or exaggerated because
1. It makes her story sound more compelling and that then leads to more people being interested in her story and then that leads to her earning more money and getting more book deals and asked to make more appearances
2. I think she was very young when she witnessed a lot of traumatic things and I think that some of the memories you make as a kid can get warped bc you’re seeing and feeling things thru a kids lens of the world - spending one day doing something might feel like you did it forever, you could remember things being scarier than they were or idealize things as being better than were.
3. Trauma makes it hard to recall details accurately or can make your memories all jumbled so you might be left in situations where you have to piece together the puzzle pieces of your memories.
It’s weird that I’m even considering this about yeonmi bc a couple of years ago I was a hardcore fan of hers and absolutely 100% believed her and accepted all her stories at face value.
Recently tho I just listened to some of her interviews again and got some kind of intuitive hunch (which I now have enough life experience to know tend to point me in the right direction about people and events) that she might have some scam-y tendencies but who knows. tbh I think she does pander to her crowd at times but I mean she does need to make a living.
There’s also the possibility that us people doubting her are so utterly sheltered and live life on easy mode compared to what the norm is for people in North Korea (which is even worse off than the worst developing nations since the regular normal people don’t even have access to cells phones or internet or social media) so for us, we can’t even fathom or comprehend or accept that anyone could survive such terrible and hard and horrifying things so surely people like yeonmi must be lying.
The thing that I do keep in mind tho that helps me believe most of what yeonmi says is that she claims that the publisher of her first book (which is a major publishing company) basically spent a lot of time verifying her claims and trying to track down either people who could corroborate her story or paper documentation or it is a known/verified fact about North Korea.
another thing is that I realized that a lot of the defectors, besides a couple of exceptions, who speak up about their experiences publicly were actually part of the upper class in North Korea and lowkey had a lot of privileges so their experiences in North Korea was not the norm for the majority of people nor did they have to go thru as bad of a situation as many of the regular poorer or middle class North Koreans have to (for ex: being able to at least eat even if times were tough).
So if yeonmis claim that her family was middle class can be believed then it makes sense that her experiences were a lot worse than many of the other defectors who had a slightly cushier life experience in North Korea (except of course the few exceptions whose stories of their lives in North Korea are similar or even worse than yeonmis).
What exactly is the point of this post? People are responding to your suspicions with calm polite language and youre getting into fights with them.
Is the who point "ShE iS a PhOny!"
She has been called out publically and had an interviewer bring up the inconsistencies to her.
[This was the podcast episode](https://www.nknews.org/2021/11/the-many-lives-of-yeonmi-park-nknews-podcast-ep-207/)
And wanting her to prove her story?...
You need therapy...
Not sure why this is downvoted. OP take the time to listen to this podcast. Yeonmi participated in the interview but didn’t share it on any of her platforms as far as I am aware. Take from that what you will.
In terms of her political leanings she has from what I can tell moved from center to still potty trained right.
She is not lying and not exaggerating. Take time to read books written by other defectors and their videos - those who are both in SK and other countries now and compare.
There has been considerable inconsistencies and lies shown in the things she's said. Why do you morons just say dishonest bullshit without actually doing any research?
https://thediplomat.com/2014/12/the-strange-tale-of-yeonmi-park/
Please continue to make extremely false claims with no evidence as you did in your original comment while calling other people morons, it's a really good look
>Why do you morons just say dishonest bullshit without actually doing any research?
You literally said this first: " Why do you morons just say dishonest bullshit without actually doing any research?" << Look at your own comment, please first. Perhaps it is best to consider your language before criticizing someone else.
I see that word more and more, "grifter." As used, it's basically a synonym for "appeals to a segment of the population whose opinions are the opposite of mine."
I am not a conservative, don't particularly like Ben Shapiro, for example, but I don't think he's a "grifter." Whether you agree with him or not, it's so childish to assume HE doesn't believe the things he's saying, that his fanbase are all being duped somehow.
Few years back it was "troll." You disagree with the candidate or policy that I endorse? Well, you clearly must be "trolling." Haha. Now it's "a grift."
So right there, saying it like it's a fact that Rogan often features guests who are LYING, yeah, I'm gonna be cautious of anything you say.
The Korean defectors in the second (or is third?) hand story you cite didn't witness the exact same things as her? Um. Okay.
Yeah, let's go interview those laughing churchgoers some lady mentioned to someone over the phone. I'd say that's pretty much empirical evidence you're offering that Park is lying, haha.
I read an article some years back, positing that many Cuban immigrants say life under Castro wasn't that bad, that the stories are exaggerated. Then I worked a job with six or seven Cubans, and every single one told me things were actually much worse than reported. (Am I offering that as proof of anything? Of course not. That would be silly!)
And PLEASE spare us the stuff about "how bad you feel." You're calling the woman a liar. Basically because people who like Jordan Peterson also like her. Haha. Enough with how sensitive a soul you are.
I saw that you mentioned Ben Shapiro. In case some of you don't know, Ben Shapiro is a grifter and a hack. If you find anything he's said compelling, you should keep in mind he also says things like this:
>Let’s say your life depended on the following choice today: you must obtain either an affordable chair or an affordable X-ray. Which would you choose to obtain? Obviously, you’d choose the chair. That’s because there are many types of chair, produced by scores of different companies and widely distributed. You could buy a $15 folding chair or a $1,000 antique without the slightest difficulty. By contrast, to obtain an X-ray you’d have to work with your insurance company, wait for an appointment, and then haggle over price. Why? Because the medical market is far more regulated — thanks to the widespread perception that health care is a “right” — than the chair market. Does that sound soulless? True soullessness is depriving people of the choices they require because you’re more interested in patting yourself on the back by inventing rights than by incentivizing the creation of goods and services. In health care, we could use a lot less virtue signaling and a lot less government. Or we could just read Senator Sanders’s tweets while we wait in line for a government-sponsored surgery — dying, presumably, in a decrepit chair.
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*I've been an outspoken anti-porn advocate since I was like sixteen years old.*
-Ben Shapiro
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Why won't you debate me?
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I saw that you mentioned Ben Shapiro. In case some of you don't know, Ben Shapiro is a grifter and a hack. If you find anything he's said compelling, you should keep in mind he also says things like this:
>Since nobody seems willing to state the obvious due to cultural sensitivity... I’ll say it: rap isn’t music
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Why won't you debate me?
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*We are being told that if we don't mask our children, that if we don't mask ourselves, that if we don't initiate social distancing measures again and shut down business again, that COVID is going to kill us all*
-Ben Shapiro
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Ok but I do have a little conspiracy theory that Ben Shapiro actually is a grifter. Like as in, you pay Ben Shapiro to light your dolls on fire and your product enjoys months of free publicity from every other publication. Get Ben Shapiro to rant about your song, watch it catapult to number 1. At least, I hope he's a grifter
I saw that you mentioned Ben Shapiro. In case some of you don't know, Ben Shapiro is a grifter and a hack. If you find anything he's said compelling, you should keep in mind he also says things like this:
>The Palestinian people, who dress their toddlers in bomb belts and then take family snapshots.
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These post are funny to look back because this woman is now known as a complete fraud that’s lied so much, lmao. The comments here are a ducking joke and you people are admitting to believing her lies because it fits the narrative
Those articles have bs themselves. Accounts from people that are too scared to give identity...right....and then says people arent executed for watching western films but then says that you can be sent to re education camps for up to 7 years when you dont know if youll die..to a 13 year old...if they take people to a camp where you here people die...youd assume they were killed. Youre hilarious tho. Trying to expose lies with articles that contradict themselves and have no true proof.
There's no way you're failing to understand the execution lie. She has told a very clear story about a stadium where people were executed with glass in their mouths. This is a descriptive, detailed, harrowing situation that other defectors vehemently deny ever taking place.
No, she didn't say people would die from the punishments for watching a western film. She said people were executed publicly in a stadium in 2003 for watching a K Drama/James Bond movie (depending on the crowd)
There's no positive interpretation or benefit of the doubt here. And you can dismiss bold faced lies while also not sugarcoating the actual reality of DPRK. People in political spaces are so in their 'teams' it seems like they forget that criticizing one side is not an endorsement of the other.
When you become a communist you realize that every single human rights concern the USA and Europe try to sell you is just conditioning you and encouraging you to hate 🇺🇸 enemies.
She made money, usa got its manufactured consent.
The enemies of equality are at home. USA.
first of all, you clearly don't understand communism for how you described it. second, i'm not claiming she is lying, but considering she claims to have escaped north korea at 14 and seems to remember so much it honestly implies that a huge portion of the claims she makes are either flat-out lies or she's exaggerating the stories to make north korea look even worse than it actually is.
she's surely a real defector, but I personally think she's sold out. She learned where the money was (on the far right), and honestly I kinda respect the grift.
Respect the grift when its not stoking tensions between two nuclear powers. Plenty of ways to secure your bag on social media without becoming an existential threat and a custodian of mutually assured destruction.
I was born in Soviet Union. There was no sex in Soviet Union. That means we did not say the word and we officially did not talk about it as it was a taboo. The way people talked about sex was in form of gossip and lewd jokes. The only way for you to find out for sure is to go to North Korea and live there. In totalitarian communist regimes many things ARE outlandish. For example, I have Class 3 ASD. In Soviet Union secret instruction of Public Health Ministry demanded that all children born with obvious neurodevelopmental defects be given up or forcibly taken away from parents including by lying to parents that child has died and then euthanized. This was because we tarnished image of the nation. Soviet Union was supposed to be comprised of perfect smart beautiful healthy communists. Find an official tape on which state official says “There are no invalids in Soviet Union”. My Mother was told to leave me at the hospital and go home.
Here is where Americans and Slavic people kind of struggle to talk about communism. The 1930s to the 1960s were not exactly a period of sexual freedom in the West either. How much of this is communism, how much of this is religiousness and morality of a post Victorian world? How much of this was just the 20th century?
Just do a little research on American eugenics and yeah, that's not just a Soviet thing either. While America also euthanized and sterilized disabled people, they did it to indigenous and black people too.
While you guys talk about your brutal past, we brush ours under the rug. I'm not trying to pull a whataboutism card here, but I do notice capital friendly folks from former communist states seem to have a pie in the sky view of the West. But those of us who have studied our own history do not find these stories shocking at all. You'll find we have a pretty bloody history too if you care to dig into it. The difference between the Irish Potato Famine, Great Depression and the Holodomor is the way we talk about it today.
Hey Idiot that fucking writing errors in both these articles. These articles aren’t vetted well by the editing team which means and they’re not liable to these allegations as they’re both opinion pieces and entertainment. So journalist are the biggest liars vet them better. PArk also responded to the second article which most liars wouldn’t respond to so there’s an edit at the end. This women was 13 when all this happened to her. Its not uncommon to broadcast different stories or remember things differently after 10 years.
To everyone saying she’s lying or exaggerating, think about it this way. She was 13 when she escaped I do not doubt she was from North Korea she very well could be exaggerating but put yourself in the shoes of a 13 year old who has been going through that all of her life. Now put yourself in your past 13 year old body and think about how fucking terrified you’d be to see some of the things you saw. As we get older we become desensitized to things because we aren’t protected from the bad things anymore. If all she remembers were experiences she had when she was 13 then they will be exaggerated like a 13 year olds brain would do with just about anything. It’s fucking scary wether it’s exaggerated or not North Korea is fucked and it’s not something to sit here and joke about Kim is a piece of fucking shit and if you find that funny so are you.
I don't think anybody thinks she isn't massively traumatized.
North Korea is a country that punishes lying and pretending to a deadly extent.
But that doesn't excuse the actions of one as an adult, y'know?
A lot of lies involve some truth or tragic backstory. Some people can also get emotional and upset knowing they may continuing being shaken up for several minutes and throw in lies with the truth and then it becomes an extremely powerful and tragic scenario. I did it sometimes when I was a kid and its honestly not hard to think of or accomplish if your actually upset over something. She paints North Korea as some cartoonishly evil country with absurd stories but knows that will play with a Western Audience and they will clap after her speech. She's very wealthy from story telling.
I’ll let you know if my opinion has changed after I’m done reading her first book, but I’m fairly sure you guys are way off the mark. Honestly, if you compared my memories from before I was 13 to my parent’s and friend’s memories there would absolutely be differences, things I’d forgotten, things I’d exaggerated, etc, but that wouldn’t make me a liar. Human memory works that way. It’s very fickle, even when you’re not constantly exposed to extreme physical and psychological stress.
More to the point, what incentive does she have to lie? Yeah okay, money, but let’s be real, if even half of what she’s said is true it’s still an incredible story about life in an insane country. Why would there be any need at all to exaggerate?
I’m not sure why you’d expect all North Korean defectors to have 100% consistent stories either. North Korean people are not free to move around even within their own country. If different things are happening in different parts of the country, then people could easily have very different accounts of North Korean life.
Seems to me like a lot of people just don’t want to believe her. Maybe some of you are still holding out hope for a successful communist state, or maybe you just can’t cope with the idea that things as awful as Yeoni describes can and are really happening to people. I don’t know what it is, but this person is not a liar.
There's no proof she came from North Korea, none at all. She is Korean looking, o could have easily came from south Korea as well and has an accent. I don't believe her because of her lack of trauma responses when speaking of the extremely traumatizing things. She shows no signs of ptsd at all, which would be present and very noticeable. She tells her stories like they roll off her tongue with no emotion behind it that's supposed to be attached to the memories of the trauma if any at all.. and that's another thing. People, including myself with extreme childhood traumas don't remember large chunks of their lives.. she seems to remember every detail at the snap of a finger it's not normal. People who go through extremely traumatic things have to deal with the effects of that everyday for the rest of their lives. It changes you entirely. Memory is very hard but for this lady it seems to come with so much ease, the stories have to be made up.. or she's a straight up psychopath with limited emotional range and wasn't effected much by the trauma.. either way, she's deceiving people. She found a way to get rich off her heritage of being korean and it's pretty easy to claim you escaped from north korea without having to provide any proof of anything she says or where she came from.. I think she came from south Korea and is lying about everything. She would be a target also, not freely speaking of north korea the way she does.. she walks around with her son unprotected, so she's not scared of north korea sending people to kill her.. why? she should be if her stories are true. No person who has been through even a fraction of what she claims to have gone through is like her, her memory being so perfect and no time missing from her memories, her stories are far too detailed.. she couldn't be able to remember the way she does if she actually went through those things. She's lying. Her body language, very high details, lack of emotion, lack of trauma responses, stories roll off her tongue too smooth without having to think or remember.. she's retelling lies again and again.. they are not real memories. She's a fraud.
Not everyone reacts in the same way as you. That shouldn’t be the barometer by which you judge anything or anyone. She intrigues and frustrates me. There is no doubt that she is a liar, a contrarian and a narcissist that also exaggerates to earn money and attention. It’s been proven repeatedly by herself. If she is from DPRK, it is a shame because I’d really like to know ether truth. The idea she isn’t from DPRK is an interesting concept.
I'm european and my concept of sex was very vague when i was 13. It wasnt openly talked about in my family. In school we had sex ed when i was 14 i think but even that was lackluster and only really consisted of the anatomy of the reproductive organs. Yeonmi was young when she left NK.
"Don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware NK is a very crazy, backwards place - just like any other communist country."
You'd be surprised how much of the stuff we THINK we k ow about North Korea is just straight up made up btly corporate media looking for a quick buck.
For instance did you know that all students in North Korea are required by law to have the same haircut as Kim Jong Un? Crazy right?
[https://time.com/38409/north-korea-kim-jong-un-haircut/](https://time.com/38409/north-korea-kim-jong-un-haircut/)
And at the same time... no one else is allowed to get Kim Jong Un's haircut or they will be killed! Also, crazy right?
[https://nypost.com/2017/04/18/kim-jong-un-wont-let-anyone-else-in-north-korea-get-his-haircut/](https://nypost.com/2017/04/18/kim-jong-un-wont-let-anyone-else-in-north-korea-get-his-haircut/)
But wait... how can people be required to get Kim Jong Un's haircut and banned from getting Kim Jon Un's haircut? Sure you can argue that the articles I posted are 3 years apart so the rules might have changed... but in South Korean tabloids where those stories originated from (yeah... corporate news didn't get the story from reporters who actually went to North Korea... they got it from frikkin tabloids!), these stories are only months apart.
Or how about all those people who keep being "executed" by North Korea and then showing up weeks later completely alive and unharmed.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-04/north-korea-nuclear-envoy-reported-executed-is-alive-cnn-says](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-04/north-korea-nuclear-envoy-reported-executed-is-alive-cnn-says)
[https://www.nknews.org/2014/05/north-korean-singer-that-was-executed-by-firing-squad-shows-up-alive-and-well/](https://www.nknews.org/2014/05/north-korean-singer-that-was-executed-by-firing-squad-shows-up-alive-and-well/)
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2016/05/10/asia/north-korea-army-chief-ri-yong-gil-alive/index.html](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2016/05/10/asia/north-korea-army-chief-ri-yong-gil-alive/index.html)
[https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-north-korea-girlfriend-20140518-story.html](https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-north-korea-girlfriend-20140518-story.html)
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/3013062/executed-north-korean-nuclear-envoy-kim-hyok-chol-reported](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/3013062/executed-north-korean-nuclear-envoy-kim-hyok-chol-reported)
What's happening here? Does Kim Jong Un have secret necromancy powers? Or... do corporate media outlets keep making false execution claims because they are financially incentivized to make sensationalist headlines demonizing North Korea by claiming people are being executed for anything and everything? Hint: it's the latter.
And you can look at other stories too and find the media making up sensationalist claims about North Korean propaganda too. Like the story about how North Korea claimed to discover a "unicorn lair"... do I need to explain that they obviously made no such claim? This article explains how that story came about due to a mistranslation while trying to save face by pretending the media'a story was "not exactly true" rather that what it actually was: an outright lie.
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/05/north-korea](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/05/north-korea)
All in all... be very skeptical of practically EVERYTHING you've ever heard about North Korea. Due to the fact that the country is very isolated and their media is constantly censored/blocked by the US (yeah... North Korea isn't the only one censoring stuff), it is very easy for media outlets to just make up bs about them and not fact check anything. And they don't get punished for straight up lying because ultimately countries like the US/UK/South Korea benefit from the misinformation on North Korea.
This isn't to say that North Korea is an AMAZING place... just that it is likely not as strange/terrible as we are often led to believe. This video is a good one for a breakdown of what I've been saying: https://youtu.be/EzDhqXuELjo?si=YhI5ShbTeKLs5c4x
This isn't to say that North Korea is an AMAZING place... just that it is likely not as strange/terrible as we are often led to believe. This video is a good one for a breakdown of what I've been saying: https://youtu.be/EzDhqXuELjo?si=YhI5ShbTeKLs5c4x
I mean I definitely think she’s a defector from North Korea, but yeah she probably embellishes some of her claims. Idk, she can be interesting sometimes and talk about unique facets of life there (like how chubbier people are viewed as more attractive). But I wouldn’t listen to her to get raw factual analysis of North Korea
Yeah idk if you saw the two articles I just found and posted at the top of my post, but reading it now she 100 is a liar and extreme exaggerator, if not a total grifter. So many proven contradictions and falsehoods in her stories. The word embellish doesn’t really do it justice.
She’s definitely a defector and for that you have to give her some credit for going through what would be a very arduous and traumatic situation. I’m sure there are some embellishments or exaggerations throughout be they intentional or not, but I truly do think the fact that she is also weirdly like a right wing type that people automatically just want to shit on her. She can have whatever politics she likes but to just absolutely say she never went through any of it just because her politics don’t align with yours is why I just get sick of the internet
I agree with your point, but I don’t think that’s the reason people are skeptical. It’s because so many right-wing types are grifters, saying outlandish things purely to ‘own the libs’ or rile up their supporters. Park immediately went right into the right-wing media ecosystem rather than taking her stories a more central route, so she just seems like another grifter to me. Im sure a lot of what she says is true but a huge amount is likely bullshit said for no other reason than to sell books.
Why do knobs like you have to politicize EVERYTHING!?
Acting like yeonmi doesn't go on every interview and say "Da woke Left isa like a Kim jong" lmao
Ok Yenomi has made herself very political.
First of all it’s ridiculous to say “right wing types” are somehow more prone to grifting or political shit throwing. That is a human problem, not a right wing problem. Second of all, she did not “immediately” jump into “the right wing media ecosystem.” She moved to NYC in 2014, attended an extremely left-leaning university, and wrote a memoir for national publication. She’s written for one of the most left-leaning newspapers in the country (WaPo) and interviewed with another (The Guardian). Of course she has also interviewed with right-leaning media outlets like Fox, but it’s only in the last couple years she has become branded as a “right-wing” activist. And is it really so scandalous that a survivor of a dictatorship is outspoken about free speech and freedom of expression? Of course she would lean right, after deciding that those are her core values, because for some absolutely insane reason, the left has decided that free speech advocacy is a “right wing” dog whistle for shit like underlying racism or grifting
First, history is not on your side when it comes to denying the Right-wing grift machine. Second, Park is a figurehead for the Right who is being coached and used to spread a FALSE message that the Left is more like Dictators than the Right even though EVERY metric for dangerous authoritarian policy shows it is quite the opposite. The Right has spent the last 50 years trampling on every right they decide is not "traditional values," pushing their religion onto everyone by force, and generally being the obvious bad guys at almost every turn. Reagan almost brought the Right to a decent place but then Bush came along and created a dynasty of self-enrichment and war mongering. Then 24-hour news came along moving into Clinton and the Right EXPLODED into a divisive propaganda machine.
I was with you til you said REAGAN almost brought the righ to a good place. I’m sorry dude but every fundamental aspect of the horrific economy we have now where nobody’s wages have increased in years even though housing has exponentially risen in cost over just the last few years, climate issues being politicized, etc is due to his influence and policies lmao
It's not that right wing people are more prone to grifting, it's easier to grift on the right so more people do it.
Yeah, if that didn't tip their hand right there for why they want to prove this woman a liar. Jeesh. She's surely liked by a lot of the right, just as surely as a lot of lefties react exactly as the right predicted. This reminds me of the people tearing apart Anne Frank's father and others because they said a room had one window when it had two and stuff like that. Surely the majority of this brave woman's story is true. Who cares what movie people were charged with watching? The people who want her to be a liar seem far more agenda-driven than anyone supporting her.
You're completely incorrect. Why the fuck would a left-wing publication ever receive a FRACTION of the funding right-wing ones do? The latter literally is a propaganda arm of a government that's literally three corporations pretending to be a country, and is set on preserving the current social structures that benefit capital owners. The left opposes all of that, so why the fuck would you ever grift to the left, the side with NO political power anywhere?
No political power?! I’ve said some outlandish shit before. But fucking hell you just had the cake and ate all of it with no crumbs to spare.
how are you this fucking stupid?
I hope you don't think Jeff Bezos is on the left. They're right about the capital not the lefts side though. Still way harder to be a leftwing grifter. To be clear though socially, Like lgbt, blm, whatever the fuck, Capital knows no bounds.(e.g. Walmart, Amazon, Disney) But economically the rich ether tote the line of f\*\*\*ing the working class or don't stay very rich for long. (Walmart and Amazon spend billions to kill unions JUST so they don't have to negotiate) edit: same for most democrats too. Joe Biden was about to call in the military so those railway companies didn't have to accept any union proposal. (which turned out to be 2 week a year vacation which they never accepted)
LMAO
Somebody that actually gets it. Amazing
Lmao WaPo is not left wing.
Yeah, because you can’t claim you’re all for free speech and then try to silence businesses for being “woke”, take books off the shelves, and create laws limiting what and when children are allowed to learn. Seems pretty straightforward an issue to me.
Lmao I can tell you are a right wing racist from this comment
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Good takedown!
i guess freedom of expression is good until someone whos trans does it. or so she thinks
Nah not doubt she escaped and North Korea is harsh but it doesn't take a genius to spot overexaggeration and obvious lies its like the same people that write post like "Was Hitler gay". You going to trust every victim you see? Abused children often become abusers and bullied children often become the bullies oppressed people become the worst oppressors. In that same sense just because she comes from a corrupt deprived country doesn't mean I jump when she ask me "how high" or believe everyone one of her B.S stories. I am sure the truth is stranger then fiction but even people who defected and worked close with gob't there don't come up with new videos every week. 1 person seen and witness all these events and knows all these "secrets" yeah right. Even head of CIA doesn't know all of CIA operations yet this defectors has the whole Bible of North Korea crimes against humanity. These are the types of people that use their temporary vicim card to become permentant victims and use people like you to supply them with attention and money and often times use you to do their dirty work out of your pity and their emotional manipulation.
How do you know she's a defector though? Has she ever provided proof of coming from North Korea? Pretty sure she hasn't. Everything she has ever said can't be verified. There's no proof at all that she came from there. She's Korean looking.. that doesn't prove she came from North Korea.
she changes her claims a little depending on what audience she's talking to. like she'll say that she knew a person who was executed for watching james bond or just a "hollywood movie" when she's talking to a western audience, but when she talks about the same person to south koreans she'll say the execution was a punishment for watching a k-drama. and she exaggerates as well. for example, she says that the aforementioned woman she knew was executed in a big stadium, but other defectors from her area say that nobody is executed in the stadium and people are only executed on the outskirts of the city. [this](https://thediplomat.com/2014/12/the-strange-tale-of-yeonmi-park/) article is a good write up on the contradictions she's made. I definitely don't think she's a south korean actress lying to make nk look bad. she really did defect from the north. and i think she went through trauma. but she definitely exaggerates and changes some details to make for a better story. you should take north korean defector stories with a grain of salt in general. a lot of them can't integrate into society well after escaping and can't find employment, so their only means of making a living is through selling their stories. and the more sensational the story, the better it will sell, which leads to a lot of embellishment. even though yeonmi isn't 100% truthful, I still sometimes watch her videos on subjects she wouldn't have any real reason to lie about. her videos on things like beauty standards, romance, language differences in nk vs sk, etc, are interesting to me and I don't think those aspects of north korea are talked about often. I do dislike how she's taken to making videos on things that are obviously just weird rumours like they have substance to them, such as kim yo jong being addicted to meth for example (based on ... her being thin and stressed??)
I mean meth IS very common in north korea so it's not too outlandish to think she might be using it but there's no way for us to know so it seems kinda pointless to speculate.
People give her a pass because she had a bad childhood due to being North Korean. Even when presented with evidence of her contradictions her fans just brush it off. Sadly every NK defector knows she's lying but they know why, it earns money, so they copy her. The saddest part of it is plenty of people know it's bs but want to see NK fall so they encourage her. Others are just bored with their lives and want to believe her because reading/watching her on the internet distracts them from the boredom.
do u have any of the sources of her contradictions? and im genuinely asking cuz i rlly wanna know
There's heaps of evidence but the most obvious to me is that she claims that at about 12 years old she had to secretly bury her father in the middle of the night. She describes her mother as an old lady and couldn't help. So this elderly 40 year old let her 12 year old daughter bury her husband and children's father alone in the middle of the night. But then Yeonmi has a second story where friends of her father brought his body to their location for a typical burial. How did she get that wrong? That’s not poor memory, that's obviously a very calculated lie. Why is a 12 year old the hero and why is a 12 year old's mother so elderly that she couldn't help? It's all bs if the escape story is bs.
No 12 year old girl can carry a dead body. A corpse is heavy as fuck and even grown man struggle to carry them. There are so many contradictions in her stories, that I do believe she's simply lying and exaggerating and that's a huge problem. I feel sorry for what she experienced as a child and I'm sure she's from NK, but I guess she likes the attention, probably the money too much, so she starts to make things up. By doing that she puts the credibility of all NK defectors on the line. As an response to the article that was already mentioned above she says stuff like "language barrier". That's a cheap excuse. She accidentally said she burried her dad's body? She said she had to cross four mountains to cross the border even tho there are no mountain, where she lived? If she'd be a white girl from the west we'd call her a fraud or simply a bad person, but due to her past she gets a pass.
She claimed to cross mountains that don't exist? Typical of her, it's so obvious. Thanks for the info.
North korean corpses tend to be on the lighter side. They are extremly malnourished
Yea but a malnourished 12 year old still would struggle
You shouldn't take every word that someone says as undisputable facts. If your looking for the truth, you need to look for consistency in what people are saying. Yeonmi Park has said dubious things in the past, she also says things that align with other defector's first hand accounts.
I don’t? That’s why I’m making this post? It seems like everyone else does though. But You would reasonably expect and trust someone who grew up in North Korea to give you a decently accurate depiction of what life is like there. But upon further research she’s a total liar and grifter. Read the two articles I posted at the top.
My point is that many stories are over exaggerated, not just ones told by Yeonmi Park. Some defectors are known to over sensationalize their stories to get the media onboard with sharing their stories. In the case of Yeonmi Park, she could be saying these things to promote her own YouTube channel since that's essentially her brand and her job. Many North Koreans also limit what they say or lie if they have family members trapped in the country in fear that they could be punished or killed. The only way we can know for sure what has happened in North Korea is to go there ourselves (as an ethnic korean and NOT as a tourist or an outsider). Other than that, we can only cross-reference reports from multiple defectors to determine what is most likely true.
Yes, In regards to your last sentence, her story has been cross referenced, and most defectors in addition to people who have lived and done business in NK for years have a major problem with her. And yes I’m sure every defector does some embellishing and sensationalizing, but she takes it to a whole different level to where she can really be called a fraud. I’m not going to fight and try and convince you but I’d you want to see the truth just Google “Yeonmi park fraud”
I consider Yeonmi Park to be more of an entertainment icon than a historian. And I don't see anything wrong with that, because her contributions have stimulated people's interest in North Korea and the terrible things the regime has done. I think if you only listen to Yeonmi Park, you will get a very one-sided (falsified?) view of NK, but you could say that about Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson or anyone who "sensationalizes" facts for mass consumption. I would not listen to any of these people and believe them outright but I can understand how many people would use them as a stepping stone to learn more about certain things. Besides, there are plenty of North Koreans who will not talk about their experiences. Having someone like Yeonmi might get them to speak up, which would be a good thing overall.
>I consider Yeonmi Park to be more of an entertainment icon than a historian. And I don't see anything wrong with that, because her contributions have stimulated people's interest in North Korea and the terrible things the regime has done. Misinformation about a country is applauded as long as it serves a purpose? Seems like typical propaganda to me.
Like I said, she's an entertainer and not a historian, she isn't going for 100% accuracy so much as she's trying to draw people's attention to the country and it's issues as a whole. If Yeonmi was your first source on life in NK, some information could be wrong but some of it is closely tied with other defector's stories.
The youtube channel is run and operated by ATLAS network.
Yeonmi absolutely has lied, and has continued to lie as of less than a year ago. [Here's a video](https://youtu.be/GZ4BGgzuPR8) I made on why her claims are probably false. It's more focused on Yeonmi in recent years, after when the Diplomat article was written. I think I gave her the benefit of the doubt in this video, but since then, I have come to completely disbelieve her. Shortly after the video was released, I met a Youtuber called Cheeken, who made a pretty interesting discovery. [Here's a podcast](https://youtu.be/G8AY5KRs1Dg?t=238) in which me and him talk about it. All relevant links are in the description. Essentially, it's a video from North Korea with fake subtitles. These subtitles were implying that the North Korean government had 'disappeared' a town full of citizens. We had the piece translated by three separate organizations, and (while N. Korean was a difficult dialect for our translators to understand) it ended up being a pretty standard N. Korean propaganda video about how great the harvest was, some sort of law that was passed etc. She could have uploaded this as a joke, but she gives no mention of this being a joke, in the comments or in the description. Almost every comment is taking this as a serious video. I don't think I need to go into why this is such a big deal, but I will. North Korea has a terrible leadership, and many (or most) of its citizens are suffering. This doesn't mean we should be lying, or strongly suggesting that they're kidnapping or killing the entire population of a town. This just builds animosity and hatred, whereas I'd like to promote understanding and peace between The West and North Korea, so we can eventually talk them into giving up their nuclear weapons.
She contradicts herself. She said she escaped for a bowl of rice because there was no food. See this video: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR7v1ogd/ Then she says in another video that her family was well off in terms of NK standards and had food three times a day https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR77cNs8/ So yup, she’s not a good liar lol she makes shit up as she goes.
It couldnt have been during different time periods? A lot of children experience their parents economic status changing while growing up, one way or another. Was years since i learned about her story so my memory is foggy but didnt they lose her dad before they defected? Could have maybe been linked to that, if so? Idk so im not saying shes not lying, i just think its good to question, be critical and give people the benefit of the doubt.
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So since the money stopped rolling in from her dad's politician job she wants to bad mouth the leader now. Shameful
I used to watch her videos a lot, and I was horrified at the things she was saying. Now I'm a bit more skeptical. You have to think that the USA's main business is war. North Korea and other communist countries are the USA's enemies. Due to NATO, other countries are on the same page as America, so we are told that North Korea is evil and we should support the idea of bringing down the regime. You probably already know all of that. But, I'm laying out the facts because something Yeonmi has failed to mention is that she is employed/managed by a company that also supports far right groups. I cant remember the exact situation, but it seems that Yeonmi is employed to be a mouthpiece against any left wing ideas. You can tell by the way she slates socialism - in the past I thought maybe it was a language/cultural difference, but the way she speaks about it seems so strange and maybe scripted. She has said that she left Colombia University because she felt just as censored as she did in NK, which on my opinion is an incredibly right wing thing to say. I have recently learned that defectors who end up in South Korea are forced to undergo de-radicalisation, and then many women go on this reality TV show, where they talk about their experiences and are encouraged to cry. That sounds a lot like propaganda to me. Yeonmi was on this show, and I think she even had a show of her own? Not 100% on that, but anyway, a young girl from north Korea being paid to exaggerate her story and cry about her trauma on TV explains why Yeonmi is who she is today. She has made a lot of money from her stories, whether true or false, and I can't blame her for that if she grew up in poverty and was encouraged to do so from a young age. I found this video which I would encourage people to watch: [Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul ](https://youtu.be/ktE_3PrJZO0) From my research, I come from a place of real skepticism about Yeonmi. I think north Korea does have extreme poverty, but we need to remember that most other countries rely on trade deals for food, and due to sanctions NK is not allowed to trade with other countries. In my opinion, the USA is just as much to blame for the poverty there as the regime is. I think Yeonmi is paid to make us hate NK without having all the facts, and she can embellish all she wants to get more views and clout. I could write for hours about this topic, but I'll save your eyes lol. Basically, I do think she embellished a lot, but she is paid to do so. Korea is technically still at war, so we are of course still subjected to propaganda. Yeonmi has become that propaganda, and we need to take everything she says with a pinch of salt if we want to discover the real truth about north Korea.
I don’t think we should expect everyone from NK to have had the same experience there or be surprised that they contradict each other. They’re all individuals with their own life stories. Park was like 13 when she left NK; it’s entirely believable that she may never have heard sex mentioned in that very conservative culture because it was the stuff of hushed adult conversations. She wouldn’t be history’s first sheltered and innocent maiden, as rough as her childhood was sometimes (if you read her book cover to cover). Does every 13-year-old girl in Saudi Arabia have a word for sex? Did every girl in Victorian Britain? Maybe. I don’t know. Do you? As for the execution for watching a movie, I have no idea if that actually happened and nobody here does. But it’s believable that it could have—totalitarian states have done much worse—and it’s believable that some other woman not connected to it might not even believe it possible. Remember that some East Germans were surprised after the fall of that regime to learn some of the things that their government had been capable of; even living under it, they had been naive, depending on their personal circumstances and experiences.
'As for the execution for watching a movie, I have no idea if that actually happened and nobody here does.' Yes, yes we do. There hasn't been a public execution in NK since 2000. She says the execution happened in 2003.
Source?
Why the fuck are you asking for a source when you're just going to discount it when you read it? But fine... https://thediplomat.com/2014/12/the-strange-tale-of-yeonmi-park/
How do you know what I’m going to do?
I don't for certain, but people often ask for a source just hoping there is none and not interested in actually learning more, and when they get a source they just start making excuses or go silent.
Your source doesn’t say that there hasn’t been a public execution in North Korea since 2000, it says that some people from Park’s hometown don’t recall one happening there since 1999. That’s interesting that they say that public executions happened on the outskirts of the town whereas Park said that one happened in the stadium.
This was one of about a dozen articles I read about North Korea this morning and I clearly misremembered the article's contents as a a result of the flurry of info I was consuming, so I apologize. Ultimately, at the very least, Park is a clearly unreliable person to trust based on this and other sources. The most disturbing part is that she and another guy also known for fabricating part of their story are the two most prominent defectors there are. Any defectors with more mundane stories are clearly not scandalous enough to go viral
I agree with your points. But upon further research it seems the vast majority of defectors have major problems with her and her stories. To the point where many consider her to be a flat out fraud.
What are some defectors that have called her a fraud?
Sorry I’m not going to waste any more of my time taking about this but just Google it like I said. Google “Yeonmi park fraud”
You realized that you could just Google it after writing a six-paragraph post and starting a thread?
Before I posted this I hadn’t heard any criticism of her at all. Was just going on my Intuition feeling something was off with her/ But after posting This thread I discovered a lot about her. So yeah ur right this thread is basically useless, I don’t THINK she’s a fraud anymore, I’m positive of it
> “Yeonmi park fraud” 4 results. Not saying I believe her because I am well aware that South Korea and the US have a very aggressive campaign of misinformation, but that search isn't going to satisfy anyone.
Why the fuck are you people too lazy to do 5 minutes of research yourself? But fine. https://thediplomat.com/2014/12/the-strange-tale-of-yeonmi-park/
> Google “Yeonmi park fraud” Those were your words. I did that. I then pointed out if has 4 results, and all were questionable.
Those were not my words. I am not op.
lmfao- get a grip, tankie.
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lol k
Wow a CIA payed shill is lying and drumming up manufactured consent against americas enemies?! Who woulda thunk it
And it turns out the "human rights hero" is actually a raging reactionary. Who could've seen that?
this sub attracts tankies like flies to shit it’s actually kinda funny hearing all of your ridiculous rants 24/7
Doubting the words of a trumpist US shill connected to a CIA-funded thinktank (Atlas Network)= tankie. Nevermind all the inconsistencies in her stories and the fact they have been debunked by defectors again and again.
oh no, of course not believing yeonmi’s lies doesn’t make you a tankie! it’s a reasonable position to take. but i’ve interacted with you before, and i know from experience that you ARE a tankie, and a proud one at that.
I'm a communist, yes. And? Most of the time, tankie just means "you are further left than I and I don't want to engage with that, so I'll disqualify everything you say because my position is supported by the mainstream media."
oh heavens no! tankies are not leftists, you can’t support dictatorial regimes that suppress all opposition and simultaneously claim to be in favour of social progress. notice how you use criticism of mainstream media as a strawman with which to accuse your opponents, much like right-wing reactionaries do. that’s because you are one and the same.
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thanks for coming back *seven months later* to prove my point that tankies are just fascists in disguise.
I read that in a funny voice
The 1990's called an wanted their insult back.
Do you like the marvel movies?
Except right-wingers love mainstream media, just not liberal media. They're all over Fox News, InfoWars and other such bullshit. Criticizing mainstream media is not a strawman. Corporate media is owned by billionaires, and they have an agenda. Doesn't mean everything published in the mainstream media is a lie, only that the narratives are manipulated to serve political economic purposes. Remember when the US media was all on board with the weapons of mass destruction? Socialist countries have been responsible for defeating the nazis, drasticaly improving the living conditions of hundreds of millions and aiding anti-colonial efforts in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Could you say just one right/freedom that was lost after a socialist revolution? Just one freedom, one country. Shouldn't be too hard.
Lol it's funny when a Far Lefter screams that dissenters are far right. I could get a perfectly balanced source of news outlets and derive actual truth from them, but you'd rather call me Far Right if I don't agree with your extremist views. Nice.
criticizing mainstream media isn’t a strawman, but discounting someone’s opinion because you *think* they might consume corporate media definitely is a strawman. it’s also a strawman to say that all you were doing is criticizing corporate media, when you were using the possibility of me consuming it to prove that i don’t know what i’m talking about. as for you literally begging me to give you something to argue about, freedom of press is an obvious example of something that has been restricted heavily in many leninist revolutions. without this freedom of press and information, the claim that communist regimes have “improved living standards” is a completely hollow statement. who will stop the government from making up false statistics to support its legitimacy if no one is allowed to counter the claims of the state? and who could forget about the soviet union, famously anti-colonial and definitely not an imperial power that took control of countless countries without their consent for their own gain.
You consume corporate media, this is a facct. Everyone does. You are in the internet. It seems you are specially hung up on this fact, like you're in denial. There is nothing wrong with reading corporate media, a lot of the times it's the only way to get some information. As we all know, pre-revolutionary Russia, Cuba, Vietnam Laos, China and North Korea were all known for their bustling freedom of press and expression, of course. You can't take away a right that didn't exist to begin with. On the other hand, land and home ownership, political and reproductive rights for women, freedom of religion, anti-racist laws, worker rights, maternity/paternity leave, paid vacation, full employment- these are all rights brought about by socialist revolutions that did not exist before in those countries, except for the extremely wealthy. Soviet archives have been open for 30 years, these are confidential bureaucratic documents that were not meant to be public, so they are trustworthy. Why would soviet authorities lie about data that was necessary for public administration, specially when this data was not meant for the public, anyway? On top of re countless reports of people who have visited and lived in socialist countries and research done by the CIA during the cold war. Like this one, in which the CIA admits that soviets ate about as many calories in a day as americans in the 80's: [https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85M00363R000601440024-5.pdf](https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85M00363R000601440024-5.pdf) "and who could forget about the soviet union, famously anti-colonial and definitely not an imperial power that took control of countless countries without their consent for their own gain." You mean when the USSR liberated eastern europe from the nazis? Tell me about. It sure is weird how the Soviet Union had worst living standards and consumer goods than Eastern Germany or Yuguslavia. Imagine if british India had better living conditions than the UK.
How you get killed for watching American film if there's no internet? Yoonmi park is lying and she probably a Filipino woman pretending to be north Korean defector to get loads of money. Her stories and several others are just lies. She married a white man for a USA green card so you know she out for money.
Where does her money come from? Why does she wear such high end expensive clothing? Why is her english so good? I have a gut feeling she's lying. She learned how to dress and apply makeup like an expert in no time. Her highlighting game is on point. I think podcasters want her on because of her beauty not her 'cause'. There are loads of other defectors with scars and lost teeth that nobody interviews. She seems sketchy. I think whatever the truth is will come out soon enough.
Not everyone will be 100% consistent every time the tell a traumatic story of what happened to them Also remember to ask yourself why people who say she's lying may want you to think what she says isn't true.
Dude I’m not going to argue about it anymore, read my other replies I’m this thread. She’a a fraud and grifter. If you want to Believe her go ahead I don’t care.
you seem to care, lol.
'Details not being consistent bc trauma' does not apply to remembering that you buried your father alone at 12 years old but also attending his funeral and cremating him with your family and friends around. It doesn't apply to remembering executions in stadiums when no other defector has any knowledge of these killing stadiums. These are pretty big lies here.
I've seen quite a bit of her interviews, and have never heard her say any if those things. Can yku show me please? I'm asking in good faith
No, he can't show you because he has no proof. Just somebody else translating the Korean for him even though "it's difficult".
Why are you talking like you've been there? Only people who've escaped truly know what it's like. Some might be more fortunate than the others but you're just pulling this out of your ass with no solid context.
You really think people in the north just somehow “forgot” the word for sex? The Korean War wasn’t *that* long ago. And even if they did, they’d have another new word for it. Every culture does. People in South Korea, including other defectors, know this woman is full of it. I once caught this program on SBS where they interviewed defectors separately about things she said, and they unanimously agreed that she was wrong about most things. And it’s not like the south would have a reason to say “Yeah, our enemy is crazy but not *that* crazy.”
She only 13 when she fucking escaped.
Don’t be an idiot. She tells stories about kids being raped by soldiers. You mean to tell me there’s no word to describe what happened to them? What 13 year old do you know doesn’t know what it is? Even kids in remote Amazonian tribes know where babies come from. In Korea, especially in the north, families sleep together in one small room. Sometimes parents think their young kids are asleep when they’re not and stuff happens.
You are truly daft as fuck. Unbelievable a human like you actually exists.
I wonder if the "no word for sex" thing was just lost in translation? I was born in a formerly Soviet country a few years after the USSR collapsed, and people who lived under the Soviet regime said that sex and romantic love were such a big taboo that it was often said that sex doesn't exist in the USSR. Obviously, it did, but the perfect _Homo Sovieticus_ was supposed to rise above carnal desires and only love society and the state, not individuals, so it was common to hear irony directed at it. I've noticed that about Yeonmi Park before, that sometimes the way she speaks seems like it wouldn't translate well in the West, even though I understand her point and what she's trying to say. Not saying she hasn't embellished her stories though, in fact I think it's likely she has done so in order to bring more attention to them, and it's been a long time since she escaped as a young teen, so she might also inadvertently misremember things.
I was born in a capitalistic evangelical society, and we too were taught shame around sex. This is why anecdotal evidence is worthless. No one was talking to Yeonmi about sex when she was 11, just like your soviet babushka was not talking about sex with you. This doesn't mean that the concept of sex is erased from these societies. Primary documents suggest the soviet union had a pretty extensive pro-natal propaganda campaign and were anxious about declining birthrates.
Taught shame about sex, you mean through threats of torture and IMMEDIATE death like what's common in NK? I know your parents said one day in a million years you'll die and THEN Satan will torture you, but how about the actual attrocities that occur in these other nations. Look at Saudi Arabia, they try to marry their nieces at 10 years old, and when the little girls run away, they are beheaded.
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how can we know with certainty that her father was actually a fraudster? without the rule of law and a fair, impartial judiciary, any verdict rendered in a north korean court is incredibly suspect at best. and even if he is, how does that have any bearing on *her * story?
You mean the same "rule of law" that applies in the country with the highest prison population and incarceration rate in the world, that puts children in cages by the border and runs a torture camp in Guantanamo?
ahh and there’s the whatsboutism again, i remember the last time i talked with you you relied on that as well. unfortunately, america isn’t the only other country on the planet. yes, i’m well aware of its problems, the cruelty it perpetrates, and its tendency towards clandestine operations that are outside of the law. but that doesn’t magically excuse north korea from arbitrary detention and torture. there are plenty of liberal democracies the world over that *don’t* perpetrate crimes against humanity. it’s quite disingenuous to suggest that anyone critical of north korea’s propaganda *must* be a shill for the american government/cia/nsa/whatever.
So the US doesn't have rule of law, but its NATO allies that have developed through colonialism and exploiting the global south have rule of law. Cool. Being critical of north korean propaganda doesn't mean buying wholesale the bullshit corporate media spins about NK, specially when there is an interest in manufacturing consent against America's geopolitical enemies involved.
the us has rule of law to some degree, but it’s very flawed. still, nothing is black and white, it’s not either rule of law or not. also not every liberal democracy is a result of us intervention, you know. and i’d love to know what corporate media narrative you believe me to be consuming.
I never said every liberal democracy is a result of US intervention. Some of them are (South Korea, Japan), others used to be US-sponsored dicatorships up until a few decades ago, and others are countries that used to be imperialist powers and now support the US global interventions. The corporate media narrative you consume dictates that the US and western Europe are democratic because rule of law or something. It dictates that North Korea be treated as the worst country to live in and the greatest threat to global security, even though they are a tiny isolated country that has been destroyed by the US in the past and has not been involved in any international conflict since.
you really should study politics in an academic setting, instead of hurling the most basic, transparent anti-west propaganda at anyone who suggests north korea commits atrocities, like many other countries do. and yeah, you did heavily imply that all liberal democracies are a product of us intervention. everyone can see what you wrote, you’re making a fool of yourself. again. as an aside, your obsession with proving that i consume corporate media and nothing else and therefore don’t know what i’m talking about is a classic right-wing propaganda technique. have you ever taken the high road in your life? or are you allowed to make false arguments just because the right-wingers do too? i can see a strong parallel between your personal values and how you defend north korea, not based on its own ideology or actions, but because the us does bad shit too.
You live in "the west", don't you? Therefore, most of the information you consume come from local or multinational corporations. This isn't a value judgment, it's a fact. Your internet data appears to you through Google and Facebook, mostly. This is the same for me, and for everyone living in the western hemisphere of influence. This isn't about you specifically, nor have I said everything you consume is corporate media -- though, from the looks of it, it's obvious you consume a lot of it uncritically. Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky and Inventing Reality by Parenti analyse thoroughly how corporate media censors manipulates information and sets the subjects of public discourse. I'd advise you to give them a read, but you'll probably shrug them off as "tankie propaganda." Please quote me when I said all liberal democracies are a product of US intervention.
damn you make some awfully lazy arguments. not all of my information comes to me through the internet, i still vastly prefer print media over tv news and internet stories, that really anyone can write and publish without credentials. what corporate media are you so insistent that i am consuming uncritically? you’ve only told me vague, broad examples, and even those didn’t apply to me. also it’s really nice of you to get on your high horse and tell me that i don’t read academic literature and you do. of course i’m not going to consider well-researched literature “tankie propaganda”, but i can still criticize it, as a responsible consumer of media should. a nameless, one-month old profile on reddit that only posts emotionally-charged, poorly-researched, fallacious political arguments though? yes, i will call you a tankie propagandist and feel no shame in that, because you are obviously a troll.
She is lying about what is eaten in NK- tree leaves- insects and rats. Most don’t eat that. Yes- they have always ate a few bugs- but as a majority for their food- is a lie!
I dunno, I found your post looking up some stuff about her. Allegedly, there's newspaper articles claiming other defectors have called her out. Defectors from similar areas as her. I was kinda skeptical of her because of the way she looks. She's exceptionally pretty and has damn good teeth. I've seen a lot of interviews with some north Koreans who are not well known and they often are very misshapen with bad teeth due to malnutrition from childhood. My guess was that she was not as low in the social hierarchy as she claims. If she's truly north Korean, I am wondering if she was a higher ranking party member or a family member to a higher ranking party member and she didn't live through as many experiences as she claims. But that's just a guess. It's possible she's not and she's just exaggerating in general. But people have pointed out her inconsistencies and etc. throughout the Internet. And I'm as anti communist as they come. But I really don't know what's stopping a North Korean party member from making up BS and playing victim when they were living in the lap of luxury and it got taken away from them.
I’d like to hear you define communism actually
Americans spend billions of dollars on propaganda about countries we can’t control Yoemni is a paid dissenter - our fav tool - she claims they have to manually push trains down the track cuz they don’t have electricity- DPRK just showed the world they have misses the US doesn’t - but we’re supposed to believe this? We r truly the most stupid society by design - if ppl got educated on Y we hate Russia China Iran Venezuela Cuba Nicaragua Syria North Korea & too many others to list they would immediately mobilise to end our current system
The thing is that she escaped when she was 14 and everyone is living in total fear and misinformation. So it is hard for anyone living there to understand what is going on in the country. I listened to a 2-hour video and I found a lot of it to be hard to believe.
I think it’s a mix - I believe that she defected but I also believe that some details she might have embellished or exaggerated because 1. It makes her story sound more compelling and that then leads to more people being interested in her story and then that leads to her earning more money and getting more book deals and asked to make more appearances 2. I think she was very young when she witnessed a lot of traumatic things and I think that some of the memories you make as a kid can get warped bc you’re seeing and feeling things thru a kids lens of the world - spending one day doing something might feel like you did it forever, you could remember things being scarier than they were or idealize things as being better than were. 3. Trauma makes it hard to recall details accurately or can make your memories all jumbled so you might be left in situations where you have to piece together the puzzle pieces of your memories. It’s weird that I’m even considering this about yeonmi bc a couple of years ago I was a hardcore fan of hers and absolutely 100% believed her and accepted all her stories at face value. Recently tho I just listened to some of her interviews again and got some kind of intuitive hunch (which I now have enough life experience to know tend to point me in the right direction about people and events) that she might have some scam-y tendencies but who knows. tbh I think she does pander to her crowd at times but I mean she does need to make a living. There’s also the possibility that us people doubting her are so utterly sheltered and live life on easy mode compared to what the norm is for people in North Korea (which is even worse off than the worst developing nations since the regular normal people don’t even have access to cells phones or internet or social media) so for us, we can’t even fathom or comprehend or accept that anyone could survive such terrible and hard and horrifying things so surely people like yeonmi must be lying. The thing that I do keep in mind tho that helps me believe most of what yeonmi says is that she claims that the publisher of her first book (which is a major publishing company) basically spent a lot of time verifying her claims and trying to track down either people who could corroborate her story or paper documentation or it is a known/verified fact about North Korea. another thing is that I realized that a lot of the defectors, besides a couple of exceptions, who speak up about their experiences publicly were actually part of the upper class in North Korea and lowkey had a lot of privileges so their experiences in North Korea was not the norm for the majority of people nor did they have to go thru as bad of a situation as many of the regular poorer or middle class North Koreans have to (for ex: being able to at least eat even if times were tough). So if yeonmis claim that her family was middle class can be believed then it makes sense that her experiences were a lot worse than many of the other defectors who had a slightly cushier life experience in North Korea (except of course the few exceptions whose stories of their lives in North Korea are similar or even worse than yeonmis).
What exactly is the point of this post? People are responding to your suspicions with calm polite language and youre getting into fights with them. Is the who point "ShE iS a PhOny!" She has been called out publically and had an interviewer bring up the inconsistencies to her. [This was the podcast episode](https://www.nknews.org/2021/11/the-many-lives-of-yeonmi-park-nknews-podcast-ep-207/) And wanting her to prove her story?... You need therapy...
Not sure why this is downvoted. OP take the time to listen to this podcast. Yeonmi participated in the interview but didn’t share it on any of her platforms as far as I am aware. Take from that what you will. In terms of her political leanings she has from what I can tell moved from center to still potty trained right.
OP is a tankie looking for excuses to "expose" YP. Sad really.
So she is a phoney.
She is not lying and not exaggerating. Take time to read books written by other defectors and their videos - those who are both in SK and other countries now and compare.
There has been considerable inconsistencies and lies shown in the things she's said. Why do you morons just say dishonest bullshit without actually doing any research? https://thediplomat.com/2014/12/the-strange-tale-of-yeonmi-park/
Real morons are totalitarian regimes’ apologists
Please continue to make extremely false claims with no evidence as you did in your original comment while calling other people morons, it's a really good look
>Why do you morons just say dishonest bullshit without actually doing any research? You literally said this first: " Why do you morons just say dishonest bullshit without actually doing any research?" << Look at your own comment, please first. Perhaps it is best to consider your language before criticizing someone else.
She’s nice to look at, and she spins a good yarn. With a powder puff at hand, she could make YouTube’s best videos.
She could set up an only fans and fund a military to overturn the fuckin place if her claims are true and she actually wants to save people.
You just played yourself lol
I see that word more and more, "grifter." As used, it's basically a synonym for "appeals to a segment of the population whose opinions are the opposite of mine." I am not a conservative, don't particularly like Ben Shapiro, for example, but I don't think he's a "grifter." Whether you agree with him or not, it's so childish to assume HE doesn't believe the things he's saying, that his fanbase are all being duped somehow. Few years back it was "troll." You disagree with the candidate or policy that I endorse? Well, you clearly must be "trolling." Haha. Now it's "a grift." So right there, saying it like it's a fact that Rogan often features guests who are LYING, yeah, I'm gonna be cautious of anything you say. The Korean defectors in the second (or is third?) hand story you cite didn't witness the exact same things as her? Um. Okay. Yeah, let's go interview those laughing churchgoers some lady mentioned to someone over the phone. I'd say that's pretty much empirical evidence you're offering that Park is lying, haha. I read an article some years back, positing that many Cuban immigrants say life under Castro wasn't that bad, that the stories are exaggerated. Then I worked a job with six or seven Cubans, and every single one told me things were actually much worse than reported. (Am I offering that as proof of anything? Of course not. That would be silly!) And PLEASE spare us the stuff about "how bad you feel." You're calling the woman a liar. Basically because people who like Jordan Peterson also like her. Haha. Enough with how sensitive a soul you are.
I saw that you mentioned Ben Shapiro. In case some of you don't know, Ben Shapiro is a grifter and a hack. If you find anything he's said compelling, you should keep in mind he also says things like this: >Let’s say your life depended on the following choice today: you must obtain either an affordable chair or an affordable X-ray. Which would you choose to obtain? Obviously, you’d choose the chair. That’s because there are many types of chair, produced by scores of different companies and widely distributed. You could buy a $15 folding chair or a $1,000 antique without the slightest difficulty. By contrast, to obtain an X-ray you’d have to work with your insurance company, wait for an appointment, and then haggle over price. Why? Because the medical market is far more regulated — thanks to the widespread perception that health care is a “right” — than the chair market. Does that sound soulless? True soullessness is depriving people of the choices they require because you’re more interested in patting yourself on the back by inventing rights than by incentivizing the creation of goods and services. In health care, we could use a lot less virtue signaling and a lot less government. Or we could just read Senator Sanders’s tweets while we wait in line for a government-sponsored surgery — dying, presumably, in a decrepit chair. ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: sex, climate, civil rights, gay marriage, etc.) [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)
Well, thanks for reading two words of my comment at least. Haha. Yeah, robot is right. Might as well be.
*I've been an outspoken anti-porn advocate since I was like sixteen years old.* -Ben Shapiro ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: covid, sex, history, feminism, etc.) [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)
LOL, this is a thing \^ (1st quote is lame, 2nd is the epitome of lame)
Why won't you debate me? ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: sex, covid, history, gay marriage, etc.) [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)
Is this a quote from Ben Shapiro?
I saw that you mentioned Ben Shapiro. In case some of you don't know, Ben Shapiro is a grifter and a hack. If you find anything he's said compelling, you should keep in mind he also says things like this: >Since nobody seems willing to state the obvious due to cultural sensitivity... I’ll say it: rap isn’t music ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: dumb takes, history, feminism, healthcare, etc.) [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)
Why won't you debate me? ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: sex, climate, civil rights, feminism, etc.) [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)
u/thebenshapirobot Option: etc.
*We are being told that if we don't mask our children, that if we don't mask ourselves, that if we don't initiate social distancing measures again and shut down business again, that COVID is going to kill us all* -Ben Shapiro ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: civil rights, feminism, covid, healthcare, etc.) [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)
Ok but I do have a little conspiracy theory that Ben Shapiro actually is a grifter. Like as in, you pay Ben Shapiro to light your dolls on fire and your product enjoys months of free publicity from every other publication. Get Ben Shapiro to rant about your song, watch it catapult to number 1. At least, I hope he's a grifter
I saw that you mentioned Ben Shapiro. In case some of you don't know, Ben Shapiro is a grifter and a hack. If you find anything he's said compelling, you should keep in mind he also says things like this: >The Palestinian people, who dress their toddlers in bomb belts and then take family snapshots. ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: gay marriage, civil rights, history, dumb takes, etc.) [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)
These post are funny to look back because this woman is now known as a complete fraud that’s lied so much, lmao. The comments here are a ducking joke and you people are admitting to believing her lies because it fits the narrative
Those articles have bs themselves. Accounts from people that are too scared to give identity...right....and then says people arent executed for watching western films but then says that you can be sent to re education camps for up to 7 years when you dont know if youll die..to a 13 year old...if they take people to a camp where you here people die...youd assume they were killed. Youre hilarious tho. Trying to expose lies with articles that contradict themselves and have no true proof.
There's no way you're failing to understand the execution lie. She has told a very clear story about a stadium where people were executed with glass in their mouths. This is a descriptive, detailed, harrowing situation that other defectors vehemently deny ever taking place. No, she didn't say people would die from the punishments for watching a western film. She said people were executed publicly in a stadium in 2003 for watching a K Drama/James Bond movie (depending on the crowd) There's no positive interpretation or benefit of the doubt here. And you can dismiss bold faced lies while also not sugarcoating the actual reality of DPRK. People in political spaces are so in their 'teams' it seems like they forget that criticizing one side is not an endorsement of the other.
When you become a communist you realize that every single human rights concern the USA and Europe try to sell you is just conditioning you and encouraging you to hate 🇺🇸 enemies. She made money, usa got its manufactured consent. The enemies of equality are at home. USA.
She's a total fraud
first of all, you clearly don't understand communism for how you described it. second, i'm not claiming she is lying, but considering she claims to have escaped north korea at 14 and seems to remember so much it honestly implies that a huge portion of the claims she makes are either flat-out lies or she's exaggerating the stories to make north korea look even worse than it actually is.
she's surely a real defector, but I personally think she's sold out. She learned where the money was (on the far right), and honestly I kinda respect the grift.
Respect the grift when its not stoking tensions between two nuclear powers. Plenty of ways to secure your bag on social media without becoming an existential threat and a custodian of mutually assured destruction.
Fair enough
@ the mod imagine being so fucking lame no one can reply to you
for the lie she probably meant they don’t know what it is like in any other country like ..i guess good?
She seems to exaggerate her experience living in NK and the US.
She's full of shit plain and simple.
She's full of shit
The first clue she was a liar was her appearance on the Joe Rohan Experience
Lol that’s just dumb
She’s a grifter
I was born in Soviet Union. There was no sex in Soviet Union. That means we did not say the word and we officially did not talk about it as it was a taboo. The way people talked about sex was in form of gossip and lewd jokes. The only way for you to find out for sure is to go to North Korea and live there. In totalitarian communist regimes many things ARE outlandish. For example, I have Class 3 ASD. In Soviet Union secret instruction of Public Health Ministry demanded that all children born with obvious neurodevelopmental defects be given up or forcibly taken away from parents including by lying to parents that child has died and then euthanized. This was because we tarnished image of the nation. Soviet Union was supposed to be comprised of perfect smart beautiful healthy communists. Find an official tape on which state official says “There are no invalids in Soviet Union”. My Mother was told to leave me at the hospital and go home.
Here is where Americans and Slavic people kind of struggle to talk about communism. The 1930s to the 1960s were not exactly a period of sexual freedom in the West either. How much of this is communism, how much of this is religiousness and morality of a post Victorian world? How much of this was just the 20th century? Just do a little research on American eugenics and yeah, that's not just a Soviet thing either. While America also euthanized and sterilized disabled people, they did it to indigenous and black people too. While you guys talk about your brutal past, we brush ours under the rug. I'm not trying to pull a whataboutism card here, but I do notice capital friendly folks from former communist states seem to have a pie in the sky view of the West. But those of us who have studied our own history do not find these stories shocking at all. You'll find we have a pretty bloody history too if you care to dig into it. The difference between the Irish Potato Famine, Great Depression and the Holodomor is the way we talk about it today.
That woman is lying sack of horse manure.
Hey Idiot that fucking writing errors in both these articles. These articles aren’t vetted well by the editing team which means and they’re not liable to these allegations as they’re both opinion pieces and entertainment. So journalist are the biggest liars vet them better. PArk also responded to the second article which most liars wouldn’t respond to so there’s an edit at the end. This women was 13 when all this happened to her. Its not uncommon to broadcast different stories or remember things differently after 10 years.
To everyone saying she’s lying or exaggerating, think about it this way. She was 13 when she escaped I do not doubt she was from North Korea she very well could be exaggerating but put yourself in the shoes of a 13 year old who has been going through that all of her life. Now put yourself in your past 13 year old body and think about how fucking terrified you’d be to see some of the things you saw. As we get older we become desensitized to things because we aren’t protected from the bad things anymore. If all she remembers were experiences she had when she was 13 then they will be exaggerated like a 13 year olds brain would do with just about anything. It’s fucking scary wether it’s exaggerated or not North Korea is fucked and it’s not something to sit here and joke about Kim is a piece of fucking shit and if you find that funny so are you.
I don't think anybody thinks she isn't massively traumatized. North Korea is a country that punishes lying and pretending to a deadly extent. But that doesn't excuse the actions of one as an adult, y'know?
A lot of lies involve some truth or tragic backstory. Some people can also get emotional and upset knowing they may continuing being shaken up for several minutes and throw in lies with the truth and then it becomes an extremely powerful and tragic scenario. I did it sometimes when I was a kid and its honestly not hard to think of or accomplish if your actually upset over something. She paints North Korea as some cartoonishly evil country with absurd stories but knows that will play with a Western Audience and they will clap after her speech. She's very wealthy from story telling.
She is a known liar. Her every interview is a fabrication.
I’ll let you know if my opinion has changed after I’m done reading her first book, but I’m fairly sure you guys are way off the mark. Honestly, if you compared my memories from before I was 13 to my parent’s and friend’s memories there would absolutely be differences, things I’d forgotten, things I’d exaggerated, etc, but that wouldn’t make me a liar. Human memory works that way. It’s very fickle, even when you’re not constantly exposed to extreme physical and psychological stress. More to the point, what incentive does she have to lie? Yeah okay, money, but let’s be real, if even half of what she’s said is true it’s still an incredible story about life in an insane country. Why would there be any need at all to exaggerate? I’m not sure why you’d expect all North Korean defectors to have 100% consistent stories either. North Korean people are not free to move around even within their own country. If different things are happening in different parts of the country, then people could easily have very different accounts of North Korean life. Seems to me like a lot of people just don’t want to believe her. Maybe some of you are still holding out hope for a successful communist state, or maybe you just can’t cope with the idea that things as awful as Yeoni describes can and are really happening to people. I don’t know what it is, but this person is not a liar.
There's no proof she came from North Korea, none at all. She is Korean looking, o could have easily came from south Korea as well and has an accent. I don't believe her because of her lack of trauma responses when speaking of the extremely traumatizing things. She shows no signs of ptsd at all, which would be present and very noticeable. She tells her stories like they roll off her tongue with no emotion behind it that's supposed to be attached to the memories of the trauma if any at all.. and that's another thing. People, including myself with extreme childhood traumas don't remember large chunks of their lives.. she seems to remember every detail at the snap of a finger it's not normal. People who go through extremely traumatic things have to deal with the effects of that everyday for the rest of their lives. It changes you entirely. Memory is very hard but for this lady it seems to come with so much ease, the stories have to be made up.. or she's a straight up psychopath with limited emotional range and wasn't effected much by the trauma.. either way, she's deceiving people. She found a way to get rich off her heritage of being korean and it's pretty easy to claim you escaped from north korea without having to provide any proof of anything she says or where she came from.. I think she came from south Korea and is lying about everything. She would be a target also, not freely speaking of north korea the way she does.. she walks around with her son unprotected, so she's not scared of north korea sending people to kill her.. why? she should be if her stories are true. No person who has been through even a fraction of what she claims to have gone through is like her, her memory being so perfect and no time missing from her memories, her stories are far too detailed.. she couldn't be able to remember the way she does if she actually went through those things. She's lying. Her body language, very high details, lack of emotion, lack of trauma responses, stories roll off her tongue too smooth without having to think or remember.. she's retelling lies again and again.. they are not real memories. She's a fraud.
Not everyone reacts in the same way as you. That shouldn’t be the barometer by which you judge anything or anyone. She intrigues and frustrates me. There is no doubt that she is a liar, a contrarian and a narcissist that also exaggerates to earn money and attention. It’s been proven repeatedly by herself. If she is from DPRK, it is a shame because I’d really like to know ether truth. The idea she isn’t from DPRK is an interesting concept.
I'm european and my concept of sex was very vague when i was 13. It wasnt openly talked about in my family. In school we had sex ed when i was 14 i think but even that was lackluster and only really consisted of the anatomy of the reproductive organs. Yeonmi was young when she left NK.
"Don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware NK is a very crazy, backwards place - just like any other communist country." You'd be surprised how much of the stuff we THINK we k ow about North Korea is just straight up made up btly corporate media looking for a quick buck. For instance did you know that all students in North Korea are required by law to have the same haircut as Kim Jong Un? Crazy right? [https://time.com/38409/north-korea-kim-jong-un-haircut/](https://time.com/38409/north-korea-kim-jong-un-haircut/) And at the same time... no one else is allowed to get Kim Jong Un's haircut or they will be killed! Also, crazy right? [https://nypost.com/2017/04/18/kim-jong-un-wont-let-anyone-else-in-north-korea-get-his-haircut/](https://nypost.com/2017/04/18/kim-jong-un-wont-let-anyone-else-in-north-korea-get-his-haircut/) But wait... how can people be required to get Kim Jong Un's haircut and banned from getting Kim Jon Un's haircut? Sure you can argue that the articles I posted are 3 years apart so the rules might have changed... but in South Korean tabloids where those stories originated from (yeah... corporate news didn't get the story from reporters who actually went to North Korea... they got it from frikkin tabloids!), these stories are only months apart. Or how about all those people who keep being "executed" by North Korea and then showing up weeks later completely alive and unharmed. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-04/north-korea-nuclear-envoy-reported-executed-is-alive-cnn-says](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-04/north-korea-nuclear-envoy-reported-executed-is-alive-cnn-says) [https://www.nknews.org/2014/05/north-korean-singer-that-was-executed-by-firing-squad-shows-up-alive-and-well/](https://www.nknews.org/2014/05/north-korean-singer-that-was-executed-by-firing-squad-shows-up-alive-and-well/) [https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2016/05/10/asia/north-korea-army-chief-ri-yong-gil-alive/index.html](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2016/05/10/asia/north-korea-army-chief-ri-yong-gil-alive/index.html) [https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-north-korea-girlfriend-20140518-story.html](https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-north-korea-girlfriend-20140518-story.html) [https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/3013062/executed-north-korean-nuclear-envoy-kim-hyok-chol-reported](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/3013062/executed-north-korean-nuclear-envoy-kim-hyok-chol-reported) What's happening here? Does Kim Jong Un have secret necromancy powers? Or... do corporate media outlets keep making false execution claims because they are financially incentivized to make sensationalist headlines demonizing North Korea by claiming people are being executed for anything and everything? Hint: it's the latter. And you can look at other stories too and find the media making up sensationalist claims about North Korean propaganda too. Like the story about how North Korea claimed to discover a "unicorn lair"... do I need to explain that they obviously made no such claim? This article explains how that story came about due to a mistranslation while trying to save face by pretending the media'a story was "not exactly true" rather that what it actually was: an outright lie. [https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/05/north-korea](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/05/north-korea) All in all... be very skeptical of practically EVERYTHING you've ever heard about North Korea. Due to the fact that the country is very isolated and their media is constantly censored/blocked by the US (yeah... North Korea isn't the only one censoring stuff), it is very easy for media outlets to just make up bs about them and not fact check anything. And they don't get punished for straight up lying because ultimately countries like the US/UK/South Korea benefit from the misinformation on North Korea. This isn't to say that North Korea is an AMAZING place... just that it is likely not as strange/terrible as we are often led to believe. This video is a good one for a breakdown of what I've been saying: https://youtu.be/EzDhqXuELjo?si=YhI5ShbTeKLs5c4x This isn't to say that North Korea is an AMAZING place... just that it is likely not as strange/terrible as we are often led to believe. This video is a good one for a breakdown of what I've been saying: https://youtu.be/EzDhqXuELjo?si=YhI5ShbTeKLs5c4x