A Clear and Present Danger

review of "While Time Remains" by Yeonmi Park

Apr 11, 2023

This issue has a lot of pictures — I took pictures of some passages of the book and used them throughout this review. If your email client doesn’t handle it well, you can read it at the Substack website.

While Time Remains, by Yeonmi Park, may be the most important book published in this century. If I had the power to do just one thing, I would require every American to read it. I caught myself wondering, probably naively, if it just might be possible that we could fix our country in a year if every American parent had to read it twice and every American teenager had to take a test on it.

Realistically, the Woke cultists are probably too far gone, but the great majority of folks who are too consumed with the minutiae of their daily lives to give much thought to overarching patterns—those people are the ones who must join the fight.

This book outlines, with grace and clarity, exactly what’s at stake and how far down the slippery slope we have already slid.

An Ongoing Holocaust

Yeonmi Park is a defector from North Korea who has been in the US for about ten years, and recently became a citizen. She repeatedly refers to the situation of North Koreans as a modern-day holocaust, and she is correct. Approximately twenty-six million people live in North Korea, a brutal totalitarian regime propped up by the Chinese Communist Party.

She made it to America in the mid-2010s, and the focus of her book is to issue a warning to Americans about the grave danger posed by Leftism. Her warning is based on her experience as a university student. She repeatedly experienced, at Columbia University, intense and terrifying reminders of the propaganda and brainwashing of North Korea. Her book is a warning to Americans about how far we have already moved in the direction of giving up everything that matters.

American Relationship with China

The ongoing genocide of the North Korean regime against its own people is made possible by the support of the Chinese Communist Party, which is primarily propped up and funded by you and me, the American taxpayer.

And they are fully aware of our stupidity in believing that diversity is our strength, while they believe that strength is their strength:

The Heroism of Good Parents

Park is a woman of almost unimaginable courage, but throughout the book I couldn’t help thinking that the heroes of her story are, every bit as much as Park herself, her parents.

Early in the book, Park describes two serious trauma reactions—though I seriously doubt she would use those words to describe either experience.

She wakes up screaming from a nightmare about being back in North Korea, a little girl facing imminent execution when she begins singing the US national anthem instead of the North Korean one. Upon awakening in her NYC apartment, she turns on the light and the heat, even though she’s already too warm.

And she twice mentions being prepared for and even welcoming of death. Once at age nine, with she and her sister fending for themselves and eating bugs to survive, while her parents were imprisoned in North Korea. And once a few years later, when she and her mother packed razor blades and poison for their trip to freedom across the Gobi desert. Suicide was far preferable to being returned to North Korea, and the razor blades and poison were the backup plan if they were caught, and she prepared for the possibility with gratitude that she would become free, one way or the other.

The consequences of complex-PTSD, which is the formal diagnosis for situations like Park’s, longterm scenarios where escape is not a realistic possibility, are evident, but she handles it astonishingly well. Her strength and courage follow in the footsteps of her parents. Her father took unimaginable risks to become a black market entrepreneur in order to help raise his family’s status—the crime for which he was imprisoned. When they escaped, her mother volunteered to be raped, repeatedly, to spare her daughter from that fate. They were both sex-trafficked and it was not possible for her mother to spare Yeonmi completely, but the selfless love and courage of her mother was one of the many passages in this book that made me cry.

Her father died when she was a teenager, never once—not one day of his life—having had enough to eat, or having been free. Yet he was grateful for the chance to be alive, and instilled that gratitude in his children.

Park’s journey to America is summarized briefly, as the focus of this book is her warning to Americans of what we are giving up with our embrace of leftism. (I have ordered her first book, which goes into her story in more detail, and will review it.)

The Mental Enslavement of Wokeness

Over and over in her remarkable book, she points out the paralells between the North Korean regime and what Americans are voluntarily doing to ourselves, especially in our education system.

In North Korea, people censor themselves to an almost comical degree to avoid risking the brutal punishment the regime imposes. The stories she tells of her time on campus, of which I have a few of my own (and a plan for helping your kids), would make for unbelievable fiction.

But they are daily reality for students of American public schools and nearly all universities.

The ongoing attempt of leftist educators to convince children that 2 + 2 sometimes equals 5, about which I have written before, naturally came to mind when reading this anecdote from her early education:

The parallels of critical race theory to North Korean ideology are chilling:

The media in the United States bears a shocking resemblance to North Korean propaganda:

The “racial affinity groups” and the way that white people are encouraged to gather in groups, read White Fragility, and “do the work” to become “anti-racist” —even pay for the privilege of cooking dinner for racial superiors who come to berate you—has a clear precedent:

The horrors of what anti-racism and transactivism are doing to our medical schools are heading in an obvious direction:

Park offers one of the clearest and most eloquent explanations of Leftist bullshit that I’ve ever seen:

The Importance of the Second Amendment

As I read her inspiring book, I thought over and over about the importance of the second amendment. Americans must never, ever, ever let go of our second amendment rights. The North Korean regime is able to do what they do because the people are helpless and defenseless. We must never let ourselves be put into their position.

Get Your Kids Out of Public School

Park never suggests that people pull their kids from public school, though she goes on at great length about seeing what is coming for her (half-white, half-Asian) son, and how he will be regarded as an oppressor and taught collective guilt from the moment he starts school.

I, however, am suggesting it. Please, please, please. Get your kids out of public school. Don’t let math be the thing that stops you. Email me; I will help you find resources online that you can afford. If push comes to shove and you are homeschooling and you get stuck on the math, I will do whatever it takes to help, up to and including getting on Zoom and teaching, myself.

A Neon, Flashing, Glaring, Obvious Warning

Park’s book is a clear and eloquent warning of what we are doing to ourselves and the risks of losing everything that we hold dear if we keep it up.

We are probably not courageous enough to fix our country, to stand up and defeat the Left. If we complete our journey to a socialist hell, this book will be mentioned in the scholarship of whatever nation eventually studies the mistakes of the American Empire.

“How could they not see?” they will ask.

“They were warned, and so clearly!” they will say.

If you care about freedom at all, and especially if you have wondered how to pass American values on to your children, please read this book.

Housekeeping: comments are open for paid subscribers, as on most posts. If you would like a paid subscription but cannot afford one, email hollymathnerd at gmail dot com and I’ll give you a free year.