While Time Remains by Yeonmi Park

Author:Yeonmi Park
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Threshold Editions
Published: 2023-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

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THE FOUNDING despot of North Korea, Kim Il Sung, rose to power on the premise not only of being a great leader, but of being a god. He did so in part by promising to solve all forms of inequality and injustice, which he explained were simple and unnecessary problems that required simple, obvious solutions. The root cause of both inequality and injustice, he explained, was a capitalist conspiracy to make everyone pay money for essential services that they should be getting for free: education, health care, housing, food—everything people need to survive and thrive. And in order to make these services and resources free and accessible to everyone, all forms of private ownership had to be abolished: “Capitalists” (which is to say, ordinary citizens) were henceforth no longer allowed to own their own schools, or hospitals, or houses, or farms. The state (which is to say, those with military and police power) confiscated them. Needless to say, the results were catastrophic—just as they were in China, Vietnam, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and the Warsaw Pact countries.

There is much one can say about the shortcomings of education, health care, housing, and food security in America, and about the dire need to reform and improve them. But the leftist insistence on nationalizing these services and resources in order to make them free—as if the various failings in these sectors can be attributed to the mere existence and legality of private ownership—contains dangerous echoes of the North Korean model. Again, to believe that the answers to social problems lie not in innovation, creativity, and a certain measure of personal and communal responsibility, but rather in the centralization of state power and the eradication of private ownership, is just a variation on the leftist theme of victimhood and oppression, which really only serves to mask the emergence and power of an oligarchy.

I experienced the consequences of this process firsthand in North Korea. When the regime abolished private ownership and stole everything the people had, the result, of course, was not free and open access to the services and resources on which ordinary people depend—it was the simple theft of those resources by the supporters and enforcers of the regime. This process didn’t just enrich the regime itself, it created an elite class of mid-level officials, bureaucrats, managers, and military officers who very much enjoy the spoils of wealth, property, and inequality, while continuing to advocate for socialist revolution. (I hope this is starting to sound familiar.)

To keep the painfully obvious contradictions in this system from bursting out into the open, the regime and its bloodhounds—the elite overclass—made use of land ownership the way today’s leftist elite in America makes use of race. In North Korea, if your ancestors were peasants, then your blood—literally, your very genes—are considered noble, because it’s uncontaminated by the blood of a land-owning, capitalist oppressor. By the same token, if your ancestors did own land, that means that the blood of an oppressor flows within you—and you’re forever tainted.

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