Yeonmi Park has told the harrowing story of her escape from North Korea as a child many times, but never before has she revealed the most intimate and devastating details of the repressive society she was raised in and the enormous price she paid to escape.
Park’s family was loving and close-knit, but life in North Korea was brutal, practically medieval. Park would regularly go without food and was made to believe that, Kim Jong Il, the country’s dictator, could read her mind. After her father was imprisoned and tortured by the regime for trading on the black-market, a risk he took in order to provide for his wife and two young daughters, Yeonmi and her family were branded as criminals and forced to the cruel margins of North Korean society. With thirteen-year-old Park suffering from a botched appendectomy and weighing a mere sixty pounds, she and her mother were smuggled across the border into China.
I wasn’t dreaming of freedom when I escaped from North Korea. I didn’t even know what it meant to be free. All I knew was that if my family stayed behind, we would probably die—from starvation, from disease, from the inhuman conditions of a prison labor camp. The hunger had become unbearable; I was willing to risk my life for the promise of a bowl of rice. But there was more to our journey than our own survival. My mother and I were searching for my older sister, Eunmi, who had left for China a few days earlier and had not been heard from since.
THE DAILY CALLERDavid Horowitz’s “Big Agenda” Matters — Book Review
This book is all the rage now that so much is in the news about Russia and Putin. The author, Bill Browder, was interviewed on Fox Business today. Sounds like a fascinating read for the summer ! Nancy
Red Notice: How I Became Putin’s No 1 Enemy by Bill Browder – review
A gripping account of murder, high finance and the Russian president’s Achilles heel
IIn 2008 a young Russian lawyer called Sergei Magnitsky uncovered a massive tax fraud. He found evidence that a group of well-connected Russian officials had stolen a whopping $230m. The same officials had Magnitsky arrested; he was tossed into a freezing cell and refused medical treatment. Magnitsky – who suffered from pancreatitis and gall stones – spent months in pain. This state-sanctioned torture was meant to make him withdraw his testimony. He didn’t. One day his condition grew critical. Guards put him in an isolation cell. There, they beat him to death.
Magnitsky’s case was to become the most notorious and best-documented example of human rights abuse in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. That this happened was down to one man: Bill Browder, a US-born financier and the CEO of a successful asset management company. Once a Putin fan, Browder found himself in trouble in 2005 when he was deported from Russia. He hired a team, including Magnitsky. When the Kremlin got nasty, most of the lawyers fled. Magnitsky – a family man with two small boys, who liked Beethoven – refused to leave. He believed the law would protect him, that Russia had said farewell to its Soviet ghosts. It was a tragic misjudgment.
Red Notice is a dramatic, moving and thriller-like account of how Magnitsky’s death transformed Browder from hedge-fund manager to global human rights crusader. Its title refers to the extradition request served by Russia on Interpol, demanding Browder’s arrest. (A Russian court later jailed him in absentia for nine years.) In truth, there are quite a few pretenders to the exalted post of “Putin’s No 1 Enemy”, as he describes himself. They include Michael Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch whom Putin (pictured) jailed and sent to Siberia. There is the lateBoris Berezovsky, another tycoon who fell out with Russia’s grudge-bearer-in-chief and decamped to London, playing Trotsky to Putin’s Stalin. Or Alexei Navalny, the Moscow opposition leader, currently under house arrest. Or the murdered Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in a Mayfair hotel with radioactive green tea.
In an unpublished manuscript, former President Barack Obama and a friend wrote that America is a “racist society” that pushes an ideology that infects the minds of whites and blacks.
Pulitzer Prize winning author David Garrow is set to reveal information about this unpublished book in his upcoming biography “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.”
In an interview on the Jamie Weinstein Show released Wednesday, Garrow opened up about his upcoming book and told Weinstein, “I think that people irrespective of their political views or partisan identification will be astonished. I cannot say that too strongly. Will be profoundly astonished by how much important substance of Barack Obama’s life has not previously been known and that’s not in a negative context necessarily at all.”
Garrow, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Martin Luther King Jr., went on to say: “Barack and his closest friend [Robert Fischer] in the early 1990s, when they were in law school, wrote several hundred pages of a proposed book manuscript that was never published, particularly the 140 pages or so of that manuscript that is about race gives significant insight into Barack’s thinking when he was leaving law school, about to enter into public life in Illinois.”
“A black man in the home is much more important than a black man in the White House.”
Dr. Jason Riley discussed his new book, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder For Blacks To Succeed, on Monday at the Heritage Foundation. Riley is an editorial board member of theWall Street Journal.
In his book, Riley discusses where the Civil Rights Movement has gone wrong. He emphasizes that liberals only encourage blacks to blame their problems on whites and to make themselves out to be victims.
Even after the Civil Rights Movement, black unemployment rates were twice that of whites for the last five decades. In 1966, the poverty rate in America was lower among all groups than it was in 2012.
Dr. Paul Kengor at the Heritage Foundation
Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage by the author, Dr. Paul Kengor
VIDEO – Presentation at the Heritage Foundation, October 16, 2015, recorded and broadcast by C-SPAN’s Book TV, airing originally the weekend of October 30-November 1, 2015. www.heritage.org/events/2015/10/takedown
Marcuse was the philosophical hero of the New Left in the 1960s; at marches in Paris, they carried banners that read “Marx, Mao and Marcuse.” As Andrew Breitbart described Herbert Marcuse in Righteous Indignation:
Marcuse’s mission was to dismantle American society by using diversity and “multiculturalism” as crowbars with which to pry the structure apart, piece by piece. He wanted to set blacks in opposition to whites, set all “victim groups” in opposition to the society at large. Marcuse’s theory of victim groups as the new proletariat, combined with Horkheimer’s critical theory, found an outlet in academia, where it became the basis for the post-structural movement–Gender Studies, LGBT/”Queer” Studies, African-American Studies, Chicano Studies, etc. All of these “Blank Studies” brazenly describe their mission as tearing down traditional Judeo-Christian values and the accepted traditions of Western culture, and placing in their stead a moral relativism that equates all cultures and all philosophies–except for Western civilization, culture, and philosophy, which are “exploitative” and “bad.”
