Marshall Matters Podcast

Yeonmi Park: Life in North Korea, Life in America

This was possibly my favourite interview so far for my pod Marshall Matters.

Yeonmi Park’s astonishing story of escape from North Korea sounds like one from another time. But no. The Stalinist state exists today in 2023. Her beautifully written autobiography ‘In Order To Live’ tells much of her miraculous journey. But I wanted to understand North Korea better. I asked Yeonmi about life and culture in her mother country, how totalitarianism slowly devours the minds of its victims. And how it can possibly still exist today, after such a protracted suffocation.

Since her escape to the West, Yeonmi has been an outspoken critic of the politics of her new home. This isn’t unlike Solzhenitsyn and his ‘Warning to The West’ speeches in the 1970s. And in turn she has come under attack, in the vicious culture wars.

She is a lightening rod and an inspiration. I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did…

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