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Show Page 10 The Ogden Valley News Volume XXX Issue XII April 1, 2023 While Time Remains: A Book Review & Commentary by Jordan B. Peterson Renown psychologist and author Jordan B. Peterson wrote the forward to Yeonmi Park’s newest book, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector’s Search for Freedom in America. Parks first book, In Order to Live, is a memoir about her harrowing story growing up in extreme poverty and oppression in North Korea, her suffering after falling victim to sex trafficking in China, and, finally, her horrific experience fleeing her homeland under the brutal dictatorship of Kim. Eventually, Park was able to make her way to the United States, where she recently gained citizenship. She now dedicates her life to bringing attention to the horrors and atrocities taking place in her former home country and in China, and warns of the alarming trends she finds, now, in the once liberty- and freedom-loving county of America, trends that are reminiscent of those found in the authoritarian countries she lived under and fled from. Peterson writes the following about Park, her new book, and the reaction from the progressive political moralists of our day. ********** If the hypothetical moralism of the Left had any grounding in reality, it would be hard to imagine anyone who those of that political stripe would celebrate more than Ms. Yeonmi Park, who escaped with little more than her skin and bones from the tender mercies of the brutal North Korean regime. She has everything the heroic victim (hypothetically) requires: all the “intersectional” virtues. She is an immigrant, and female; someone who had been subject to truly dreadful abuse from someone truly tyrannical (and from the government agents at his family’s diabolical disposal); she was genuinely starved; she was enslaved—along with her mother, literally bought and sold—and exploited sexually, at a very young age. Her ”education” as a young girl consisted of little more than the propagandistic glorification of her persecutors; subjugations to the lies they told (constantly) about everyone else everywhere in the world—including the explicit demonization of Americans, blamed continually for the utter catastrophic failure that North Korea clearly and irrefutably constitutes. Park emerged from all that, and worse, to become a voice of freedom; to become someone who not only talked about speaking truth to power but actually did so; to become, despite her relative and starvation-induced frailty; a true thorn in the side of one of the worst dictatorships the world has ever managed to produce…. There is no one more annoying to the ideological activists of the radical Left than a minority woman who doesn’t know her proper political place; no one more irritating than someone whom, according to the dictates of that Godforsaken jargon-ridden conceptual scheme, has “internalized their oppression,” and who therefore stands up for the hypothetical enemy, which must always and invariably be, by the standards of the pseudo-illuminated puritans in question, the West, the West, the West. She [Park] employed her YouTube channel to draw attention to the plight of the North Koreans, particularly the women who experienced the same horrors that befell her and her mother. She pointed out, with all due accuracy, the utter complicity of the damned Chinese Communist Party in supporting that appalling, tyrannical regime—allowing the continued slave-trading of North Korean women in China, and using the cruel, genocidal, and megalomaniac Kim dynasty as a convenient and nuclear- armed goad to prod and threaten the West. And that regime posed no mean threat: North Korea’s military is the fourth largest in the world and is nuclear armed. Furthermore, as Ms. Park points out, the anti-American rhetoric employed by the Kim family’s nest of devils is ultimately inflammatory, in the most atomic of manners: North Korean schoolchildren are taught that the total destruction of American cities by the very weapons just described is something not only fully justified but to be devoutly desired. YouTube’s response? The demonetization of Yeonmi’s channel—not once, but repeatedly, with no explanation. Remember “Don’t be evil”? The much-paraded motto of the very Google that now owns YouTube? Remember when that motto was scrapped? Every wonder why? Look no further than the pathetic kowtowing to the Chinese overlords that characterizes such behavior and derive your own conclusions. If the Cinderella story had been written by someone much grimmer than the Brothers Grimm, the star could well be the author of the current book. After escaping from the utter prison of North Korea; after surviving the sex slavery imposed on her (and her mother, simultaneously) in China; after educating herself in an absolutely unlikely manner in South Korea, she made her way to the U.S. and enrolled in Columbia University, a once-great beacon of Western freedom. To say that this was the dream of a lifetime is to radically overstate the case; this was something undreamed of, something outside the realm of all reasonable possibility. Ms. Park, guided by the spirit of her entrepreneurial father, truly valued education— had endeavored in all ways to educate herself as thoroughly as possible, in the traditional sense, when she managed to make her way to South Korea, where she pored over, among other works, the books of the great George Orwell…. And what happened when she entered the hallowed halls of that august institution of higher education [Columbia]? She encountered the same ideology that had corrupted her homeland and doomed its inhabitants to a life in hell. Of course, it was America: it was Totalitarianism Lite, offered, as all such things are in this over-coddled and narcissistic time, as a convenient fashion statement; a faux identity; a means of parading unearned moral virtue while biding time as an oppressor-intraining—the inevitable and truly desired fate of every virtue-signaling Ivy League graduate. She was upbraided by her pathetic professors for daring to admire Jane Austen, whose books “promote female oppression, racism, colonialism, and white supremacy” and “propagate the idea that women are inferior to men; that only white males are fully evolved and capable of higher-level thinking; that salvation is only achievable through the dogma of Christianity” (of course; or else). There was nothing more unacceptable at Columbia than to be a “SIX HIRB”: a sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist bigot. Yeonmi Park grew up in a totalitarian nightmare. As a child, she roasted and consumed insects to survive, when she could find them. As someone from a poor family… she had to bring five rabbit pelts to class and hand them over to maintain any social standing whatsoever with the propagandists who passed as teachers. She grew up among people whose dying wish was meat stew and rice. She was subject to the worst dictatorship on the planet—maybe the worst dictatorship ever promulgated, although the competition for that vaunted position is very fierce. She came to the U.S. miraculously, and encountered fools dallying with the same ideas that had made her life something almost unbelievably harsh—certainly that, by Western standards. She attempted with all her heart, as she is doing in the present volume, to warn us THE DIGGER I’m taking appointments for the spring, I do the following: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. PLANT TREES. CLEAN UP FOLLOWER BEDS. BUILD ROCK WALLS. TAKE ROCK WALLS DOWN. DIG PIPE LINES, ELECTRICAL, AND GAS LINES. 6. BUILD STORM DRAINS. 7. DIG POST HOLES. 8. DIG AND LEVEL BUILDING LOTS. 9. ANY AREA THAT NEEDS LEVELING GIVE ME A CALL. 10. CAN PREPARE AREAS THAT NEED ROAD BASE. DON’T WAIT! CALL ME FOR TIMES AND DATES. CALL DAN AT 801-332-0052 here in our luxury and comfort not to fall prey to the same ideological temptation that doomed the Soviet Union and all its satellites and that still possess the billion-plus people in China, much to the detriment of that country’s beleaguered citizens, and the rest of the world. Who led the rush to lockdown? China. Who copied the actions of that terrible state? The cowardly fools of the West. Park is warning us not to continue to do so. Will we listen? Perhaps. Perhaps not. In her own words, Yeonmi writes, “The fact that leftists tend to benefit so greatly from American democratic capitalism while rhetorically advocating for its destruction also helps explain why they are so much less focused on the future than the past. Stuck in their own selfmade contradictions about current American life, from which they profit so handsomely, leftists tend to focus on the unalterable past as a way of perpetuating their own perceived victimhood and punishing their ideological opponents. Hence, a distant descendant of nineteen-century African slaves who works at Goldman Sachs or studies at Harvard is a victim. The first-generation immigrant child of a twenty-first-century Chinese slave who goes to public school is not. “I write all this by way of trying to explain the kind of ideology to which I worry about subjecting my son. If many or most teachers and educators see it as their duty, or even just their professional obligation, to teach students that all of human history is just a catalog of oppression, and that the United States exists only to oppress them, what are our children’s prospects for living joyful and meaningful lives? How will they see their own prospects for overcoming life’s many challenges, and for making changes to improve themselves as individuals and members of their communities?” Read Yeonmi’s enlightening and clarifying book, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector’s Search for Freedom in America. FLOODING CONCERNS cont. from page 1 authority. • If you are unincorporated Weber County, know that we do stage sand and often sandbags in emergent 昀氀ooding situations only. We generally do not pre-stage sand or sandbags for the following reasons: • If we pre-stage sand, it is often at our Roads Department shops because we are able to cover the sand. If we pre-stage sand out in the elements, it gets wet and therefore, defeats the purpose for the sandbag. • Sandbags that are left out in the elements when there is not active 昀氀ooding can become saturated and subject to freezing and repeated thawing, thus causing them to break down and burst, making them ine昀昀ective during active 昀氀ooding. • If there is active 昀氀ooding in your location, call 801-395-8221 if you have a life safety emergency call 911 and the request will be dispatched immediately and we will respond with sand and bags quickly. • For more 昀氀ooding preparedness information or to volunteer to assist with sandbagging within the unincorporated county, you may sign up here: webercountyutah.gov/sheri昀昀/ homeland/ Mission of the County’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Office - The mission of the Weber County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management is to unite our partners and stakeholders in providing services to the community designed to protect and preserve life, property, and the environment from natural, manmade, and technological disasters through planning, prevention, mitigation, education, and response. For more information, visit webercountyutah.gov/sheriff/homeland/. now to take steps to protect our homes. Cities and Weber County will do what they can to manage the water on a broader scale as they do not have enough sand and sandbags to prevent all potential flooding issues and will need to be strategic in use of limited resources. The cities and Weber County will be working on trying to keep water from getting to your residence and may assist residents in the emergency stage, however, it may not be in time to prevent it. Here are some ways to be better prepared when the runoff starts. • If your home has snow surrounding it, please remove it 3 to 5’ from your home. • Once you clear the snow away from your home, use that area to place your sandbags. Try not to stage your sandbags too early as they will be exposed to the elements and can be ine昀昀ective in active 昀氀ooding. • If you have a sump pump, please check it frequently and make sure it is ready to go when you need it. If it is already working, continue to keep an eye on it, and make plans in case you lose power so that you can continue to run your sump pump. If you think you live in an area that may 昀氀ood into your home, consider getting a sump pump and purchase early. It is harder to 昀椀nd one to purchase when the region is in active 昀氀ooding. • If you live in an incorporated township or city, any questions about their 昀氀ood planning and response goes to their city o昀케ce. The county is responsible for county infrastructure and unincorporated areas of the county, and they are our 昀椀rst priority. The cities and towns can work with us on planning and any response gaps they have, but we are respectful of their plans and protocols and do not supersede their Join Us Easter Day! Easter Brunch 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Easter Dinner Dinner 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. Reservations recommended. 801-392-6775 508 Ogden Canyon, Ogden www.grayclifflodge.com HOURS Thurs.-Sat. 5-9 pm Sunday Dinner 3 - 8 pm |