Life Matters - March 29, 2023

Socialism, the god fostered by the god of materialism, has added to the creed of its foster parent that not only is God unnecessary, but He is dangerous to rational thinking, so dangerous in fact, that socialism’s chief architect, Karl Marx, infamously said that “religion is the opium of the people.” Mr. Marx taught that once the inherent goodness of mankind were released from the selfish shackles of capitalism then, and only then, would that inherent goodness be released to spread out across a grateful and relieved world of people now eagerly applying themselves to work “each according to his ability” for “each according to his need.” A noble goal, perhaps, but with several insurmountable non-negotiable flaws, the most tragic being the blasphemous claim that “there is no God” followed closely by the equally blasphemous (perhaps more covert) claim that people are gods unto themselves, in effect, replacing a good infallible God with this inherently bad, fallen human race. Just how bad and fallen could be told us by the 100 million (approx.) citizens of communist regimes that have been starved or outright killed by their own government, could they but speak. They can only “speak” to us from the dead, their deaths a dark blot on the history of socialism. A dark blot that we may forget to our detriment or remember for our betterment. A dark blot that many are still living in to this day.

Many books have been written by those having escaped communism, which is applied socialism, to begin a new life in the free world. One such book, just out this year, While Time Remains, written by Yeonmi Park contains the story of her family’s “escape” from North Korea to China where they were again engulfed in the sinister maw of communism where heads of government are “all important” but the average citizen is viewed as a commodity that either adds or detracts from the value of the system. Those that “add value” are then “given a pass” while those “detractors” become used as disposable commodities.

Since 2015, Yeonmi Park is now American. But something has changed. Miss Park encountered what she believes to be the early stages, the same fear tactics, used in the propagandizing slide into the darkest of communist regimes which is the North Korea she lived in for the first 13 years of her life. At age 13 she and her family were smuggled into China, another communist regime, but with a unique touch of capitalism introduced by a successor of Mao Tse-tung after his death in 1976.

In a horrifying twist of events this 13-year-old and her 40-year-old mother were sold by their “guides” into sex slavery to Chinese farmers. Her father died of cancer in China, after which mother and daughter escaped to Mongolia and eventually Miss Park came to her dream of freedom, the United States of America! Desiring to further her education and to bring attention to the horrific plight of average North Koreans and the hypocrisy of its socialist state, she enrolled and was accepted at Columbia University in New York, unwittingly entering a far-left learning institution where students and faculty alike griped against the very pillars of government that has given them the freedom to gripe. Nothing had prepared her for this, so when they degraded Donald Trump and elevated Hillary Clinton she trusted and believed them, her belief bolstered and assured by the mainstream media. But with time she became aware of the fear-mongering tactics of the left, the propaganda tactics, the cancel, the shadow-banning tactics and with a sense of horrified awakening, she began to hear and experience the socialist beginnings of the same movement that has gripped and destroyed her homeland.

Somewhere in Yeonmi’s journey, she noticed that the supreme leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, whom she was used to believing was god, in fact could hear her thoughts, was in fact fat while his countrymen fought and in many cases succumbed to starvation. She herself knew what it was like to catch grasshoppers and dragonflies for food, even to eat grass and other such greens to still the pains in her stomach caused by extreme hunger. God has woven natural law into the very fabric of nature and Miss Park knew by that natural law that God is not like Mr. Kim. Yeonmi Park is now an author and has published two books so far: In Order to Live, and now gives us While Time Remains.

Life Matters!