American freedom is theatrical. You can shout about anything. You just cannot alter anything.
https://x.com/nxt888/status/1998074758127345744
Your entire argument rests on one mistake:
You think the presence of formal freedoms in America proves the absence of control.
It does not.
It only proves you confuse permission with power.
Yes, Americans can insult the President.
Yes, they can tweet at Congress.
Yes, they can joke about the FBI.
None of that threatens the system.
None of that changes policy.
None of that stops a war, a sanction, a coup, a bombing campaign, a corporate merger, or a lobbyist-written bill.
In Vietnam, political power is explicit.
In America, political power hides behind the illusion that criticism equals influence.
You mistake noise for freedom.
You cite Article 117 as if it wins the argument.
All it does is show you know Vietnam's laws but not Vietnam's history.
We did not write those laws in a vacuum.
We wrote them in a country where foreign agents, propaganda networks, and psychological operations have been deployed for a century straight.
We wrote them in a nation that survived the French, the Japanese, the Americans, and every attempt to break it from the inside.
We wrote them because sovereignty in Vietnam was earned with blood, not slogans.
America talks about "freedom."
Vietnam talks about survival.
These are not the same conversation.
And since you brought up repression, let us talk about what actually happens in the "land of the free" when someone touches the pillars that matter.
Ask Julian Assange.
Ask Edward Snowden.
Ask Reality Winner.
Ask COINTELPRO.
Ask the Black Panthers murdered in their sleep.
Ask Muslim charities destroyed without trial.
Ask the student protestors beaten for speaking about Gaza.
Ask how many American journalists can challenge AIPAC or the Pentagon and keep their careers.
You brag that America has no midnight knocks.
America doesn't need midnight knocks. It perfected punishment in broad daylight.
Financial blacklisting.
Algorithmic silencing.
Platform bans.
Corporate pressure.
Smear campaigns.
Career destruction.
Legal warfare.
Repression outsourced through institutions looks cleaner, but it functions exactly the same.
Vietnam arrests dissidents openly.
America bankrupts them, erases them, or exiles them.
Vietnam restricts speech because it fears foreign interference.
America restricts speech because it fears the truth.
You want to talk about conditional freedom?
The United States industrialized it.
You may speak freely about everything except the things that matter.
Criticize the President. Yes.
Criticize Israel. No.
Criticize capitalism. Carefully.
Criticize Wall Street. Not if you want a job.
Criticize empire. Enjoy the blacklist.
Criticize the military. Ask the soldiers who were court-martialed for TikTok videos.
Criticize the intelligence community. Ask Assange and Snowden how that story ended.
Freedom is not judged by what a citizen can say.
Freedom is judged by what a citizen can change.
Show me the last time Americans voted to stop a war.
Show me the last time they voted to remove a foreign base.
Show me the last time they voted to end sanctions.
Show me the last time they voted against Wall Street or AIPAC and won.
You cannot.
Because American freedom is theatrical.
You can shout about anything. You just cannot alter anything.
Vietnam does not pretend.
America hides behind its own mythology.
You taunt that people flee countries like Vietnam.
Yet millions flee nations destroyed by U.S. invasions, coups, and sanctions, then arrive in America only to be lectured about freedom by the same empire that turned their homes into rubble.
And here is what you truly do not understand:
Vietnam is not ashamed of being a one-party state.
Vietnam is proud of being a unified nation that defeated three empires in one century while America was still learning where Vietnam was on a map.
We did not fracture.
We did not kneel to foreign interests.
We did not become a client state.
We survived.
And that survival is the freedom Westerners hate most:
The freedom not to live under their approval.
You call it "self-parody" when a Vietnamese person critiques the U.S.
No, the real parody is an American lecturing the one country that beat them so thoroughly their veterans still wake up sweating 50 years later.
Vietnamese freedom does not look like American freedom.
It looks like independence, sovereignty, unity, and resilience, things America talks about but rarely practices.
And if you truly believe America's freedom is judged by the absence of midnight knocks and not by the global violence required to maintain its domestic comfort, then you have already proven my point:
Freedom in America is conditional.
It always has been.
It simply conditions you to believe you are not the one being controlled.
posted by Satish Sharma at
03:00
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