SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: Freedom, in "the free world," did not mean what the dictionary said it meant. It meant: aligned with us.

https://x.com/nxt888/status/2088225495959982208

Sony Thăng

The genius of "the free world" as a phrase is that it performed two operations simultaneously.

First, it defined the American sphere of influence as defined by freedom rather than by American power, so that any country that accepted American military and economic arrangements was, by definition, "free," regardless of what its government actually did to its people.

This is how the Shah of Iran was part of the free world. How Pinochet's Chile, after the coup, was part of the free world. How Suharto's Indonesia, which killed between 500,000 and one million people in 1965-66 with direct CIA assistance, was part of the free world.

Freedom, in "the free world," did not mean what the dictionary said it meant.

It meant: aligned with us.

Second, it defined the Soviet sphere as definitionally unfree, so that any government that pursued an independent or socialist path was, regardless of what it actually offered its people, by definition "tyranny."

This is how Cuba's literacy campaign, which within one year made it one of the most literate nations in the Western Hemisphere, was never part of the free world.

How Vietnam's reunification after thirty years of fighting foreign occupation was not freedom.

How the democratically elected government of Allende, removed by a US-backed coup, was not free, but the military dictatorship that replaced it was.

The phrase did not describe a condition.

It described a border.

And the people inside the border were never given the language to see it as anything other than geography.