Orissapost🇨🇱🇨🇳🇨🇿
THE REAL ‘FREE WORLD’
Bonds
A nyone old enough to remember the Cold War will also remember an imagined place called the “free world.” It was where Westerners believed they lived, while Eastern Europeans, Russians, and Chinese lived behind barbed wire. The description was partly true, insofar as there was barbed wire, and there was a kind of freedom outside the Communist world. But the overall story was a lie. After all, the free world included the Shah’s Iran, Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, and Francisco Franco’s Spain. These countries were anything but free, yet because they were anti-Communist, they were granted membership in the club. Meanwhile, the club’s leader, the United States, regularly proclaimed how free it was, even though its own Black citizens were denied the vote in the American South until 1965. The free world, in other words, was a noble lie. It helped us imagine the world we wanted to live in, and it helped US presidents from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan articulate important truths. They told us that the Berlin Wall was a moral abomination, not a fact of life that we would just have to accept, and they were right.
Chile