Updated: May 8, 2022 My views of democracy have roots in the Cold War, the birth which I experienced firsthand, up close and personal. I have lived long enough to see the term 'free world" re-emerge. Now in 2022, I am witnessing the rebirth of that term again. I am watching a country, Ukraine, fight to death or victory, to preserve that form of democracy I support, in the face of an autocrat who wants to take it away and reassemble an empire of old. My support of Ukraine's resistance to Russian aggression runs deep in my soul.
The key to identifying who belongs to the "free world" and who does not, is whether a country has a government that has the rules laid out in their laws and constitutions, that provide protecting individual rights to express themselves freely, but also reflect the will of the people through democratic elections that are fair and follow the rules that ensure their freedom.. There are shades. degrees, and nuances of democratic governments but in practice they practice, honor, and observe these concepts. The opposite of that is a government with a political party, a dictator, a ruling religious body, an autocrat that decides what the rules mean, to whom they apply, and who enforces rules without permitting contradictions in media, from an independent judiciary, from, a freely elected legislative body. For nearly 250 years elected presidents have followed those rules for the process of changing regimes without the violence of a coup. or distortions and lies to justify distorting and abusing the laws...until January 2021., Updated note: May 8 2022. Not every country in the free world supports US support of Ukraine strongly enough to identify themselves with the policy. There are various reasons. Standouts include India and Israel, who see either economic or national defense in their interest to play both sides. Those willing to support Ukraine publicly, if attendance at a meeting of the willing in Germany recently is one measure, are the NATO nations and fourteen others From Jordan to Japan: US invites 14 non-NATO nations to Ukraine defense summit - Breaking Defense
The designation of those who stand in opposition to Russian expansionism in Ukraine as the "free world" is " Deja vu all over again" for me and very personal. It's meaning is unchanged as it lay dormant after the fall of the Soviet Union and the tumbling of the Berlin Wall . Once again it refers to western style democracies who stand in opposition to Russian's style of governance, this time ruled by autocratic a strong man who is driven to resurrect the empire of the old Soviet Union Putin himself caused the revival of its use with the invasion of Ukraine. It also stoked some vivid memories of my personal encounter with the term's birth.
In the late 1950's I attended the Free University of Berlin. I had met a young medical student from a communist country, Yugoslavia, and fell in love. (It was a marriage that lasted over 50 years, so let me ruin the ending of that romantic story) . I decided to learn all I could about Yugoslavia and I took a course in the constitution and law of that country. On paper, it sounded like ours in the US, with of course giving lip service to rule of the proletariat in keeping with Marxist dogma. What I observed resembled nothing in practice, with allegiance to Drug (Comrade) Tito on everyone's lips and with no one daring to speak in private or to strangers that contradicted the party proclamation of the day. There were whispered stories of disappearance of those who did not follow those unspoken and spoken rules and tattletales and spies to report to authorities the names of those who stepped out of line. It was every bit as restrictive in private, professional, and public life as the Nazi's had been over twenty years before. The ideology was different, but government's total control over its citizenry was the same. I watched the East German communist rulers began to control the thoughts and actions of the surviving Germans with Stalinist tactics in the territories they ruled and those who could, fled to the West. The brain drain of those thinking professionals led two years later to the infamous Wall. (My husband to be became part of that brain drain by fleeing to Switzerland in 1959, and a couple of years later with PhD and MD diplomas from the University of Basel in hand, he came to the US).
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