What does "The Free World" mean, these days?

Question

In the old days it meant anywhere that wasn't the Soviet Union. What does it mean now?

Answer 1

An excellent question.  I think that "freedom" has always been a relative term that has been far easier to ascribe to people who have rights to elect and rights to travel than those that don't. Totalitarian states, denying both, can readily be defined as "un-free."

But in every society there are people who want to tell others what to do. If you don't conform to their ideology, they may not be able to take you away and shoot you in the back of the head. But they can deprive you of your livelihood for saying the wrong thing by firing you, and they can deprive you of your savings by fining you in a so-called "Human Rights Tribunal." These tribunals, staffed not by jurists but by left-leaning political hacks.

Finally, to answer your question, the Free World exists everywhere for those who pull the strings. It exists nowhere for those that don't.