'Free World'

In the wake of WWII, it was briefly imagined that good had triumphed over evil in the form of delivering freedom from political oppression. But the idea of the 'free world' was riddled with ironies from the start. The 'free world', although the self-styled defender of democracy, in effect defended capitalism. Despite Russia's role in the Allied victory, communism and the Soviets became the opposition to it. And long after the end of the Cold War, with the rising popularity of far-right parties on the contemporary Western political landscape, German leader Angela Merkel (chosen as Time's 2015 Person of the Year) was dubbed the 'Chancellor of the Free World'. The label had already descended into irrelevance at best, and satire at worst, when Donald Trump breathed new life into its absurdity. This lyric essay explores the idea of the 'free world' in a context in which the freedoms it purported to defend seem increasingly challenged by the ideologies of the market. Using Derrida's analysis from Spectres of Marx, Arendt on totalitarian thinking and Baudrillard on the 'hyperreal', the discussion aims at highlighting these ironies and the danger they present to political discourse now.