And on NK there's no internet at all. So what? Why this fixation in changing the focus out of the US with whataboutism? Others' worse actions dont make ones bad actions better.
It’s not really whataboutism to say “I like the US empire better than other wanna-be empires because not a single wanna-be empire allows you to meaningfully criticize it”
The US did bad things to its own people like bikini atoll and MkUltra and the Tuskegee Experiments. Maybe it even did things like stage 9/11 as a false flag (there were real plans to stage a similar false flag in the 70s to support a war against Cuba) - even if it did, I’m allowed to speculate about it or even claim it to be true online. In China try to mention Tiananmen Square. Even if the US empire is evil, which I think is a bit overly harsh at the general level while agreeing that many of its individual actions have been evil, it’s better than any of the other empires.
America is the first (and maybe only, ever?) major
imperial power that allows such open discussion of
its atrocities.
I did not claim that America was the first imperial power to allow public dissent. That, as I'm sure you'd agree, is manifestly untrue.
So it's unclear to me what point you're attempting to make by pointing out a single instance of prior public dissent in the British Empire.
Particularly since Swift's work of satire was not exactly a direct criticism of the British Empire, nor a catalogue of its atrocities.
If you do the minimum feasible amount of research and read the Wikipedia article, you will learn that it was largely a parody of other such popular contemporary treatises, a thing that is easy to miss in 2023 if you aren't familiar with the context in which "A Modest Proposal" was written.
Back to my original post... I certainly don't think America was the first to allow such dissent. I think it is the first to do so on such a scale.
(I also don't necessarily think America allows such dissent for entirely noble purposes. As has been often pointed out, legitimate criticism and evidence often gets lumped in with whackadoo fake conspiracy theories and is therefore discredited by default in the public's mind. The end result is a more effective form of suppression than could be achieved by direct totalitarian repression. The US government will let you talk about the MKUltra experiments or Guantanamo all day long because barely anybody will believe you, or care.)
The scale is an artifact of the ease of publication today. I agree that the speech allowed today is greater than ever before. Your point stands.
The US First Amendment is indeed unique, but it came from a tradition[1][2]. And it's not so long ago that US citizens were prosecuted for sedition. And this is not totally unique to the US or Britain[3][4].
> In the mid-1890s Edmund Dene Morel was working for Elder Dempster as a shipping clerk based in Antwerp, when he noticed discrepancies between public and private accounts given for the import and export figures relating to shipping from the Congo.[5] Morel deduced from the steady export of firearms and cartridge, against the disproportionate mass imports in rubber, ivory and other lucrative commodities, that no commercial transaction was taking place.[6] He concluded that the use of force was the only explanation: the consistency of the exchange could only be supported by a state-led system of mass exploitation.[7] Resigning from his role in 1901, Morel turned to journalism to investigate and raise awareness about the activities of the Congo Free State authorities, establishing his own journal in early 1903 – the West African Mail.[8]
