I was born in a dicatorship country and though I was still too young when General Franco died, the years that followed his death which are known to Spanish History as The Transition [to democracy] I lived them intensively.
Even when I speak to my parents today, who never sympathised with Franco's regime, they agree in that they felt more free then than they do today.
Represion under Franco was delivered by police. Today it is delivered through courts with strange and often ambiguous laws.
Under Franco, the media was controlled directly by the state. Now it is controlled by one or two big groups which are part of the system. Before you get a legal trial, you are likely to get a media trial and by the time you arrive to court you know that you are sentenced already.
An average person would walk alone at any time during the night, on any area knowing that the worse that could happen to him was that the police stopped him to enquire what he was doing on the street so late, and perhaps being unlucky that the police would not be all that polite.
It happened to me. I was taken from an ear to a police station with two other friends of my age (12, 13, 14 y/o) when the police stopped us at 3 am on one night. They were pretty harsh and tried to scare us, and they retained us there until our families came for us. They phoned my parents, I knew my father was abroad so it was only my mother. They asked her, gently if her son was at home. She said of course, it's 4 am, he is sleeping. Then they asked her to make sure that I was sleeping.. of course I wasn't, that room at the police station was cold and scary!
The same for my other two friends.
They were rude to us (they were very polite to our mothers when they arrived) and they harassed us with harsh and scary words and slapped us on our heads several times. That, today, would be a reason to denounce them for physical abuses. So yes, I would have been more free today.
Today I would have been able to denounce them for abuses, yet they were teaching me a lesson. Probably they wouldn't have bothered with detaining me at 12 y/o for walking on the streets at night.. but they were protecting us from whatever could have happened to us.
This is only a part of one example out of many others that I'll use against the farce of democratic freedom.
Freedom should not be exptected to be granted. Freedom must be conquered. And when you have to conquer freedom, you know that it has a price and you learn to appreciate freedom to its full extent.
And when you put your freedom at risk, it is for a worth cause.