Liberation

When a town or a country is liberated, it passes from one conqueror to the next. Conquest is liberation for the winner, and liberation is conquest for the loser. It is all words.

We read about liberation in history and we then know which side history is on. History is on the side of the winner.

A conquest is a temporary setback: Your country was conquered before it was liberated.

Or a conquest is a memory of distant times and has become a neutral occurrence devoid of judgement: Alexander the Great conquered.

For description we should never talk about liberation. From the perspective of history, history has no winners. There is just a perpetual recurrence of events, looking much the same if you don’t happen to identify yourself with some of them. And why should you? The past is gone, and the motives of its actors are clouded in mystery.

The present wasn’t meant to come about; it happened, and here we are. Our independence, if that is what we have, was not given to us by liberators, and our subordination was not a conquest. Only the bias of the present bestows such names.

One authority is changed for another. The one you prefer is the liberator, the other was the conqueror. Who asked you?

True liberation is a personal thing. Freedom is not collective. A town cannot be liberated; a country cannot be free.

A free people is one that decides for itself, they say, but what is a people and how can a random collection of millions of individuals decide anything? (The counting of votes is an artificial imitation of a decision)

You are an individual and you can decide. Your ability to do so makes you free or not free.

How can you be free? Liberate yourself by conquering yourself. Whatever that means, it doesn’t depend on armed forces.