Liberation

To liberate is not to set free. It is to wrest something, and area or a people, out of the control of someone else and take it into your own possession. Great conquerors always view themselves as liberators and any oppressive force, any governmental prison guard, likes to flatter itself with such an epithet.

There are no liberators. No town and no country have ever been liberated. Words without meaning have no descriptive force and shouldn’t be used by anyone who seeks understanding. They are employed for propaganda purposes, intended to manipulate feelings while disguised as information.

How can a country be liberated? What would it mean? A person can be free or unfree. Whoever is able to do what he wants, is free, but what an entire country wants cannot be determined since it is never unanimous. Under certain circumstances, some people feel privileged and free while others insist that their movements are limited. Two people in the same condition, two brothers say, may assess their level of freedom differently, and so only one of them is free. At the moment of “liberation” their status will be turned around and one will gain and the other will lose his freedom. And if a country of millions is “liberated”, some of the inhabitants will lose their freedom in the process just based on their own conception of what has happened.

Liberation, if it has any meaning, can only be individual. A person can break out of a prison or achieve personal release from whatever physical or mental impediment he may have. But “liberation” in the political sense is necessarily collective and therefore meaningless.

I suggest we liberate ourselves from the language of confusion and manipulation and use words we understand. Otherwise we are forced into a compulsive mode of thinking from which we would need liberation.

https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2020/07/19/your-daily-word-prompt-liberate-ydwordprompt-July-19-2020/