THE LIBERATION'
Mayer, Milton
The Liberation' By MILTON MAYER MR. ROOSEVELT informed his press conference the other day that he had re-named the war. Old war—new name. If you want to know about the old war, ask Stalin about...
...I didn't want to take a poke at Our Leader, especially on what must have certainly appeared a flimsy pretext...
...Gee whiz, when Mr...
...Slavery is the rule for all of those hundreds of millions of people, and what would happen if all of them suddenly made the mistake of thinking that The Liberation applied to them too...
...Trivial as it was —or just because it was so trivial—it seemed to me to suggest that Mr...
...What worried me was just how much there was to him besides light-heartedness...
...and so do the fascists and the democrats, the sinners and the saints, the right and the wrong...
...at, in a word, a great dramatic crisis...
...And Mr...
...his mastery of paralysis was truly heroic, and what besides his lofty light-heartedness could have carried him through it...
...Roosevelt starts naming theee wars of his, he raises the whole question of just exactly what liberation consists of...
...As far as anyone knew, or cared, Mr...
...The Nazis would tell you, at the drop of a bomb on a school-house, that survival is exactly what they are fighting for...
...If you want to know about the new name, ask Franklin D. The new name is "The Liberation...
...They would add, in confidence, that they do not see how the master race can survive without enslaving the world...
...liberty must mean something more than throwing off the foreign yoke, and Mr...
...F.D.R's Lofty Light-Heortedness' I thought at the time that this name contest stuff betrayed a very corny streak running right down the middle of Mr...
...Some Unanswered Questions I harbored this worry of mine quietly at the time of the Great Name Contest, for Walter Winchell was going around grabbing people for sedition, and the Anti-Defamation League and the Chicago Tribune were already sore at me...
...Roosevelt's justly famous bounce was the biggest thing about him...
...Emancipation At Home Of course we are clear that we are liberating anybody and everybody from the Nazis...
...But if this is The Liberation, and not just The Liberation from the Nazis, don't we have to liberate everyone who's enslaved, including the Indians under the heel of England, the crushed and homeless Jews who can not get into Palestine (or, for that matter, into America), the Spaniards under Franco, and maybe even the Russians under Stalin and the Chinese under Chiang...
...Roosevelt must give us a definition along with the name...
...His own suggestion, he said triumphantly, was "The War of Survival...
...Whom are we liberating, and from whom, and for what, and just what do we mean by "liberation...
...But there is more here than meets the eye...
...Churchill made his historic speech of May 24, with its "kind words" for Franco, fascism, and colonial slavery, and a few days later the invasion began, and wave after wave of young men, who would rather have been home drinking beer or hearing Jack Benny, went forward into the jaws of death...
...He started, you may remember, right after Pearl Harbor, when he gathered the newspapermen around him, puffed meditatively on his cigarette, and, while the newspapermen poised their pencils to catch every vital word that was about to drop from his lips, he informed them that he was starting a contest to name the war...
...But the contest had no $5,000 prizes connected with it, and it failed to catch on...
...If you want to know about the old war, ask Stalin about Poland or Churchill about Spain...
...If liberty simply means freedom from foreign domination—which the French had prior to 1939—then unsophisticated people might begin to get the idea that liberty lsnds to slavery...
...And finally, when Mr...
...Hell, that's the war everybody is always fighting...
...Roosevelt's character...
...You can't help admire a fellow who's game, even if he isn't too clear about what he is being game about...
...The War of Survival...
...But they are not always the fellows who are best for the long pull...
...And that is about as laudable a purpose as I can think of off-hand...
...And, if we can't, we should show our good faith by liberating the millions of political and economic slaves right here at home—not because they are Americans, but because it would be so much easier to strike off their chains than to liberate the people across the seas...
...Well, as I say, the Great Name Contest pooped out...
...R. insist upon fooling around with it...
...We should certainly liberate'them all, if we can...
...It is certainly an improvement upon "The War of Survival...
...Liberation is a big order...
...I did observe, however, that if I were one of the judges in the Great Name Contest, I would throw Mr...
...But as far as the name is concerned, it would suit them right down to the scorched earth...
...The Liberation," he thought, shooting his grin at the newspapermen, was just a peachy new name for the war...
...Three-fourths of the people of the world are in political slavery...
...The press dutifully reported this cataclysmic development in Washington and even, for a while, did its best to promote the Great Name Contest...
...This preoccupation with naming a war, when there were at least a few doubts as to what the war was about, seemed to me to suggest that Roosevelt, like Churchill, was another one of these characters that are known as game...
...After a while it quietly pooped out...
...Survival is an animal instinct, and has nothing to do with principles...
...The question that survival raises in the animal which has free will is—survive for what...
...Such men are magnificent at a Dunkirk, at proclaiming a bank holiday...
...The just and the unjust both fight to survive...
...I suppose it seems lousy of me, when there are such big issues at stake as Poland and Spain, to start yammering about a trivial thing like a name...
...Or, better yet, he might just call in the boys who named Rinso and Wheaties and let them take care of the titles, and confine himself to the plot...
...We were supposed to be fighting for the survival of human liberty, not just for survival...
...Roosevelt promises that France will rise again with her empire around her, does he mean that he is not going to liberate the black, brown, yellow, and biege colonial slaves of France in Africa and Asia...
...I always liked his gayety, his resilience, his comeback...
...If the name of this war is a trivial thing, why does Mr...
...And ff we want really to liberate the people across the seas, too, wouldn't the liberation 'of the slaves at home hearten those who are oppressed so far away...
...Roosevelt's entry was the winnah...
...But it raises more questions than it answers...
...And then Mr...
...There is no percentage in liberating people if what happened to France'before the war is the consequence...
...All we want," they would say plaintively, as they massacred another million Jews or Christians, "is to survive...
...Closer to nine-tenths are in economic slavery...
...Roosevelt's entry into the ash-can...
...Roosevelt, instead of clarifying the grisly confusion that surrounds the Allied policy, felt the irresistible urge again to start naming things instead of doing something about them...
...We are going to liberate the French from the Nazis, but the French were at liberty prior to 1939, and they did not seem to know what to do with their liberty...
...And if he doesn't, wouldn't it be better not to call this war The Liberation, but just to keep our mouths shut and go on fighting the Nazis...
Vol. 8 • June 1944 • No. 25
