Wars of National Liberation and Local Wars

Abstract

The Chinese min-tsu chieh-fang and the Russian Natsionaïnoe osvobozhdenie, although translated as “national liberation,” have their peculiar connotations. Should we make bold to use clumsy English, we may render the former something like the “release and unwinding of the people and race,” and the latter as the “deliverance and unstringing of a nation,”¹ To a man on the street in Moscow or Peking, the word “liberation” signifies the fight of an enslaved people for their manumission. He supposes, first, some forces which take away freedom and, second, the struggle required to win it back. However, not all liberations sought for by masses are national in substance, because a mere resistance to a despotic rule which has no foreign backing is properly an intranational affair of two opposing forces. Here is involved nothing national in the sense of one nation vis-à-vis another.