In the name of freedom

And I was thinking. I was thinking that since reserves, national parks, are created for animals, because we are concerned to prevent, if only on a limited terrain, the disappearance of bison, bear, and reindeer, it would be high time to think about creating some reserves for free people, reserves of freedom. Because the man who wants truly to be free, who truly loves that most beautiful of all creations—freedom, is now becoming as rare as the bison or reindeer. He is hunted at all seasons and with the help of ever more refined weapons, or put in the modern reserves and national parks known as concentration camps. He is being exterminated at every step of the way—in the name of freedom. This is perhaps the best joke of all. It often seems to me that things began to go bad for freedom from the moment it began to be fabricated all over the place, when anyone at all, in thousands of fly-by-night distilleries, began to bootleg this splendid drink in any which way and as much as possible. And the result was “booze,” an awful moonshine, used to make the millions drunk, while persuading them it’s the real thing. Ask the twentieth-century man you encounter on the street how he imagines freedom. He begins with the words: “First you must eliminate and exterminate, imprison and neutralize . . .” Every program for freedom begins today with the slammer and the gallows, places of confinement and the hunting of a certain category of human mammals. That’s fine—it’s logical. What’s more, understandable and appropriate. And then there will be freedom. What kind, damn it? Freedom for whom? For the slaves of “freedom,” for the galley slaves.

Andrzej Bobkowski
Wartime Notebooks