I am of the generation that was drilled in schools with the concept that freedom is absence of restraint. Freedom meant the right to say what we wanted, to befriend whoever we wanted to, to write what we wanted and to read what we wanted.
There was a time when this explanation satisfied me but by the time I arrived in Asia as a GI, I clearly saw its many limitations.
In India, for example, I saw countless people spending all their hours from dawn to dusk begging for food and money. Many of them carried children in their arms and shoved the tiny, starved bodies right in front of your face and asked you to look at them.
Is there freedom here, I asked? Does freedom to them mean the right to read, write, speak and assemble? Freedom explained in this sense, as we had been taught in our schools, was incomplete.
They had no leisure for these activities, for they were engaged day alter day in the fundamental task of seeking meager supplies of food. They were as badly or worse off than the primitive man who spent all his time hunting and fishing. The primitive man too, was not free, for while he had no one to exploit or oppress him, he was a slave to nature. As man extends his control over nature, that much more his freedom grows.
I saw the same thing in China. In Kunming, I saw women and children with baskets on their backs going toward the mountains every morning. They returned in the evening with twigs, pieces of wood and other kindling material in their baskets. There was no firewood around the city and its barren outskirts, for scavengers fought for pieces of wood. So many people spent all their days merely trying to provide their families with fuel needed to boil water, for instance, which is polluted almost everywhere.
Not Freedom, But Privilege for the Few
In the West, particularly in our universities, we had heard of Chinese philosophers and classics, yet as we moved around the cities and countryside, we saw that education had been and still was a privileged thing for a few of the upper class. The masses, whom we saw begging, peddling small items, or toiling in the fields of India and Kuomintang China, had no leisure or means to study, to read or to come in contact with new ideas.
Feudalism was a root cause of this poverty and ignorance. Squeezing of these weaker Asian nations by foreign powers was another cause. Freedom therefore, meant, as I observed in the towns and countryside, complete sovereignty of these nations and the development of their productive resources to benefit the millions of underprivileged.
It would mean then, more schools, the introduction of new ideas, electric lighting for reading and discussion rather "than dim candlelight or going to bed early; pure tap water in one's home rather than walking hundreds of yards for a bucket of polluted water; electric and oil-burning stoves, and increasing the wealth of the country by improved means of production, which actually is the key to liberation for the millions who spend many hours doing chores which should take but minutes in this day and age.
"Tobacco Road" Is Not Only In Georgia
In India and China I constantly recalled the words of Mrs. Ira S. Caldwell, mother of novelist Erskine Caldwell, who told me when I went to their area in Georgia to visit "Tobacco Road":
"'Tobacco Road' is not only in Georgia; it is a belt road for poor folks that runs around the earth for people who have been pushed back! by soil erosion, land tenancy and monopoly . . ."
I believe almost) no GI would forget the tired voices of the beggars, who salaamed and came up to and followed him, repeating all the time: "No papa, no mama, no uncle, no sister, no brother, no first sergeant—baksheesh, master . . ."
In Colombo, on the island of Ceylon off the coast of India, I passed through a settlement one night and saw children and mothers engaged in wholesale procuring.
Human Mind and Body Brutalized
There was a youngster of about eight, who came running up to me and said: "Joe, my mother. She young, nice looking. Very good!" Another pulled my shirt sleeve to say: "My mother, she good, Joe. Come, come, Joe." Or a mother saying in a pleading voice: "Joe, my girl." She lifted her hand in explaining that her daughter was small, still a child. She squeezed a smile hopefully.
What a brutal way to supplement the piddling pay they received from Englishmen! All dignity had been stripped from them.
From Calcutta we sailed for Colombo, which in the early spring of 1944 was still plagued by the tail end of a famine that had swept Bengal province. The poor were still dying in the streets. We saw naked people whose bodies were caked with mud begging with heart and soul, for death was not far away from them. We also saw rich Indians and Britishers living luxuriously, callously disdainful towards these people.
Resistance To Change Forges A Force To Effect the Change
But amidst this poverty and disillusionment, I sensed as I talked with students and small shopkeepers, a restless wave stirring with great, swelling, cumulative force, someday to remove this burden that rested heavily on the common people like a giant parasite.
In this particular situation where the ruling class tried hard to prevent fundamental social changes, revolutionary in nature, from taking place gradually, I wondered when, by its very resistance, it would help create a force powerful enough to bring the change. For it is axiomatic that counter-revolutionary activities and force, fighting the change for the better, would cause resistance and forge a revolutionary people who would proceed to improve conditions with greater zeal.
I was stationed in a U. S. army transient camp outside Calcutta. When we arrived there, a briefing officer told us to guard our rifles and carbines with our lives.
"Don't lose them and don't sell them!" he warned us. He said the Indians were collecting weapons for uprisings, and to fight the British in the future for independence.
GI Reaction To World Politics Was Aloofness
Our camp was near a large British hemp plantation which, employed hundreds of Indian coolies. We visited a British estate where the plantation manager lived. In immaculate white shirts and shorts, the managerial staff played croquet on green, spacious lawn toward the evening. At night they showed movies. Always it started off with: "Ladies and gentlemen, the national anthem!" We all rose while the reel was run off with King George's picture on the screen and a voice singing "God Save the King!"
The average GI was not aware of world politics. He was not even conscious of the role he was playing as the instrument of American foreign policy. He was not concerned with Roosevelt's four freedoms or what the oppressed people thought of. them. He longed for his home, and the conveniences of modern living, and, when he saw the poverty and misery in Asia, his love for America became painfully acute. He wanted to "get the damn war over with and get home."
We Made Friends Then, for We Were a Liberating Force
He did not realize the change in social thinking he brought to the natives wherever he went. He was essentially kinder than the British, for he felt he was part of a great liberation army fighting imperialism. He was not fighting the native people. There was no order issued to him to "shoot everything that moves." He did not see the flattening out of villages by his air force or the burning of innocent people with jellied gasoline as is being clone in Korea today.
He made friends then and basically enjoyed a comfortable feeling among the native people. But this was during the period of Roosevelt's leadership, not Harry S. Truman's.