William Tenn - The Liberation of Earth

Though this story was read aloud during protests by students in the nineteen sixties at rallies opposing our participation in the Vietnam War, it was actually written during and about the Korean War, a decade earlier.

My feelings about that situation were really quite simple.

North Korea invaded South Korea across the thirty-eighth parallel. The United States, acting for the United Nations (read, please, the Galactic Federation), came to the aid of South Korea, driving the North Koreans all the way back. Thereupon, the People’s Republic of China, with the backing of the Soviet Union, came to the aid of North Korea, driving the U.S. forces back in turn. The entire matter has not been entirely resolved to this day, leaving the country in a kind of military stasis, with armistice and peace talks coming up in a desultory fashion at Panmunjom, the approximate midpoint.

The period covered was roughly the same as the Red-Scare years that began with the Dies Committee and ended with the Senate censure of Joseph McCarthy in 1954. As a result, the organized Left inveighed against what it called “Truman’s War,” and urged us to get the hell out of Korea; the official Right not only supported the war but considered it perhaps the most crucial element in the battle against the godless Communists.

In writing the story, all I wanted to do was point out what a really awful thing it was to be a Korean (and later a Vietnamese) in such a situation. (But recently I have come to the conclusion that if I had been a Korean, North or South, under those same circumstances, I would very much have welcomed the U.S. intervention. Am I growing old? Or just official?)

As was pretty much the case with “Brooklyn Project,” absolutely none of the top science-fiction magazines wanted to touch the story. It was finally purchased by Bob Lowndes of Columbia Publications for his Future Science Fiction, then the butcher-paper bottom of the field.

When I at last read the story in print, I was quite proud of it. But nobody, absolutely nobody, seemed to notice it.

Not even the F.B.I.

Written 1950 / Published 1953