Weekly Short Story: The Liberation of Earth by William Tenn

I read The Liberation of Earth several years ago when I bought the science fiction anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 15 (1953), published by DAW Books in 1986.  For some reason 1953 featured several outstanding short stories of this genre...I discussed Time is the Traitor by Alfred Bester in an earlier article.  Today's story is another one by William Tenn, the pen name for Philip Klass...you might have read my article about his 1959 story The Malted Milk Monster...

The narrative in The Liberation of Earth is from the future...nine generations after the described events.  One day an alien ship arrives on Earth and proclaims that they are the Dendi, who preside over the galactic federation and have been observing humanity from a distance...without interference...while we develop to the point when we are admitted as a participating member.  But events have interfered with this as the invading Troxxt have occupied nearby star systems and our solar system is within their sphere of influence.  To counteract them and "liberate" Earth from the Troxxt, the Dendi have arrived to set up their own base here.  Then the Troxxt attack and drive away the Dendi and proclaim themselves as liberators.  This conflict between the two galactic powers goes back and forth...and each time untold numbers of people are killed and the environment progressively ruined.  At the end, well...the story is told as an oral history handed down from generation to generation...the narrator gives a hint of his current situation on Earth by stating. "Looking about us, we can say with pardonable pride that we have been about as thoroughly liberated as it is possible for a race and a planet to be!"

The Liberation of Earth is a very thinly-veiled satire about how the East and West during the Cold War treated the many different countries that they deemed as strategic in their struggle against the other.  It was written at the opening of the Korean War in 1950 and published at its conclusion, three years later.  Each side in that conflict...as well as in Vietnam a few years later...made great public fanfare about "liberating" the country's people...while increasingly making their homeland uninhabitable.  After the Cold War we still have our proxy conflicts...look at the devastation in Syria and Yemen as other countries interfere with them while proclaiming themselves as liberators...

Earth as a proxy war target between two much more advanced alien races may seem a little bit too speculative for anyone to seriously consider as a possibility, but if you happen to live in one of the Third World countries with relatively little military might to defend themselves and you have little to interest you other than taking care of yourself, your family, and immediate community, the relatively sudden presence of super military powers and "wars of liberation" on your land may seem just as far-fetched to you...and just as tragic...