For the month of April, as part of the annual A to Z Challenge, I will be endeavoring to write a short personal post every day on the subject of war and peace—short because of time, War and Peace because of the times. To make things more bearable, I will endeavor to include music in every post.
Freedom is a big word, and in its shaking off of all constraints it opens up the world. Everybody yearns for it, but it means very different things to different people. Large groups of people come together to struggle for freedom, but to an individual, after the initial excitement, freedom can quickly get very lonely. Freedom gives you choices, but too many choices can make you lose your bearings. Unfreedom weighs you down and holds you back, but freedom can give you heavy responsibilities. Freedom conjures up a sense of ease, but it doesn’t come easy, and without constant vigilance you may wake up one morning and find that it has gone.
The etymology of the free in freedom in Old English means exempt from, not in bondage, noble, joyful, and in Proto-Germanic, beloved. Way back, it is connected in Old English and Old Norse with affection, friendship, peace, personal security. By the 13th century, freedom also means clear of obstruction, unrestrained in movement, loose, at liberty, wild. By the late 14th century, we see freedom, in relation to nations, meaning “not subject to foreign rule or to despotism.”
From modern times down to the present day, freedom still retains its sense of deliverance from domination. Hence enslaved and colonized people continue to yearn and struggle for freedom.
Freedom from coercion or constraint is also very much present in a longing for personal freedom: the freedom to come and go, to be with family, to love the person one wishes to love, and to achieve personal fulfillment, spiritually, psychologically, through love and work. This sense of individual freedom as distinct from collective liberation on the one hand and spiritual liberation on the other is a more modern one, the freedom to break away and be alone.
I once asked my students to listen to Kris Kristofferson’s Me and Bobby McGee, sung by Janis Joplin and to think about the meaning of the line, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” They were stumped. What a lonely freedom, empty without love and commitment.
I want to hold up the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, founded in April, 1915, during the First World War, “’to bring together women of different political views and philosophical and religious backgrounds determined to study and make known the causes of war and work for a permanent peace’ and to unite women worldwide who oppose oppression and exploitation.” WILPF’s U.S. website introduces itself in this way:
Feminist peace analysis is our superpower. We understand how war, economic exploitation, climate destruction, and oppression are linked through the same systems. That’s why we’ve been fighting for total peace, not just the absence of war, but justice in every form.
For WILPF, Freedom means peace gained through working together to end injustice and exploitation, and to give all people room to move: freedom in all its senses. On March 2nd, 2026, almost immediately after the launch of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, WILPF issued a Call for Immediate Ceasefire and Compliance with International Law,
denounc[ing] these acts as violations of international law and part of a broader pattern of militarism and impunity. Rejecting both aggression and militarised retaliation, this statement calls for an immediate ceasefire, urgent diplomacy, accountability, and a renewed commitment to disarmament—affirming that true security is rooted in peace, justice, and the rule of law, not war.
In contrast, the term Free World, as in, “The President of the United States is the leader of the Free World,” came into use as propaganda in the Second World War and the Cold War, referring to the Allies, the Western Bloc, and the aligned countries as opposed to the authoritarian states such as Germany, Italy, and Japan. Later, it came to refer to capitalist liberal democracies collectively—and their authoritarian allies—as opposed to communist states. The term fell into disuse after the end of the Cold War, but it seems to be having a revival of late. To me, it has always been distasteful in its carving up of the world into perpetually warring power blocs, leaving the formerly colonized and the non-aligned nations out of the picture altogether; and in its equating of capitalism (the “free” market) with freedom. In any case, the “free” in Free World no longer has explanatory meaning in the world’s current geopolitical configurations—perhaps it never did.
President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, though, in his 1941 State of the Union address, still hold resonance for me:
The first is freedom of speech, and expression—everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.
He continued:
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
Let me leave you with some freedom songs for the letter F:
Freedom, by Richie Havens, sung here at Woodstock in 1969.
Havens’ repeated cries of “Freedom,” followed by the heart-wrenching, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child/A long way from my home,” evokes all the meanings of Freedom at once.
Oh Freedom! sung by Odetta in 1956, a spiritual taken up and adapted as a freedom song after the Civil War.
and
Freedom is a Constant Struggle, a Civil Rights song covered by Leyla McCalla in 2023 as a tribute to singer and activist Barbara Dane, who recorded it with the Chambers Brothers in 1966.
Tell Me Another 