Norman Rockwell illustrated a series of covers for The Saturday Evening Post, know as The Four Freedoms: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. His illustrations took their titles from a 1941 speech by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which defined these freedoms as things to hold on to that made America special, and to use them to contrast against Nazi Germany. These four "essential" human freedoms were later incorporated into the United Nations Charter, and the images that Rockwell created are themselves strongly integrated into America's cultural consciousness.
In the twentieth century, the idea of freedom took on many varied and often contradictory meanings, and its importance was espoused by political leaders from all over the globe. During this period, the meaning of freedom became so broadened through overuse that it has ceased to carry any meaning at all -- the fundamental idea of freedom is so debased as a concept that the word is useless in modern political discourse.
Take, for example, the rhetoric of Marx and Lenin. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx argues that "freedom" itself was a corrupt word, when used by capitalists and the bourgeois, equating it only with "free trade" and decrying its hold on the minds of the workers. Lenin drew on this idea when, in "What Is To Be Done?" he defined "freedom" as little more than the ability of the bourgeois to attempt to add capitalist ideas to a perfect socialist state -- since any criticism of socialism was automatically to add strength to the bourgeois movements. This somewhat tortured logic would rule the Soviet Union for the entirety of its existence, giving rise to a state where freedom was defined as the freedom from freedom itself.
In Hitler's 28 July 1922 speech in Munich, he talks of the "slavery" of the German people to a Jewish menace, in the dual forms of capitalist "Stock Exchange Jews" on one hand and socialist agitator Jews on the other. Although he does not explicitly say that "freedom" will result with him rising to power, the meaning of his drawing an image the German people being in chains is to offer them freedom through his ideas. But, with hindsight, Hitler's freedom looks awfully queer to us: he would end up killing large swathes of the German Jewish population and sweep away the democratic government of the Weimar era, replacing it with his own totalitarian regime. This, too, he must have described to the citizenry at the time as increasing their freedom. And the twisted argument can be made, if Hitler's definitions are accepted: he had given the German people freedom from the repressive Treaty of Versailles, freedom from the Jewish menace, and freedom from the need to worry about who would lead them. He has taken care of all of these things.
In the wake of World War II, when the rest of the world became aware of the terrible abrogation of basic human decency that had occurred in Nazi Germany, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created by the United Nations. The Declaration attempts to define and quantify the idea of freedom in the twentieth century, since the word was already beginning to experience a dilution of meaning. It is at once amazingly broad and astonishingly narrow with its definitions. Most of its lines begin with either "everyone" or "no one" in an attempt to cover the entire human race in the following pronouncement: "Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the security of person" is the whole of Article 3, echoing the beginning of the United States Declaration of Independence.
The Americans had used this as a basis for their own government's definition of freedom for generations, and extended the idea to foreign policy, keeping the country free from foreign entanglements and obligations. This changed with the rise of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, and American began seeing that there was a need for it to project its values of freedom onto other countries. Truman's speech to Congress on 12 March calls for "freedom-loving peoples" to assist both Turkey and Greece in fighting Communist -- and therefore Russian -- uprisings, and stay members of the club of Western democratic governments. Soon, the United States moved to formalize its commitment to promoting freedom internationally by strongly supporting the United Nations, as well as the creation of NATO and other alliances and treaties internationally to attempt to contain what it saw as a dire threat to its own freedoms from the Soviet Union.
In the view of the United States, freedom often came down to a question of supporting democratic, popularly elected, non-communist governments against any form of -- real or perceived -- Russian influence. The fear of Communism's inroads in Europe was even given a name by Churchill: the Iron Curtain "descending across the Continent." Churchill says that these countries are under increasing control from Russia -- the exact opposite of freedom.
What then is freedom? Is it freedom from the bourgeois, as Marx campaigns for and Lenin instituted in Soviet Russia? Is it the freedom from choice that Hitler promoted in Nazi Germany, which lead to the deaths of untold millions of men and women around the world in the terrible conflagration of World War II? Is it the specific rights laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which in the years since its inception has failed to prevent wars in dozens of nations, as well as genocides in Kosovo, Rwanda, and others? Or is it the freedoms advocated by the liberal democracy of the western powers, which Rockwell illustrated with his Americana flair so memorably on the covers of The Saturday Evening Post? In the end, this relativism has rendered the question all but moot: freedom's meaning is specific to the individual using the word, and there can be no agreement from one person to the next.