Politics & Power Quote by Kim Y. Sam

There’s a deliberate muscularity to the phrasing here: “blood and sweat” yanks freedom out of the realm of ideals and plants it in the body, in injury, in exhaustion. Kim Y. Sam is not interested in freedom as a poster word; the line frames it as a product purchased at a brutal, measurable cost. Calling that sacrifice the “prime mover” is a calculated escalation. It doesn’t merely credit troops with helping; it argues they were the engine of post-war liberation, the force without which the machinery of “realisation” wouldn’t turn.

That choice also reveals the quote’s political posture. By pairing “United States and United Nations troops,” it fuses national power and international legitimacy, smoothing over the messy reality that these forces often pulled in different directions, and that “UN” interventions have always been entangled with geopolitics. The subtext is a defense of liberal internationalism: freedom as something advanced by coordinated military action, not simply won by local movements, diplomacy, or economic reconstruction.

“Throughout the post-war period” broadens the claim into an era-sized narrative, the kind used to anchor textbooks and speeches. It implies a consistent moral arc - intervention leading to freedom - while quietly editing out the contradictions: proxy wars, coups, civilian casualties, and places where “freedom” arrived wearing someone else’s strategic priorities. The sentence works because it’s both elegy and argument: it sanctifies sacrifice, then leverages that sanctity to make a contested historical thesis feel like common sense.