Of course, it does get ridiculous around here when we call X movie or Y book a libertarian book in disguise.
But you know, I found that I was amazingly impressionable to libertarian thinking at a very young age, and I found that my mind was already conditioned to accept the premises and conclusions of it. I guess it must have been the influence of everything I was exposed to before it.
So it should be obvious that Watership Down, a book I read when I was 14, must have conditioned me in such a manner. And thinking back, it IS a pro-liberty story.
This book is about making a safe haven for liberty which exists in an unacceptable compromise fo all slaves in foreign lands. When a group of rabbits find that their own burrow, run by a myopic elder chieftain, is unable to see the impending danger to it, and is too much of a dogmatic institution to accept or listen them, these rabbits simply leave their old burrow without question. These rabbits then end up in another burrow where all rabbits are well-provided, but are nothing but a fodder for the one who maintains them, and are meant to be harvested and discarded, which they actively deny but fully accept. Thus these rabbits leave immediately again with no hesitation. And when they finally find a burrow where they can live freely, they try to make it a place open to all rabbits from the nearby burrow, but those rabbits wish to conquer and subjugate them, and do not want to allow any room for them to even exist.
Of course, when the protagonist rabbits visit that heavily policed and surveyed burrow and see the supposedly gentle and enlightened leaders there who handle everything there with a firm hand, the result of that is nothing but cramped, warped, and hidebound rabbits with loss of initiative and ability to think or even emotionally hold themselves together. Ultimately it shows that destroying the liberty of even a rabbit destroys the rabbit’s ability to be a rabbit and know what it’s like to be one.
Hell, it very much is a pro-liberty story, no matter how you spin it.