Faith-Based Wars

        Because the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick PBS series on Vietnam pays scant attention to the context of a hundred years of  French colonization that preceded it the result is a certain illiteracy that bends how the film series views the twenty years of war that follow.  Perhaps the lengthy French occupation is not shown because it had a clearer more revealing purpose, one that begs us to look the other way. It was to extract the region's rich mineral and natural resources for the profit of French enterprise. This purpose was sacred, supported by Catholic missionaries teaching a version of Christianity to the Vietnamese intended to pacify them to accept their own victimization; that is, moving their natural wealth into European hands.   

        It's this colonial history that frames the political and spiritual reality of the years after the brief WW II Japanese occupation and after the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu.  Irregardless of how both Catholic and Protestant missionaries during the age of colonialism in China, India and Africa were dedicated to their Christianizing purpose they also served the same simplicism:  that a higher moral purpose, God's purpose, required the servitude of native populations to build the wealth of Western nations.

        Which may be why the U. S. State Department  never showed President Truman the letters from Ho Chi Minh requesting American help setting-up a democracy in Vietnam. For Secretaries of State such as John Foster Dulles God's purpose was served by enriching the U. S. 

         So much for the ancient biblical instruction about welcoming strangers and delivering justice. 

        Just so the U. S. could not escape its metaphoric identity as successors to French colonialism.  The Burns/Novick film toils in each segment to respect the naivete, innocence, and heroic sacrifices of American soldiers in a misbegotten cause, but that does not illuminate how American leaders understood the slaughter of Vietnamese by the hundreds of thousands to be worthy of the sacred purpose to defeat Communism and save Vietnam for the West.

        This role as faith-based champions against Communism makes the Burns/Novick segment incomprehensible when it shows the self-immolation of a devout Buddhist Monk protesting the American supported Diem regime in 1963.  As the flames consume the Monk, Thích Quang Duc, he is surrounded  by a large circle of followers kneeling in prayer.  What Americans see--including the ambassadors, the President, the Generals--is an  act of religious fanaticism, blind to understand this was a window into the spiritual center of Vietnamese culture.   

        This may help explain Ken Burns' illiteracy about the subsequent faith-based non-violent resistance to the war. By 1967 Jewish and Christian leaders were mobilizing their own opposition to the war and by 1968 a coalition named Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam had distributed twenty-four thousand copies of a 400 page paper-back, "In the Name of America." It was composed entirely of newspaper clippings of U. S. brutalities and indiscriminate destruction; e.g. CIA operatives interrogating captured Vietnamese then pushing them out of their helicopter. By 1969 forty thousand people of faith came to Washington to march by candlelight to Richard Nixon's White House, each carrying the name of one of the 40,000 dead U. S. soldiers at that point in the war. It marked a daily death toll of 40 U. S. soldiers per day. 

        The Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee distributed a shocking slide show about "The Electronic Battlefield" showing the use of cluster munitions with hundreds of shards of flying steel exploding above ground and shattering pigs, children and old folks working in the fields and villages. Shown repeatedly at the 1972 Democratic Convention, in some cities church volunteers bought multiple carousel projectors and slides to show the horror of the war to churches, synagogues and other groups.  The point is that this resistance by non-violent interfaith movements during the war practiced a religious tradition that, like the Monk Thích Quang Duc, was not centered in illusions of American greatness.  Strangely, leaders of the anti-war movement of the 1960's report that no one from the Burns research teams asked about their faith-based non-violent actions.

        This is important today because the old time religion of the Vietnam war--faith merged with American nationalism, especially in the age of Trump, is still in play--sometimes for cynical reasons (Lindsay Graham on the "health policy choice between socialism and democracy"), more often because it asks for no moral engagement on the frontier of policy choices about equity, justice or injustice. Trump age heroes are the people with the most money and therefore the most power.

        The irony is that the people supporting Trump are among the least advantaged by the turn to globalization that ended their jobs and who must now send their children--as a means of employment--to fight and die in Iraq or Afghanistan.  The old paradigm still teaches that all this is a religious happening because God is making America great again.  Whether people accept this today may be influenced by the lessons being taught, or not, by the Burns film about Vietnam. 

Democracy as Myth

        When the U. S.  health care system was transferred in the 1980's from the awesome authority of physicians to the power of corporate-based managed care groups--HMO's--the new equation replaced the wisdom of doctors with the techniques of corporate management. Patients would no longer be seen as a source of revenue but as a cost that would be contained and minimized by efficiency.  

        This was a 'dream of reason' wrote Paul Starr in his 1983 Pulitzer prize winning book "and did not take power into account,"

"The dream was that reason, in the form of the arts and sciences, would liberate humanity from scarcity and the caprices of nature.... not least of all, the diseases of the body and the spirit."

            

        Although more progress in health care followed, the change also cast up a new world of power that has left in its wake both growing inequality and widespread distrust of the profiteering to be had through the new corporatized health care model.  A critical analysis of this power, measured by its total impact in the U. S. must deal with both healing understood as a metaphor of faith and health care corporatism's claim to deliver the most justice for dollars spent.  The numbers are staggering and don't fit ordinary people's pockets or understanding about what's going on.

• The U. S. pharmaceutical industry is reported to be worth $446 billion. 
• Forbes Magazine cites a CDC report that the private insurance industry is worth $900 billion.  
• The Center for Responsive Politics reports 811 lobbyists in 2017 working for the insurance industry at a cost of $79 million.  
• Salon cites a Kaiser Health News analysis that thirty-eight major drug makers and trade groups will spend a total of $50.9 million this year on 1,296 lobbyists (See Opensecrets.org)

            You may be for or against Obama Care and Bernie Sanders' new single-payer proposal for Medicare-for-All, but you can be certain of one thing: No stone will be left unturned to preserve this huge health care corporate profit system.  

             Readers may also remember that they cast no votes about the rise of managed care as those major policy changes unfolded thirty-five years ago. The voting public has had to depend on the authority (the power) of other sources.  "When professionals claim to be authoritative about the nature of reality," wrote Starr,  "whether it is the structure of the atom, the ego, or the universe, we generally defer to their judgment."  A very bad dependency if democracy (rule by the people) is to be real.

       These coming weeks in Wahington citizens must weigh what it means for the future of health care if insurance company profits are subordinated to decrease inequality and pay the cost of health care for everyone.  It's a justice question and a challenge to all faith communities and other community groups to enter the public square of political life to tackle the task of critical thinking about about writing new laws and changing old laws in order to give the people equity.  

         Without that happening democracy will continue in its mythical status. And yes, it is a question that bears on the growing threat of fascism in the U. S.

"Power, at the most rudimentary personal level, originates in dependence, and the power of the professions primarily originates in dependence upon their knowledge and competence....what makes dependence on the professions so distinctive today is that their interpretations often govern our understanding of the world and our own experience. To most of us, this power seems legitimate"  [The social transformation of American Medicine: the rise of a sovereign profession and the making of a vast industry]  

Or, as Ivan Illich put it many years ago, "a professional is someone who has a stake in your not knowing what he knows." [Deschooling Society]