As we are in high-patriotic season when it comes to the American
liturgical calendar I thought it apropos to recall this speaker I heard being
aggressively pushed on local Christian radio stations in 2019.
Thankfully this heretic has been silenced for the present in
2020 – gagged by Covid-19 as it were.
His 'testimony' and 'gospel' presentation is especially
egregious as he ties in the gospel with his patriotism and 'service' in Vietnam
– a conflict fomented by the US in the aftermath of WWII. The French had lost
control of their Indochina colonies during the war as the region had fallen
under Japanese administration and then domination. After Japan's utter defeat
in 1945, Paris sought to re-assert its authority but was met with sustained local
resistance. The people of the region were glad to be rid of the Japanese but
they did not want their former French masters to return either.
Economically ailing the waning French Empire looked to
Washington for help and (as was later revealed in the Pentagon Papers)
Washington funded the French attempt to re-conquer the region. The French
attempts ultimately failed, culminating in the defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954
– at which point the Americans began to directly intervene and under the cover
of the United Nations – the nation was split between the ostensibly communist
North under Ho Chi Minh and the newly created American satellite of South
Vietnam led by the US-installed dictator Diem.
Diem's pro-Western, pro-Catholic policies upset the majority
population in the South and the North under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh
resisted Western political control and political manipulation of their nation.
A new phase of war was brewing and by the early 1960's it had become a hot war
– leading to instability in neighbouring Laos and Cambodia and the US would certainly
become involved in these nations as well.
While the US didn't officially send 'combat' troops in until
the year after the deceitful 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the truth was the
US had already been engaged for nearly twenty years prior to the insertion of
actual combat units in 1965. 'Advisors' and other military and intelligence
figures had already been involved, playing a significant role in the
brutalising of the local population – ultimately driving many of them into the
arms of the communists and membership in the paramilitary resistance also known
as the Viet Cong. And of course as was seen in other Cold War proxy theatres,
communism was often worn lightly – often serving as a veneer for
anti-colonialism and nationalism. It became an organising principle, a means to
access a larger political bloc with its money and arms but for the average
fighter in the African bush or the jungles of Indochina – the ideas of Marx,
Lenin and even Mao were of little import or consequence. They were fighting an
invader, a power that would dominate and exploit them and would destroy their
culture.
Supported by the North Vietnamese Army, the Viet Cong waged
an unrelenting guerilla war against the American occupiers and the puppet
regimes which ruled South Vietnam. It turned into a meat grinder with the
Americans pursuing a mathematical strategy based on 'body counts' – the notion
put forward by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara that if enough Vietnamese
soldiers and resistors would be killed – eventually they wouldn't be able to
replace them and field viable resistance. The math would become inevitable. The
Hanoi regime would see this and acquiesce, dropping their support for the Viet
Cong resistance in the South – allowing the Americans and their Saigon
satellite to stabilise the country and proclaim victory.
It was ivory tower driven 'whiz kid' or 'bureaucratic' war
and the ignorant and immoral policy would prove devastating.
Needless to say the strategy failed. Under the leadership of
McNamara and General Westmoreland the 'body count' strategy became an excuse
for wanton slaughter. The dehumanisation of the Vietnamese, reckoned as mere
'gooks' only exacerbated the climate of murder, rape, massacre and general
exploitation. Though it is popularly perceived as such, My Lai was no isolated
event but the evil result of the policy and the outworking of the theatre's
military ethos. And such massacres happened on many occasions – but in most
cases the Pentagon was able to keep it quiet.
Indeed, even years after the war the disgraced and maddened
General Westmoreland argued that the US tactically won almost every battle but
the Vietnamese continued to throw away lives out of some kind of defect –
something rooted in their Oriental character that made life cheap. The truth is
that they were defending their land and way of life and were willing to die for
it. They didn't have modern Western weapons and their power of indiscriminate
destruction, so they literally fought with their very bodies and blood and
proved to be made of much sterner stuff than the decadent Americans who sought
to dominate them. Did Vietnamese generals such as the infamous Giap throw away
many lives? He was determined to win and for him victory meant the Americans
leaving. Westmoreland's charges of immorality and a lack of character and
integrity are just staggering given US conduct in the theatre and the fact that
Westmoreland (a professed Christian) schemed and conspired to use nuclear
weapons in the conflict – demonstrates just whose character is lacking and
drives one to conclude that it was the defeated and rightfully disgraced
American general that truly devalued human life.
Strategic Hamlets became euphemisms for forced labour
concentration camps. Operation Phoenix provided a bureaucratic cover for what
was little more than large-scale assassination by means of death squad – tens
of thousands dying as a result.
The conflict which was meant to focus on South Vietnam
quickly became a regional war. Due to the Cold War, the US command felt that it
could not directly invade North Vietnam, fearing an attack on Berlin, Taiwan or
a repeat of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But that didn't stop them from bombing.
Indeed the bombing campaigns that took place in Indochina make World War II
look like child's play. In Cambodia the bombing accompanied by US political
machinations so destabilised the country that it created the conditions for the
genocidal Khmer Rouge to come to power – an evil and despotic regime that once
ousted by unified communist Vietnam in 1979, the US would go on to support
throughout the 1980's as it continued to wage its low-scale war against the
Hanoi puppet regime installed in Phnom Penh – perpetuating America's evil
Indochina policy and crimes into the 1990's.
Additionally a long and terrible proxy war was waged in
neighbouring Laos which in addition to ripping that society apart and leaving
many destitute, the war was in part financed by the drug trade which continues
to affect the larger region, US military members, US domestic society and the
global community at large.
The war has left a legacy of orphans, widows and the maimed.
Unexploded ordnance still kills hundreds a year and because of heavy American
use of Agent Orange and other chemicals, people are still being born with
deformities some forty plus years after the fighting stopped. More could be
said about the US government's betrayal of its own troops in Vietnam and other
conflicts but that's another complicated story.
Altogether while 58,000 Americans died, something on the
order of 3 million died in the larger Indochina theatre. The whole episode was
a disgrace. From 1945-1975 (and even after) in places like Cambodia and
Thailand, US policy resulted in large-scale destruction – and in the years
after the war as the stories and history would be revealed – an honest
assessment can only conclude the entire operation was rooted in lies, willful
misperceptions, schemes and manipulations and rank profiteering. It is
literally disgusting and anyone who would wish to associate or affiliate
themselves with that war demonstrates either their obscene even staggering ignorance
or utter lack of conscience.
The idea that the efforts of American soldiery in this war
had anything to do with 'our freedoms' is preposterous.
Many have asked how the American population would respond to
a fascist government, to a Nazi-like administration. While the Vietnam era
administrations engaged in sinister domestic policies, they were unable to
exercise a great deal of authority within the United States itself. Part of the
reason for this was due to widespread resistance to the war. As the public
learned more about the war and the lies that undergirded it, public opinion
began to change and turn against the conflict. Others, conscious of what
America was actually doing in Vietnam took the activist route and sought to
resist (in some cases with violence) a state that they believed (with some
cause) that was behaving in Indochina in a very Nazi-esque manner.
Some rightly saw US actions as imperialistic and evil. Others
whose patriotism and emotional commitment to the United States would not allow
them to see the full reality – but at least they began to see that the US was
not 'standing by an ally' but had manipulated and misread a situation and found
itself caught in the middle of an internal and regional conflict that it did
not understand and had no chance of winning. In the meantime people were dying
on all sides and they wanted the US out.
And though the US military did all it could to keep the
rumours quiet, word was getting out. The US armed forces were near to collapse.
Mutinies were breaking out and the military was forced to take action –
restricting access to weapons and taking other measures to protect officers
from being attacked and in some cases murdered by their subordinate troops. By
1970 and 1971 there was a mutiny almost every single day. Drug use was open and
defiant as soldiers in theatre came to understand the conflict was a quagmire-lie
and that the US was simply trying to get out and save face. Why would they risk
their lives or kill others for such a cause – lies upon lies? And yet that
history has been swept under the rug and now the veterans of that war want to
be called heroes and stopped and praised on the streets and in airports. I
realise not every American soldier in Vietnam was a mutineer, refusenik,
druggie, rapist or baby killer – but let's be honest, many were. War is not
glorious – it is debasing. It is the Fall turned loose and given license to run
riot. Men cease to be human and trample on the image of God – and become
bestial. It is sheer apostasy to turn New Testament Christianity into a system
that supports, encourages and even glorifies war.
From a Christian perspective all wars are immoral – results
of the Edenic Fall never to be gloried in. And as a rule they are built on lies
and are an excuse for theft and murder. Because done on a massive scale and
with societal sanction these actions (which would be condemned on an individual
basis) are embraced and justified.
But even by the world's standards, especially for those who
(right or wrong) embrace the values of liberal democracy and in light of all
that took place in World War II – Vietnam was an abomination and a travesty in
every way.
Conscientious objectors and conscripts that fled to Canada
were right to defy the orders of the state. They saw what was happening and
acted morally. The orders should have been rejected. Again, even from a
non-Christian perspective, a thinking moral person would want to understand the
conflict they are being called to participate in. An examination would have led
them to not only doubt the Washington narrative but to ultimately question the
veracity and moral authority of the American state. 'My country right or wrong'
is an expression of rank idolatry and is an ethos no Christian can embrace or
even entertain.
As I've repeatedly said, I understand an 18 year old getting
drafted, going over to Vietnam out of a sense of patriotic duty and social
pressure – but then if that same person is moral and if at all reflective, he
would be filled with regret and would not want to call attention to his
participation in those events. He certainly wouldn't want them celebrated. And
indeed not a few Vietnam veterans hold that view.
But others such as Tim Lee embrace the glory narrative.
Usually this indicates they're either phonies or literally moral reprobates
that (handed over to some form of idolatry) can no longer differentiate between
right and wrong – a clear sign of the unregenerate heart.
Anyone involved in Vietnam should be ashamed – some more than
others to be sure. But for a professed Christian the sacralisation of the
conflict and to present one's injuries as something of a martyr narrative is
blasphemous heresy – a functional apostasy and rejection of Christ and His
Kingdom.
And if you have any doubt just how phony and lost Mr. Lee is,
just consider the financial angles of his so-called 'ministry' – in addition to
hawking patriotic geegaws and other filth, he weds himself to the FOX channel,
proffers the writings of Iran-Contra criminal Oliver North and happily
affiliates himself with the corrupt Falwell organisation and its Dominionist
propaganda mill.
Between him and his wife (as the ministry's form 990 reveals)
they pull in nearly $200,000 a year which of course does not include the
numerous perks associated with such ministries. The truth is, as far as you and
I would be concerned their income is significantly higher that what they're
officially paid. Altogether they have nearly a million dollar a year
organisation. Not a few people would give up their legs to have that.
Did Lee give his legs to America? Hardly, he gave his legs to
his real god – mammon.
I hope he enjoys his reward because it's the only one he's
ever going to receive.
I don't say this out of a spirit of cruelty but men like Lee
literally make me tremble. The terrible judgment episode reported in Matthew 7
literally jumps from the page and echoes in my mind. And I tremble for I cannot
imagine a worse place to be – a more awful moment than to believe you serve
Christ but then to discover you were deceived and ultimately a deceiver.
There is no salvation without a living repentance and Lee
like the president I'm sure he loves – despite whatever claims to the contrary,
knows nothing of it. There is no brokenness or humility in a man that would
pursue wealth by such means and atop the graves of the people he helped to
kill.
He has titled his biographical account – Born on the Fifth of
July – a deliberate contrast with Ron Kovic's famous 'Born on the Fourth of
July'. Kovic of course was also disabled in Vietnam and returned to the states
eventually becoming one of the most famous veteran war protestors and the
subject of an Oliver Stone film. Kovic's story is sad but compelling and I
consider it tragic when we've reached a point that lost people have a greater
conception of ethics and integrity than what is found in the Christian
community. I'm not suggesting it's our duty to go out and march in the streets
and get into tangles with the police in order to stop the imperial war machine.
But rather the conscience of Kovic regarding US policy and war in general puts
many Christians and certainly Mr. Lee to shame.
That's a sign of judgment to be sure. When the lost have a
stronger moral compass than those professing Christ – the Church has lost its
way and risks utter apostasy.