In the 1950s there were three prominent Asian leaders who were also Christians -- Taiwan's Chiang Kai-shek (
But before looking at what it has to say about him, it's important to explain just what is Seth Jacobs' ruling theory.
Jacobs believes that religion played a far greater part in American involvement in Vietnam's affairs than has hitherto been realized. Asia was perceived by the policy-makers on Capitol Hill as an area about to be taken over by atheists, Communists receiving their orders from the godless citadel of Moscow.
In addition to this, Asians themselves were seen as passive by nature, easily swayed, and for the most part adherents of a religion, Buddhism, that encouraged just such passivity. For them to have Buddhist leaders was therefore not enough.
Christians, stalwarts in their opposition to godlesness in all its forms, were the only individuals capable of leading these mild-mannered people in resisting the monster from the north.
In order to support this analysis, which goes against the Marxist view that the motives for almost everything are economic, Jacobs looks at the diplomatic exchanges between top American statesmen of the 1950s and their representatives in southeast Asia. He also looks at some key books that succeeded in shaping American public opinion about the region in that distant era. All these sources emphasized the religious nature of the struggle.
This might be of merely academic interest were it not for the quite extraordinary parallels with the situation today. In 2005, we see once again a heavy American presence in a distant land with strong religious reasons given for that involvement. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are all reported to hold apocalyptic views about the cosmic battle in which they are involved.
The Axis of Evil, heir to Reagan's Evil Empire, once again puts religion in the front line, and in addition a handful of bizarre books are again credited with lying behind the American administration's thinking.
The similarities don't end here. In the run-up to the war in Vietnam, a coalition, in effect of "the willing," was put together, involving Australia, New Zealand and a handful of other countries, in order to give an international gloss to what was essentially an American commitment.
An anti-atheistic crusade was announced -- a term still thought permissible in those days -- and the entire project was presented under a "slavery versus freedom" flag. The parallels with today, in other words, are terrifyingly exact.
First among the books to rally American opinion in favor of action in Southeast Asia was Tom Dooley's Deliver Us from Evil, described by Jacobs as "a brilliant piece of Cold-War propaganda in which the communist enemy was irredeemably evil and the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies were virtue incarnate."
Dooley was a medic who had witnessed the "Passage to Freedom" exodus of refugees from Communist-held North Vietnam to the south in 1954 and 1955. Atrocity stories were his speciality, notably ones of Catholic priests with nails hammered into their skulls in mocking imitation of Christ's crown of thorns. The suppurating wounds of the Vietnamese refugees themselves, though also graphically described, tended to get second place.
RSS