In the end, the Welfare State has to be sold to all of us suckers, so it’s fascinating to see how it – and nationalized health care – was sold to our British friends after World War II. As you’ll recall, after Germany folded in 1945, the British held a general election to toss out Winston Churchill and elect a Labour government headed by Clement Atlee. Over the next five years – and under continuing rationing – HM Government took the first solid steps to socialize the British economy.
‘Socializing’ means, of course, ‘nationalizing’. Most industry wound up under government control. Where the private sector continued to exist, the penalty was punitive taxation that provided subsidies to less efficient nationalized industries. Because they were class enemies, the wealthy were likewise penalized with high taxes. Think of it as a jizya paid by anybody with two shekels more than the next man. ‘Beggar thy neighbor’ was now acceptable social policy.
But to health care. While the nationalizers could talk glowingly of the Elysian Fields ahead, the inescapable fact was that the government was appropriating for itself services based on privacy and special relationships. And this was not an altogether easy sell. So, a government devoted to socialism used the tools of propaganda to sway the populace. But as history has taught us, socialist efforts at cinema and art tend to be crude and unsubtle.
Speaking of socialist crudities, here’s a cute cartoon from 1948 that analogized health care services to water and sewer systems and municipal trash collection.
Observe the abrupt segue from purely ‘public’ systems to ‘personal’ services. It would never occur to most people to equate trash collection and street sweeping, which are simple and impersonal, with individualized medical services requiring a high degree of training, skill and experience.
You’ll also observe that the scriptwriter used the same rhetoric as today: we can have care ‘whenever we want’ and our choice of doctors. Even though the commissars were attempting the impossible – depersonalizing a personal service – it was still necessary to head-fake on matters like doctor choice.
But then as now, selling the welfare state was a matter of selling grievance and entitlement. Here’s a postwar film showing soldiers and even children engaging in ’social criticism’.
Note the themes that recur even in our own day: central planning (the notion that enlightened commissars can engineer a utopian future), collectivism (the idea that the individual matters only to the degree he serves the ‘greater good’) and the ever-elusive promise of a re-engineered humanity, looking bravely into a future that never seems to arrive.
In short, the private life is dead once the commissars control all.
In the film above, I was struck by the appearance and demeanor of the bespectacled soldier who, with controlled anger and righteousness, declares that their elected MPs should ‘do the job when they get there’. Compare his zealotry with Pasha Antipov from Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago. The Russian Revolution’s brutalities transform Antipov into Strelnikov, soulless scourge of the Counter-Revolution. Here Antipov (played by Tom Courtenay) critiques Zhivago’s poetry in light of the Revolution’s new – and de-personalized – order.
Keep this in mind as we discuss our own version of the National Health Service. Remember that our own de-personalization is not yet complete. There is still time. Just not much.
