But, what about a private citizen giving up his or her life to try to stop the politicians/government from deciding what is best for other countries? Could a “mere” citizen be so concerned about politicians/government actions that she/he is willing to die to bring public attention to the actions?
By Ann Wright World Beyond War March 22, 2018
“No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one”. (Colored version).
Many in America admire young men and women who join the military and profess to be willing to give up their lives for whatever the U.S. politicians/government decide is best for another country—”freedom and democracy” for those who don’t have the U.S. version of it, or overthrowing self-rule that is not compatible with the U.S. administration’s view. Actual U.S. national security seldom has anything to do with U.S. invasions and occupations of other countries.
But, what about a private citizen giving up his or her life to try to stop the politicians/government from deciding what is best for other countries? Could a “mere” citizen be so concerned about politicians/government actions that she/he is willing to die to bring public attention to the actions?
One well-known and several little-known actions of private citizens from five decades ago provide us with the answers.
While on a Veterans for Peace trip to Viet Nam in 2014 (and I’m now on another VFP delegation in March 2018), our delegation saw the iconic photo of a well-known Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc who set himself on fire in June, 1963 on a busy street in Saigon to protest the Diem regime’s crackdown on Buddhists during the early days of the American war on Viet Nam. That photo is seared into our collective memories.
The photos show hundreds of monks surrounding the square to keep the police out so that the decision that someone would be able to complete their sacrifice would succeed. The self-immolation became a turning point in the Buddhist crisis and a pivotal act in the collapse of the Diem regime in the early days of the American war on Viet Nam.
AP photo from 1963
But, did you know that several Americans also set themselves on fire to attempt to end U.S. military actions during those turbulent war years in the 1960s?
I didn’t, until our VFP delegation saw the portraits displayed of five Americans who gave their lives to protest the American war on Viet Nam, among other international persons who are revered in Vietnamese history, at the Vietnam-USA Friendship Society in Hanoi. Though these American peace persons have fallen into oblivion in their own nation, they are well known martyrs in Viet Nam, fifty years later.
Portraits in Friendship Society Building, Ha Noi, Viet Nam
Our 2014 delegation of seventeen– 6 Vietnam veterans, 3 Viet Nam era vets, 1 Iraq era vet and 7 civilian peace activists– with 4 Veterans for Peace members who live in Vietnam, met with members of the Viet Nam-USA Friendship Society at their headquarters in Hanoi. I returned to Viet Nam this month (March, 2018) with another Veterans for Peace delegation. After seeing one particular portrait again-that of Norman Morrison, I decided to write about these Americans who were willing to end their own lives in an attempt to stop the American war on the Vietnamese people.
What distinguished these Americans to the Vietnamese was that, as American soldiers were killing Vietnamese, there were American citizens who ended their own lives in order to try to bring the terror of the war of invasion and occupation on Vietnamese citizens to the American public through the horror of their own deaths.
The first person in the United States to die of self-immolation in opposition to the war on Viet Nam War was 82-year-old Quaker Alice Herz who lived in Detroit, Michigan. She set herself on fire on a Detroit street on March 16, 1965. Before she died of her burns ten days later, Alice said she set herself on fire to protest “the arms race and a president using his high office to wipe out small nations.”
Six months later on November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, a 31-year-old Quaker from Baltimore, a father of three young children, died of self-immolation at the Pentagon. Morrison felt that traditional protests against the war had done little to end the war and decided that setting himself on fire at the Pentagon might mobilize enough people to force the United States government to abandon its involvement in Viet Nam. Morrison’s choice to self-immolate was particularly symbolic in that it followed President Johnson’s controversial decision to authorize the use of napalm in Vietnam, a burning gel that sticks to the skin and melts the flesh.
https://web.archive.org/web/ 20130104141815/http://www. wooster.edu/news/releases/ 2009/august/welsh
Apparently, unbeknownst to Morrison, he chose to set himself on fire beneath Pentagon window of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
Photo of portrait of Norman Morrison at the USA-Viet Nam Friendship Society in Hanoi, Viet Nam
Thirty years later in his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy in Lessons of Vietnam, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara remembered Morrison’s death:
“Antiwar protests had been sporadic and limited up to this time and had not compelled attention. Then came the afternoon of November 2, 1965. At twilight that day, a young Quaker named Norman R. Morrison, father of three and an officer of the Stony Run Friends Meeting in Baltimore, burned himself to death within 40 feet of my Pentagon window. Morrison’s death was a tragedy not only for his family but also for me in the country. It was an outcry against the killing that was destroying the lives of so many Vietnamese and American youth.
I reacted to the horror of his action by bottling up my emotions and avoided talking about them with anyone –even with my family. I knew (his wife) Marge and our three children shared many of Morrison’s feelings about the war. And I believed I understood and shared some of his thoughts. The episode created tension at home that only deepened as the criticism of the war continued to grow.”
Before his memoir In Retrospect was published, in a 1992 article in Newsweek, McNamara had listed people or events that had had an impact on his questioning of the war. One of those events, McNamara identified as “the death of a young Quaker.”