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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://popularresistance.org/why-would-anyone-kill-ones-self-in-an-attempt-to-stop-a-war/">popularresistance.org</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Why Would Anyone Kill One’s Self In An Attempt To Stop A War? <br></h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">By Ann Wright, Popular Resistance.</div>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">February 26, 2024<br></div>
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<img src="cid:ii_lt4jryc90" alt="aw1.png" width="395" height="235"><br><p>Four years ago in 2018, after returning from a Veterans For Peace trip to Viet Nam, I wrote an article called “<strong><a href="https://worldbeyondwar.org/why-would-anyone-kill-ones-self-in-an-attempt-to-stop-a-war/">Why Would Anyone Kill One’s Self In an Attempt to Stop A War?</a>”</strong></p>
<p>Now, four years later, in the past three months, two persons in the
United States have taken their own lives in an attempt to change U.S.
policies on Palestine and call for a Ceasefire and stop US funding to
the State of Israel that would be used to kill in the Israeli genocide
of Gaza.</p>
<p>A yet unidentified woman, wrapped in a Palestinian flag, set herself
on fire in front of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta, Georgia on
December 1, 2023. Three months later authorities have yet to release
the name of the woman.</p>
<p>This week, on Sunday, February 25, 2024, active duty U.S. Air Force
Aaron Bushnell, set himself on fire at the Israeli Embassy in
Washington, DC, while he was stating “Free Palestine and Stop the
Genocide.”</p>
<p>As I mentioned in the<span> </span><a href="https://worldbeyondwar.org/why-would-anyone-kill-ones-self-in-an-attempt-to-stop-a-war/">article in 2018</a>,
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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>One well-known and several little-known actions of private citizens from five decades ago provide us with the answers.</p>
<p>While on a Veterans for Peace trip to Viet Nam in 2014 and while 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.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/the-burning-monk-1963/">photos</a> 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.</p>
<a href="https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/02/aw2-e1709003083391.png"><img src="https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/02/aw2-e1709003083391.png" alt="" width="395" height="235" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;"></a>AP photo from 1963.
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><a href="https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/02/aw4-e1709003204460.png"><img src="https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/02/aw4-e1709003204460.png" alt="" width="395" height="127" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;"></a></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><a href="https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/02/aw5-e1709003304927.png"><img src="https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/02/aw5-e1709003304927.png" alt="" width="303" height="395" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;"></a></p>
<p>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. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130104141815/http:/www.wooster.edu/news/releases/2009/august/welsh">https://web.archive.org/web/ 20130104141815/http://www. wooster.edu/news/releases/ 2009/august/welsh</a></p>
<p>Apparently, unbeknownst to Morrison, he chose to set himself on fire
beneath Pentagon window of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.</p>
<a href="https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/02/aw6.png"><img src="https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/02/aw6.png" alt="" width="395" height="337" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;"></a>Photo of portrait of Norman Morrison at the USA-Viet Nam Friendship Society in Hanoi, Viet Nam.
<p>Thirty years later in his 1995 memoir, <em>In Retrospect: The Tragedy in Lessons of Vietnam, Secretary of Defense</em> Robert McNamara remembered Morrison’s death:</p>
<blockquote><p>“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.</p>
<p>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.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Before his memoir <em>In Retrospect</em> 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.”</p>
<a href="https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/02/aw7-e1709003540407.png"><img src="https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/02/aw7-e1709003540407.png" alt="" width="256" height="395" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;"></a>Photo of Roger La Porte.
<p>One week after Norman Morrison’s death, Roger La Porte, 22, a
Catholic Worker, became the third war protestor to take his own life. He
died of burns suffered through self-immolation on November 9, 1965 on
the United Nations Plaza in New York City. He left a note that read, “I
am against war, all wars. I did this as a religious act.”</p>
<p>The three protest deaths in 1965 mobilized the anti-war community to
begin weekly vigils at the White House and the Congress. And every week,
Quakers were arrested on the steps of the Capitol as they read the
names of the American dead, according to David Hartsough, one of the
delegates on our 2014 VFP trip.</p>
<p>Hartsough, who participated in anti-war vigils fifty earlier,
described how they convinced some members of Congress to join them.
Congressman George Brown from California became the first member of
Congress to protest the war on the steps of the Congress. After the
Quakers were arrested and jailed for reading the names of the war dead,
Brown would continue to read the names, enjoying Congressional immunity
from arrest.</p>
<a href="https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/02/aw8.png"><img src="https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/02/aw8.png" alt="" width="211" height="395" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;"></a>Photo of Florence Beaumont (very poor quality, but only known photo of Florence).
<p>Two years later, on October 15, 1967, Florence Beaumont, a
56-year-old Unitarian mother of two, set herself on fire in front of the
Federal Building in Los Angeles. Her husband George later said,
“Florence had a deep feeling against the slaughter in Vietnam… She was a
perfectly normal, dedicated person, and felt she had to do this just
like those who burned themselves in Vietnam. The barbarous napalm that
burns the bodies of the Vietnamese children has seared the souls of all
who, like Florence Beaumont, do not have ice water for blood, stones for
hearts. The match that Florence used to touch off her gasoline-soaked
clothing has lighted a fire that will not go out–ever– a fire under us
complacent, smug fat cats so damned secure in our ivory towers 9,000
miles from exploding napalm, and THAT, we are sure, is the purpose of
her act. ”</p>
<p><a href="https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/02/aw9-e1709003726237.png"><img src="https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/02/aw9-e1709003726237.png" alt="" width="277" height="395" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;"></a></p>
<p>Three years later, on May 10, 1970, 23-year-old George Winne, Jr.,
son of a Navy Captain and a student at the University of California, San
Diego set himself on fire on the university’s Revelle Plaza next to a
sign that said “In God’s name, end this war.” <a href="https://sandiegofreepress.org/2017/05/george-winne-peace-vietnam-war/">https://sandiegofreepress.org/2017/05/ george-winne-peace-vietnam- war/</a></p>
<p>Winne’s death came just six days after the Ohio National Guard fired
into a crowd of Kent State University student protesters, killing four
and wounding nine, during the largest wave of protests in the history of
American higher education.</p>
<p>At our 2014 meeting at the Vietnam-USA Friendship Society office in
Hanoi, David Hartsough presented Held in the Light, a book written by
Ann Morrison, the widow of Norman Morrison, to Ambassador Chin, a
retired Vietnamese Ambassador to the United Nations and now an official
of the Society. Hartsough also read a letter from Ann Morrison to the
people of Vietnam.</p>
<p>Ambassador Chin responded by telling the group that the act of Norman
Morrison and other Americans in ending their lives is well remembered
by the people of Vietnam. He added that every Vietnamese school child
learns a song and poem written by Vietnamese poet <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E1%BB%91_H%E1%BB%AFu">Tố<span> </span>Hữu</a> called
“Emily, My Child” dedicated to the young daughter that Morrison was
holding only moments before he set himself on fire at the Pentagon. The
poem reminds Emily that her father died because he felt he had to object
in the most visible way to the deaths of Vietnamese children at the
hands of the United States government.</p>
<h3>Sparking Revolutions</h3>
<p>In other parts of the world, people have ended their lives to bring
attention to special issues. The Arab Spring began on December 10, 2010
with a 26-year-old street Tunisian vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi setting
himself on fire after a policewoman confiscated his food street vending
cart. He was the only breadwinner for his family and had to frequently
bribe police in order to operate his cart.</p>
<p>His death sparked citizens throughout the Middle East to challenge
their repressive governments. Some administrations were forced from
power by the citizens, including Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben
Ali, who had ruled with an iron fist for 23 years.</p>
<h3>Or Being Ignored as Irrational Acts</h3>
<p>In the United States, acts of conscience such as taking one’s own
life for an issue of extraordinary importance to the individual is
viewed as irrational and the government and media minimize its
importance.</p>
<p>For this generation, while thousands of U.S. citizens are arrested
and many serve time in county jails or federal prisons for protesting
U.S. government policies, in April, 2015, young Leo Thornton joined a
small but important number women and men who have chosen to publicly end
their lives in hopes of bringing attention of the American public to
change specific U.S policies.</p>
<p>On April 13, 2015, Leo Thornton, 22 years old, committed suicide by
gun on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol. He had tied to his wrist a
placard that read “Tax the 1%.” Did his act of conscience have any
effect on Washington-the White House or the U.S. Congress?
Unfortunately, not.</p>
<p>The following week, the Republican-led House of Representatives
passed legislation that would eliminate the estate tax applies only to
the top 1% of estates. And no mention of Leo Thornton, and decision to
end his life over inequitable taxation, appeared in the media to remind
us that he ended his life in opposition to another piece of favorable
legislation for the rich.</p>
<p>Five years ago, in October 2013, 64-year-old Vietnam veteran John
Constantino set himself on fire on the Washington, DC national
mall–again for something he believed in. An eyewitness to Constantino’s
death said Constantino spoke about “voter rights” or “voting rights.”
Another witness said he gave a “sharp salute” towards the Capitol before
he lit himself on fire. A neighbor who was contacted by a local
reporter said Constantino believed the government “doesn’t look out for
us and they don’t care about anything but their own pockets.”</p>
<p>The media didn’t investigate any further into the rationale for
Constantino’s taking his own life in a public place in the nation’s
capital.</p>
<p><span>In the case of U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell,
Aaron told the world his reason: “I do not want to be complacent in the
genocide of Gaza! Free Palestine!.” His sentiments are echoed by
hundreds of millions around the world who recognize the horrific Israeli
genocide of Gaza. For U.S. citizens, it is our duty to keep pressure
on the Biden administration to stop funding Israel’s genocide of Gaza
and violence in the West Bank.</span></p>
<p><strong>Ann Wright</strong> served 29 years in the<span> </span>U.S. Army/Army Reserves and retired as a Colonel. She also served 16 years as a U.S. diplomat<span> </span>in U.S.<span> </span>Embassies
in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone,
Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She resigned from the U.S.
government in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq. She is the
co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience.</p>
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