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When, in 1963, the Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire in downtown Saigon in protest of the anti-Buddhist policies of the South Vietnamese government, he could not have known that his extreme tactic would be taken up by scores of people around the world in subsequent years. Had he known this, I wonder if he would not have reconsidered. He could not have anticipated the self-immolation of over a hundred Tibetan protestors, dying with a last despairing gesture of revolt against the Chinese government. He could not have anticipated the deaths of economically marginalized and unemployed people in Spain, in Bulgaria, in Albania. He could not have anticipated the self-immolation of Mohammad Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose suicide sparked off the Arab Spring. And he could not have known that a mere two years after his own death, an American Quaker named Norman Morrison would set himself on fire outside Robert McNamara�s window at the Pentagon.
It is Norman Morrison I wish to discuss here, as I have just seen his story treated in the 1967 French propaganda film Far from Vietnam. This film is the cinematic equivalent of a DJ Khaled song, as its various segments appear to have been directed by virtually everyone: Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein, Claude Lelouche, Chris Marker, and Joris Ivens. Far From Vietnam presents a diverse and kaleidoscopic look at the North Vietnamese cause, the anti-war movement in the U.S., and the anti-American movement around the world. It makes no effort to conceal its propagandistic intent (nor does it make any reference to the numerous atrocities committed by the Vietnamese communists). Among its most notable segments: North Vietnamese disarming American cluster bomblets by hand; Fidel Castro brandishing a machine gun and talking about the significance of Vietnam for revolutionaries around the world; Jean-Luc Godard narcissistically (and engrossingly) discussing why the North Vietnamese were right to not allow him to visit their country (although they evidently had no qualms about admitting Joris Ivens, or Jane Fonda, for that matter); American anti-war protestors being confronted by �patriots� chanting, �Bomb Hanoi! Bomb Hanoi!�; and, most memorably, an interview with the widow of Norman Morrison.Morrison had a wife and three children, but the knowledge that women and children in Vietnam were being burnt and blown to pieces by the American Air Force appears to have consumed his mind and given him no peace. And so, inspired by the example of Thich Quang Duc, he decided that Americans needed to learn first-hand what it meant for someone to die by burning, and he committed self-immolation on November 2nd of 1965. The equanimity of his widow, seen at the dinner table and at play with her three fatherless children in Far from Vietnam, is astonishing. She says that she and her husband frequently discussed the war in Vietnam, and she seems never to have doubted the rightness of her husband�s actions. And she says that her children know that, in death, their father was able to spread his love around the world.
This segment is intercut with interviews with a Vietnamese mother of small children living in Paris, who speaks about the high esteem in which Morrison came to be held in Vietnam, and how the Vietnamese �believe in the American people.� Morrison (or Mo Ri Xon, as it was rendered in Vietnamese) even ended up on a North Vietnamese postage stamp. Now, I wouldn�t wish self-immolation upon anyone, but it is rare today to encounter Americans who give much of a shit about what the U.S. government does overseas. There are no protests�or at least none of any considerable size�when American drones blow up a wedding party in Yemen or Afghanistan, let alone self-immolations. The same can be said of the (non)response to Obama�s assassination of American citizens Anwar al-Awlawki and Shamir Khan, and of al-Awlawki�s sixteen-year-old American citizen son, Abdulrahman. Someone like Norman Morrison in the current American political climate is almost inconceivable, with its reductive Democrat-Republican paradigm.
It can happen, though. In 2006, the American musician Malachi Ritscher set himself on fire in Chicago in protest of the American war in Iraq. The American media by and large didn�t care. When they did bother to comment, it was to dismiss the act as the final gesture of a man who had struggled with alcoholism and mental illness. Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times said, �With all great respect, if he thought setting himself on fire and ending his life in Chicago would change anyone's mind about the war in Iraq, his last gesture on this planet was his saddest and his most futile.� With all respect, fuck you. You�re just another American who can�t conceive that there are things in this world worth dying for anymore than that there are things worth living for. Now, I certainly wouldn�t recommend suicide to anyone, but I�m also not going to disparage someone for choosing in death to embody a pure and righteous indignation against the rank criminality of the bastards in Washington whose hubris and war-lust led to the deaths of huge numbers of innocent people in Iraq and all the other countries the U.S. has attacked after 9/11. The U.S. would be a more virtuous country if it had more people like Norman Morrison and Malachi Ritscher. We have quite enough Richard Roepers.
And, to reiterate that I strongly advise against self-immolation in any circumstances, I will close this piece with a quote from Albanian dissident Lirak Bejko, who survived his immolation by three weeks; he said of other protestors who might be inclined to imitate him: �I love them very much. I do not want them to feel my pains. They are atrocious, it is like meat roasting.�
