The Self-Immolations of Climate Activists Exposes The Need For An American Reckoning
As our social contract lies in tatters, our community bonds are further rended, and ruling elites do nothing but hasten the ecological holocaust, acts of self-destruction are only going to increase.
To watch a video version of this article, check out this link here.
Wherever
we protest
we will go planting
- from "Wherever," by Muriel Rukeyser“If anyone would have asked me if it was possible for this fire to grow more than a hundred thousand acres in one day, I would have laughed,” said Grand Lake, Colorado Fire Marshall Dan Mayer to Colorado Public Radio. “Fires don’t grow that fast.”
In late October of 2020, the East Troublesome wildfire would burn a total of 193,812 acres, the second-largest in Colorado’s history. The fire, spurred by wind, ample fuel, and a drier than usual season, grew 120,000 acres in just one day making it the fastest expanding fire in the state’s history. “The way that thing came through — you couldn’t have stopped it,” Mayer said. By the time the fire was put out with the help of snowfall, 580 structures were destroyed.
The next year, in December of 2021, with drought affecting 100 percent of the Colorado landscape well-into the usually wetter fall and winter seasons, Boulder County experienced the most destructive wildfire in the state’s history, the Marshall Fire, which destroyed 1,084 homes in and around the towns of Superior and Louisville. Ash from the fire contaminated the community’s water supply, with residents currently still reporting a smoky taste to their water six months after the fire started.
The aridification of the west, due to longer and more severe droughts than usual and increasing global temperatures from carbon emissions, is radically altering the region’s livability for humans and animals. Snow packs are declining, rainfall is decreasing, trees are dying off, the Colorado River is shrinking, and the Lake Mead reservoir is at its lowest point since it was first created. This aridification ensures that the fuel that is still around - trees and grasses - will be at high risk for causing record-breaking wildfires.
As fire seasons in the west extend throughout the year and more homes are lost to the flames, firefighters, already underfunded, are feeling helpless. "You just feel defeated," Matt Newberry, a veteran firefighter, told NPR, "The things that we used to do that worked ten years ago are no longer working anymore."
Firefighters are suffering more and more from PTSD, depression, anxiety, drug abuse, and domestic violence. As temperatures rise, the delicate illusion of humanity’s ability to control the environment slips away, taking with it the mental health of our first responders.
One wildland firefighter lamented the poor treatment and lack of pay for those who take on the dangerous job, writing, “Why are we hailed as ‘Heroes’ by the media and politicians but paid like second-rate cannon fodder that can be replaced easily?” He asked the media not to call them heroes because “when divorces, mental health problems and declining wages are the reality, we don’t feel like heroes at all.”
In the face of rising temperatures, the Biden administration has continued to open up public lands to fossil fuel extraction, approving 34 percent more permits in its first year than the Trump administration. This last March, in response to rising gas prices, Biden began unleashing domestic oil reserves, revealing the lie of any liberal “commitments” to fossil fuel reduction. This action came less than a month after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report warning that, on our current path, global temperatures will rise by 3 degrees Celsius, and that it is “almost inevitable” we will reach 1.5°C. Professor John Bellamy Foster calls this temperature rise “apocalyptic”:
…we are currently headed toward the IPCC’s most apocalyptic scenario, in which global average temperatures this century would, in the “best estimate,” rise by 4.4°C, which would, according to current scientific assessments, mean the collapse of industrial civilization, raising questions of human survival…
The trouble is that if we go beyond a 1.5°C increase, and especially beyond a 2°C increase, more and more climate feedback mechanisms, such as the loss of arctic ice and thus the weakening of the albedo effect (the earth’s reflectivity), the release of methane and carbon dioxide from the melting tundra, the burning of the Amazon, and the degradation of the ocean as a climate sink will compound the climate problem and create an irreversible situation, increasing the possibility of runaway climate change that would in effect feed on itself, to the extent that the very existence of humanity would be in question.
Rising global temperatures are currently causing mass species die off in both animals and plants. One study found that insect populations that are most affected by rising temperatures and ecosystem loss due to agriculture saw a 50 percent decline in their numbers. Salmon populations across the U.S., from the Columbia River to the Klamath River to the Sacramento River, are seeing catastrophic die-offs due to warming waters and shrinking rivers, with up to 95 percent of all salmon eggs dying in some cases. The oceans are absorbing more and more CO2, thus contributing to ocean acidification. This acidification is causing coral reefs, a foundational ecosystem for many species, to dissolve their coral skeletons faster than they can grow them.
With little to nothing being done by the world’s governments to ebb carbon emissions, people are losing faith in the efficacy of their leaders. A recent worldwide survey of young people found notable indicators of climate dread. More than half of the survey respondents, “felt sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty” about climate change and believed “humanity is doomed.” Most respondents reported feeling “betrayed” by their governments.
Those in the climate movement, like those who fight our fires, are also losing faith in the ability of mainstream institutions to stave off the worst of climate catastrophe and are instead resorting to more militant and radical actions to combat fossil fuel companies, often at great personal risk. Fossil fuel companies are partnering with both private firms and public police departments to surveil climate activists. Similar to the animal agriculture industry, fossil fuel companies are lobbying for increased punishments against activists who protest their business practices. Courts are meting out punishments which amount to criminalization of dissent. Actions such as turning off oil pipeline valves and damaging construction equipment are getting climate activists sentenced to lengthy prison terms on terrorism charges.
In the context of all this, shortly after Colorado’s worst fire seasons on record in 2020 and 2021, a Boulder man went to the Supreme Court and started a fire of his own.
In April of 2022, Wynn Bruce, a 50-year old practicing Buddhist and environmentalist, travelled from his home in Boulder, Colorado to Washington D.C. On the evening of Friday the 22nd, Earth Day, Bruce walked up the steps of the Supreme Court, sat down with his legs extended before him, and set himself on fire.
According to eyewitnesses, as the flames enveloped Bruce, he did not scream in pain. He remained sitting upright as police attempted to douse the flames with water from a nearby fountain.
After being airlifted to a nearby hospital, he died of his wounds the next day.
Although he did not leave an explicit letter explaining his motivations, the timing of Bruce’s self-immolation in accordance with Earth Day actions at the U.S. capitol, as well as the testimony of his friends and loved ones, paints a picture of someone who cared very much about the issue of climate change and wanted people to recognize the immensity of its scale and impact.
A friend of Bruce, Dr. Kritee Kanko, herself a Buddhist and a scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, wrote, “This act is not suicide. This is a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to climate crisis.”
Bruce’s Facebook page is mostly composed of Buddhist teachings, his photography work, black and white self-portraits, and concerns about the accelerating ecocide. Bruce shared an event for a class being given on climate change by University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann. Elsewhere, articulating the teachings of Shambhala Buddhism that he learned in Colorado, Bruce wrote:
May the warm-heartedness, I have discovered, be a parasol to protect all beings. May the love that I have tasted be shared with the entire world. May the courageousness of this moment never be forgotten. May there be harmony between biospheric family, friends and nations. May the Earth be healed. May the elements be balanced. May humanity have peace. May enlightened society manifest on this Earth.
Those who knew Wynn Bruce remember him as a kind and gentle man, passionate about his beliefs and empathetic for all life.
"His commitment and concern about the environment and climate issues are really heartfelt and central to who he is,” Bruce’s father said, “There's no question about that in my mind.”
Colorado Public Radio spoke with Brian Grossman, a Boulder-area sculptor who Bruce befriended. Grossman, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, would get help from Bruce with unloading his electric wheelchair from his car and doing grocery shopping. Grossman would chat with Bruce about, among other things, the government’s inability to respond rationally to the climate crisis.
In chance encounters on bike paths and on planned conversations over tea, Grossman said he came to appreciate Bruce as "a great guy" who shared his disgust with the indifference of politicians and other people in power. The pair agreed corruption created a government with little compassion for people or the planet, Grossman said.
Others who knew Bruce say they did not have any indication that he was planning to burn himself alive, but that they understood how he came to that decision. A man named Michael Moore, who knew Bruce through community dance events, reflected on his interactions with him, writing:
Remembering his deeply idealistic nature and high intelligence, I believe he simply followed the logic of his convictions without flinching. The value of any one person’s life is negligible compared to the havoc we are rapidly and irrevocably bringing to our planet—the unimaginable legacy of human suffering and violence of every sort that will come with a world of diminishing resources and barren habitats.
Bruce often attended the Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center in the mountains of Boulder, participating in meditations and doing volunteer activities. Leaders from the retreat center put out a statement saying, “We have never talked about self-immolation, and we do not think self-immolation is a climate action. Nevertheless, given the dire state of the planet and worsening climate crisis, we understand why someone might do that.”
The U.N. recently released a report that, even in its watered-down form, warns that we are on track for “global societal collapse” due to current climate catastrophe mitigation strategies being woefully inadequate.
Dr. Bellamy Foster, writes that “…the word catastrophe is scarcely adequate in the present age of catastrophe capitalism…We are experiencing throughout the globe a series of extreme weather events due in large part to climate change, each of which rank as ‘catastrophic’ by historical precedents, sometimes lying outside the range of what was previously thought to be physically possible.”
The Washington Post interviewed Stephen Bross, a friend of Bruce, quoting him as saying, “He wasn’t radical in any way, and he just had a huge heart. And I received [the self-immolation] as an act of compassion and a desire for his life to go to something that he really cared about, which was to bring attention to this climate issue.”
The Post spoke with Morgan Stanfield who also knew Bruce through improvisational dance classes in Boulder. “The practices that Wynn did were things like meditation on wishing well being for others and imagining taking in their suffering into himself and breathing out light and happiness toward them,” Stanfield said.
Bruce was influenced by the teachings of the prominent Vietnamese Zen Buddhist leader Thich Nhat Hanh, who Bruce memorialized on his Facebook page shortly after Thich Nhat Hanh’s death in January, thanking him for “sharing compassion.”
Bruce’s self-immolation follows in the tradition of Vietnamese and Tibetan Buddhist monks self-immolating in response to state persecution as an effort to call attention to the injustice.
Since Bruce’s death, his Facebook page has been vandalized by many people claiming that he must have been insane, that his actions were pointless, and that he was the victim of histrionic climate change fear mongering. Still others rejoiced that there was now “one less climate change nut” in the world.
Those who actually knew Bruce have a different understanding. In conversations with friends and family shortly before his death, few people indicated they sensed any change in Bruce or that he may have been planning his death.
Speaking to The Washington Post, Bruce’s father said, “Everybody gets to decide for themselves about how their end of life is going to take place. I honor that. I honor that. I respect him for it.”
Stanfield said to The Post, “A person can be suffering profoundly and also be enormously courageous. They can be doing something to ease their own pain, and they can be doing something at the same time that they believe is going to genuinely change the world in a profound way. And for me, that is the only way that I can see this and have it make any sense at all.”
Wynn Bruce is not the first person to set themselves on fire in order to call attention to climate change. In the quiet early morning hours of April 14th, 2018, prominent LGBTQ-rights lawyer and environmental activist David Buckel walked from his Brooklyn home to nearby Prospect Park. There, he poured out a ring of soil on the grass, sat in the center of it, and self-immolated. With few witnesses to the flames, he died of his wounds at the scene.
Buckel sent a letter explaining his reasoning to multiple news outlets just minutes before dowsing himself with fuel. Buckel wrote, “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result. My early death by fossil fuels reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”
Buckel ended his letter with, “Here is a hope that giving a life might bring some attention to the need for expanded action.”
In a note he left by his body, addressed to first responders, Buckel wrote, “I apologize to you for the mess.”
Buckel’s death was the first known incident of someone self-immolating in response to climate change.
Buckel, 60-years old at the time, left behind a husband and daughter, as well as a co-parenting lesbian couple with whom they raised their daughter.
Buckel was formerly a lawyer for the marriage equality project at Lambda Legal where he took on and strategized high profile court cases. One such case was Brandon v. County of Richardson, where the state found that a sheriff was liable for failing to protect a transgender man murdered in Nebraska. This incident later inspired the film “Boys Don’t Cry.”
After leaving Lambda Legal, Buckel went on to run a volunteer composting site at Red Hook Community Farm in Brooklyn, New York, where he worked for a decade.
Like Wynn Bruce, Buckel was influenced by Buddhist philosophy. The letter he sent prior to his death made reference to Buddhist monks who had self-immolated. He and his husband of 34 years, Terry Kaebler, had previously travelled to Bhutan and the Himalayas. “He believed in things like being mindful, right action, thought and speech,” Kaebler told the New York Times.
Buckel also gave little indication to his friends or family about his plans to self-immolate. His family said that he had grown increasingly concerned and serious about the climate crisis, but that he did not show any signs of depression. Buckel’s husband wrote later, “None of us — not family, not friends — had any idea of the depth of my husband’s desperation.”
Also like Wynn Bruce, there were those who attempted to dismiss Buckel’s immolation as an irrational and pointless act. One bigot even went so far as to describe it as an “L.G.B.T.B.B.Q.”
Others, though sympathetic, could not understand or simply misread why Buckel chose to light himself on fire. Mary Pilon, who came across Buckel’s scorched body while she was on a run, wrote, “As much as I respect Buckel’s work and mission, it’s hard for me to see his action as anything beyond a profound act of suffering. As I stood dumbstruck, staring at his corpse on that spring Saturday, I saw it as an act of defiance, but also a cry against life.”
The attempt to write off these climate immolations as mere suicides carried out by the depressed, the insane, or the deluded is a common strain in Western thought, going back to the political immolations of the 1960’s. In order to best comprehend the climate immolations of David Buckel and Wynn Bruce, we must look at the broader context that causes people to choose this painful form of death; we must seek to understand their motivations for their radical action; we must understand the history of self-immolation as a strategy for instigating change; and we must look at the underlying commonalities across different cases of self-immolation.
Though a relatively rare act in the United States, self-immolation has a powerful, long-standing history amongst the persecuted Buddhist communities of Tibet and Vietnam. This was seen perhaps most strikingly with the self-immolation of Thich Quảng Dức, who in 1963 sat down in the middle of a busy intersection in Saigon, had gasoline poured over him by a fellow monk, and then lit himself on fire. Reporter David Halberstam described the scene at the time: “As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him."
Thich Quảng Dức was calling attention to the persecution of Buddhists by the president of South Vietnam, Ngô Dinh Diệm, who was a staunch Catholic as well as a U.S.-backed anticommunist. Several more immolations by Buddhist monks followed.
Diệm labeled the monks as mere communist insurgents and continued his oppression against them. Diệm’s sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, was unmoved by the immolations, saying, “If the Buddhists want to have another barbecue, I will be glad to supply the gasoline.”
Thich Nhat Hanh, the revered Vietnamese Buddhist leader, wrote to Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965, explaining the actions of Thich Quảng Dức and other monks. He wrote:
The self-burning of Vietnamese Buddhist monks in 1963 is somehow difficult for the Western Christian conscience to understand. The Press spoke then of suicide, but in the essence, it is not. It is not even a protest. What the monks said in the letters they left before burning themselves aimed only at alarming, at moving the hearts of the oppressors and at calling the attention of the world to the suffering endured then by the Vietnamese. To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance. There is nothing more painful than burning oneself. To say something while experiencing this kind of pain is to say it with the utmost of courage, frankness, determination and sincerity…The importance is not to take one's life, but to burn. What he really aims at is the expression of his will and determination, not death. In the Buddhist belief, life is not confined to a period of 60 or 80 or 100 years: life is eternal. Life is not confined to this body: life is universal. To express will by burning oneself, therefore, is not to commit an act of destruction but to perform an act of construction, i.e., to suffer and to die for the sake of one's people. This is not suicide…The monk who burns himself has lost neither courage nor hope; nor does he desire non-existence. On the contrary, he is very courageous and hopeful and aspires for something good in the future. He does not think that he is destroying himself.
Pictures of Thich Quảng Dức’s action were seen around the world. The plight of the monks stirred the international community and they were then able to exert popular pressure on Diệm's regime. As Victoria Scrimer writes, “The monk’s act, temperate and selfless, casts Diệm’s oppressive regime in the role of the overzealous executioner, specifically implicating Diệm in his death. And, indeed, the world responded as if Diệm had lit the match himself, galvanizing waves of dissent that would topple his dictatorship in a matter of months.”
Diệm’s regime was indeed an unpopular one and he paid the price. Although, it helped a bit that the C.I.A. assisted in orchestrating the military coup against Diệm, with Washington realizing that they could no longer prop up an overtly corrupt and unpopular leader. Diệm and his brother were later captured by the South Vietnamese military and assassinated.
In the years following the self-immolations of Vietnamese monks, U.S. citizens began carrying out similar actions against the U.S. invasion and bombing of Vietnam. The first of these immolations merits considerable mention.
In March of 1965, Alice Herz, an 82-year old Detroit resident and a German immigrant who fled from Nazism with her daughter Helga in the early 1940s, circulated letters amongst her family, friends, and fellow activists decrying the U.S. war in Vietnam. A copy of one such letter was published by the Swiss journal Neue Wege: Contributions to Religion and Socialism. Beginning as early as 1936, Herz wrote regularly for the journal throughout her life. Her final letter reads thusly:
To the Peoples of the World! To U Thant, General Secretary of the UN! As a citizen of the world, in full possession of my physical, mental and moral powers, I accuse before the creator of this world LYNDON B. JOHNSON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, for announcing his decision and already starting to enact it: the four-hundredfold (overkill) by the USA to — if necessary — eradicate entire peoples at his choice. To the American people! With the help of the colossal lie, your Presidents Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, J.F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson have each deceived and misled you. Confused by hatred and fear that were consciously stirred up over the last twenty years, you allowed your lawmakers in Congress to spend endless billions of dollars on an incalculable arsenal of destruction. Awake and act, before it's too late! Yours is the responsibility to decide, if this world shall be made available to live for all human beings, to be the site of a good, dignified and peaceful life - or whether she should blow herself up into oblivion. God is not mocked! To be heard, I have chosen the flaming death of the Buddhists to be carried out on the campus of Wayne University of Detroit. May American youth lead the way toward life! March 1965 Alice Herz
In a note accompanying the letter, Herz wrote, “My conscience compelled me to do this. I didn't do it out of despair, but in faith, hope and love."
On the evening of March 16, Herz travelled from her home in Detroit to a retail shop called the Federal Department Store. It was there, near the corner of Oakman Boulevard and Grand River Avenue at around 9 p.m., that she doused herself with two cans of a cleaning fluid called Energine and set herself aflame.
A young man named Richard Boddy was driving by when he saw a figure on the sidewalk dancing in flames. “There was nobody else around - just this woman, flaming, a real human torch,” he related to the reporter Hayes B. Jacobs, who conducted the only in-depth, contemporaneous reporting on Herz’s action for Fact Magazine.
After failing to remove Herz’s burning coat, Boddy ran into the Federal Department Store to grab a fire extinguisher. At the same time, a man named Stephen Burke, who had been driving by the scene with his two young sons and some fellow members of their Cub Scout team, ran up to Herz and smothered the flames with their jackets. By the time Boddy returned with the fire extinguisher, there was nothing to be done. “I’ll never forget her,” Boddy said, “It was pretty horrible. Her face was completely black except for one little blistered spot on one cheek. She was moaning but I didn’t hear her say anything.”
An ambulance drove Herz to a nearby hospital. She told a fireman that she did it “to protest the arms race all over the world.” She died of her wounds ten days later.
Herz and her daughter Helga, of Jewish descent, had lived in Detroit since 1943. In Germany, Herz had been involved with the Women’s League for Peace and Freedom. They both had moved from Germany to France in the 1930s, where they were briefly interned as German nationals after France was invaded by the Third Reich in 1940. After being released, they spent two years living in a tiny village with a Catholic priest. They were then able to make their way to Cuba, where they lived in a refugee camp for three months. After being sponsored by a family member in the States, they attained visas and settled in Detroit.
Herz taught German at Wayne State University and Helga became a librarian for the Detroit Public Library. They both regularly attended the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit, where Herz sang in the choir.
The timing of Herz’s immolation came after two key events. President Johnson announced that on March 2, 1965, the U.S. military commenced Operation Rolling Thunder, a bombing campaign that targeted both North and South Vietnam. The U.S. would eventually unleash more bombs on Vietnam than the total amount of bombing conducted during WWII by every faction. This is the “overkill” that Herz warned about in her letter. She was right to be worried.
As the journalist Nick Turse writes in his masterpiece history of the U.S. war in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves,
The United States would not deploy its nuclear arsenal, but it would nonetheless assault Vietnam with the destructive power of hundreds of Hiroshimas. In other words, it would wage a war of overkill. A sound from a tree line? Hose it down with machine-gun fire. A sniper shot from a ville? Hit the hamlet with napalm. A hunch that an area might have enemy fighters [VC] in it? Plaster it with artillery fire.1
The estimated death toll from America’s war in Vietnam is staggering, due in large part to the psychotic fixation on body-count as a measure of success in the war, which predictably led to the ubiquitous grim maxim: “If they’re dead, they’re VC.” As one U.S. Army Major put it, “Body count was everything. To say that body count permeated everything in operations is not an exaggeration.”2
Turse, by drawing on hundreds of examples of officially documented atrocities in Vietnam as well as interviews with both American veterans and Vietnamese survivors, makes a strong case that the stunning number of civilian casualties in Vietnam were due, not to accidents and negligence, but to deliberate military policies and racist ideologies that led to wanton murder, rape, and torture of countless Vietnamese people by American troops. All of these heinous acts were carried out with virtual impunity. Turse writes:
The notion that Vietnam’s inhabitants were something less than human was often spoken of as the “mere-gook rule,” or, in the acronym-mad military, the MGR. This held that all Vietnamese - northern and southern, adults and children, armed enemy and innocent civilian - were little more than animals, who could be killed or abused at will. The MGR enabled soldiers to abuse children for amusement; it allowed officers sitting in judgment at courts-martial to let off murderers with little or no punishment; and it paved the way for commanders to willfully ignore rampant abuses by their troops while racking up “kills” to win favor at the Pentagon.3
So much for winning hearts and minds.
Untold millions lost their lives or were permanently scarred or disabled by U.S. violence. “The most sophisticated analysis yet of wartime mortality in Vietnam,” writes Turse about a 2008 study done by Harvard and the University of Washington,
suggested that a reasonable estimate might be 3.8 million violent war deaths, combatant and civilian. Given the limitations of the study’s methodology, there are good reasons to believe that even this staggering figure may be an underestimate. Still, the findings lend credence to an official 1995 Vietnamese government estimate of more than 3 million deaths in total - including 2 million civilian deaths - for the years when the Americans were involved in the conflict.”4
The next event that troubled Herz happened the Sunday after Lyndon Johnson announced the bombing campaign in Vietnam. The world was shocked by images of civil-rights marchers in Selma, Alabama being severely beaten by police. Herz went on to participate in a solidarity march for Selma with members of the Detroit Women for Peace.
Shortly before her immolation, Herz told her friend and fellow activist Lucy Haessler that more needed to be done to stop what was happening. “The day the police broke up the first march in Selma, she called me and she was crying,” recalled Haessler, “What can we do? she asked. What can we do? I tried to console her. I told her that bad as things were, I saw some hope. She said I should be more worried, that this was just the way things had been in Germany.”5
Another friend and fellow teacher said that Herz felt like she was running out of options for making change. “I’ve written everything I can,” she told her, “I’ve spoken everywhere; what can I do?”
Jacobs reported that a branch of the Detroit Police known as the Subversive Squad had lots of material on Herz going back years. The files, read out by a police sergeant to Jacobs, listed her maiden name, the location and date of her birth, marriage history, job history, children, citizenship status, and a list of all the demonstrations she was known to have attended. “On October 24, 1962, took part in demonstration protesting Cuban blockade. Picketed Cobo Hall - that’s our civic center here…August 14, 1962, picketed Federal Building with Detroit’s Sane Nuclear Policy Committee, protesting use of hydrogen and A bombs…Attended meeting of Fair Play for Cuba Committee. On March 3, 1962, was on peace-picket line sponsored by Student Peace Union…Was a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the Women’s Strike for Peace.”
After Jacob’s questioned why the department kept all this information on file, the sergeant said it’s important to “know just who is where.” He went on, “…I’ve seen [Herz] around for years. She was just a pacifist. You know, always out on the march whenever someone - anyone - was demonstrating against war. She was what I’d call a go-er. I don’t think she ever missed a meeting of any of those peace organizations.”
Besides this telling admission by the Detroit police that they keep detailed records of the Constitutionally protected activities of citizens in their “Subversive Squad” branch, Jacobs also found out how involved Herz was in the international pacifist community.
“She carried on a correspondence with people all over the world,” said Haessler. “You never saw such energy in anyone. She could travel all night by bus and picket all the next day.”
One such international correspondence Herz maintained was with Japanese professor and peace activist Shingo Shibata. He later published many of Herz’s letters and other materials in Phoenix: Letters and Documents of Alice Herz - the Thought and Practice of a Modern-day Martyr.
Reading Herz’s letters and articles evinces a woman who was extremely literate, thoughtful, intelligent, and troubled by the global violence being perpetrated by the world’s greatest powers. John Conley, a friend of Herz and a Harvard-educated English teacher, said that Herz “…was a source of a tremendous amount of useful information on public questions since she kept herself so well informed.”
Those who knew Herz were quick to push back against accusations that she was mentally disturbed. “She didn’t do it to satisfy her soul. Or as a kind of solace for depression. But as an attempt to stir action,” her daughter said.
When Jacobs asked Haessler if she ever doubted Herz’s mental balance, she responded, “Never. Not the slightest. She was just terribly concerned about what’s been happening, that’s all.”
In the eulogy she gave for Herz at her memorial ceremony, Ruth Gage-Colby, a pacifist leader with Women Strike for Peace, said “in an insane society, Alice sought to make a completely sane testimony,” and that Herz “was not a fanatic, nor a propagandist, but a sincere and intelligent lady.” Later, Gage-Colby said that she was honored to give a eulogy “for such a fine, wonderful friend.” She described Herz as “a warm, loving, truly gentle person, with an unconquerable spirit and a rare combination of moral and physical courage.”
Upon visiting her in the hospital, a fellow organizer for Detroit Women for Peace, Lillian Lerman, told Detroit Free Press that Herz “ is a rational, reasonable, well-educated woman. It is difficult to see how she could do this - just imagine feeling so strongly.”
Though Herz’s immolation received scant coverage in the Western press, with much of it having a bemused tone, the international response was spirited. As she laid in critical condition in the hospital, Herz and her daughter Helga received many letters of condolences from abroad, including from Vietnam. In Hanoi, the capitol city of North Vietnam, crowds took a moment of silent prayer after Radio Hanoi announced the news of Herz’s death. The Ho Chi Minh Revolutionary Museum created a shrine dedicated to Herz. In a later 1965 interview with the Boston Globe, Ho Chi Minh himself lauded the actions of American immolators such as Herz, calling them heroes in the same American spirit as Washington and Lincoln. “We would not encourage these acts,” he said, “but for us they have a high symbolic significance.”
Herz’s immolation also opened up direct talks between U.S. and Vietnamese peace groups. As Jon Coburn explains in the journal Peace & Change, the Vietnamese Women’s Union invited members of Women Strike for Peace (WSP), of which Herz was a member, to travel to North Vietnam only after Herz’s action had stirred up so much international support and sympathy. “Herz broke down barriers of suspicion between North Vietnamese activists and their US colleagues,” Coburn writes. Peace activists Mary Clark and Lorraine Gordon even met with the prime minister of North Vietnam, Pham Van Dong. Coburn writes:
Clarke and Gordon used their visit to arrange a conference in Indonesia between a WSP delegation and members of the Vietnamese Women’s Union and the Women’s Union of Liberation. Brokering the event raised WSP’s stature and validated its members as spokespeople of the peace movement. Participants spoke to the US Senate as experts on the conflict and “the only group of American women who have had the opportunity to speak with the ‘other side.”…
Herz’s exceptional role in initiating such exchanges deserves recognition. As Mary Hershberger writes [in Traveling to Vietnam: American Peace Activists and the War], the fact that “Herz had belonged to the same organization that these women came from prompted a warm response from the Vietnamese.” Clarke, after returning from North Vietnam, explained that the people she met revered the “woman in Michigan who had set herself on fire” and were “delighted and excited” to meet with some of Herz’s colleagues.6
Herz hoped that her action would help the “American youth lead the way toward life.” As she was being cared for in the hospital, fifteen students from Wayne State University representing the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam went to deliver flowers to Herz. They gave a statement to the Detroit Free Press, saying “Mrs. Alice Herz provided the most dramatic protest to date against the brutal war in Vietnam. We acknowledge this courageous act of defiance. However, we urge other American citizens to refrain from such extreme actions.”
As America’s war escalated, people far younger than Alice Herz would carry out their own immolations.
The most high-profile of these cases is the well-reported self-immolation of 31-year old Norman Morrison. In November of 1965, nearly eight months after Alice Herz self-immolated, Morrison, a Quaker, stood on the lawn of the Pentagon in view of the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and, with his 1-year old daughter Emily nearby, poured kerosene over his head and burned himself alive.
Morrison’s act received considerably more Western media attention than Herz’s, perhaps mostly due to the location at the Pentagon and because Morrison had a young wife and family.
“Norman Morrison has given his life today to express his concern over the great loss of life and human suffering caused by the war in Vietnam,” Morrison’s wife Anne said in a statement, “He was protesting our Government's deep military involvement in this war. He felt that all citizens must speak their convictions about our country's action.”
Like Alice Herz before him, Morrison felt that all of his options had been exhausted in trying to stop America’s war in Vietnam. In a final letter that he sent to Anne, he included a newspaper clipping about a Vietnamese village that had been destroyed by U.S. bombing. Norman and Anne had both discussed this news story over what turned out to be their final meal together. Anne recalled this conversation in a later memoir:
‘What can we do that we haven’t done?’ he asked. His tone was grave, but he didn’t seem distraught or depressed. He appeared quite calm. I kept stirring the soup and responded, ‘I really don’t know.’ We had done everything I could imagine doing to try to stop the war: praying, protesting, lobbying, withholding war taxes, writing letters to newspapers and people in power. I remember adding, ‘All I know is that we mustn’t despair.’
The growing demonstrations of peace activists throughout the country were falling on deaf, uncaring ears. The war didn’t just continue, it escalated. The worst of the atrocities were yet to come.
Also like Herz before him, there were those who painted Norman Morrison as insane. One person wrote to the Baltimore Sun:
To place the suicide of Mr. Morrison in the category of martyrdom would be a mistake; it belongs in one of the more macabre subdivisions of the science of abnormal psychology. In this country, innumerable forms of effective protest are available. When a citizen concludes that the only suitable method is to douse himself with kerosene and set himself afire, we have good reason to doubt his sanity. –E. Ulrie Buddemeyer
Others were more understanding of Morrison’s act, even casting blame on the greater society. Again from the Sun:
The death of Norman Robert Morrison before the Pentagon last Tuesday was not a suicide, but murder. Our souls calloused over with indifference, acquiescent to violence, impervious to human suffering, murdered Norman Morrison. We murdered him just as coldly, just as mechanically, just as insensitively as daily we murder men, women and children in Vietnam. –Dorothy Mock
Like Herz, Morrison’s family received many letters from Vietnam offering condolences and lauding his immolation as a courageous act. Ho Chi Minh invited Anne Morrison to visit North Vietnam. A shrine in Morrison’s honor was placed next to Alice Herz’s at the Ho Chi Minh Revolutionary Museum. The government of North Vietnam issued a stamp with Morrison’s face on it.
Years later, in 1999, Anne Morrison would finally take up that offer to visit Vietnam. She brought their two daughters Christina and Emily with her. Their son Ben had died of cancer in 1976 at the age of 16.
"What people most wanted to do," Anne later told The Guardian of their trip to Vietnam, "was tell the stories of where they had been when they heard the news of Norman's sacrifice, often with tears streaming down their faces." The article goes on:
"As a child," Christina says, "the only thing that helped me understand my dad's death was being aware of the suffering in Vietnam. On our visit, I got to meet some of those children who told us how much my father's sacrifice meant to them. This was indescribably healing for me."
The wartime prime minister, Pham Van Dong, told them: "Your family is esteemed to the highest magnitude." Norman's "noble and great act" had touched "the most beautiful and valuable parts in humanity," he said.
"I went to Vietnam to say thank you for the kindness and love expressed to us," says Anne. "I came away with more love than I knew was possible."
Perhaps due to the high profile of Morrison’s immolation, his action was soon followed by others.
Just one week after Morrison’s death, a young man named Roger Allen LaPorte, 22, sat outside the U.N. in New York City, taking the same lotus position as Buddhist monks who had immolated before, and set himself on fire. LaPorte was a member of the Catholic Worker Movement, a pacifist organization with a history of civil disobedience.
Friends of LaPorte who attended a draft card burning action with him the day before said that he did not seem obviously disturbed or depressed.
In the ambulance that rushed LaPorte to the hospital, he told a police officer, “I’m a Catholic Worker. I’m against war, all wars. I did this as a religious action.”
LaPorte, after being administered last rites by a Catholic priest and receiving a brief visit from his parents and older brother, died of his wounds the next day.
Two years later, on October 16th, 1967, a woman named Florence Beaumont, 56, ascended the stairs of the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles with a can of gasoline. Standing at the front doors, she poured the fuel over herself and set herself aflame.
“It wasn’t a scream, just a moan,” said John Osberg who had been sitting nearby. “There were flames all over her ,” he said, “She didn’t say anything. She just moaned. She was burning from head to foot.” After lighting herself on fire, Beaumont walked about 40 feet in one direction and then collapsed. By the time a Federal Building guard rushed to Beaumont with a fire extinguisher, she was already dead.
At the scene of her immolation, Florence parked her truck, bedecked with bumper stickers for the Peace and Freedom Party, and left antiwar literature in the bed. She dropped her purse before self-immolating, with a note attached that said, “Hello, I’m Florence Beaumont.”
Beaumont left behind her husband George, 58, and their two daughters Sally, 21, and Mary, 18.
Beaumont was active in several antiwar and peace groups with her husband, including Women Strike for Peace. Like Alice and Helga Herz, Florence and George were both members of the First Unitarian Universalist Church. Before moving to California, the Beaumonts were deeply involved in labor union organizing in New York City. “I did my weekly stint of selling Daily Workers in the East Harlem slums,” Florence wrote later in life,
gave my labor to performing office and picketing chores for the militant revolutionary unions whose organization paved the way for the C.I.O., drawing inspiration in the great May Day Parades and the passionate demonstrations and mass meetings denouncing war and fascism.
I relearned my American History in the light of capitalist exploitations and its brutal assault on the American Labor Movement. I went into the New England area and did “field work” in the great textile strikes in the 30’s, distributing Daily Workers at the strike halls, to let the workers learn where their salvation lay…
Like the others before her, Florence Beaumont was troubled by America’s war in Vietnam and felt that there was no official recourse for changing things. George Beaumont said that Florence “had a deep feeling against the slaughter in Vietnam” and “must have felt she had to do this.” He said that she would often tell him, “It’s not worth living when you have no redress from your representatives. All you receive from them is form letters.”
“She was a perfectly normal, dedicated person,” said George, “and felt she had to do this just like the ones who burned themselves in Vietnam.” George gave a press conference to clear up any questions that he may have known of Florence’s plan beforehand and to help explain her motivations. He said:
This was no suicide. There were no indications of escapism or frustration. This was an immolation, a supreme sacrifice to humanity, to peace and freedom for all mankind. In a sense, it was a religious rite far beyond the hypocritical posturings of orthodoxy. Greater love hath no man!
The flames that enveloped Florence Beaumont differ in no way from the flames of napalm our government has inflicted upon the millions of Vietnamese infants and children, nor does Florence Beaumont differ from the Vietnamese mother clutching her child to her breast in a vain effort to bring back the breath of life.
The barbarous napalm that burns the bodies of the Vietnamese children has seared the souls of all those who, like Florence Beaumont, do not have icewater for blood, stones for hearts, and minds filled with murder.
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.
Like John Brown’s body, what is now the mortal husk of Florence Beaumont shall lie mouldering in the grave but her spirit shall go marching on and we shall follow, and that is what she must have wanted.
A friend of Beaumont’s, Pat Marion, said that, “She was a gentle, thoughtful person who was not known for irrational action. Possessing a rare combination of strength and humanity, she did not act out of weakness or despair.”
Beaumont wrote constantly to her elected representatives to try to stir action to end the war. In a letter that she wrote to President Johnson, Beaumont said:
The use of mass bombings, napalm and gases make it seem that our aim is the extermination of the people of N. Vietnam, unless their govt. surrenders, and the news indicates that many of the people of S. Vietnam view the U.S. as intruders and aggressors. I believe this policy takes us back to the barbaric principle: “Might makes right!” and destroys the moral base of the U.S. before the world…
Please listen to your own conscience and stand up against the war hawks. Please let there be open debate on these vital issues!
George Beaumont painted a picture of Florence as someone who was tirelessly committed to the peace movement, but frustrated with the lack of results:
Florence had done everything she could to stop the war. She lived for the peace movement. She wrote hundreds of letters to her congressmen, her senators, all she got back were form letters. She passed out literature, attended rallies and marches…She registered voters in the Peace and Freedom Party. She bought her clothes at the Salvation Army because the difference between a $2 coat and a $25 coat was the $23 she could contribute to the peace movement. But the war had her so frustrated. She would sit and wring her hands when they reported the war news. She felt she had to do something, to make a better world and to wake people up.
As it turned out, antiwar immolators such as Florence Beaumont were correct in worrying about mainstream apathy and the callousness of the establishment. The American press, with some notable exceptions, was decidedly skittish and non-adversarial when it came to questioning the Pentagon’s motives and methods in Vietnam. In 1968, the radical magazine Ramparts, which was the first outlet to publish the famous photo of burned Vietnamese children running out of a napalm explosion, had a written account of a massacre of around 19 women and children gleaned from the testimony of medic Jamie Henry. This would have been the first published article on such a massacre, beating out Seymour Hersh’s famous exposè on My Lai by two years, but Ramparts shelved it. Many other atrocities did not see the light of day in the mainstream press until years later, if ever.
In an even greater dereliction of duty, Newsweek suppressed and eviscerated a story about Operation Speedy Express, where U.S. troops, over the course of several months, carried out the slaughter of upwards of 10,000 people in the Mekong Delta, most of whom were unarmed civilians, all under explicit orders from commanding officers to kill anything that moves to keep the body counts up. The original version of the story, reported by Kevin Buckley and Alexander Shimkin, was a “5,000 word exposè on the horrors of the operation, plus a powerful sidebar filled with eyewitness testimony from Vietnamese survivors,” writes Nick Turse. “The results were damning. The piece exposed wanton killing on a massive scale…It was the stuff of Pulitzer Prizes and congressional hearings. For Newsweek, it was a potential blockbuster; for the military, a surefire nightmare.”
But it was not to be. The craven editors at Newsweek asked for the article to be “radically shortened,” writes Turse. Newsweek forbade the story from being published elsewhere so that they wouldn’t be perceived as fainthearted. After stalling the publication for months, one editor explained to Buckley that it “would be a gratuitous attack on the [Nixon] administration at this point to do another story on civilian deaths after the press had given the army and Washington such a hard time over My Lai.”7 The final published version was only 1,800 words, with many facts and eyewitness interviews removed, including the name of the man who oversaw Operation Speedy Express, Julien Ewell. The story faded into obscurity.
The story “should have been even more explosive than Seymour Hersh’s exposè on My Lai,” writes Turse. Had the story been published in its original form, “it might have proven to be the crest of the wave of interest in war crimes allegations, resulting in irresistible public pressure for high-level inquiries.” It could have “transformed the country’s understanding of the entire conflict…it might have blown the lid off the entire American project in Vietnam and called the American way of war into serious question. Of course, none of those might-have-beens ever happened.”
Despite an increasing public awareness of the crimes being committed by the U.S., the military, the State Department, and the Executive branch all effectively covered up atrocities, avoided accountability, and stymied investigations and criminal trials. In 1971, an international commission held in Oslo, Norway composed of journalists, scholars, American veterans, and Vietnamese survivors put together a damning set of evidence which concluded “that the crimes committed in Indochina are not only the results of actions of individual soldiers and officers. Clearly, these crimes are the results of the long-term policy of the United States in Southeast Asia, and the main burden of responsibility must lie with those who have been making this policy.”8
Also in 1971, Telford Taylor, a former army general who served as chief counsel for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, argued in public, as Turse writes, that “the widespread bombing and shelling of civilian hamlets in ‘free-fire’ zones, the forced evacuations of peasants from their homes, and general failure to provide for the safety and care of civilians,” amounted to war crimes for which high-level figures such as General William Westmoreland were responsible. “It had been one thing for antiwar radicals to call the former top commander in Vietnam and now the army’s chief of staff a war criminal,” Turse writes, “quite another for a retired American general who had prosecuted the top Nazis to say much the same.”
In spite of such prominent charges, Washington aimed to do everything they could to keep the Pentagon and the White House from being held accountable. “With long experience at covering up war crimes,” Turse writes, “[Washington officials] knew just how to evade the burden of responsibility that the Oslo commission so unambiguously placed on them. Drag out all investigations as long as possible, intimidate witnesses, obstruct courts-martial, and hope that the public would eventually lose interest; throughout the early 1970s, this would be the military’s steadfast approach.”
Like the endemic atrocities being committed in Vietnam, Florence Beaumont’s self-immolation in 1967 received relatively little mainstream press coverage in the West. In spite of this, Beaumont received honors from Vietnamese peace groups. Nguyen Thi Binh, Vice President of the South Vietnam Liberation Women’s Union, wrote to the Beaumont family:
We are deeply moved to learn that Mrs. Beaumont has burned herself in protest against the US Government’s war of aggression in Vietnam. May we express to the bereaved family our profound sympathy for that great loss. As a mother, an emotional woman and a genuine patriot, Mrs. Beaumont has used her death to express her utter indignation at the US Government which has been committing bloody crimes in South Vietnam and trampling upon the conscience and moral values of the justice-loving American people.
The women of South Vietnam pay their respect to Mrs. Beaumont’s noble sacrifice for the sake of truth, justice and the legitimate national rights of the South Vietnamese people, and shall forever be grateful to her.
Others in the U.S. defended Beaumont’s action against accusations of insanity. A sympathetic letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times from Beatrice Miller read:
We are not to mistake the message of Florence Beaumont who set herself afire on the steps of the Federal Building October 15. The flames that destroyed this woman were in the hope that more of us would search the dark corners of our own souls and question our complaisance and complicity in the destruction of human life.
In an insane world where the bombing and burning of defenseless villages is an everyday occurrence, visible nightly on television, it unfortunately sometimes takes the expressed feeling of an anguished soul to shock us awake again. If Florence Beaumont was deranged, then sanity is defined by our nuclear stockpile, and insanity by a woman’s sacrificial compassion for human suffering.
Five months to the day after Florence Beaumont set herself aflame in response to the murderous carpet bombing of Vietnam, and exactly three years to the day since Alice Herz had self-immolated, on March 16th, 1968, U.S. troops from Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry would slaughter 504 civilians at My Lai, most of them women and children, many of whom were tortured and raped before being shot or blown up by American grenades. On the very same day, just a few miles away from My Lai, troops from Bravo Company, 4th Battalion, 3rd Infantry slaughtered up to 155 civilians in the village of My Khe (4). One soldier who was there recollected the ghastly murder of a child, “I remember that the baby was about [10 feet away] and [Infantryman Donald Hooton] fired at it with a .45. He missed. We all laughed. He got up three or four feet closer and missed again. We laughed. Then he got right up on top of him and plugged him.”9
The mass U.S. killing in Vietnam would continue for another five years.
On March 19th, 1968, 16-year old Ronald Brazee, “Ron” to his seven siblings, entered a Catholic church in downtown Syracuse, New York and stood by the alter. A woman named Catherine O’Connell entered the church behind Brazee. Upon noticing her, Brazee quickly exited out a side door. O’Connell noticed that there was a metal can of gasoline on the floor.
Once outside at the front of the church, Brazee asked an elderly man, Joseph Madden, for a light. “I gave him a match and he lit it and went up in flames and ran ahead,” Madden told the Syracuse Post-Standard.
The police found a note by Brazee that read, “I’m giving my life, not in war, but to help end it. If giving my life will shorten the war by even one day, it will not have been in vain.”
With burns on 90 percent of his body, Brazee died over a month later from pneumonia.
The radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan visited Brazee in the hospital before he passed. Berrigan said:
The boy had come to a point of despair about the war. He had gone into the Catholic cathedral, drenched himself with kerosene, and immolated himself in the street. He was still living a month later. I was able to gain access to him. I smelled the odor of burning flesh, and I understood anew what I had seen in North Vietnam. The boy was dying in torment, his body like a great piece of meat cast upon a grill. He died shortly thereafter. I felt my senses had been invaded in a new way. I had understood the power of death in the modern world. I knew I must speak and act against death because this boy’s death was being multiplied a thousand-fold in the ‘Land of Burning Children’ [Vietnam].
Though not a member of any activist group, Brazee was closely following the war in Vietnam. “He was a smart, smart kid,” Brazee’s brother Mike later told the Syracuse New Times. “If I could point to any direction he might have gone in, it would have been as a writer…If Ron were alive he probably would have been there with the students at Kent State.”
That summer, the world watched as Chicago police beat and arrested around 600 protestors outside of the Democratic National Convention.
Two years later, on May 10th, 1970, at approximately four in the afternoon, a 23-year old UC San Diego graduate student named George Winne Jr., the son of a Navy Captain, went to the Revelle Plaza carrying a sign that read, “In God’s name, End this war.”
By this time, about 48,000 U.S. servicemen had died in the conflict. The draft was in full swing. Few at home were willing to be sent overseas. Of those who were sent, many refused to kill for their country. Huge cracks were beginning to appear in the military’s own edifice. An epidemic of “fragging” had taken hold in the ranks - enlisted men murdering their commanding officers. Colonel Robert Heinl wrote in 1971 for the Armed Forces Journal:
The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.
By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous…
Historical precedents do exist for some of the services' problems, such as desertion, mutiny, unpopularity, seditious attacks, and racial troubles. Others, such as drugs, pose difficulties that are wholly NEW. Nowhere, however, in the history of the Armed Forces have comparable past troubles presented themselves in such general magnitude, acuteness, or concentrated focus as today.
Despite this state of affairs, the war continued on and President Nixon was still drafting young men and boys to fight on the other side of the Pacific. On April 30th, 1970, Nixon announced that he would be expanding the war in Vietnam across the Cambodian border. Four days after that, four students were murdered by the National Guard during a demonstration at Kent State University in Ohio.
Just days before he had walked into Revelle Plaza carrying his protest sign, George Wynn Jr. had received his draft notice.
Wynne, with several gasoline soaked rags attached to his clothes, lit himself on fire. He began running around the plaza while clutching his sign and screaming “Stop the war! Stop the war!” A fellow student named Keith Stowe saw Winne running aflame and rushed over to him. Stowe knocked Winne to the ground as he and others attempted to put out the flames with their jackets. Winne suffered third and fourth degree burns over 90 percent of his body. He was taken to a hospital where he remained conscious, uttering the Lord’s Prayer, until he died 10 hours later.
“He and I talked a little on the way to the hospital,” Stowe later told UC San Diego’s The Triton. “We both could tell that he would die soon.” While dying, Winne told his mother that he “had picked the most dramatic way he could think of to call people’s attention to the most deplorable condition of the world and of this country.”
On the fourth anniversary of Winne’s death, David Buchbinder wrote for The Triton:
…Winne's act probably did nothing to end the war in Vietnam, but in his act of immolation he made himself a symbol of the anguish gripping America. Rarely are people willing to act upon their own, yet Winne was unafraid to do so, unlike so many who are unable to think or act without the support or anonymity of the mass either behind or around them. Winne, unprotected by the anonymity of the mass, reaffirmed the spirit of individual thought and action.
The collective acts of masses may ultimately cause change to occur, yet it is in the actions of individuals where the moral conscience to cause change is initially raised. It is this power of the individual to stir conscience which we should recall and honor on this day. May we be as brave.
In 1973, under extreme pressure from the American public, most U.S. combat troops were pulled out of Vietnam. In 1975, with the capture of Saigon by North Vietnamese revolutionary forces, the war came to a close.
What can we learn from the self-immolations of the 1960s and 70s? How are they relevant to us today? What do the deaths of the immolators of the Vietnam era have in common with those of the climate activists Wynn Bruce and David Buckel? What are the factors that contribute to someone electing such a painful death?
Perhaps it can be phrased this way: When a society fails to live up to its promises, when the systems of power do not allow for reform, when people feel that they do not have any meaningful say over the systems which govern their lives, and when those systems are responsible for immiseration and death, then individuals, feeling helpless, will begin to engage in acts of self-destruction.
People living in a society that fails to live up to its promises - like how Western nations are nowhere near on track to meet their pledged goals of reduced carbon emissions (and even those are not enough to prevent catastrophe), or how the U.S. preached the values of “freedom” and “democracy” while at the same time killing every Vietnamese in sight - will feel betrayed by their county’s hypocrisy.
Alice Herz wrote, “To the American people! With the help of the colossal lie, your Presidents…have each deceived and misled you.” Florence Beaumont wrote that the U.S. policy in Vietnam seemed to be the “extermination of the people” and that this “destroys the moral base of the U.S. before the world.” A feeling of betrayal, of disillusionment, of having been lied to, is a common thread amongst these immolations. As a former Lambda Legal colleague of David Buckel’s said to the New York Times regarding Buckel’s death, “How do you get from that, to this?” Buckel seemed to have fallen so far.
People living under a system of power that does not allow for reform - like how our decisions to go to war are not decided by the popular will of the people but rather by the whims of private arms manufacturers that lobby for belligerent foreign policy instead of diplomacy, or how corporations most responsible for carbon emissions effectively partner with the state to criminalize dissent and protest - will feel helpless.
Alice Herz asked her friend, “What can we do? I’ve written everything I can. I’ve spoken everywhere. What can I do?” Norman Morrison asked his wife Anne, “What can we do that we haven’t done?” She said, “I really don’t know.” They wrote letters, lobbied, prayed, protested, withheld taxes. Had they tried voting harder?
People living under a system that is responsible for immiseration and death - such as with the U.S. war in Vietnam, or with Western powers making only shallow moves on addressing the climate crisis for which they are largely responsible - will feel like something drastic must be done in order to call attention and stir action. People will feel isolated by the seeming apathy and ignorance all around them.
A young man named Domingo Morales who worked with David Buckel at the Red Hook Community Farm composting site remembered Buckel talking to volunteers before their shift was over. “More than 90 percent of the world’s population breathes polluted air,” Buckel said to them. “The Arctic Circle is experiencing record-breaking temperatures.” After the volunteers left, Buckel said, “Nobody cares, why does nobody believe it?” Florence Beaumont commented to her husband on the Buddhist monks who had immolated in Vietnam, saying “They’re not close enough to home.” The immolators were deeply troubled by what they saw and they felt that those around them were not troubled enough.
The mainstream media has consistently ignored or downplayed the causes for which these people self-immolated. The establishment press was caught sleeping on the litany of atrocities occurring in Vietnam; it ignored or downplayed the significance of antiwar immolations, treating them as mere peculiarities; it currently ignores or downplays the exigencies of the climate crisis. In the face of all this, an individual with strong convictions who feels isolated, helpless, and betrayed will turn towards drastic action.
This frame of understanding can be applied to other political self-immolations. Whether by the Polish man Ryszard Siwiec and the Czechoslovakian Jan Palach who set themselves on fire in opposition to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; or by Mohamed Bouazizi who set himself aflame in Tunisia after it became too much to bear the Kafkaesque existence of trying to maintain a living and feed his family under the regime of Ben Ali, the immolation thereby instigating the Arab Spring; or by John Constantino, a Vietnam veteran who set himself on fire at the National Mall and had previously told a neighbor that the government is “a waste of time” and that “They don't look out for us and they don't care about anything but their own pockets.”; or by Leo P. Thornton who shot himself at the Capitol Building in 2015 in response to rampant inequality.
Isolation, extremity, helplessness, and a need to change things are all contributing factors to these immolations.
Now, as Thich Nhat Hanh argued, the act of someone setting themselves on fire, particularly someone who is steeped in the Buddhist faith, is not necessarily an act of destruction but of “construction.” It is an act carried out in faith for a better future. Florence Beaumont wrote, “…Are not our children our basic investment on this earth? Who can deny that the majority of parents’ major concerns is for their children.” Alice Herz wrote that she chose her immolation out of “faith, hope and love.”
Regardless of the effects it may or may not have on an issue, an immolation motivated by a desire to sacrifice oneself for a cause may be considered constructive. For those who believe that their immolation can serve as a testament to their seriousness and to their desire for change, it is a constructive act. But the same factors which contribute to someone choosing to self-immolate can also produce quite different outcomes. People feeling betrayed and helpless may, on the constructive end of the spectrum, organize themselves to exert popular control over their society. Or, remaining atomized, they may try to reclaim individual power in pyrrhic victories over others through domestic violence, bullying, or mass shootings.
It does not matter whether someone’s self-immolation is “successful” or not as a protest tactic. We cannot fully appreciate such extreme acts of flaming death if we do not realize that so long as there is no official recourse for people’s grievances, people will continue to destroy themselves and others. As the climate crisis worsens and more people begin to suffer its consequences, we can expect to see acts of self-destruction, from self-immolation to mass murder, get worse.
The current existential dread being felt by many in today’s society is not unlike the mood of the 1960s and 70s. The activist Saul Alinsky wrote in 1971: “These are the days when man has his hands on the sublime while he is up to his hips in the muck of madness…The outcome of the hopelessness and despair is morbidity. There is a feeling of death hanging over the nation.”
But today’s collective mood of helplessness is not, I contend, stemming only from climate change. The root of it, rather, is the well-founded belief that the people with dominion over our lives are enforcing an undemocratic system that necessarily leads to the illogical destruction of life and the deprivation of our environment, and that this system is so powerful, self-serving, and self-perpetuating, that any attempts to alter or abolish it are futile.
This futility itself, in the end, does not matter. It does not matter if our attempts at changing the system fail. What matters is the attempt itself. If we measured the value of an act of resistance only by its efficacy, there would be no moral reason for revolt in the first place. The value is in the act itself.
“Resistance is futile” is nearly a truism at this point. But futility is not a reason for despair, it is all the more reason for resistance. As Albert Camus proclaimed, “One of the only coherent philosophical positions” by humanity in the face of an absurd and uncaring universe is revolt. “It is not aspiration,” Camus writes, “for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.”
Revolt is not a means to an end. Revolt is the end.
These days, hope is being killed. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. Hope, when it is built on illusions, is less than worthless, it is counterrevolutionary. The disease of optimism in the face of catastrophe assures that humanity, instead of going out with some style by choosing to affirm human dignity in ironic defiance of annihilation, will instead be emotionally unprepared for its fate and struck dumb and blind. Our illusions must be shattered before we can talk about hope.
The liberal establishment will not save us. Joe Biden, a longtime warmonger and proud “tough-on-crime” neoliberal, has requested that the U.S. military, one of the leading carbon emitters and contributors to climate change, be given an astonishing $813 billion for the 2023 budget, making it the largest U.S. military budget in history. Adding to that number the costs of Veteran’s Affairs and unaccountable dark money that gets funneled to the Pentagon and the CIA, and the total yearly military budget approaches $1 trillion, amounting to well over half of all discretionary spending.
This budget increase request, proposed by a Democrat, sheer folly as it is, is indicative of a failing empire squandering its treasure on military projects that hasten its own decline. This military budget is being proposed during a global pandemic, which itself exacerbated the already rampant inequality of our society, and it comes after the House could not pass further funding for Covid relief and booster vaccines. But Congress did instead send billions of dollars to Ukraine in order to prolong a U.S. proxy war against Russia at the cost of Ukrainian and Russian blood and U.S. taxpayer money.
The U.S. military and national security state is great at certain things. It can control populations, bomb them into oblivion, conduct total surveillance, monopolize federal spending, invade sovereign nations, destabilize entire regions, and produce vast profits for mercenaries and privatized weapons manufacturers. These manufacturers, such as Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics, have seen their stocks shoot up since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and in fact predicted and celebrated that this would occur. Not to mention the fact that these weapons manufacturers fund think tanks which encourage belligerent foreign policy and mock diplomacy. Weapons manufacturers lobby members of congress to keep the money flowing to their coffers built on death. Predictably, the war in Ukraine has been attended by Western media propaganda that has primed the citizens of the West to express irrational hatred toward anyone or anything deemed remotely Russian or sympathetic to Russian people.
Sadly, such private war profiteering and chauvinism is anything but new. As Thomas Paine wrote in the 18th century: “That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations, is as shocking as it is true; but when those who are concerned in the government of a country, make it their study to sow discord, and cultivate prejudices between Nations, it becomes the more unpardonable.”
The U.S. military is not equipped to rationally respond to climate catastrophe and pandemics. It’s equipment is useless against the human suffering caused by environmental degradation.
Anyone who believes that the climate crisis can be slowed without a radical dismantling of the U.S. empire is deluded. But we do not express hope through a realistic assessment of where we are. We express hope through illusion. Reality is no impediment to our desire. And thus, we as a society, holding on to our own image of American innocence - which is so morally repugnant to those suffering under our boots - cannot intellectually comprehend nor be emotionally prepared for the violent calamities which befall us, which have already befallen so many others around the world, who are our brothers.
Those who believe that humanity can avert worldwide ecological catastrophe, meaning humanity’s extinction, without the dismantling of corporate capitalism and its attendant evils from their vaunted position as a global economic and philosophical force, or without a radical upheaval of our current ways of living and the degrowth of Western economies, are believing in the magical thinking of corporatism, a subservience to the almighty undemocratic free market, and an illusion so grand as to exalt snake oil salesmen and turn them into our final saviors.
Our rulers do not react rationally to the crisis. They react as self-important, unassailable, institutionalized kings always react: with acts of force and control. They, believing in their righteousness and their divine right to rule, scoff at the dirty rabble who dare to assert any minimal democratic control over our lives. Thus, they exacerbate the problems, perpetuate the inequalities, and sow the seeds of their own destruction, as they remain prisoners to the fear they have for the people they wish to keep in submission.
But it is not only those in the most vaunted positions of power who stand to blame for the crisis. As Thomas Paine wrote of the “thousand despotisms” of the decrepit and corrupt French monarchy prior to the revolution:
When despotism has established itself for ages in a country, as in France, it is not in the person of the King only that it resides. It has the appearance of being so in show, and in nominal authority; but it is not so in practice, and in fact. It has its standard every where. Every office and department has its despotism, founded upon custom and usage. Every place has its Bastille, and every Bastille its despot. The original hereditary despotism resident in the person of the King, divides and subdivides itself into a thousand shapes and forms, till at last the whole of it is acted by deputation. This was the case in France; and against this species of despotism, proceeding on through an endless labyrinth of office till the source of it is scarcely perceptible, there is no mode of redress. It strengthens itself by assuming the appearance of duty, and tyrannises under the pretence of obeying…
There is no longer an official mode of redress in our society. “Every office and department has its despotism,” and we suffer a thousand daily tyrannies “under the pretense of obeying.” The self-immolators such as Alice Herz, Norman Morrison, and Florence Beaumont understood this. They saw that all of the protesting, letter writing, sit-ins, teach-ins, and hippies fucking each other was not stopping the bloodshed in Vietnam.
What the immolators did was not madness. It was action compelled by the inability of our structures to respond to the needs of the people. There is no due process; no official recourse; every attempt at going through the “proper channels” is either ignored or suppressed. Our protests did not stop NAFTA. Our protests did not stop the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Our protests did not stop the oil pipelines. Our protests did not stop police violence.
The Senate recently took a step towards gutting $8 billion from green energy projects and instead shifting that money towards weapons research to “compete with China.” The Supreme Court just eviscerated the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate fossil fuel production. Our woefully monopolized meat and agriculture industry, one of the leading contributors to carbon emissions, controlled by the likes of Tyson and Monsanto, squeezes out small, independent farmers and forces the remaining subsidiary farmers to buy into their expensive equipment, GMO crops, and toxic pesticides, thereby turning farmers into little more than corporate slaves. Big Ag, knowing that their dirty practices would shock the nation, cajole the state into criminalizing those who expose their inhumane treatment of animals.
Today, our courts levy punishment in favor of corporations, robbing workers of their rights; judges and prosecutors hound and destroy the lives of whistleblowers and journalists such as Chelsea Manning, Daniel Hale, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange, whose only crimes were revealing to the world the rank criminality of our governing institutions. Whistleblowers are barred in court from defending themselves on the basis that what they shared was within the public interest, nor are they allowed to discuss the details of the information they shared. They are prosecuted only within the narrow legal confines of whether or not they broke the law when sharing their inside information. This is not justice. This is not a publicly controlled free society. It is to be found guilty a priori for the crime of speaking out against the mythology that our government spins about itself.
The many millions who daily manage this system are rarely morally reliable, they simply go with the flow. As Henry David Thoreau wrote:
Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice…
Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the State chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God…
There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war [against Mexico], who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who…sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free-trade…They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed…
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
We accept the world as it is made for us. We see that it is beyond our individual control and we hope to find a comfortable place within the system as it is. We retreat into our walled cities and dark ghettos that have been designed by unseen hands, we turn our eyes away from the corporate forces of control and death, dropping a ballot in the box every two or four years to pick between one of two money-anointed puppets, and we call this democracy.
There is a deep restlessness in the society. A nameless feeling of dread and un-control, fueled by a lack of belonging and meaning, that has no informed place to go. And thus, we lash out blindly against those closest to us. Our enemies are created along the same lines that those with power want them to be created. As groups such as antifa and the Proud Boys spar with one another in the streets, the bankers are laughing at us.
This lack of meaning, our learned helplessness, and the powerlessness in our communities paves the way for fanaticism, demagoguery, cults, and, ultimately, deeply self-destructive acts of violence. As despair takes hold, lives are lost. There were 100,000 overdose deaths in the U.S. last year. The U.S. suffers from a chronic epidemic of mass shootings. Our life expectancy is declining.
We, the children of today, have a lower standard of living than our forebears, and look to the future not with hope, but with despair. It should be made clear where this despair comes from. It is not from individual failure or lack of personal responsibility. It is not because we lack the desire for moral conviction. It is because those things which are worth such conviction have been systematically stolen from us and destroyed before our very eyes. What can one do in the face of a state which serves moneyed interests and criminalizes dissent? As Stephen Maher writes:
Over the past three decades [state] agencies have become deeply entangled with transnational institutional regimes established through “free trade” agreements. These agreements effectively “constitutionalize” neoliberalism, locking states in to protecting corporate and investor rights against the environment and labor, regardless of the will of the population.
The naked corruption, fecklessness, and moral decrepitude of the political, economic, and media elite, all of whom are beyond the reach of the same laws which are levied so harshly against the great mass of us, leads to our prevalent cynicism, apathy, political and civic dislocation, and our collective rage.
This rage - an understandable desire for revenge, to bring those with power low and to make them feel what it is like to live under their boots – when it is properly placed, is set firmly at the door of those who manage this system, those who brought this rage into existence, nursed it from its inception, and brought it up into the people who bear it today. Those who hold power are the ones primarily to blame for this dismal state of affairs. They are the ones who broke the social contract and demanded us to go on believing in it anyway despite the hollowness of their words and the evisceration of the moral integrity of our society.
This rank corruption, what Thomas Paine, when referring to the despotic French monarchy, described as “the Augean stable of parasites and plunderers too abominably filthy to be cleansed, by anything short of a complete and universal revolution,” degrades the soul of our society and renders the principle of the rule of law into a cruel joke. Why would we follow the dictates of those above us when those above us are self-serving hypocrites? When their laws apply to us but not to them? Why would we respect a system that does not respect us?
The more that we as citizens are locked out of having a voice in and a say over the governmental and economic systems of power, and the more that those same institutions are used to compel compliance through open force or more subtle means of inculcation and propaganda, then the more those systems become targets of legitimate revolt and violence. As the activist Ralph Poynter said,
What you have is the bubbling underneath. It is there and it is going to explode. But it’s not going to be an explosion where people are going to be working to become a part of this society. That was in the 60s and the 70s - it was a struggle for the poor and the oppressed to become a part of. That dream is dead. There is just ugliness now. There is just anger. And it was created by the government that exists now. They think that they can continue this forever…And they’re creating a wealthy society compared to a society that has nothing. And what you’re gonna see, and I guarantee it, there’s gonna be death.
There are few who see where humanity is headed and who have the fortitude to rebel against it. The immolators had this vision. Their vision was attended by a profound sensitivity and love for humanity. Florence Beaumont “was a gentle, thoughtful person,” her friend said, “…Possessing a rare combination of strength and humanity, she did not act out of weakness or despair.” Alice Herz was “a warm, loving, truly gentle person,” her friend said, “with an unconquerable spirit and a rare combination of moral and physical courage.”
David Buckel’s niece said, “He was always a more sensitive and gentle soul.” Friends of Wynne Bruce said he “had a huge heart” and that he did what he did as “an act of compassion.”
You may not agree with someone’s conclusions about climate change. You may not agree with their actions that follow from their conviction, be it self-immolation or an act of eco-terrorism. But to simply operate under the assumption that society is healthy, people in power are benevolent, and the actions of our government are always righteous, and to then paint anyone who lashes out against those systems as an incoherent madman, someone who is mentally ill and obviously irrational, is to be dismissive of the very real conditions that drive people to extreme acts. It is to ensure that those acts will continue and even swell.
This is exactly what happened with the fanatical witch hunts against Communists and leftists in the U.S. during the McCarthy era. We treated anyone with anti-capitalist values as pathological and therefore worthy of persecution. Why would anyone want a different form of society? We must silence them before they spread their filthy ideas to the children. This is exactly what happened with the war on terror. Instead of examining the motivations of Islamic terrorists, instead of examining ourselves and how we sowed the seeds of hatred against us, we charged forth on a nationalistic Christian crusade against “savages,” a crusade for which we will continue to pay a heavy price.
September 11th, 2001 - a terrorist attack carried out by radical Islamic jihadists funded by Saudi Arabia against a Western superpower that had its hands in the preponderance of violence, death, and meddling in the Middle-East during the 20th century - was a world-turning event that serves as a parallel for the current climate catastrophe: Western, developed nations, responsible for the preponderance of carbon emissions, the looting and pillaging of the natural world, and the capitalist desiccation of entire ecosystems, will soon bear the dire consequences of their actions.
On 9/11, the United States suffered blowback that was targeted at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Today, with the climate catastrophe, we will suffer blowback on a global scale.
The victims of the climate crisis will not only be those who suffer and die from its most obvious consequences - crop failure, flooding, fires, massive storms, heat waves, and bloody wars over water and food - in the same way that those who died on 9/11 were not only those killed in the initial explosions of the airplanes colliding with the towers; it was not only those who were unable to escape the buildings before they came crashing down into a wasteland of twisted and toxic rubble; it was not only the first responders who dutifully ascended the many flights of stairs in efforts to reach the top floors; it was not only those who suffered and died from chronic diseases caught by inhaling the poison ash.
It was also the jumpers.
Up to 200 people are estimated to have jumped from the towers that day. Most of them jumped alone, falling one after the other. Some grabbed ahold of flimsy improvised parachutes in vain attempts to slow their fall. Others fell together in pairs, holding on to each other in their last moments. The jumpers would reach up to 150 miles per hour before hitting the ground. The sound of the sickening, explosive thuds continue to haunt eyewitnesses.
The tragedy of the 9/11 jumpers was eerily similar to another New York City disaster - the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. In 1911, a fire broke out on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the factory, located in Greenwich Village. The fire originated from a scrap bin and quickly spread throughout the 8th floor and upwards. Many of the employees, mostly young immigrant women, found escape to be impossible. Doors to stairways were locked so that managers could monitor workers, keeping them from taking unauthorized breaks or from allowing outside union organizers inside. Fire ladders weren’t tall enough to reach the 8th floor. A poorly constructed steel fire escape collapsed under the weight of those trying to seek refuge, sending dozens falling to their deaths. Elevators began to fail. Some jumped to their deaths down the elevator shafts. Others, with nowhere left to turn, ran to the windows. The windows, instead of opening outwards, opened inwards, making escape even more difficult. Knowing that they would succumb to the flames if they stayed, many chose to jump instead. Of the 146 people who died that day, at least 62 jumped from the building.
"I learned a new sound that day, a sound more horrible than description can picture – the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalk," the reporter William Gunn Shepard remembered. The New York World reported:
…screaming men and women and boys and girls crowded out on the many window ledges and threw themselves into the streets far below. They jumped with their clothing ablaze. The hair of some of the girls streamed up aflame as they leaped. Thud after thud sounded on the pavements. It is a ghastly fact that on both the Greene Street and Washington Place sides of the building there grew mounds of the dead and dying…
From opposite windows spectators saw again and again pitiable companionships formed in the instant of death - girls who placed their arms around each other as they leaped.10
Another eyewitness, Louis Waldman, later recalled, “Occasionally a girl who had hesitated too long was licked by pursuing flames and, screaming with clothing and hair ablaze, plunged like a living torch to the street.”
Faced with such unimaginable extremity, the jumpers of the 1911 disaster and the jumpers of the 9/11 terror attacks were both forced into choosing their own form of death.
“The mass suicide was one of the pivotal events of 9/11,” writes journalist Chris Hedges,
But it was immediately expunged from public consciousness. The jumpers did not fit into the myth the nation demanded. The hopelessness and despair were too disturbing. It exposed our smallness and fragility. It illustrated that there are levels of suffering and fear that lead us to willingly embrace death. The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live.
The story being fabricated out of the ashes of the twin towers was a story of resilience, heroism, courage and self-sacrifice, not collective suicide. So, the mass murder and mass suicide were replaced with an encomium to the virtues and prowess of the American spirit.”
We, today, facing the compounding disasters of climate change and the betrayal of the political elite, will be forced to make our own choices.
As the climate catastrophe continues unabated, acts of self destruction will only get worse. This may take several forms: self-immolations, alcoholism, drug overdoses, domestic violence, suicides, mass shootings, riots, theft of resources, political violence, state-sanctioned crackdowns on dissent, and more.
So long as the society refuses to face what must be done in order to turn back the tide of our rising oceans, our total annihilation will be assured. The question, then, is not how we will live, but how we will die.
So long as we cling to illusion, to the belief that we are historically exceptional and immune from the sways of the universe, we will be unprepared for what is coming. We must shatter our myths of innocence and progress. America was defeated after twenty years in Afghanistan just as we were defeated in Vietnam. Our enormous C-130 airships desperately evacuating hundreds of Afghan elites and those who assisted the U.S. military were just a newer version of our many helicopters that airlifted Vietnamese from rooftops during the fall of Saigon. The U.S. empire, knowing that it cannot stand up under the weight of its own lies, chooses to obfuscate and lash out against invented enemies. The inchoate violence of our adventures of empire only hastens our decline as we attempt to decapitate an endless-headed hydra.
“America was not attacked [on 9/11] because of a clash of civilizations,” Hedges writes, “America was attacked because the virtues we espouse are a lie. We were attacked for our hypocrisy. We were attacked for the campaigns of industrial slaughter that are our primary way of speaking with the rest of the planet.”
The deaths on 9/11, treated as heroic, were used to justify an escalation of policies that had already been carried out in the Middle-East throughout the 20th century. Israel, acting as America’s nuclear-armed cudgel in the region, had long invaded and bombed other countries into submission. The U.S. overthrew democratically elected leaders such as Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in order to maintain Western oil interests. Then we act surprised when our hegemonic machinations are responded to with violence. “The hijackers spoke to America in the idiom we taught them,” Hedges writes.
We have forgotten, or simply never learned, the central lesson of Vietnam: The U.S. empire is not the good guy. Now, post-9/11, we have yet again waded neck-deep into the swamp of death.
The self-immolations of the Vietnam era divided the public. Some called them insane, ineffectual, deluded. Others called them saints, martyrs, and prophets. Given that we now have a fuller picture of what happened in Vietnam, the immolators of the antiwar era may be called the vanguard. They saw the path that the U.S. was going down. Those such as Alice Herz precipitated the broader, intense antiwar movement of the later sixties and early seventies. Through her sacrifice, she kept hope aflame.
Alice Herz, fleeing Nazi Germany, understood the inhumanity that humans are capable of. She could not sit idly by in 1965 as she watched her adoptive country crack down on civil-rights marchers in Alabama, or as it began its own industrial mass slaughter of Vietnamese with the Operation Rolling Thunder bombing campaign.
In a letter to a fellow activist dated just days before her immolation, Herz wrote, “The air is full of mendacious fog. As I listen to the radio news getting more menacing with every hour, I ask what remains of America to distinguish this country from Germany, as I knew it in the first terrible months of the Third Reich?”
Herz, emulating the sacrifice of Thich Quảng Dức in Saigon, presaged the immolations of Norman Morrison, Roger Allen LaPorte, Florence Beaumont, Ronald Brazee, George Winne Jr., and others in the West.
David Buckel and Wynn Bruce are vanguards of today’s climate crisis, itself a form of industrialized slaughter.
The difference this time is this: In Vietnam - after Americans waged total war on the countryside, dumping millions of pounds of the toxic herbicide Agent Orange over the land; after Americans wantonly raped, tortured, and murdered civilians with the full power of our military machine standing behind them, all under the impunity of the racist “mere-gook rule”; after Americans extinguished the lives of millions of people throughout Southeast Asia and permanently scarred countless more - the American war in Vietnam ended.
With the climate crisis, nobody will live to see the end of it.
Nick Turse, “Kill Any Thing That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam,” 78-79.
Turse, “Kill Anything,” 207.
Turse, “Kill Anything,” 50.
Turse, “Kill Anything,” 13.
Hayes B. Jacobs, “The Martyrdom of Alice Herz,” Fact Magazine, Vol. 2, Issue 4, 1967, 15.
Jon Coburn, “I Have Chosen the Flaming Death: The Forgotten Self-Immolation of Alice Herz,” Peace & Change, Vol. 43, No. 1, 44-45.
Quoted in Turse’s, “Kill Anything,” 254
Quoted in Turse’s, “Kill Anything,” 241.
Turse, “Kill Anything,” 141.
Quoted in Howard Zinn’s, “A People’s History of the United States,” 326.
"The question, then, is not how we will live, but how we will die."
Excellent reporting. The past repeats itself here; long lives the war machine.
Just found this through your comment on Chris Hedges' latest post... And whoa! This is hands down one of the most hard-hitting articles I've read lately. Not just for how you humanised each and every one of these people and their motivation, but also how you put everything into a wider context of imperialism and capitalism.
So many *try* to speak of the same, but only offer half solutions at best, shy of poking the lion too much and calling things for what they are, a monstrous product of unbridled capitalism that exploited and extracted every single drop from the essence of our being ("our" as in human and non-human life forms and our entire natural world). You speak clearly and loudly about dismantling our entire way of being that grew in an unsustainable, unacceptable direction. Thank you for that. This is an article I'll keep returning to over and over again.