The self-immolation of Alice Herz in 1965

[BShea]

The full target seems to have been the growth in nuclear weapons, U.S.Cold War nuclear and military policy, and the resulting likelihood of large-scale destruction.

If that's true, then her action was for naught. The policy continued and was largely successful. And there was no large-scale destruction. It would strain logic to think the lack of Armageddon is because of any populist protest, even spectacular forms of protest.

It was all because of "The Day After" on television.

[EastsideAl]

The policy continued and was largely successful.

Well, successful if you call spending trillions upon trillions of dollars on thousands of potentially enormously destructive weapons that served no productive human purpose a success. I presume lots of defense contractors would agree with you that it was.

[Stosh]

If Liberals did this the world would REALLY be a better place.... to only hope.

Sure thing Jerry.
Just kneel down and call a liberal to put you out of your obvious misery.

[rid0617]

"Still, she would have done better to pour that lighter fluid over Bob McNamara and set him alight." Best thing ever said on this forum!

As I sit here a disabled Vietnam vet still arguing with the VA over benefits, I have to second that comment.

[BShea]

Well, successful if you call spending trillions upon trillions of dollars on thousands of potentially enormously destructive weapons that served no productive human purpose a success. I presume lots of defense contractors would agree with you that it was.

Yes, yes ... guns and butter ... swords into plowshares ... I've heard it all and every other tired pacifist canard.

I'd call it successful because the West managed to keep an aggressively Soviet Union and Communist China relatively in check. And I'm well award plenty on the American Left thinks it a tragedy that we opposed the exportation of their beloved communism -- a noxious, odious thing that I think is as equally evil and German National Socialism in its sheer disregard for human rights and repellent ideology.

And while Vietnam was a complex situation, accusations of American imperialism [[and fascism) are absurd. The war was clearly mishandled, but its value was that it showed the Communist bloc that the West was willing to engage it militarily to prevent the spread of that ideology to its allies -- even flawed allies like South Vietnam.

I'm sure more than a few people around here cheered when Saigon fell 35 years ago, ignorant of the million or so people subsequently executed by the communists. And we all saw the infamous boat people desperate to leave communist Vietnam ... just like people have risked death to free communist nations around the world. American academics and politically motivated hipsters sure get off on Che and Lenin, but the people who actually live under those ideologies certainly don't share those views. Or those who remember the Katyn Forest massacre. When you need walls, barbed wire, machine guns and secret police to keep your people in check, and to keep them from fleeing, then something is inherently wrong with your political/economic system.

So yeah, keeping millions of American and other Western troops under arms to keep the Soviet bear out of the rest of Europe and other nations around the globe was a pretty good idea. I'm sure the resident apologists here will dispute that, of course.

[maxx]

People tend to forget that the original Vietnamese Buddhist monk to immolate himself, Thich Quang Duc in June 1963, did so not to protest the war, but to protest the Ngo Dinh Diem regime's treatment of the monks. Diem was Roman Catholic, and something of a goon.

The crisis did eventually lead to Diem's assassination and regime change, so I guess his protest worked.

Herz on the other hand didn't appear to have much effect, since the war lasted another decade.

It probably wouldn't have changed anything if she had immolated herself on the steps of the Capitol. I wonder if any number of self-immolations at the Capitol would have changed anything. We were fighting "the good fight" against communism, saving the S. Vietnamese from a fate worse than death. [irony]

[EastsideAl]

This discussion is growing well outside of the scope of this thread, and indeed of this board, so I'm not going to engage in it much further than this. But before Mr. Shea gets too happy putting words [[and ideologies) in my mouth, I think I have to state that I am neither a pacifist nor sympathetic to Communism or Leninism. And the charge that the "American left" [[whatever that is - does he mean the tiny ranks of American Communists, or just anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan?) is, or was, somehow in love with Soviet-style Communism is a scare tactic that has been used to stall political change, roll back social progress, frighten people into supporting hugely wasteful and deadly military adventurism, and drive the flow of our funds to giant defense contractors for decades.

All this even though it is the American "left" that consistently stood on the side of greater expansion of political participation, social freedom, economic opportunity, expansion of democratic freedom in other countries, de-emphasizing of the military in foreign affairs, freedom from state and police intrusion into our private lives, and expansion of civil liberties in general - hardly stuff that a Communist state would tolerate - against an American right that continues to this day to to fight these things every step of the way.

One needn't have gone as far as Ms. Herz [[who, whatever the power of her convictions, comes off as somewhat mentally imbalanced in the very small amount of her own writings that are available), or even be a pacifist or some sort of apologist for Communism, in order to have opposed the enormously wasteful and deadly excesses of the Cold War era, such as the hugely wasteful flood of politically-motivated funds into the mostly non-productive defense sector, support of massively murderous foreign wars - whether fought directly by the U.S. or by our proxies - of dubious purpose, and our support of brutally repressive regimes around the world in the name of ideological stability [[and continued opportunity for American business interests). And almost all of us who opposed those things were neither Communists nor potential self-immolaters.

[RickBeall]

>>Or right-to-lifers self-igniting to protest Proposal 2 passing?

Or the Woman's rights activists could perform backed-dated abortions on themselves ... "This is for you Mom!"

[RaumVogel]

I was in second grade when this happened.I was traumatized by the cold war all my life.I grew up terrified of having to go to the F-ed up quagmire that was Vietnam.I can remember being angry as a child because my bugs bunny cartoon was interrupted by the assassination on JFK. Most of my friends dealt with all of this BS that we as children were exposed to by making jokes about it. What would you have us do? Cry because we were born into such a F-ed up world? No,we made joke about it, because that's the only way we could cope. I can still remember the joke going around my elementary school about this incident. Who's Alice? I don't know,but that hurts! Then came Alice's Restaurant and then Alice Cooper. There's a lot of Alice involved with Detroit. Maybe there wouldn't be so many of my generation that are cold and heartless if that wasn't the world we were forced to survive in!

/BTW, enjoy the current crappy economy...a lot of people living in poverty that will be blamed for their plight by the greedy worms that put them into this situation.

[BShea]

This discussion is growing well outside of the scope of this thread, and indeed of this board, so I'm not going to engage in it much further than this. But before Mr. Shea gets too happy putting words [[and ideologies) in my mouth, I think I have to state that I am neither a pacifist nor sympathetic to Communism or Leninism. And the charge that the "American left" [[whatever that is - does he mean the tiny ranks of American Communists, or just anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan?) is, or was, somehow in love with Soviet-style Communism is a scare tactic that has been used to stall political change, roll back social progress, frighten people into supporting hugely wasteful and deadly military adventurism, and drive the flow of our funds to giant defense contractors for decades.

All this even though it is the American "left" that consistently stood on the side of greater expansion of political participation, social freedom, economic opportunity, expansion of democratic freedom in other countries, de-emphasizing of the military in foreign affairs, freedom from state and police intrusion into our private lives, and expansion of civil liberties in general - hardly stuff that a Communist state would tolerate - against an American right that continues to this day to to fight these things every step of the way.

One needn't have gone as far as Ms. Herz [[who, whatever the power of her convictions, comes off as somewhat mentally imbalanced in the very small amount of her own writings that are available), or even be a pacifist or some sort of apologist for Communism, in order to have opposed the enormously wasteful and deadly excesses of the Cold War era, such as the hugely wasteful flood of politically-motivated funds into the mostly non-productive defense sector, support of massively murderous foreign wars - whether fought directly by the U.S. or by our proxies - of dubious purpose, and our support of brutally repressive regimes around the world in the name of ideological stability [[and continued opportunity for American business interests). And almost all of us who opposed those things were neither Communists nor potential self-immolaters.

So which allies are/were worth fighting to protect? We determined it was no longer worth expending blood and treasure to defend South Vietnam by 1973. We didn't think the Western democracies were worth actively aiding militarily in 1939-1940 until the Japanese bombed us in 1941. Was there some confusion about the Nazi invasion of the Low Counties, Poland and France by June 1940? Was there some reason to stand on the sideline, in the face of some of the purest evil mankind has ever witnessed? Apparently there was, but I don't understand the mindset that sees defense spending as tragic waste that takes from social spending -- as if it's one or the other.

After nearly 500,000 American deaths by 1945, we as a society determined that the moral slothfulness of America First-ism was pretty much not in our self interest. By then, the evils of Nazism and fascism had been replaced by the equally repugnant manifestations of Communism, which was more than happy to export itself around the world at a time when Western imperial holdings were in withdrawal mode. The Soviets had armies and missiles in Europe, poised to topple the West, and it along with China were exporting their poisonous ideology around the globe.

What, pray tell, should we have done? Purely negotiate, Chamberlain-style, in vain hope that words and treaties would buy off the Communists?

The Cold War was impure and imperfect, and without historic precedent to guide us, but the alternative of a lax America on the sidelines as a pacifist nation relying on rhetoric rather than military might is a nightmare scenario. The world would be a much darker, sadder place without our flawed efforts to oppose communism.

It's easy to bemoan the Cold War as simplistic warmongering and greed by bloodthirsty fools. But statecraft isn't conducted by the naive [[hopefully) anymore. And that doesn't mean I don't believe there is waste in greed in the defense sector -- there is. I just don't subscribe to the Zinn-like belief that everyone in power here is sinister and pursuing greedy, evil ends. And if they were, they are in other nations and we should be prepared to deal with that.

[EastsideAl]

I'm not going to take up the rest of your post, which is full of straw men [[like the U.S. as a "pacifist nation") or references extremely different historical contexts, such as the story of our involvement in WWII. But I'm always curious when I run into people who believe as you do about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, in what way exactly were we "defending Vietnam"? And what possible meaning could that "defense" have had for Vietnamese civilians, since our own actions killed millions of them - many of them citizens of "our" half of the country - permanently injured and maimed thousands more, and left the agricultural economy through much of the country destroyed by highly toxic chemicals?

[BShea]

I'm not going to take up the rest of your post, which is full of straw men [[like the U.S. as a "pacifist nation") or references extremely different historical contexts, such as the story of our involvement in WWII. But I'm always curious when I run into people who believe as you do about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, in what way exactly were we "defending Vietnam"? And what possible meaning could that "defense" have had for Vietnamese civilians, since our own actions killed millions of them - many of them citizens of "our" half of the country - permanently injured and maimed thousands more, and left the agricultural economy through much of the country destroyed by highly toxic chemicals?

Millions of people had fled North Vietnam when the nations were partitioned. Clearly, the bulk of South Vietnam preferred to remain non-communist. The Soviet Union -- seeking a year-round freshwater port for its Pacific fleet salivated over Cam Rahn Bay -- and Communist China were more than happy to supply arms and other materiel to the North. The United States supported a free, non-communist South Vietnam. You know the rest with the Domino Theory, which while criticized today made logical sense when you consider that communist insurrections were springing up in peasant/agrarian societies around the globe. There was value in showing the Communist Bloc that the West was willing to militarily engage it.

And yes, there was "mission creep" as we took over from the French imperial withdrawal. It's easy, from the armchair of 50 years later, for us to be critical of people making decisions at the time, but their worldview didn't have the benefit of another Vietnam for them to learn from. They thought they had learned lessons from the French -- and if you've read Bernard Fall's "Street Without Joy" you know those lessons had been available in print since the 1950s -- but obviously we did not in time. Yes, by 1970 the southern communist insurrection was, for all intents, defeated and it became a conventional war, but it was lost on the home front by then so it was wasted in that sense. However, a bungled war doesn't mean the conflict was without value. Empty words to the dead and their kin, but true nonetheless.

As for the death of Vietnamese civilians, while unfortunate, that's war. We leveled French towns in 1944 and South Korean towns in 1950. Gen. Sherman leveled everything in his path in 1864-65. American insurgents torched New York City in 1776 to deny its use to the British. To think civilians suddenly began to die by our firepower in 1965-1973 is wrong. It simply was magnified because of the increase in advanced weaponry/delivery systems and the presence of real-time news media that brought it home to the populace in ways that it hadn't in any other previous conflict.

How is the failure of the U.S. to act in 1940 when our two closest allies had fallen, or were threatening to fall, to the Nazis so different? Because WWII is the "good was" against which all other conflicts are judged? How is it good that we stood by while Europe fell to the Nazis? That is one of the most shameful episodes in our history, and my point was that a lesson had been learned - never again.

Pacifist/non-interventionist forces had been at work in America in the 1930s and early 1940s -- the American First crowd and the odious Father Coughlin -- and that reflected the general view of the United States while the world went to war. We learned our lesson, that letter evil hold sway will eventually be more costly than dealing with it head on. Soviet and Maoist communism was every bit as horrid as the Nazis, and killed more people.

[rid0617]

I was in second grade when this happened.I was traumatized by the cold war all my life.I grew up terrified of having to go to the F-ed up quagmire that was Vietnam.I can remember being angry as a child because my bugs bunny cartoon was interrupted by the assassination on JFK. Most of my friends dealt with all of this BS that we as children were exposed to by making jokes about it. What would you have us do? Cry because we were born into such a F-ed up world? No,we made joke about it, because that's the only way we could cope. I can still remember the joke going around my elementary school about this incident. Who's Alice? I don't know,but that hurts! Then came Alice's Restaurant and then Alice Cooper. There's a lot of Alice involved with Detroit. Maybe there wouldn't be so many of my generation that are cold and heartless if that wasn't the world we were forced to survive in!

/BTW, enjoy the current crappy economy...a lot of people living in poverty that will be blamed for their plight by the greedy worms that put them into this situation.

Reading your post brought to mind all those stupid nuclear bomb drills that forced you to hide under your desk. Never quite understood what being under the desk would do to protect me from radiation

[9mile&seneca]

And then there's that little thing that LBJ and his cronies [[I'd be willing to bet McNamara)were making buttloads of money by prolonging the "WAR" calling cease fires and then having to regain the same ground over and over again. That really saved America. Thank you LBJ for our not being a socialist country.

[CindyJaroh]

Does anyone remember the self-immolation of Alice Herz in 1965? Apparently, it happened on a street corner somewhere in Detroit in March of 1965. Where did this happen and does anyone know anymore about it? Usually, when we think of self immolation, we think of that image of Buddhist monks in Vietnam burning to death.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Herz

My dad and my brothers were the people who tried to save her. I wasn't born yet but they have spoken about this. My brothers were young boys [[10 & 13) and this is something they will never forget.