Here's the Wikipedia article on Norman Morrison:
Filmmaker Errol Morris interviewed Secretary McNamara at length on camera in his documentary film, The Fog of War, in which McNamara says, "[Morrison] came to the Pentagon, doused himself with gasoline. Burned himself to death below my office ... his wife issued a very moving statement - 'human beings must stop killing other human beings' - and that's a belief that I shared, I shared it then, I believe it even more strongly today". McNamara then posits, "How much evil must we do in order to do good? We have certain ideals, certain responsibilities. Recognize that at times you will have to engage in evil, but minimize it."
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31 comments:
"suicide victim" ?
The war would go on for ten more years (though the US itself was out of Viet Nam after 1973). He wasted his protest and his life.
At least America learned her lesson and won't elect another micromanaging, warmongering president.
That McNamara. What a compassionate guy.
"50 Years ago today..."
"Time to play B-sides"?
"engage in evil" = serve in the Johnson administration
every generation has it's own peculiar aberrations
He was not a suicide victim, but a murderer.
When the good people win a war, they stop the killing. When the bad people win a war, the killing intensifies.
That is one difference between the US and Communists. Or the Spanish fascists and Communists. Or the Chilean junta and Communists. Or anyone and Communists.
And the same seems to go for the world and Islamists.
Of such sublte distinctions as the height of the piles of skulls are the good and bad winners of wars determined.
The Germans have a word for this....selbstmorder. Quite literally, self-murder.
Yes, I need an umlaut over the 'o'.
Even the guy who protested killing ended up killing himself to prove a point.
He rid the world of his evil doing everyone a favor.
LBJ personally started and extended the useless Asian land war against a 25 year old colonial insurgency against France, Japan, France again and finally the John Burch wing of the anti-communists. There never was a good reason except for talk about a domino theory and a desire to re-train young Americans in war like their daddy's used to do.
'human beings must stop killing other human beings'
Jeez, you have to be a left-wing idiot to offer up these type of vapid slogans.
The only thing to stop bad human beings from killing other human beings is for good human beings to intercede, often with force. (see, WWII, allied invasion of Normandy, 6 June 44).
Vietnam was thornier, perhaps messier, perhaps a bit opaque, but if one were to recognize that the Communist North was trying to invade, repress, subjugate the Non-Communist South, well, it's a good place to start, on why we felt it was necessary to make war on the North Vietnamese.
Now Viet Nam truly was a "war of northern aggression", just like the old mint julep drinkers used to refer to our Civil War. You could say the same thing about the Korean War.
That's not really fair though--the reasons for the Northern half of an artificially divided state or linguistic group invading or seeking to take over/unify the entire state are more complicated than that.
But unlike Traditional Guy, I'm not going to heap all the blame for the Viet Nam war on LBJ. Our Sainted President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had a big hand in starting our military involvement in Southeast Asia; also had at least some responsibility for the assassination/murder of President Diem--and 'twas JFK who made McNamara Secretary of Defense--and appointed the Bundy's and Walt Rostow. JFK's fingerprints are all over the start of Viet Nam.
Never mind that we left a lot of people to deal with unadultered Hell in Cambodia and Vietnam.
While Vietnam was a war we would have been better off staying out of, it never made sense that opponents of the war were quite so animated to the point of setting themselves on fire or in lesser cases risking criminal records in their protests (unless it was more about signalling and being in the right social groups, which I suspect was the driving force for most protesters). Every single "immoral" thing the U.S. did had worse precedents in our "good" wars:
1) Going to war against a weaker country? We basically did that for every war since 1812.
2) Widespread accidental killing of civilians? Have we ever!
3) Going to war overseas where our country's security wasn't directly threatened? It's a bit more muddy here, but Germany certainly in the first war and arguably in the second war was not a threat to us except insofar as we were sending volunteers and our shipping into a war zone. Germany did declare war on us, so while they weren't in imminent threat they were a long term threat. But by strictly pacifist terms, we provoked them by violating our neutrality in supporting the British and sinking U-boats.
4) Americans dying in overseas war? We lost hundreds of thousands in WWII compared to tens of thousands in Vietnam.
The anti-Vietnam War argument best boils down to "not worth the sacrifices" which is fine and all, but to lose yourself over it seems a bit like something else is going on.
How come Quakers never protest against North Korea? (I mean, by going to the DMZ or the Chinese border and attempting to march across peacefully.) They strike me as disgusting hypocrites.
Here is a book about something else McNamara and LBJ orchestrated: Click
I went through basic in 1969, and can vouch for this.
The Fog of War is the best documentary I have ever seen.
I really enjoyed "The Fog of War," too. Excellent documentary -- McNamara's mea culpa. But, still not a fan of McNamara. What an educated fool. He died at the ripe old age of 93, peacefully, on his estate in Martha's Vineyards, after basically giving us the Otter treatment from Animal House -- 40 years after the fact:
"You f%@%^@# up. You trusted us. Now make the best of it."
God ordered human beings to murder human beings. I read it somewhere.
Killing yourself to protest killing- Is it hypocrisy or just ironic? In any event, it's a fruitless wasteful gesture that serves no good. The man's daughter lost a father, not to mention the trauma of witnessing him burn to death, and for what? Cause he opposed a war? Did he change anybody's mind or opinion? Sad- sounds like the guy was mentally unwell to put his baby through that, set his own child on fire to protest a war- Then again, maybe he was just a progressive democrat after all.
Yeah, that same McNamara, who did well by doing evil, and a war criminal like Kissinger, whom we still hope to capture and put on trial in South America.
Jimbino"...we still hope to capture.."
LOL
You keep using "we" in the most amusing ways.
Traditionalguy said: "except for talk about a domino theory"- Yeah, let's ask 2 million dead Cambodians and another half a million Vietnamese dead, imprisoned and exiled about that domino theory crazy-talk- Those silly John Birchers. Don't they know that Walter Cronkite passed judgement on them in 1968? Domino Theory? Ha ha ha- domino theory, what's that? Something about pizza?
Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan . . . . The lesson is, don't get into a war you aren't going to win.
("You" doesn't mean the President; it means the country.)
Madame Nhu, is that you?
Why was there only one? Why don't they all do us a favor and burn themselves to death?
3rd paragraph of the NYT article:
The suicide victim had with him his blond, blue-eyed, one-year-old daughter.
Why did we need to know about the baby's hair and eye color? I'm reminded of the Onion article:
Area Homosexual Saves Four From Fire
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