Re: Chang change - Malachi Ritsche - Norman Morrison - Quang Duc - unnamed monk in Phanthiet - Thich Nu Thanh Quang - Alice Herz

Tragic and senseless. I see no nobility or courage in torching oneself to make a point. It makes far more sense and takes far more courage to stick around and find a way to effect change.

A martyr is someone who suffers or is put to death for their principles, at the hands of someone else. To die by one's own hand simply stops a person's own suffering, but does nothing to alleviate the suffering of others; in most cases, it increases it.

(Buddhist monk self-immolation excepted ... if anyone asks I will tell them why I feel this way)

blue wrote:
From Norman Morrison to Malachi Ritscher
Self-Immolation as Anti-War Protest
By JOE DeRAYMOND

"When you own a big chunk of the bloody third world, dead babies just come with the scenery"

Chrissie Hynde, from "Middle of the Road", by The Pretenders

In November of 2005, the United States used white phosphorus munitions against the people of Fallujah, Iraq. Jeff Englehart, a former marine who spent two days in Fallujah during the battle, said he heard the order go out over military communication that WP was to be dropped. Mr Englehart, now an outspoken critic of the war, says: "I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military jargon it's known as Willy Pete ... Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone ... I saw the burned bodies of women and children." (as reported by Andrew Buncombe and Solomon Hughes: 15 November 2005, The Independent)

On November 3, 2006, on an off-ramp during rush hour in Chicago, Malachi Ritscher immolated himself. News reports have made much of the fact that his death had no immediate impact, since he was not identified for many days, and because the national news did not pick it up for several weeks. He is characterized as a troubled man. These are the words he left behind in his suicide note: "Here is the statement I want to make: if I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country... If one death can atone for anything, in any small way, to say to the world: I apologize for what we have done to you, I am ashamed for the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country."

In March of 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized the use of napalm against the people of Vietnam. Napalm is a burning gel that sticks to the skin, and made flame throwers and incendiary explosives a staple of the US arsenal against Vietnam. A Business Week article (February 10, 1969) termed the chemical "the fiery essence of all that is horrible about the war in Vietnam."

On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison immolated himself within sight of Robert McNamara's window at the Pentagon, to protest the war in Vietnam. Norman did not leave a suicide note. His friend John Roemer described his action as follows, "I don't know. I don't know. He fought the war more and more deeply. I mean, when are you one of the Germans?...You have to be mentally different to fly in the face of received wisdom in this country. He played it out in his mind, I think, in terms of being a moral witness", and, "In a society where it is normal for human beings to drop bombs on human targets, where it is normal to spend 50 percent of the individual's tax dollar on war, where it is normal...to have twelve times overkill capacity, Norman Morrison was not normal. He said, 'Let it stop' ".

The Vietnamese canonized Norman Morrison. Streets were named after him, a postage stamp was printed with his image, poems were written in his memory. The most quoted, by To Huu, includes this stanza:

McNamara!
Where are you hiding? In the graveyard
Of your five-cornered house
Each corner a continent.
You hide yourself
From the flaming world
As an ostrich hides its head in the
burning sand.

Norman was one of several people who chose to become a victim of the fire of the Vietnam War. Others include Vietnamese Buddhist monks, Quang Duc, June 1963, in Saigon; an unnamed monk in Phanthiet, August, 1963; Thich Nu Thanh Quang, in Hue, 1966. Each death galvanized opinion and resistance to the war within Vietnam. On March 16, 1965, Alice Herz, an 82 year old pacifist, immolated herself on a Detroit street corner. She stated in her suicide note, that she was protesting "the use of high office by our President, L.B.J., in trying to wipe out small nations." And "I wanted to call attention to this problem by choosing the illuminating death of a Buddhist." A week after Norman Morrison's death, Roger LaPorte burned himself in protest in front of the United Nations in New York. In May of 1970, George Winne, Jr., burned himself in protest of the Vietnam War on the University of California campus in San Diego. (See Frances Farmer's Revenge.)

Coverage of the sacrifice of Malachi Ritscher has been obsessively concerned with his sanity. The AP article on his death includes this conclusion, "Mental health experts say virtually no suicides occur without some kind of a diagnosable mental illness." Our government and its experts expect that rational citizens living rational United States lives understand that the burning of civilians is just part of the scenery, a necessary element of foreign policy. A person who actually takes responsibility for the purposes to which his/her tax monies are being devoted is by definition insane. It is a world turned upside down, in which torture, napalm and white phosphorus are "legal", and peaceful protest criminal. It is no mystery to me that there are human souls who cannot bear the light of truth, and choose to join the victims of our culture's madness.

http://www.counterpunch.org/deraymond11292006.html



"blue" <rainbowblue_rfoll@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:g2io37$s56$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15916765/

War protester's fiery suicide provokes questions
Man's flaming body was meant to be a symbol of rage, but no one listened


updated 5:42 a.m. PT, Mon., Nov. 27, 2006
CHICAGO - Malachi Ritscher envisioned his death as one full of purpose.

He carefully planned the details, mailed a copy of his apartment key to a friend, created to-do lists for his family. On his Web site, the 52-year-old experimental musician who'd fought with depression even penned his obituary.

At 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 3 - four days before an election caused a seismic shift in Washington politics - Ritscher, a frequent anti-war protester, stood by an off-ramp in downtown Chicago near a statue of a giant flame, set up a video camera, doused himself with gasoline and lit himself on fire.

Aglow for the crush of morning commuters, his flaming body was supposed to be a call to the nation, a symbol of his rage and discontent with the U.S. war in Iraq.

"Here is the statement I want to make: if I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country," he wrote in his suicide note. "... If one death can atone for anything, in any small way, to say to the world: I apologize for what we have done to you, I am ashamed for the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country."

There was only one problem: No one was listening.

It took five days for the Cook County medical examiner to identify the charred-beyond-recognition corpse. Meanwhile, Ritscher's suicide went largely unnoticed. It wasn't until a reporter for an alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader, pieced the facts together that word began to spread.

Soon, tributes - and questions - poured in to the paper's blogs.

Martyr or man consumed by mental illness?
Was this a man consumed by mental illness? Or was Ritscher a martyr driven by rage over what he saw as an unjust war? Was he a convenient symbol for an anti-war movement or was there more to his message?

"This man killed himself in such a painful way, specifically to get our attention on these things," said Jennifer Diaz, a 28-year-old graduate student who never met him but has been researching his life. Now, she is organizing protests and vigils in his name. "I'm not going to sit by and I can't sit by and let this go unheard."

Mental health experts say virtually no suicides occur without some kind of a diagnosable mental illness. But Ritscher's family disagrees about whether he had severe mental problems.

In a statement, Ritscher's parents and siblings called him an intellectually gifted man who suffered from bouts of depression. They stopped short of saying he'd ever received a clinical diagnosis of mental illness.

"He believed in his actions, however extreme they were," his younger brother, Paul Ritscher, wrote online. "He believed they could help to open eyes, ears and hearts and to show everyone that a single man's actions, by taking such extreme personal responsibility, can perhaps affect change in the world."

His son, who shares the same name as his father, said his father was trying to cope with mental illness. Suicide seemed to be the next step, and the war was a way to give his death meaning.

"He was different people at different instances and so, so erratic. I loved him no doubt, but he was a very lonely and tragic man," said Ritscher, 35, who is estranged from the rest of the family. "The idea of being a martyr I'm sure was attractive. He could literally go out in a blaze of glory."

Born in Dickinson, N.D., with the name Mark David, Ritscher dropped out of high school, married at 17 and divorced 10 years later. Eventually, he would change his name to match his son's and, coincidentally, a world-famous prophet. At the end, he worked in building maintenance and was a fixture in Chicago's experimental music scene.

He described himself as a renaissance man who'd amassed a collection of more than 2,000 musical recordings from clubs in Chicago. He was a writer, philosopher and photographer. He was an alcoholic who collected fossils, glass eyes, light bulbs and snare drums. He paid $25 to become an ordained minister with the Missionaries of the New Truth and operated a handful of Web sites protesting the Iraq war.

A member of Mensa who claimed to be able to recite the infinite number Pi to more than 1,000 decimal places, he titled his obituary "Out of Time." Friends, who seemed surprised about his death, found themselves searching for answers. Ritscher's death became even more enigmatic than his life.

'Too hard for them'
Perhaps the most famous self-immolation occurred in 1963, when Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc burned himself at a Saigon intersection in protest against the south Vietnamese regime. Another activist, Kathy Change, lit fire to herself in 1996 at the University of Pennsylvania to protest the government and the country's economic system.

Ritscher's death brought back memories for Anita King, a 48-year-old artist from West Philadelphia who was Change's best friend.

"I think both of them, they just felt like their death could be the last drop of blood shed," King said. "It was too hard for them. They had too much of a conscious connection to the struggle to go on in their lives."

In the end, only Ritscher knew the motivations for his suicide. There is little doubt, though, that he was satisfied with his choice.

"Without fear I go now to God," Ritscher wrote in the last sentence of his suicide note. "Your future is what you will choose today."

"SoyUz" <Veggywow@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:dfe7cdcb-c695-43ef-a9b7-76ccfdb8745c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
she burned herself alive in front uv duh U of Penn.

" October 24, 1996
Kathleen Chang was an eccentric to some and a valiant voice for social
justice to others, but she was hard to ignore: in the summer, she wore
a bikini to her protests, in the winter, leotards. Sometimes it was a
suit of faux marijuana to grab attention for the one-woman political
demonstrations she staged for 15 years on the University of
Pennsylvania campus.

On Tuesday, feeling that her cause for social ''transformation'' was
not getting through, Ms. Chang, 46, held her final protest. At 11:20
A.M., as students walked across campus or sat on the green, she stood
before a sculpture of a peace sign, poured a bucket of gasoline over
her thin frame and set herself afire. She was pronounced dead shortly
afterward."




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