Dying to Stop a War

Greg Mitchell at The Nation reminds us what a real anti-war protest looks like:

The wars in Iraq an Afghanistan were notably, and tragically, absent as campaign issues this autumn. Street demonstrations? Very scattered. Various forms of protest continue online but it's a long way from the heated Vietnam era. This Monday, in fact, marks the 41st anniversary of the largest mass antiwar march ever, the November 15, 1969, demo in Washington, DC, which I attended as a college student.

But this month marks another notable anniversary in the annals of Vietnam protest: the day Norman Morrison, a 31-year-old Quaker from Baltimore handed his infant daughter off to a bystander, doused himself with kerosene and set himself ablaze under Pentagon chief Robert McNamara's window at the Pentagon.

One week later, on November 10, 1965, another antiwar protester, Roger LaPorte, did the same thing in front of the United Nations building in New York.

Morrison had been particularly saddened by the burning of villages and killing of civilians in Vietnam. A Catholic priest's account of a bombing in a Vietnamese village particularly distressed him. He had resisted taxes, demonstrated, and lobbied in Washington, but now said to his wife (she recalls), "It's not enough. What can be done to stop this war?"

In his final letter to Anne, his wife (they had three children), he wrote, "Know that I love thee, but I must go to help the children of the priest's village." It is believed that he carried his daughter to the Pentagon that day to remind him of the children he was trying to save in Vietnam.

McNamara would later describe Morrison's death as "a tragedy not only for his family but also for me and the country. It was an outcry against the killing that was destroying the lives of so many Vietnamese and American youth."

Morrison became a kind of folk hero in US antiwar circles, his name or face carried on antiwar posters for several years. North Vietnam named a street after him and issued a stamp in his honor—the possession of which was declared illegal in the US. Morrison's widow visited Vietnam in 1999 and met a poet who had written a tribute to her husband. On a visit to this country in 2007, Nguyen Minh Triet, the country's leader, read the poem near the site where Morrison set himself ablaze.

Read the whole thing.

I can't remember the last day that passed without a press release from DoD:

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

More than 1,300 young men and women - children and spouses and parents - cut down in their prime for nothing.

No, not for nothing. They died - and continue to die - for Wall Street and Halliburton and Lockheed Martin and Blackwater and oh yes indeed BP.

They died - and continue to die - because George W. Bush is a sociopathic arrested adolescent with a mommy complex and a teeny-tiny dick.

They died -and continue to die - because Barack Obama - tragically just like McNamara 45 years ago - doesn't have the guts to say what I'm sure he believes: that this clusterfuck is destroying the nation and has to stop.

But no, Afghanistan is not Vietnam. Not until another Norman Morrison stands before the White House gates, hands his infant daughter to a bystander, pours kerosene over his head and sets himself on fire.