Vietnam critic’s end was the start of family’s pain | Hacker News Reader

Vietnam critic’s end was the start of family’s pain

washingtonpost.com

23 pointssmollett13 comments

Nobody here is showing the other perspective: that of the millions of Vietnamese whose hearts were touched by his actions. He was a martyr for the Vietnamese people. Vietnamese schoolchildren learned a poem by heart - by Vietnam's poet laureate - about Morrison's brave sacrifice. He is a national hero ther, and is still remembered there for what he did.

Read http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/16/norman-m... for a better description than I can do.

One lesson? The moment ideology enters a scene, we pretend that's what it's all about. Even his surviving family can only talk about his unhappiness in a purely political context. The writer doesn't note that the man's behavior leading up to the suicide is strongly reminiscent of other suicides and family annihilators. Many people reading this article will only think of the war and pacifism and not this guy's humanity.

It's similar to how many people imagine suicide bombers are just random fervent Muslims given an explosive vest. In actuality, their recruiters target depressed and traumatized people and try to sell them a way out of their pain.

It's usually foolish to 2nd guess a plane crash if you weren't the pilot

No it’s not. We second guess every plane crash trying to figure out exactly what happened and how we can prevent another crash in the future. Lessons learned are then passed on to other pilots. The NTSB and other safety boards are huge second guessers and it’s how aviation has become as safe as it is today. Certainly you want to appreciate the stressors the pilot was under, but that’s no excuse for not evaluating the actions he or she took leading up to the crash.

But what's being second guessed here is the state of mind of the pilot, or the protester. You don't know that person, only what you read in the accident report or the news article. You don't know what was going on in that person's life or head at the moment of crisis.

On the contrary, it's meaningless to view this only through psychology. Was the monk who self-immolated in Vietnam depressed? Psychology doesn't have the vocabulary in place to understand political emotions, and the only people who insist that political emotions don't exist are people who would prefer you didn't have them.

This action is inseparable from the politics that created it -- that's why people talk about politics in its context. Was it a cold action that hurt his wife and the people closest to him? Yes. But was it also a bold humanitarian move that made him a hero in Vietnam? Yes. It's possible for something to be both political and personal, and this article didn't try to oversimplify that.

How about a different lesson? That unnecessary war causes untold suffering.

"On the contrary, it's meaningless to view this only through psychology"

Nice excluded middle. But realistically, this man wasn't a humanitarian hero. He accomplished nothing--nothing changed due to his immolation. Except that he died, which looks like it was his actual and ultimate goal.

If he had had the foresight to somehow get a reporter with camera onsite, guaranteeing a photo, I think the impact of this would have been far greater.

A 1% chance of ending the Vietnam War in 1965 was probably objectively worth one man's sacrifice. (Suicide is horrible, but on utilitarian grounds of greatest good for greatest number.) I'm not sure what the actual odds were. Pentagon Papers clearly had a bigger impact and no one died. There were probably other effective anti-war protests which could have been used, too. (I personally would listen to military officers breaking ranks and explaining why the war is unwinnable as it was being prosecuted much more closely than I'd listen to arbitrary hippie anti-war protestors; particularly someone who had actually served in Vietnam in a capacity to see that firsthand, and who was advocating a reasonable course. Similarly I listen to Binney/Drake/Wiebe, Snowden, etc. far more seriously than random anti-NSA-on-moral-grounds people.)

"The future will repeat the recent past until some catastrophe changes our current way of implementing republican government, and Americans may not like what that change will bring." - Major General (Rtd) Mike Symanski

There was also presumably some pain for the families of 2 million or so Vietnamese killed. Maybe the moral is to avoid wars even if the alternatives are less glamorous. The US could have allied with the Vietnamese and basically bribed them to adopt liberal values rather than going the puppet government and military intervention route.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com