Spectacle and Nonviolent Struggles During the Vietnam War

Disclaimer: The following blog post is not a reflection of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s opinion on the below topics.

Warning: The following article contains images of self-harm, as well as violence against protestors and minors. Although frightening and upsetting, these images are necessary to understand why and how Vietnam War protestors conducted protest in the way they did.

[Letter from the author]

To whomever it may concern,

My name is Rae Kalscheuer and I have worked for the Nonviolence Project this past academic year. As you’ll see through my articles, I am incredibly interested in nonviolence as a tactic for change. Often, nonviolence is not an overarching philosophy and way of life for protestors, but a way to gain sympathy for causes, raise awareness, or help their communities when the powers at be will not.

My article “Spectacle and Nonviolent Struggles During the Vietnam War” exemplifies what I’ve done up to this point. It takes a controversial form of protest and contextualizes it within a specific time period. My goal, as I hope is clear through the language of the article, is to show how this was a response to the actions happening in Vietnam. As someone with conflicted opinions on the practice myself –especially after further research for this article– I do not condemn nor uplift the practice of self-immolation. It is controversial, it is captivating, and it is impossible to ignore.

Additionally, over the past year I have done extensive research for my senior thesis which touches upon both the role of Quakers’ resistance (though in a different context) and the Vietnam War. I also have interest and experience in exploring art in a historical context. While I believe this practice and the images I include are disturbing, they provide powerful artistic and symbolic resonances to the violence being inflicted upon the Vietnamese. I felt that as much focus as possible should be placed on these images. This is why I included them without captions, even without looking at the history I wrote around them, these images tell a story that you or your parents or your grandparents lived through in real time. People were seeing unspeakable violence done to others and so they did unspeakable violence to themselves. How to better illustrate that than through the images seen by people living through the Vietnam War every day?

On a different note, there is only one mention of self-immolation on the entire website. I believe as a cutting-edge resource on the topic of global nonviolence it is unthinkable that we would not include such a popular method of resistance on our site. As historians, it is important for us to explain how these things come to be, so that our audience can fully understand these past events and their relationship to the present. Although it would be false to say recent events have not inspired this article, I feel that I have clearly demonstrated my interest in these topics beyond their connections to our current times.

Best,
Rae Kalscheuer

By Rae Kalscheuer

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It’s the late 1960s. A small, boxy television flickers on in the den just in time to catch the beginning of the nightly news. Like many nights before– and many to come– images of death and destruction from some far off communist country in Asia light up the room. American soldiers, Vietnamese children, and endless clouds of smoke fill every inch of the TV set. The first televised war, the Vietnam War, has entered into the households of America.^[1]

For the ninety percent of Americans whose households had a television, this was their daily reality.^[3] Images of bombs and napalm burning up the Vietnamese countryside left many with a feeling of dread and helplessness in the face of a war many of them did not support or understand. Nonviolent protest against the war was an outlet for many at this time to try to stop what must have felt like an endless series of violence. However, no form of protest was more fitting to the spectacle-driven Vietnam War than self-immolation.

Self-immolation is an extreme, controversial form of resistance in which a person lights themselves on fire and dies in the name of a specific cause. The incredibly emotional and evocative image of a human being burning to death is a guaranteed attention grabber. It is also an act which defies apathy. Intentional and spectacular suicides through self-immolation force empathy onto a viewer– it forces them to consider what cause is so important that it could compel a person to douse themselves in gasoline and light a match.

Although many consider this an act of violence, even if only against oneself, those in the Buddhist tradition like Thích Quảng Đức (the man in the image above) did not. For Buddhists, a famously peaceful and introspective religious group, self-immolation is viewed as a way for protestors to sacrifice their lives in order to stop further violence.^[5] Therefore, this approach justifies violence to one’s own body in the pursuit of a nonviolent world. Protesting the religious persecution of Buddhists in South Vietnam in 1963, Thích Quảng Đức believed his sacrifice would lead to an end of the persecution he and his colleagues faced.^[6] His protest would go on to inspire many more self-immolations as the Vietnam War dragged on.

One such protest was Norman Morrison’s. Morrison was a Quaker, who are a group of Christians known for their pacifism and continued resistance to injustice across the world. On the morning of November 2nd, 1965, Morrison went to the Pentagon and burnt himself alive in full view of then current Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s window.^[8] Despite not being Buddhist and the Quaker’s teachings against suicide, Morrison believed so strongly this was what he was meant to do that he left his wife and infant daughter in a moment of excruciating self-sacrifice. This act, although not caught on camera, evoked a powerful image for many. The North Vietnamese even commemorated his protest in the stamp above which depicts Morrison awash in flame behind images of other American picketers arguing for an end to the Vietnam War.

As alluded to above, the ever-present role of fire within the Vietnam War only made self-immolations a more prescient form of protest. Napalm, a petroleum jelly like substance which causes fire upon contact, was used heavily during the war by the Americans. Its sticky texture made it nearly impossible to remove without severely injuring oneself. The image above of children running away from napalm being sprayed down on them from the sky in 1972 portrays the horror of being burned with the substance. The young girl in the middle has already been stripped in an unsuccessful attempt to remove the napalm before it could touch her skin. Although this image postdates the self-immolations previously discussed, the controversial use of napalm throughout the war provided a powerful connection point to the self-immolators. They burned themselves on purpose in an attempt to stop the involuntary burning of the Vietnamese public by the United States.

While some try to undermine these self-immolations as a form of nonviolent protest because they were self-inflicted, it is important to remember that even those who did not intentionally put themselves in the line of fire would die due to their nonviolent resistance to the Vietnam War. College students at Kent State were famously shot down in 1970 by national guardsmen for the act of protesting the Vietnam War. In an examination of this photograph, scholars Hariman and Lucaites argue “the image’s emotionality has a totalizing force: it calls for peace, but peace that would end both war and demonstrations.”^[11] Instead of looking at self-immolation as an entirely separate entity from nonviolent protest, Đức and Morrison can be seen as people making a self-conscious attempt towards this same goal. Their deaths were meant to be an end to all of it; an end to the war, as well as to their own resistance to that war.

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^[1]Jessie Kratz, “Vietnam: The First Television War,” National Archives and Records Administration, https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2018/01/25/vietnam-the-first-television-war/.

^[2]Napalm bombs explode on Viet Cong structures south of Saigon in the Republic of Vietnam. 1965. Photo. Color Photographs of U.S. Air Force Activities, Facilities, and Personnel, Domestic and Foreign ca. 1940 – ca. 1980, National Archives at College Park, College Park, Maryland.

^[3]“Research Guides: American Women: Resources from the Moving Image Collections: Television.” Television – American Women: Resources from the Moving Image Collections – Research Guides at Library of Congress. https://guides.loc.gov/american-women-moving-image/television#:~:text=In%201950%20only%209%20percent,figure%20had%20reached%2090%20percent.

^[4] Malcolm Browne (American, 1931-2012), and Wide World Photos, publisher. Buddhist Monk Thich Quang Duc Sets Himself Ablaze in Protest against Alleged Religious Persecution by the South Vietnamese Government, Saigon. June 11, 1963. Gelatin silver print, 8 1/8 x 10 in. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Gift of an anonymous donor in memory of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros. https://jstor.org/stable/community.12039964.

^[5]John Soboslai, “Violently Peaceful: Tibetan Self-Immolation and the Problem of the Non/Violence Binary,”  Open Theology 1, no. 1 (2015): 153.

^[6]Nicholas Patler, “Norman’s Triumph: The Transcendent Language of Self-Immolation.” Quaker History 104, no. 2 (2015): 19.

^[7]“Norman R. Morrison.” Stamp. Vietstamp. https://www.vietstamp.net/en/postage-stamp-of-vietnam/postage-stamps-of-the-democratic-republic-of-vietnam/1965/norman-rmorrison/.

^[8] Nicholas Patler, “Norman’s Triumph: The Transcendent Language of Self-Immolation.” Quaker History 104, no. 2 (2015): 28.

^[9]Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut (American, 1951-). Phan Thi Kim Phuc (Center) Flees from the Scene Where South Vietnamese Planes Have Mistakenly Dropped Napalm. June 8, 1972. Gelatin silver print, 16 x 19 7/8 in. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; museum purchase. https://jstor.org/stable/community.9927453.

^[10]Kent State University. 1970. https://jstor.org/stable/community.13885495.

^[11]Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites. “Dissent and Emotional Management in a Liberal-Democratic Society: The Kent State Iconic Photograph.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31, no. 3 (2001): 5–31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3886040.