Even burned flesh does not win arguments

If the smell of defeat isn't disturbing, how disturbing is the smell of burning flesh? Like many things, it all depends on the audience:

Gestures must express some deep but unexpressed emotion to be effective. Roland gave the performance of his life but the gallery was empty.
(Via Glenn Reynolds.)

Roland was a Lutheran vicar in Germany, who burned himself to death to protest Islamic hegemony in Europe. But as Wretchard notes, the gallery was quite full when a Buddhist monk set fire to himself in Vietnam:

Thich Quang Duc's action was front page New York Times News. Pictures of it were on President Kennedy's desk the next day. It was regarded as a tremendous public relations blow against "the American backed South Vietnamese government and its war against the Communist supported Viet Cong". Even though it had nothing to do with Communism at all, it is possible that many Americans, shown the picture today, would misidentify it as a protest against the US troops in Vietnam, although American troops would not be there in numbers for two more years.
This prompted commenter hdgreene (who has a blog) to add a sardonic remark:
He should have screamed "Bush out of Iraq!"
If he had, his death would have gotten a higher audience rating.

Interestingly, when University of Pennsylvania activist Cathy Change burned herself to death in 1996, a major part of her message was that she wanted Clinton out of Iraq:

Clinton seems to think that since all the targets of his missile attacks in the first week of September were military targets, those strikes were ok. Wait a minute. How would the Pentagon feel if American bases on the U. S. mainland had been attacked by missiles of a hostile country? The Pentagon would probably act like it had just been shot in the testicles. Can there be any doubt its response would be war? Military attacks on any target, military or civilian, should not be undertaken lightly. Indeed they should not be undertaken at all...

The average person is essentially well-intentioned, and to such a person it may be inconceivable that his government is motivated by pure evil. But looking at the whole picture, an impartial person must finally conclude that the true objective of the U.S. government is to destroy America and the world.

While I think that Cathy Change's self-immolation over Iraq would have gotten far more attention today under Bush than it did then under Clinton, the fact remains that in terms of pure logic, self immolation does little to advance the argument which it is intended to advance, because it adds nothing to the argument beyond the obvious fact that the person who self immolates is willing to die for his or her beliefs.

That's probably why the deaths tend to be noticed more by people who agree with the beliefs than by people who don't. The more such deaths occur, the more callused people become, and thus the less effective they are.

No matter how passionately you feel about something, dying for it will not make you any more right than you were before you died. While martyrdom might inspire people under certain circumstances, I think that in general the longer you live, the more you can accomplish. People who believe in their principles so strongly that they're willing to die for them would do better to channel that same energy into living.

That's why people who want to live will generally defeat people who want to die.

posted by Eric on 11.05.06 at 01:28 PM





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