Malachi Ritscher, a denizen of Chicago’s avant-garde jazz scene, committed suicide by self-immolation on November 3. In this suicide note he explained that his intention was to protest the Iraq war.
Peter Margasak’s Nov. 7 blog report is worth reading; so is this lengthier comment by Nitsuh Abebe of Pitchfork Media.
Many of the comments that follow Margasak’s post take issue with the view that Ritscher was simply mentally ill, arguing instead that this was a courageous and principled act of political dissent. Ritscher’s death is undeniably tragic, and the background of his obvious mental suffering is very sad. But these commenters are buying right into his clinical delusions of grandeur, which are clear in the very first paragraph of his suicide note. “I would prefer to be thought of as a ‘spiritual warrior’,” he tells us. The commenters fulfill his request, with a credulity that would be comical if it weren’t so unseemly.
The world has far too many so-called “spiritual warriors,” from the brainwashed children of “Jesus Camp” to the suicide bombers currently pursuing a massive campaign of slaughter in Iraq. And there’s the irony: This is all supposed to be about the suffering of the Iraqi people, but one of the commenters, “Sweejak,” writes the following, and is not challenged:
I have no problem understanding the mind of a suicide bomber, it isn’t mysterious or unfathomable, while not as pre-meditated it’s the same reason people jumped out of the burning WTC…. no option.
Leave aside, if you can, the obscene moral equivalence this posits between the perpetrators and the victims of 9/11. The commenters are furious about injustice in Iraq, but then one of them justifies the very method — suicide bombing — that is claiming the lives of more and more Iraqi civilians by the day. This blindness — ignorance posing as enlightenment — is all too common in today’s antiwar movement. I’m afraid it’s evident in Ritscher’s suicide note, which is otherwise an unremarkable far-left screed, save perhaps this:
I have had one previous opportunity to serve my country in a meaningful way – at 8:05 one morning in 2002 I passed Donald Rumsfeld on Delaware Avenue and I was acutely aware that slashing his throat would spare the lives of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people. I had a knife clenched in my hand, and there were no bodyguards visible; to my deep shame I hesitated, and the moment was past.
Abebe of Pitchfork Media gets this exactly right: “This is frightening and morally confused, the same logic that animates people to gun down reproductive health workers.” In other words, it’s fanaticism, and it helps us understand the violence that Ritscher ultimately turned on himself. To praise Ritscher’s act as heroism is to perpetuate the idea that to kill oneself for a cause — an idea that has wrought havoc from Tel Aviv to Baghdad to Kandahar to Colombo — is noble. If the goal is pursuing peace, then this is ass-backwards and shameful. And the fact that so many of my fellow creative music devotees accept it is truly disheartening.
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