by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
A young man with a Palestinian flag set himself on fire outside of the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta on December 1st, and while he did not die in the incident he did suffer very serious injuries in his highly personal protest of Israel's unrelenting attacks on the civilians and children of Gaza.
This past Sunday Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old member of the United States Air Force, set himself on fire outside of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, again over the savagery that the Israeli military has been unleashing on the Palestinians in Gaza. Airman Bushnell, who live-streamed his self-immolation on social media, died from his injuries the following day.
That type of personal protest, setting oneself on fire, is not original, but it does tend to be highly effective in drawing the eyes of the world to a specific problem.
On June 11th, 1963, a Buddhist monk who was living and working at a monastery and orphanage Hue, the old capital of Vietnam, decided that he would set himself on fire as a protest to the United States' growing involvement in the civil war in his homeland. The monk, Thich Quang Duc, loaded his Austin Westminster Sedan with a few younger monks and a couple of cans of gasoline - and drove off to Saigon where he notified several foreign journalists of a planned "shocking political protest" that he was going to hold against the government of South Vietnam which was being backed by the United States. The monk told the journalists where and when the protest would be held, but only one showed up, a photojournalist named Malcolm Wilde Browne who wound up winning a Pulitzer Prize for taking the time to attend the monk's protest.
When Thich Quang Duc arrived at the scene he seated himself on the curb in the lotus position and waited as several hundred people gathered. Then the young monks carefully and thoroughly doused him in gasoline, and the seated monk struck a match and set himself ablaze. For the next couple of minutes the burning monk chanted prayers while the flames consumed him - and the journalist took photos
The ;photographs of the burning monk resonated with people around the world, and President Kennedy was reportedly so affected by the image that he began to reevaluate his position on the war in Vietnam.
Self-immolation is a drastic measure of passion and self-sacrifice that is very effective at drawing attention to an issue. We may question the ultimate sanity of those who choose this recourse, but their commitment to the cause is beyond doubt.
1 comment:
From Plum Village, excerpts of a letter to Martin Luther King, Jr. from Thich Nacht Hahn on the practice of monks burning themselves; https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/in-search-of-the-enemy-of-man.
The self-burning of Vietnamese Buddhist monks in 1963 is somehow difficult for the Western Christian conscience to understand. The Press spoke then of suicide, but in the essence, it is not. It is not even a protest.
What the monks said in the letters they left before burning themselves aimed only at alarming, at moving the hearts of the oppressors and at calling the attention of the world to the suffering endured then by the Vietnamese. To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance. There is nothing more painful than burning oneself. To say something while experiencing this kind of pain is to say it with the utmost of courage, frankness, determination and sincerity.
I am sure that since you have been engaged in one of the hardest struggles for equality and human rights, you are among those who understand fully, and who share with all their hearts, the indescribable suffering of the Vietnamese people. The world’s greatest humanists would not remain silent. You yourself can not remain silent.
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