An active US Air Force member set himself on fire and perished this morning outside the Isreali Embassy in DC. He died. His protest was against Isreal’s attacks on Gaza and the Palestenians there.
The practice goes back centuries, believed to have begun in India as a form of protest among Buddhists and Hindus and has been considered a form of peaceful protest. Other examples are recorded by the Chinese, Roman and Greek historians. In more modern times there were many examples of self-immolation protestors during the 60’s and 70’s over the Vietnam war. And now more recently there have been two examples in the US protesting the Isreal war with Palestine/Hamas.
But how effective is it as a protest? I definitely don’t question their committment to their cause. But it seems like a waste of life.
I’ll just note there was a prior instance of self-immolation outside the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta, Georgia back in December. It just didn’t get quite the same publicity.
It is certainly attention-getting. It is sad and tragic. Is it effective? I don’t know.
I would think it actually works against the cause. Many people, rightly or wrongly, will assume he’s mentally unstable. And they will associate mental instability with the cause.
Protests of any nature are useless until / unless they get to the level of Orange Revolution, Maidan Square, etc.
This particular example, or self-immolation in general, simply let the protester believe, however briefly, that their life is not totally in vain. They’d be wrong of course, but they probably never figure that out.
I’m having difficulty parsing the intended meaning(s) of terms like “effective”, “useless”, etc. in this context.
Obviously, unless you’re somebody as famous and influential Gandhi during the Partition wars, endangering or sacrificing your own life to make a point about the seriousness of the ongoing catastrophe is not going to have much if any effect in terms of immediately causing policy changes.
Does that mean it accomplishes nothing? I don’t know; I think such impacts are very hard to track and quantify. I know I remember the account of the 1963 self-immolation of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon in my high school history book, for example, but I don’t know exactly how his suicide influenced perceptions and opinions at the time.
My view (and worth every penny you paid to hear it) is that almost all protesting is fully useless; it does not advance the agenda the protesters expect it to. Individual acts of protest are the limit case of useless. It’s the gnat hurling itself against the elephant, only to die utterly unnoticed by the elephant.
Certainly there are examples of successful protests but it is almost never just one person. It takes a lot of people and the protesting needs to be almost continuous (or at least very frequent) over a long period of time (many months or even years). Even then it does not always work. Many governments know they can almost always wait out the people who will eventually get bored and go home (e.g. Occupy Wall Street).
That one guy standing at a busy intersection with a sign you pass every day on your way to work? Not effective.
It gets attention. Although this likely usually changes nothing and may threaten no one, I believe such an event launched the Arab Spring in Tunisia FWIW.
One guy is not much of a protest. I imagine you will need, let’s say, ten times as many protesters as cops, or whatever is the critical mass required for the protest to go ahead and them not to just disperse/arrest everybody.
You are right: the one guy may be a critical seed that launches thousands of others. But someone still needs to organise those others.
It had a huge effect; a pretty straight line can be drawn from this first self-immolation in protest of Diem’s persecution of Buddhists to the coup that killed him.
Quảng Đức’s act increased international pressure on Diệm and led him to announce reforms with the intention of mollifying the Buddhists. However, the promised reforms were not implemented, leading to a deterioration in the dispute. As protests continued, the ARVN Special Forces loyal to Diệm’s brother, Ngô Đình Nhu, launched raids across South Vietnam on Buddhist pagodas, seizing Quảng Đức’s heart and causing deaths and widespread damage. Several Buddhist monks followed Quảng Đức’s example, also immolating themselves. Eventually, a US-backed coup toppled Diệm, who was assassinated on 2 November 1963.
Photographs taken by Malcolm Browne of the self-immolation quickly spread across the wire services and were featured on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. The self-immolation was later regarded as a turning point in the Buddhist crisis and a critical point in the collapse of the Diệm regime.[40]
Historian Seth Jacobs asserted that Quảng Đức had “reduced America’s Diệm experiment to ashes as well” and that “no amount of pleading could retrieve Diệm’s reputation” once Browne’s images had become ingrained into the psyche of the world public.[41]Ellen Hammer described the event as having “evoked dark images of persecution and horror corresponding to a profoundly Asian reality that passed the understanding of Westerners.”[42]John Mecklin, an official from the US embassy, noted that the photograph “had a shock effect of incalculable value to the Buddhist cause, becoming a symbol of the state of things in Vietnam.”[40]William Colby, then chief of the CIA’s Far East Division, opined that Diệm “handled the Buddhist crisis fairly badly and allowed it to grow. But I really don’t think there was much they could have done about it once that bonze burned himself.”
I saw the full video of this last night (with the graphic area blurred). One peripheral thing that stuck with me was the police officer (or more than one?) helpfully standing by with their gun pointed at the burning lump on the ground while someone yelled that they need fire extinguishers, not guns. (That and how many times he had to flick his lighter before he could get it to work. He came close to having to do an embarrassing retreat.)
Seems like a hunger strike would be more impactful, especially if there were more people involved. Not saying it would be effective at pushing an agenda, but a hunger strike could stay in the news cycle longer and whatever message could be more widely spread (and people wouldn’t necessarily die for no reason). But, even a well-organized event wouldn’t do much to change the course if this nasty war we got going on.
Was @SuntanLotion 's question about Bobby Sands aimed at me? I think people did care about his actions. Also, there were big organizations on both sides of the conflict.
To be fair, the late Senior Airman Bushnell was probably under considerable psychological stress at the moment. If I were about to publicly commit suicide as an act of humanitarian protest, I doubt I’d be able to manage it with 100% smooth nonchalance either.