Masha Gessen writes:

On Sunday afternoon, Aaron Bushnell, wearing a mustard-colored sweater under his combat fatigues, walked up to the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. As he approached the building, he filmed himself saying, “I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but, compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” He set his phone down, propping it up to continue filming, poured a flammable liquid from a water bottle over his head, then put on his camouflage hat and used a lighter to set himself on fire. He died in the hospital from his injuries later that day. He was twenty-five years old.

Self-immolation is not a new form of political protest, but it is by no means a common one. Dozens of Buddhist monks have committed self-immolation, to protest the suppression of Buddhist leaders in Vietnam in the middle of the last century and, more recently, to draw attention to Chinese rule over Tibet, and the exile of the Dalai Lama. In the nineteen-sixties, dozens of people in the United States and Asia died after setting themselves on fire to protest the war in Vietnam. Then the practice spread to the Soviet bloc. It began when hope died. In 1968, students in Warsaw and Prague protested, much like students elsewhere in the West that year. In Czechoslovakia, the leadership of the Communist Party instituted liberal reforms, relaxing censorship and promising to build a “socialism with a human face.” It was known as the Prague Spring. But, in August, Warsaw Pact troops, commanded by Moscow, entered Czechoslovakia. The country’s leadership was placed under arrest and airlifted to Moscow. The Prague Spring was crushed. In September, Ryszard Siwiec, a fifty-nine-year-old Polish war veteran, set himself on fire during a harvest festival, insuring that his protest against his country’s complicity in the invasion was witnessed by thousands of people. A more widely remembered act of self-immolation was committed several months later by a twenty-year-old Czech student named Jan Palach, who ran down a street in Prague after setting himself on fire.

Under conditions of democracy, people act politically because they think that their actions can lead to change. They cannot effect change alone, and change is never immediate, but their experience tells them that change is possible and that it is brought about by the actions of citizens. When people do not believe that change is possible, most do not act. Authoritarian regimes rely on a passive citizenry. Totalitarian regimes mobilize their subjects to imitate political action, but in a way that never brings about change. The vast majority comply. But a small minority can’t stand it. Dissidents are people who would rather pay the psychic cost of becoming outcasts because what Václav Havel called “living within the lie” is even worse. Within this minority, there seems to be an even smaller group of people who find their individual helplessness so unbearable that they are willing to do something as desperate as self-immolate. Jan Palach’s protest suicide was followed by several more in Czechoslovakia, then in Lithuania and Ukraine. In the past few years, self-immolation has reëmerged as a form of protest in Putin’s Russia. [Continue reading…]