This Is Rare -- Why Are We Seeing More Of It?
The Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam saw the persecution of the country's majority religion under the administration of Catholic president Ngô Đình Diệm. Several Buddhist monks, including the most famous case of Thích Quảng Đức, immolated themselves in protest.
The example set by self-immolators in the mid 20th century sparked similar acts between 1963 and 1971, most of which occurred in Asia and the United States in conjunction with protests opposing the Vietnam War. Researchers counted almost 1000 self-immolations covered by The New York Times and The Times.
On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, an anti-war activist, doused himself in kerosene and set himself on fire below the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara at the Pentagon, to protest United States involvement in the Vietnam War.
Wikipedia has a separate entry containing a list of "political" self-immolations beginning in 1948. The vast majority of these took place outside the US, and indeed mostly in India, Southeast Asia, and China. In the West, they were often protests against Communist regimes. But the overall pattern of the list confirms my impression that most in the US took place in the 1960s and 1970s in protest of the Viet Nam War.Four people, Alice Herz, Norman Morrison, Roger Allen LaPorte, amd Celene Jankowski, set themaelves on fire in the US on 1965, presumably following the Vietnamese examples. Then, after a year, two people, Florence Beaumont and Erik Thoen, set themselves on fire in 1967, followed by one, Ronald Brazee, in 1968. In 1969, Bruce Mayrock set himself on fire, not in protest of the Viet Nam War, but in protest of genocide against Biafra in the Nigerian Civil War.
In 1970, two people in the US self-immolated in protest of the Viet Nam War, Robert Rex Vice and George Winne Jr., both in the immediate aftermath of the Kent State shootings. Things were then quiet for more than a decade until 1986, when Orland Payne McCafferty set himself on fire to protest Reagan's policies. In 1987, Antoine Thurel set himself in fire in Boston to protest conditions in Haiti. In 1988, Mehrdad Imen set himself on fire in New York to protest human rights abuses in Iran.
In 1993, Binh Gia Pham set himself on fire in Boston to protest persecution of Buddhists in Viet Nam. In 1996, Kathleen Chang, going under the name Kathy Change, set herself on fire in Philadelphia to protest conditions in general. In 2011, Thomas James Ball set himself on fire outside a New Hampshire courthouse to protest family court injustice. In 2014, Thu Hoang set himself on fire, apparently to protest a Chinese oil rig. A few days later, Charles R Moore set himself on fire in Texas to protest racism in the town where he grew up.
In 2016, Charles Ingram self-immolated to protest corruption in the Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2018, David Buckel set himself on fire to protest fossil fuels; Chloe Sagal self-immolated to protest homelessness and mental health issues; John Watts set himself on fire to protest corruption at the Department of Veterans Affairs; Nicholas McCrary set himself on fire to protest involuntary celibacy. Four people in 2018 matches the highest number in 1965.
In 2019, Amav Gupta, from India, set himself on fire outside the White House for unknown reasons. In 2020, Linda J. Zhang self-immolated to protest climate change. In 2022, Wynn Bruce (no relation) set himself on fire outside the Supreme Court to protest climate change. In 2023, Chet Bohrer, a non-student, self-immolated on the UC Berkeley campus to protest bullying in Utah.
And now we have two incidents in the sort of quick succession that we haven't seen since 1970; on February 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC to protest the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and just yesterday, Maxwell Azzarello, who set himself on fire outside the New York courthouse in which the Trump trial is being held. His specific reasons appear to involve conspiracy theories that aren't necessarily related to Trump.
So in the US, the self-immolation phenomenon began in the Viet Nam War era, a time of great social change, followed after 1970 by a 16-year interval of no self-immolation protests at all; one a year in the late 1980s, then a couple in the mid 1990s -- and then another 15-year interval ending in 2011, with incidents beginning to ramp up again since then.
Azzarello's motives were unclear. According to the New York Post,
The self-described “investigative researcher” traveled to New York City in recent days from Florida without his family knowing and had been protesting in front of the courthouse where he bashed political leaders from both sides of the aisle.
“This extreme act of protest is to draw attention to an urgent and important discovery: We are victims of a totalitarian con, and our own government (along with many of their allies) is about to hit us with an apocalyptic fascist world coup,” Azzarello wrote in part of a rambling manifesto on the Substack page.
. . . Azzarello was previously arrested three times across several days in the Sunshine State that included charges of disturbing the peace and damage to property last August.
Following his third arrest, Florida cops noted he was suicidal and listed him as unemployed, per police reports.
On one hand, the Azzarello episode and the uptick of those preceding it for the past decade can be attributed to growing issues of homelessness and untreated mental health problems. On the other, we're looking at conditions of social change that are bringing about phenomena that we haven't seen since the 1960s and early 1970s -- except that counterculture fringe figures seized the limelight then, like Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, Angela Davis, and Eldridge Cleaver -- but their mainstream political allies, like Eugene McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy, and George McGovern, proved feckless. There are no equivalent counterculture figures now, while one political agent of change, Donald Trump, is proving highly effective.These developments are at least driving me to think we're in conditions like the 1960s and early 1970s, but I'm not ready to say much more than that at the moment.
