On Setting Oneself on Fire

What would we sacrifice for what we believe in?

Thích Quảng Đức, Saigon, June 11, 1963/ (Malcolm Browne / AP)

“To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance.” — Thich Nhat Nanh, writing to Martin Luther King, Jr. in June 1965.

“Human beings burn surprisingly easily.” — David Halberstam, “The Making of a Quagmire.”

For many of us who were alive and conscious at the time, 1963 was the year that Vietnam first appeared on our radar. On June 11, 1963, just a few days before my 16th birthday, a Buddhist monk set himself on fire in Saigon to protest the treatment of Buddhists by the minority Catholic government of Ngô Đình Diệm. I have a memory of seeing film of the monk immolating himself on the nightly news, but I suspect that memory is false—more likely I saw those images years later, perhaps while watching Peter Davis’s 1974 documentary about Vietnam, “Hearts and Minds.”

I am pretty sure, however, that few of us heard or registered the name of the monk who sacrificed himself that day, Thích Quảng Đức, who is now a national hero in Vietnam. I do recall, however, that his act was extremely embarrassing to the John F. Kennedy administration. The U.S. was a major backer of Diệm and saw him as a linchpin in the fight against Communism in Southeast Asia. Things only got worse when several more Buddhist monks did the same thing, and it was no surprise when the South Vietnamese Army staged a coup against Diệm, backed by the CIA, and he was then assassinated.

In the United States, questions were already being raised about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. For many, the act of setting oneself on fire—even though it was a violent act in and of itself—seemed to resonate with the nonviolent civil disobedience of the civil rights movement, then led by Martin Luther King, Jr. That was why Thich Nhat Nanh, quoted above, wrote to MLK to explain the meaning of the monk’s act, even if, as he said, “The self-burning of Vietnamese Buddhist monks in 1963 is somehow difficult for the Western Christian conscience to understand.”

It certainly was difficult for me to understand, at the time. As a bookish teenager, I was heavily into existential psychology, both in fiction (Dostoyevski, Kafka, Camus) and in nonfiction (Erich Fromm, Rollo May, Karen Horney). Coming from a difficult family life, including an authoritarian father, self-expression and self-actualization were exciting concepts to me, which I hoped to practice in my own life. Setting myself on fire for a cause, for the collective good, seemed an act of self-negating fanaticism, and I am sure it did to many others as well.

I did, however, wonder what it felt like, and how it was possible to endure so much pain before one died. Once you douse yourself with gasoline and set yourself on fire, there is no turning back. I had no thoughts of suicide at that tender age, but I have in later periods of my life, typical of many I know, especially in this Age of Depression (the worst bout was when my best friend was diagnosed with lung cancer about 15 years ago; he later died.)

And I have pretty much decided that if I do take my own life, I will use a method, like that of the monks, in which there is no turning back—for example, jumping off a building or ledge high enough to make sure the deed gets done. The one drawback, of course, is that one leaves a very messy corpse for bystanders to find and loved ones to identify. I still have not worked that problem out—but please don’t worry about me. I strongly believe in the right to die if life becomes unbearable, but right now I am reasonably happy.

Indeed, my current musings about self-immolation are actually associated with something positive, the question of courage. Over the past years, I have been working mainly as a #MeToo reporter, far from the only one, but one of the more prolific, I think it is fair to say. I have investigated dozens of cases of sexual harassment, assault, and bullying, and each case required one or more people to be brave and come forward to tell their story. It has also, I dare say, required courage on my own part, because I have been threatened with lawsuits numerous times and actually got sued once (just recently settled.) As an independent reporter, rarely indemnified by an established publication, those risks are far greater than for a reporter working at the New York Times or The New Yorker.

So what I have become interested in is, what makes some people brave, some people cowards, and probaby most doing their best to avoid having to make those kinds of choices?

Before I go on to that, I’d like to talk a bit more about the history of self-immolation, because I think there are clues in those stories.

A short history of self-immolation

Joan of Arc / Hermann Stilke

Joan of Arc, pictured above in this painting by the 19th century artist Hermann Stilke, did not set herself on fire, of course, but hers is still considered a story of sacrifice for a cause, in which she perishes in the purifying heat of the flames. According to a list compiled by Wikipedia, the first recorded self-immolation took place in China, as early as 396 AD. For a long time it did appear to be something that Buddhists, especially monks, were most likely to do.

But the Vietnam War, with its huge death toll of Vietnamese and Americans alike, drove so many members of my generation half-mad with outrage that perhaps it was inevitable setting oneself on fire would become a political statement in the West as well. The two most highly publicized cases during the Vietnam War were those of Roger LaPorte, a Catholic activist, and Norman Morrison, a Baltimore Quaker, both of whom died by fire in 1965.

After LaPorte died, Dorothy Day, the famed peace activist and founder of The Catholic Worker, wrote a piece for the newspaper entitled “Suicide or Sacrifice?” Day pretty much absolved LaPorte of the Catholic sin of suicide, declaring that “Roger’s intent was to love God and to love his brother.”

In the case of Norman Morrison, those who eulogized him, in some cases years afterwards, took a similar attitude, recognizing his act as a sacrifice and not a suicide. His widow, Anne Morrison Welsh, took up his cause immediately afterwards, writing and lecturing for many years about her husband’s act, to make sure as many people as possible understood the meaning of it.

But one of the saddest episodes of self-immolation has received much less attention, although it raises many questions about the motivations of activists who engage in this kind of ultimate protest. On March 16, 1965, an 82 year old woman named Alice Herz set herself on fire on a street in Detroit. She died of her injuries 10 days later. Herz, a German Jew, had left Germany in 1933, seeing the writing on the wall with the rise of Nazism. In 1965, she was active in Women Strike for Peace, one of the leading activist groups of that time, but reportedly confided to a friend before her death that she had used up all the acceptable methods of protest against the Vietnam War. Self-immolation, it appears, was her last, desperate attempt to make a difference.

But according to Jon Coburn, who wrote a PhD thesis in 2015 about the Women Strike for Peace for Northumbria University in Newcastle, the activist organization was largely embarrassed by Alice Herz’s actions and tried to distance itself from her (see p. 122.) The organization, Coburn wrote, “struggled to reconcile the inherent violence of her immolation with their desired stance as moderate American housewives.” A few days later, the founder of the organization said it was “difficult to understand how she could have done this.” (p. 123.)

Personally, I don’t find it all that difficult to understand. Alice was 82, a Jewish escapee from the horrors of Nazi Germany, frustrated with the inability of the anti-war movement to actually stop the war. She went out, one might say, in a blaze of fire and courage and sacrifice to an ideal that people are still fighting for today, perhaps inspired by the examples of those who put their lives on the line for what they believed in.

People are still setting themselves on fire, but is there enough courage to go around?

Sitting in Sing Sing prison in 1953, awaiting her execution for helping her husband Julius give atom bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, Ethel Rosenberg read George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan” and spent time writing out Joan of Arc’s speeches. It took five powerful electric shocks to kill her, and witnesses reported that smoke came out of the top of her head.

People are still setting themselves on fire today. In Tibet, hundreds have self-immolated since 2009 to protest Chinese rule; the suicide of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in 2011 sparked the Arab Spring; and just last year, Russian journalist Irina Slavina set herself on fire in front of the police headquarters in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, apparently as a protest against persecution by local authorities.

I think it is clear that I am not advocating self-immolation as a useful or desirable method of protest. But I do think we should all think a bit more about what we would give up for something we believe in. Many of us would instinctively give up our lives to save a child, our own or someone else’s, and we read often about the owner of a dog or other pet jumping into a river and drowning while trying to save it.

What would we give up to correct an injustice, even a relatively small one, done to ourselves, our friends, or our families? If a colleague is being sexually harassed by a powerful man for whom we work as well, would we risk our careers to make it right and expose the abuses? As a reporter, I can attest that many have done just that, although they tend to be the most vulnerable and not the most established and protected.

In other words, courage is not a luxury for those who have little to fear, but often a necessary character trait for those who have everything to lose—or who see injustices in the world that they feel endanger their own humanity.

Let’s not make courage something we display instinctively in a desperate moment when all else seems lost. Let’s make it part of our everyday lives. For that, we need to think about it, think about it hard; and we need to make hard choices, every day.