50th Anniversary of Palach's Death Marked With New Immolation

A man set himself on fire in a central Prague square on Friday, January 18, 2019, as Czechs marked the 50th anniversary of a student’s self-immolation in protest at the Soviet invasion that crushed the Prague Spring.

The unidentified man was taken to hospital after bystanders doused the flames that enveloped him in the same spot at the elevated top of historic Wenceslas Square where Jan Palach set himself ablaze in January 1969.

“According to initial information, a man born in 1964 poured an inflammable liquid on his body and set himself on fire,” Prague police said on their Twitter feed.

The immolation victim was placed in an induced coma and taken to the hospital.

Jan Palach, a student at Charles University in Prague, startled passersby by pouring a liquid over his body at about 3 P.M. on Thursday, January 16, 1969, and then setting himself ablaze. The twenty‑one‑year‑old student chose the statue of Wenceslas, the Czech hero saint, as the site of his protest in Prague. I extensively discussed this incident in the immolations chapter of The Copycat Effect, and share these details here.

The book details immolations since the Vietnam war era protests, such as by Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc who set himself on fire. He received widespread media attention. 

2018: Georgia, Oregon and New York Self-Immolations

Self-immolations have been a form of political protest in modern times since a number of Buddhist monks (including the most famous case of Thích Quảng Đức) immolated themselves by fire in protest of the persecution of Buddhists under the administration of Roman Catholic President Ngô Đình Diệm in South Vietnam. The immolations spread through Asia and to America from 1963 to 1971.

In the third known high-profile fire suicide attempt of 2018, a man is fighting for his life at Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital with burns to 85 to 90 percent of his body.

Georgia Veteran

A veteran who was fed up with treatment by the Department of Veterans Affairs set himself on fire in protest outside of the Georgia State Capitol building (seen above) in downtown Atlanta on June 26, 2018.

The 58-year-old from Mableton, Georgia, who has not yet been identified, parked his car alongside the Capitol before walking toward the building, where he commenced self-immolation, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

“He was strapped with some homemade incendiary devices (and) firecrackers, and doused himself with some kind of flammable liquid,” Georgia State Patrol Captain Mark Perry told the Atlanta newspaper.

The Georgia immolation appears to follow the same pattern of the immolation of Charles Ingram, a 51-year-old Gulf War veteran, who grew increasing frustrated by the Department of Veterans Affairs. In March 2016, shortly before his VA appointment, Ingram went to the clinic in Northfield, N.J., doused himself in gasoline and lit himself on fire. The clinic was closed at the time. He died.

Chloe Sagal

Exactly a week before, on Tuesday, June 19, 2018, a person lit themselves on fire in Lownsdale Square (see above), the park located across from the Multnomah County Courthouse in downtown Portland, Oregon.

The person entered the park, on crutches, and barely able to walk, wearing a red scarf around the neck. Then the individual sat down and began reading a statement about homelessness and mental health issues. The person died at the hospital.

The local media reported some confusion about the gender of the person. It turns out it was video developer Chloe Sagal, 31, who identified herself as trans.

Variety wrote:

Sagal was best known for her horror game “Homesick,” which follows the story of a woman searching for her friends inside the house where her family was murdered. She also made headlines in 2013 when she ran an Indiegogo campaign that was ostensibly for metal poisoning treatment. But, according to Eurogamer, the money was instead used for gender alteration surgery.

David Buckel

Another self-immolation of 2018 occurred on Saturday, April 14, 2018, when David Buckel, 60, a prominent green activist and lawyer for LGBT rights, died after setting himself on fire in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park protesting ecological destruction and global warming. The famed 60 year old attorney left behind a suicide note in which Buckel told of his intention of burning himself to death with "fossil fuel" in a bid to show how mankind was likewise killing itself. Buckel also worked as an urban gardener and ecologist with the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, helping run what he called the largest composting program in the country to use only renewable sources of energy.

The New York Daily News headlined the story.

Other related immolation articles:

Burning Man 2017

Immolations 2017

Palace Self-Immolation 2015

Aurora Self-Immolation 2014

Colorado Self-Immolation 2014

D. C. Self-Immolation 2013: 1, 2, 3

h/t to Media Monarchy for GA news.

Fayette Factor: First Quarter 2017

The Fayette Factor seems to be always be with us. There are a surprisingly high incidence of Fortean (inexpliable) events linked to places named after one of the USA's Founding Fathers--the Marquis de Lafayette. Fayette, Lafayette, Fayetteville. The locations are "special," in terms of the weird quotient.

The Fayette Factor is probably one of the strangest mysteries in American Forteana, first discovered by researcher William (Bill) Grimstad, back in 1977, and written about in "Fateful Fayette," Fortean Times, No. 25, Spring 1978.

Now in Bill's 40th year of tracking the phenomenon, he shares the following recent notices of the Fayette Factor yesterday, in a email to me:

Self-Immolation

It’s been a lively Lafayette, CO scene in the past few days. A man claiming FBI harassment burned himself to death at a Lafayette Wal-Mart on March 27.

Suicide

Only 12 days earlier, on March 15, a man publicly shot himself to death in front of police near [the Flatirons] church in Lafayette.

Infanticide 

Also on March 27, a man was charged with stabbing to death his two infant daughters from Fayetteville, NC.  

Tillman Freeman is accused of killing his 2-year-old and 4-day-old daughters, Genesis and Serenity.

~ Bill Grimstad

Death, Immolation, and the Inauguration

Death may be knocking on the doorsteps of Donald Trump's Inauguration as the 45th President on Friday, January 20, 2017.

It appears to be a time when the unexpected may surprise those who wish to have things so well-ordered and planned.

This was a special week in January 1989 called "Palach Week." It marked the beginning of the end of Communism in Czechoslovakia, and the Velvet Revolution. There is a powerful documentary made in 2014, Agnieszka Holland’s Burning Bush (image above is from that film) that chronicles those times. The title has many meanings, of course.

Self-immolations have a way of changing the course of history, as the form of protest is so powerful, radical and shocking.

The Burning Bush

Concidentially, another kind of Bush may be important in the midst of this upcoming very political American weekend.

On Wednesday, January 18, 2017, the 41st President George H. W. Bush was admitted to the intensive care unit at Houston Methodist Hospital to address an acute respiratory problem stemming from pneumonia. Bush underwent a procedure to clear his air passages. His wife Barbara, furthermore, was hospitalized as a precaution.

The 36th President Lyndon Baines Johnson died on January 22, 1973, two days after Richard Nixon was sworn in for this 2nd term. Johnson's death disrupted Nixon's "celebration" of the start of what would be his shortened term, and LBJ's state funeral was held on January 25, 1973.

In an era of wall-to-wall media, the death of George H. W. Bush would be an auspicious beginning for Trump's first term.

Immolations 2017

Two reports of self-immolations (suicides by fire) in which both people lived surfaced yesterday. One is directly related to Trump's assuming power.

On Tuesday night, January 17, 2017, a man set himself on fire outside the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.
DC Fire and EMS received a call at 9:23 p.m. about an individual trying to place himself on fire.
"We did arrive and did find a male adult with burns and we transported that patient to an area hospital with potential but not life-threatening burns," DC Fire and EMS Department spokesman Vito Maggiolo told CNN Wednesday. The man attempted to start the small blaze outside the Trump hotel but was burned badly in the process and taken to a hospital for treatment.

The 45-year-old man, who has not yet been identified, said the act was in protest of the President-elect's looming inauguration, Daily Mail reports said.

Witnesses described how he yelled 'Trump' several times as 'flames ran up his back' before lying down in the street.

Also on Tuesday night, January 17, 2017, another self-immolation occurred, this one in Nashua, New Hampshire. The Union Leader reported:

Officials said a pair of passers-by came to the aid of a man who tried to immolate himself in a city parking lot Tuesday night, using jackets and snow from the ground to put out the fire.

Police and fire said they received the report of the unidentified man on fire just before 10:30 p.m. in the parking lot of the Headlines store at 37 East Hollis St.

According to a press release from the Nashua Fire Department, the man had just purchased gasoline from a nearby gas station, poured it over his head and ignited himself.

The Fire Department said the man suffered burns over at least 20 percent of his upper torso, but was conscious and breathing. He was taken to Southern New Hampshire Medical Center.

January 1969

In my book Suicide Clusters (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1987), I revisited how Prague and immolations were keys in overturning Communism. Here is my summary from a later work.

Jan Palach, a student at Charles University in Prague, startled passersby by pouring a liquid over his body at about 3 P.M. on January 16, 1969, and then setting himself ablaze. The twenty‑one‑year‑old student chose the statue of Wenceslas, the Czech hero saint, as the site of his protest in Prague. Palach had left a note declaring that he belonged to a group whose members planned to self‑incinerate themselves, one every ten days, until the Soviet troops departed. Palach's protest and death three days later got worldwide media coverage with others following his lead.

On January 20, 1969, crowds of people waving the Czechoslovak state flags, black flags and enlarged photographs of Jan Palach, gathered at the spot of Palach’s suicide. In the Philosophical Faculty building, the clocks were stopped so they showed the exact time of Palach's death (3:15 P.M.). Josef Hlavaty then self-immolated himself just as Palach had. Two days later, on January 22, Miroslav Malinka killed himself through suicide by fire, and Blanka Nachazelova suffocated herself with coal gas. On the day of the Palach funeral, Hlavaty died. 

In the next well-publicized suicide, Jan Zajic, an 18-year-old student at a vocational school in Sumperk, set himself on fire on February 25, 1969. Before his death, he gave his friends a poem about Palach and four letters, in which he described himself as “Torch no. 2.” He did it in Prague in the passageway of a building on Wenceslas Square, as he was trying to run to the statute, but he fell in flames and died there. He said he decided to immolate himself after seeing that life was returning to its old routine despite Palach's action.

On April 4, 1969, in another square, this time in the southeastern Bohemian city of Jihlava, Evzen Plocek, 40, set himself on fire. At least 26 people attempted suicide between January 20 and the end of April 1969, with at least seven of these dying by fire in Czechoslovakia, Scotland, and Hungary after Palach's death. Reports of seven other fatal self-immolations came from India, Pakistan, England, and the United States. ~ The Copycat Effect, (NY: New York, 2004).

Self-immolations, exactly 20 years later, in 1989, set off the overthrow of the Iron Curtain throughout the Eastern Block.

The self-immolations in the Arab Spring changed the political landscape, once again.

++++

“Hold on—that’s a trash fire. Over there is Trump’s Inauguration speech.”

The above (by coincidence) is The New Yorker's Daily Cartoon (by Tom Toro) for January 18, 2017.

Update:

During a live report on [January 19, 2017's] Thursday’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on the Fox News Channel, a young man protesting in Washington, DC claimed to have started a fire in the street, “Because I felt like it. And because I’m just saying, ‘Screw our president.'”

Self-Immolation + More School Incidents

Colorado. A cafeteria. A school. Violence. We have heard this all before.

The wave of recent school violence situations continued on Monday, January 27th. The epidemic of shootings has not gone unnoticed by the media. See the Los Angeles Times, "5 Days of School Shootings, Lockdowns, Scares Jolt U.S. Campus."

Now, for today...

Colorado ~ Self-Immolation

A 16-year-old boy (identified as Vince Nett, above, from Facebook) set himself on Monday in the cafeteria at a suburban Denver high school. Westminster Police Department spokeswoman Cheri Spottke said the boy didn't make any threats before starting the fire at about 7:15 a.m. at Standley Lake High School. A custodian was able to use a fire extinguisher to put out the blaze before it could spread. Several other students were in the cafeteria at the time, but none were injured. There are fire-related injuries over 80% of the body of the suicidal boy.

Two self-immolation attempts took place on Friday, October 4, 2013 (see here). One was on the Washington D.C. mall (with a resulting fatality) and the other in downtown Houston, Texas (with a survivor).

Monday's incident was the latest to affect a Denver-area school in recent weeks.

On Thursday, Columbine High School, where two gunmen killed 13 people in 1999, went on high security alert after receiving a series of threatening phone calls. The alert applied to a half-dozen other schools in the area, in the same school district as Standley Lake, but was lifted the same day.

On December 13, 2013, student gunman Karl Pierson, 17, fatally shot Claire Davis, a 17-year-old classmate at Arapahoe High School in Centennial before killing himself in the school's library.

Westminster, Colorado, was home to 10-year-old Jessica Ridgeway, who was abducted on her way to school and killed in 2012. Austin Sigg, who was 17 at the time of the crime, was sentenced to a life sentence plus 86 years. Jessica's disappearance put Westminster and neighboring Denver suburbs on edge as police, aided by an army of volunteers, searched for her and then her killer.

Iowa ~ Lockdown

Police were called to a Des Moines school and it was placed on lockdown Monday. Officers were at Lincoln RAILS Academy at 1000 Porter Avenue, which is just off Southwest 9th Street. Des Moines Schools officials said the lockdown ended about 12:15 p.m. It started less than an hour before that.

"This was due to a report we received from a parent indicating their student may have posed a threat to the school and our students," said a statement from the district.

District officials said officers and staff "thoroughly searched the school building. It was confirmed that the student had not been on campus today, and there was to be no threat to our school or students."

Illinois ~ Shooting

Carbondale Police say one juvenile is in custody following a shooting Monday at Carbondale Community High School’s Rebound school. Carbondale Community High School's Rebound program locates on North Oakland Avenue.

The Rebound program is located at the old high school campus on North Oakland Avenue. Police responded to the school around noon after a report of gun shots. One adult male was taken to Memorial Hospital of Carbondale. Police say they are still looking for another suspect.

Carbondale Community High School officials placed the main campus on East Walnut Street on lock-down for a period of time this afternoon. A school official said the lock down was a safety precaution but would not confirm if the action was related to the shooting at Rebound. An investigation continues. Carbondale Community High School’s Rebound program provides alternative education for students 16-years and older who need to complete their secondary education.

Georgia ~ Fatal shooting

Perhaps marginally related to school violence, but grouped as such by the media, a fatal shooting also took place in Georgia.

The Phoenix High School (its logo above) is located at 501 West Pike Street, Lawrenceville, Georgia.

One person was dead and two others were injured in a shooting near a suburban Atlanta high school Monday afternoon, police and school officials told NBC News. Phoenix High School in Lawrenceville, about 30 miles northeast of Atlanta, was in "soft lockdown" as investigators tried to determine whether any students were involved.
The shooting occurred partly in the roadway and partly in the parking lot at an address about 200 yards across a street from the school, which is on the busy main highway through Lawrenceville.

Tibetan Monk Immolation

An act of protest from the Vietnam War lives on in this photograph and in modern incidents.15 August 2011 Last updated at 08:44 ET BBC News

Share this page

Tibetan monk sets himself on fire in China

Continue reading the main story

A Tibetan monk has set himself alight in China's Sichuan province, amid claims of a crackdown on monasteries in the region.

Western-based activists said the monk, who they named as Tsewang Norbu, had died from his injuries.

A similar action sparked weeks of confrontation earlier this year in another town in Sichuan.

Unrest is fuelled by a widespread belief that the government wants to suppress Tibetan culture.

The argument has been going on for decades, with many Tibetans accusing the government of forcing monks to attend re-education camps, encouraging the migration of Han Chinese to Tibetan areas, and crushing any sign of dissent.

But the authorities say they have brought relative wealth and prosperity to a region that was a rural backwater.

The UK-based Free Tibet movement said the 29-year-old monk had doused himself with petrol and set himself alight at the Nyitso Monastery in Dawu town.

The group said he had been calling out "we Tibetan people want freedom", "long live the Dalai Lama" and "let the Dalai Lama Return to Tibet".

Most Tibetan monks are loyal to the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader who has lived in exile in India for decades.

The state-run Xinhua news agency quoted local government officials confirming that a monk had set himself alight, but gave no details of his condition.

In March, a monk set light to himself in Aba, about 100 miles (150km) from the latest incident.

Local people accused the authorities of locking down that monastery and carting off monks to be re-educated.

The UN later said up to 300 monks may have been illegally detained.

China has denied the accusations.

Fires of Change, 1848, and the Kingdom of Kush

The Kingdom of Kush was established in about 1070 BC. The first cultures arose in Sudan before the time of a unified Egypt. Now, days before a new Egypt emerged on February 11, 2011, a new southern nation in the ancient land of Kush/Cush has appeared on the horizon on February 7, 2011.

Immolations & Facebook Revolution

These are incredible times. The new tomorrows are not over. Other countries, e.g. Libya, Algeria, Yemen, plus more Arab lands and even Italy and Serbia, are feeling the cries from the people calling for freedom.

We have been this way before, of course. While others have noted detailed examinations of the timing, let us observe other specifics beyond the significance of Tahrir Square.

The important role of self-immolations in sparking the wave of protests and changes we are seeing in governments cannot be underplayed. It began in Tunisia in December, and quickly spread throughout the Arab world, with immolations in several countries of the region.

Egypt fell on February 11, 2011, after Tunisia saw change in January. Immolations were a key. The fall of Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali -- the first time in generations that an Arab leader has been toppled by public protests -- sent a sharp signal to the rest of the region, dominated by autocratic regimes. The protests that brought down Ben Ali erupted after the self-immolation of 26-year-old vegetable seller Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire on December 17, 2010. The same type of incidents swept the region. More protesters set themselves afire in Egypt, Mauritania and Algeria on Monday, January 17, 2011, in fiery suicide copycats. This was followed by more in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and France. (As noted in The Copycat Effect, fire suicides are a powerful, political form of behavior contagion.)

The self-immolations of Buddhist monks in South Vietnam, beginning in 1963, eventually pushed that government to change leadership, and foreshadowed the political overturns in Southeast Asia. 

Likewise, the fiery suicide of Jan Palach, a 20-year-old Czech who burned himself to death in Prague in 1969, was the spiritual precursor to what would grow into the blazing fire of change that would transform Eastern Europe.

These are often called "grassroots movements," although today's massive waves of political realignments are rightfully being termed the "Facebook Revolution."


Revolutions of 1848

The most comparable historical events to the current protests and changes seen throughout the Arab World are the Revolutions of 1848, which impacted Europe for decades.

Barricade on the rue Soufflot, an 1848 painting by Horace Vernet. 

The Panthéon is shown in the background.

The European Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Spring of Nations, Springtime of the Peoples or the Year of Revolution, were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe. Described by some historians as a revolutionary wave, the period of unrest began in France and then, further propelled by the French Revolution of 1848, soon spread to the rest of Europe.

It will be recalled that in the midst of all of the calls for change from the poor classes (reflective of the situation in the Arab World today), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had written at the request of the Communist League in London (an organization consisting principally of German workers) The Communist Manifesto, published in German in London on February 21, 1848.

The people of each of the following locations had massive protests and revolutionary incidents: Italian states, France, German states, Denmark, Schleswig, Habsburg Empire, Hungary, Slovakia, Switzerland, Greater Poland, Wallachia, Belgium, and even Brazil.

Although most of the revolutions were quickly put down, there was a significant amount of violence in many areas, with tens of thousands of people tortured and/or killed. While the immediate political effects of the revolutions were largely reversed, the long-term reverberations of the events were far-reaching. 1848 was a watershed year for Europe, and many of the changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have origins in this revolutionary period.


The Kingdom of Kush

While the newest governmental change in the world today is the new Egypt, the newest full nation also was announced a few days ago, on February 7, 2011. 

Due to the vote for independence, the citizens of southern Sudan voted in overwhelming numbers to break away from the northern portion of their country and form a new entity. While it may not formally have a new name yet, other than press reports calling it South Sudan, Sudan's President Omer Hassan Al-Bashir accepted the final results of the referendum where southerners almost unanimously voted (by nearly 99%) for the secession of their region.  South Sudan will be declared an independent state on July 9, 2011. This new land is very reflective of the ancient country known as the Kingdom of Kush.

We should not take the news lightly that old Kush/Cush has returned.  The Kingdom of Kush, like Egypt, is ancient and dominated by smaller pyramids and familiar artifacts.

Kush

Egypt

The Kingdom of Kush or Cush was an ancient African state centered on the confluences of the Blue Nile, White Nile and River Atbara in what is now the Republic of Sudan. It was one of the earliest civilizations to develop in the Nile River Valley. Having also been referred to as Nubia, and as "Ethiopia" in ancient Greek and Greco-Roman records, the Kushites left their mark on various aspects of the ancient world and their legacy is still readily discernible from the various archaeological field sites scattered throughout modern Sudan.



Biblical Prophecies of Cush

The name given this ancient civilization issues from the Bible's Old Testament, where Cush (Hebrew: כוש) was one of the sons of Ham (Genesis 10:6) who settled in northeast Africa. As noted in the Bible and at different times in the ancient world, a large region covering northern Sudan, modern day southern Egypt, and parts of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia was known as "Cush." 

The Hebrew Bible refers to "Cush" on a number of occasions, though various English translations translate this as "Nubian", "Ethiopia", "Sudan", and "Cushite" (Unseth 1999). Moses' wife, Tzipporah, is described as a Kushite in the book of Numbers 12:1. Some contend that this Cush was in southern Arabia. All of this is complicated by the fact that the Septuagint translated "Cush" as "Aethiopia," leading to the misleading conclusion that "Cush" should be equated with the borders of present day "Ethiopia."

Sudanese Christians in southern Sudan believe the independence of their nation was foretold in the Bible more than 2,000 years ago. Isaiah 18 is one of several passages that refer to the land of Cush, which describes the people as tall and smooth-skinned and the land as divided by rivers.

"It used to be read so many times on Sunday," said Ngor Kur Mayol, who drove to Nashville from Atlanta earlier this month to vote in the independence referendum. "It mentions a lot the way we were suffering in for so many years and how that same suffering, we're going to end it today, to vote for independence," (according to the Associated Press writer Travis Oller).


The interpretation is not so far-fetched, said Ellen Davis, a professor at Duke Divinity School who has been working since 2004 with the Episcopal Church of Sudan to strengthen theological education there.


"There's no doubt that Isaiah 18 really is speaking about the people of the upper Nile," she said. "It really is speaking about the Sudanese people."


Davis said the belief in the prophecy is nearly universal among the Christians she has met in Sudan.


"In general, Sudanese Christians believe to a much greater extent than mainline North American Christians that the Bible speaks to current events, specifically political events," Davis said.


Jock Paleak, pastor at the Sudanese Cumberland Presbyterian Church in the Nashville suburb of Gallatin, explained how Isaiah 18 has been interpreted to refer to independence.


"The Bible says when they will raise their flag on the mountain, the whole world will see."


Isaiah 18 concludes with a passage Paleak said predicts the end of rule by the Muslim north. He paraphrases and explains it: "'They will bring their gifts to the mountain of Zion,' which means we will be free to praise God in our own way in our own land."

Portions of this blog, in terms of photos 

and content, are reprinted under the 

Fair Use Doctrine of International Copyright Law 

as educational and/or editorial material 

of which commentary is made, 

without benefit of financial gain. 

This is applicable throughout 

the entire Twilight Language blog.

Sections of this entry may reflect summaries of data from Wikipedia.