The “Burning Body” as an Icon of Resistance: Literary Representations of Jan Palach

Mediations of Outrage: How Violence Against Protestors is Remembered

“…Remembering his violent demise is a way of bearing witness to his refusal to give up the struggle against the Soviet domination of his country and hence reasserts over and over again his resistance to tyranny. The memorability of Palach's self-immolation was from the outset enhanced by its resonance with the national memory of Jan Huss, who had been burnt at the stake, also in Prague, for his heretical religious beliefs in 1415 (Lederer 1982;Sabatos 2009). More recently, the memory of the self-immolation of the 26-year-old street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, widely interpreted as a protest against the willful destruction by the police of his fruit cart and hence his livelihood, became an important catalyst in the Tunisian revolution (Alexander 2011).…”

Social media and suicide in social movements: a case study in Hong Kong

“…It is well established that suicide is a complex phenomenon generally resulting from many factors [ 15 ]. However, a desire to attribute a suspected suicide to specific causes may be particularly strong in certain political circumstances, and contribute to perceptions of suicide as a form of political martyrdom, or expression of collective frustrations or despair over perceived social injustice, stirring up the emotions in the community to provide the spark or sustenance for a social movement, such as in the case of Thich Quang Duc in Vietnam in 1963 [ 16 ], Ryszard Siwiec in Warsaw in 1968 [ 17 ], Jan Palach in Prague in 1969 [ 18 ], and Mohamed Bouazizi prior to the Arab Spring protests in 2010 [ 19 ]. This raises questions over how these deaths in Hong Kong may have influenced the ensuing escalation in social unrest.…”