Dissent by Fire
On June 11, 1963, over 300 Vietnamese monks and nuns marched through the streets of Saigon to protest President Ngô Đình Diệm’s brutal repression of Buddhists. At the center of this demonstration sat a motionless Thích Quảng Đức, in lotus position, as two monks doused him in gasoline. Moments later, he set himself ablaze. He remained completely still throughout his self-immolation, offering to history one of its most harrowing and profound spectacles of protest.
The image, captured by Malcolm Browne for the Associated Press, shattered America’s false narrative of a just and morally necessary Vietnam War and disrupted the culture of complacency that this narrative demanded. Đức's protest called attention to the contradictions of the USA's foreign policy by posing an apparent contradiction of its own: it seemed unthinkable that someone whose life was dedicated to nonviolence could commit such a brutal act.
Who decides which sacrifices are heroic and which are deranged? When U.S. Army veteran Aaron Bushnell self-immolated outside an Israeli Embassy in 2024 to protest the country’s ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza, his act — and his clearly articulated intentions — were livestreamed and broadcast for all to see. Despite this exposure, his motives were largely rewritten as the expression of an unstable psyche. Yet this very erasure highlights its own enabling conditions: after all, who controls narratives of sanity and protest? How do societal frameworks shift depending on who is protesting – and against whom?
Acts such as Đức's and Bushnell’s rupture the status quo by calling us to confront what we’d rather not see. Thích Quảng Đức’s radical protest reminds us that bearing witness is not a passive act, and that a single image can outlive the fictions written by empire — even as those fictions migrate from our papers to our screens.