Word: palach
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...suicide was 21-year-old Ian Palach, a quiet, bookish philosophy major at Charles University. Entering Wenceslas Square in the bustle of mid-afternoon traffic, Palach carefully removed his overcoat, poured a small can of gasoline over himself and struck a match. Instantly, to the horror of several dozen passersby, he turned into a human torch. Despite a bus dispatcher's frantic effort to smother the flames with his overcoat, Palach's body was ravaged. He died three days later...
Appalled Reaction. The purpose of Palach's self-immolation was contained in a note found in his overcoat pocket. To rescue Czechoslovakia from the "edge of hopelessness," he had written, a group of volunteers had decided to burn themselves, one by one, as a protest. Palach made two demands of the government: an end to censorship and the prohibition of the Soviets' occupation newspaper, Zprávy. Considering the finality of his act, they were remarkably modest requests. The note was signed, "Torch...
...regime. Shortly after the Stalinist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, the Communists announced that Wartime Leader Jan Masaryk, son of Tomás, had jumped out of a window-a claim that seemed credible to many Czechoslovaks despite evidence that he was pushed. Many of Palach's mourners compared him to Jan Hus, the 15th century martyr who chose death at the stake rather than recant his religious views...
Still, there is no precedent in Czechoslovakia for Palach's attempt to provoke unrest by the deliberate, fiery kind of self-destruction that Buddhists used in South Viet Nam, and the first appalled reaction was to dismiss his act as the product of a deranged mind...
Duplicate Martyrdom. What caused that view to change was a feeling, even in the government, that Palach's death had to be taken as a serious political protest. While President Ludvik Svoboda pleaded against the repetition of "this horrible deed," he declared sympathetically on television that, "as a soldier, I am able to assess the self-denial and the personal courage of Jan Palach." Student and some union leaders quickly moved to channel the nation's horror and sympathy for Palach into full-scale political protest. First in Prague and then in other cities, they staged memorial marches...