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Jan Palach’s Self-Immolation

Back in the day on January 19th, 1969, Jan Palach, a student of history, died three days after having set himself on fire in protest of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. The twenty-year old young man had been an avid supporter of the “Prague Spring” of 1968 and its efforts to create ‘socialism with a human face,’ when he decided to take drastic action against its dismantlement. On that fateful day, Palach took to a public square in the country’s capital where he then doused himself in gasoline, and set fire to the flames. Much of the student activist’s body was covered in third-degree burns as he died slowly and painfully as a result of them in the days following his suicide protest. Palach had hoped that his self-immolation would ignite Czechoslovakians to rise up against the occupation. In the days between his act of resistance and his funeral procession, hunger strikes, silent processions, and other protest suicides took place.

The occasion of his burial itself became a mass demonstration in the spirit of Palach’s own last words that read, “One must fight against the kind of evil that he is able to defeat.”

For Uprising, this is your truth professa’ saying it’s no mystery why they conceal our people’s history