It seems to me you've tried unsuccessfully to minimize the political significance of these acts of self immolation. What counts in the end is the popular reaction, not the inherently uncertain motives of the individuals. Bouazizi inspired, even if he himself was just at rope's end.

Daniel Serwer
www.peacefare.net

While these people obviously firstly kill themselves because they are suicidal. They still do have political motivations, the people who set themselves on fire obviously want to make a point, that it was the government policies that may have pushed them to suicide. Bouazizi killed himself because the way authorities were treating him and he probably was trying to get a political reaction. All the other people who have killed themselves recently, while the government may not be why they killed themselves, still wanted to make political statement. And I feel you are just completely dismissing the political motivations of why they are setting themselves on fire. They clearly want to change the government, while not wanting to live.

The term Self-immolation have no relation with the case of Bouazizi he just commited suicide by burning himself wich cannot be as easy as you think but this guy killed himself not anybody else , oppressed peoples do everything for a bit of bread, sometimes even selling the most expensive thing they have Arab people no longer bare the injustice and oppression and poverty and slavery that has taken place that's why some of them choose suicide not for political purposes at all

This piece is written by a man who gives his own book 5 stars at Amazon.

This strikes me as a rather pathetic and indecent attempt both to demean Bouazizi further in death, and to deny an evident component of political intention in his self-immolation, even in the face of the manifest circumstances of Bouazizi's final words and actions in which an element of political intention is plain.

The man lit himself on fire in public. He did it in front of a government building. He did so after complaining to a government official earlier in the day. In his parting Facebook note to his mother he decried both the times in which he lived and the "treachery in the people's land."

Mr. Lankford's whole piece is based on an austere, one-dimensional and psychologically unrealistic distinction between the "personal" and the "political", and an either/or conception of the monocausal determination of human actions. Yes, there is no doubt Bouazizi had been pushed to the edge of endurance by the humiliations he suffered, and had reached a point where he couldn't bear to go on. But he then chose to end his life in a particular way, a way which embodied an obvious element of deliberate political expression.

Mr. Lankford actually admits this, but then tries to mentally block it out by saying, "However, it is relatively common for depressed and suicidal people to try to latch on to something bigger and more significant than themselves in their last moments on Earth -- regardless of their primary agenda." Well, of course. But in this case the "something bigger" to which Bouazizi tried to latch on was a public demonstration of his self-assertion against a government which had beaten him down. So Lankford's admission just amounts to another way of saying that Bouazizi decided on a manner of ending his life that didn't only bring his personal pain to an end, but succeeded in making a deliberate political statement in the process.

There is also an elision in the course of the article from the suggestion that making a political statement might not have been Bouazizi's primary aim to the more comprehensive suggestion that the entirety of Bouazizi's motives were "personal". But most political actions proceed from a mix of self-regarding and socially oriented attitudes and emotions.

Mr. Lankford tries to further his case by pointing out that:

Similarly, the other self-immolators throughout North Africa were reportedly struggling with a range of personal problems such as unemployment, homelessness, and depression.

Indeed. Oddly, it doesn't seem to have occurred to Lankford that a great many of the political sphere's actors have been motivated to their political actions by personal problems such as unemployment, homelessness and depression. It is doubly odd that Lankford seems to believe that if Bouazizi's action was impulsive and not well thought out, that tells against a political motivation. The claim rests on the very dubious notion that an action can't be both impulsive and deliberately political at the same time.

There is something almost Soviet in this forced attempt to classify as matters of "personal" problems cases in which a person finds life no longer endurable because he finds himself deeply at odds with his social environment .

I agreet hat it is regrettable to say that the American people have been excluded from when it comes to foreign policy. Few large multi-national corporations control most what Americans see, hear and read. In addition, the mainstream media is infested by influential Zionist news editors and executives, who exclusively project the Israeli point of view at all time to gullible Americans !!!!

perdre du poids

Politics is about power. Personal powerless is still a form of politics. Even in one's job -- or joblessness -- one can experience this powerlessness and its attendant "depression, hopelessness, guilt, shame, and rage," loss of faith in leaders, and the inherent injustice and unfairness of a system. As a university administrator in a negative and demeaning environment, I indulged in fantasies of both suicide and homicide over all of these emotions, although I never intended to act on them. But I understand these emotional frustrations and how they can be magnified if it affects one's family and if the entire society is producing these emotions in a wider population.

The Mauritanian man who set him self aflame outside the presidential palace in Nouakchott seems to have been a well off middle class businessman. In his final internet exchanges about his impending self-immolation, he apparently wrote: “a simple citizen demands legitimate rights.” The rest of his final commentary seems rather political to me: http://themoornextdoor.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/self-immolation-in-mauritania/

at PTR: great comment.
at the author: You said that Bouazizi burned himself when Tunisia was living a political turmoil. That is not true. What he did, caused the turmoil. Before he committed suicide,there were no demonstrations and no media attention. Well since I am a Tunisian guy myself in my mid twenties who lives in Tunisia, maybe I have some credibility when I say to you, that the word in the street is , that Bouazizi does not have a university degree. Some of my relatives confirmed to me that they have heard this even in Tunisian media. I heard that he was a normal fruit seller and had not had any particular education whatsoever. I heard also that the officer who harassed him was a woman and she allegedly slapped him in the face. He went to the building of the governor to complain to him of what just happened but he was denied access and he was humiliated. Well somebody must have come up with the idea of him being a university graduate unable to find a job, forced to work a menial job.

Aljazeera played a huge role in this, in my understanding. When I watched their coverage of the story as it developed, I could feel that they were really encouraging the tunisian people to revolt.There are many examples which show this. In my opinion, Aljazeera was looking for financial profit of this story, which no one expected. what happened is quite phenomenal. The military played also a major role.

On an other note, I personally was disappointed in the US government, staying out of this. I lived some horrible nights of fear in my city. Chaos ruled. Criminals and thugs were in the street , stealing, beating, robbing, burning, it was crazy. I live in a rather small country in the south of the land and no reporter came here , and no one saw what atrocities happened here. Personal feuds between citizens were resolved like in the stone ages. I had absolutely lost the feeling of safety. now things look better and there is lesser violence. But america , the leading nation of freedom and democracy, was not there when things were pretty ugly. I always was a big fan of the ideal ideas of the us , but now my enthusiasm has been a little lessened , to say the least.