On July 3, 1936, while the League of Nations was in session in Geneva, a Czechoslovakian Jewish writer named Stefan Lux entered the chamber and shot himself in the chest in front of the assembled delegates. In a letter he had sent to Anthony Eden, Britain’s foreign secretary, Lux explained that his suicide was meant to alert the world to the dangers of Nazism: “You are dealing with a band of criminals in Germany [who] are morally and mentally depraved individuals. It is my profound hope … that the death of a barely known writer will help to bring out the truth and to shed some light.”
It did not. According to the League of Nations archives—now held by its successor, the United Nations—“the Official Journal of the Assembly does not even mention the interruption of the meeting,” and “in the following days, none of the delegates mentioned [Lux] in the discussions at the Assembly.” Today the incident is almost completely forgotten; even histories of the period seldom mention it.
What is an agitator to do when even the most extreme act of protest provokes nothing more than a shrug? This isn’t just a historical question. On April 19, a 37-year-old man named Max Azzarello set himself on fire outside the New York courthouse where Donald Trump is on trial. He, too, had a message, one he felt was so urgent that he was willing to die a horrible death to get the world’s attention: in a manifesto he posted online, Azzarello warned of an “apocalyptic fascist world coup.” But this was self-evidently the work, and the act, of a disturbed individual, and no one took it seriously. Azzarello’s ultimate sacrifice, like Lux’s, was for nothing.
In recent years, saner activists have tried to shock the public into paying attention by targeting works of art. In January, protesters in the Louvre threw pumpkin soup at the Mona Lisa, shouting: “What is more important? Art or the right to have a healthy and sustainable food system?” Last year, climate activists smeared red and black paint on a display case at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., holding Degas’s sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. But the public was no more affected by these stunts than were the artworks, which are protected by safety glass.
Last month, three activists from Extinction Rebellion, the radical environmentalist group, tried a different tactic, disrupting a performance of An Enemy of the People on Broadway. The target was well chosen: Henrik Ibsen’s classic 1882 play is about a doctor who insists on telling the truth about his town’s polluted water supply, only to be silenced by his neighbors, who are worried about the effect on tourism. The protest was widely covered in the media, and Jeremy Strong, the actor who plays the principled doctor, went on Late Night to tell Seth Meyers, “I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t support what [the activists] were saying. It only underlies the message of the play.”
The public was no more affected by these stunts than were the artworks, which are protected by safety glass.
That might sound like the protest was a success. But three weeks later, neither climate change nor the Ibsen production has been affected in the slightest. Strong’s reaction captures the paradox of dissent: the more that people already agree with an act of protest, the less effective it is. If throwing soup at the Mona Lisa to send a message about sustainable agriculture strikes many museum-goers as a non sequitur, telling the audience at a Broadway show about environmental degradation that climate change is bad could be the dictionary definition of preaching to the choir.
On the other hand, an act of protest that is genuinely shocking, such as setting yourself on fire, is likely to be seen as either pathological or martyr-like, and most people do not aspire to either madness or sainthood. It’s natural to think that destroying the thing that is most precious to me, my own life, will show the world I care so much about a cause that they should care about it, too. But this is fundamentally an expression of vanity, a literally fatal miscalculation of how much human beings care about a stranger’s life.
The power of egotism also explains what kind of protest does have a chance of succeeding: one that makes life difficult for people, especially people with power. If an injustice is a problem for a protester, I can ignore it; if it is a problem for me personally, I have no choice but to start thinking about it. When Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old air-force serviceman, immolated himself outside the Embassy of Israel in Washington, D.C., in February, his protest against the Gaza war made tragic headlines for a day. But months-long anti-Israel encampments at Columbia and Harvard, among other universities, have become unignorable.
Making it difficult for students to cross the quad, go to class, or attend graduation ceremonies might seem trivial compared with burning yourself alive, but the protestors have kept at it long enough to provoke administrative crackdowns and even draw the attention of Congress and the White House. Whether they are attracting more adherents than they are repelling remains to be seen, but week after week they are still in the news.
Effective protest tactics don’t guarantee that a cause is just, or that it will prevail. The Occupy Wall Street movement against financial deregulation in New York, in 2011, and the Freedom Convoy against pandemic restrictions in Canada, in 2022, are examples of populist protests that ultimately failed to achieve their aims. But by blocking access to public spaces, these movements forced themselves into the national conversation. A single spectacular action, whether self-immolation or defacing a work of art, can win public sympathy, but for better or worse, to make human beings care about a problem, it’s necessary to make it their problem, too.
Adam Kirsch, an editor at The Wall Street Journal’s weekend Review section, is the author of several books, including The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us