February 26, 2024
An active duty member of the U.S.
Air Force self-immolated while yelling “free Palestine” in a tragic protest of
Israel’s genocide in Gaza in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C.
on Sunday afternoon. Aaron Bushnell, of San Antonio, Texas, was 25 years old
and died later that day.
In his final acts, Bushnell, donning
his army fatigues, recorded and live streamed his protest. In footage of his
self-immolation posted by reporter Talia Jane on social media, he explains that
he “will no longer be complicit in genocide.”
“I am an active duty member of the
United States Airforce, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” says
Bushnell, who sent news outlets a link to his livestream prior to his
self-immolation.
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“I am about to engage in an extreme
act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine
at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our
ruling class has decided will be normal,” he continues in the video.
Standing in front of the embassy,
Bushnell then douses himself in liquid and sets himself on fire. He repeatedly
yells “free Palestine,” even as he screams in pain, and eventually falls
silent. Those appear to be his last words.
As Bushnell committed his final act
of protest, the official death toll from Israel’s genocide of Gaza was
surpassing 30,000 Palestinians, with thousands more missing under the rubble,
many presumed dead. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees
(UNRWA) has reported that Israel has blocked food from entering the northern
part of Gaza since January 23, and officials have warned that over 700,000
Palestinians in Gaza are on the verge of starving to death due to Israel’s
starvation campaign. Horrors that would otherwise be unimaginable — like
newborn babies dying from starvation, air strikes or the systematic destruction
of an entire region’s medical system — are becoming commonplace for
Palestinians amid Israel’s horrific assault.
As Bushnell falls over, a police or
security officer is seen on video pointing a gun at his burning body. Another
officer responding to the incident can be heard yelling, “I don’t need guns, I
need fire extinguishers.”
Those who knew Bushnell described
him as a principled and warm-hearted man who dedicated his time to mutual aid
efforts.
“Aaron is the kindest, gentlest,
silliest little kid in the Air Force,” someone identified only as Errico told
Jane. “He’s always trying to think about how we can actually achieve liberation
for all with a smile on his face.”
The Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine (PFLP), a leftist political party in Palestine, released a
statement honoring Bushnell, whose protest is extremely rare even within the
history of anti-war self-immolation, since he was an active U.S. military
member.
“The Front expressed its full
solidarity with the soldier’s family and all the American sympathizers …
confirming that the act of an American soldier sacrificing his life to draw the
attention of the American people and the world to the plight of the Palestinian
people, despite its tragic nature and the great pain it involves, is considered
the highest sacrifice and medal, and the most important poignant message
directed to the American administration,” the PFLP said.
Advocates for Palestinian rights
have criticized coverage of Bushnell’s death by corporate outlets, which have
held extreme pro-Israel biases for many years, for failing to lead with the
fact that Bushnell committed his extreme act in order to send a message about
Gaza. Headlines from most major outlets don’t mention what Bushnell was
protesting; an earlier version of The Washington Post’s coverage criticized his
protest as “problematic” due to his engagement in the act while in fatigues.
Other outlets like NPR also appeared to be editing stories on the fly on Monday
in order to take out controversial statements downplaying Bushnell’s message.
Bushnell is at least the second
protester to self-immolate in recent months in protest of Israel’s genocide,
and will be remembered alongside a long line of self-immolators who have
protested wars across the world. In December, a person draped in a Palestinian
flag set themself on fire outside of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta. Their
act of protest was barely touched by the media, and they appear to never have
been identified by news sources.
Advocates for Palestinian rights
have organized a candlelight vigil to be held on Monday afternoon in the place
where Bushnell held his protest.
Before his self-immolation, Bushnell
appeared to have written a Facebook post calling for people to take action
against the genocide. Along with a link to the Twitch channel on which he
streamed his protest, he wrote: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would
I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What
would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing
it. Right now.”
He
Burned Himself Alive to Turn Eyes to Gaza
I watched the uncensored video of
U.S. airman Aaron Bushnell self-immolating in front of the Israeli embassy in
Washington while screaming “Free Palestine.” I hesitated to watch it because I
knew once I put it into my mind it’s there for the rest of my life, but I
figured I owe him that much.
I feel like I’ve been picked up and
shaken, which I suppose was pretty much what Bushnell was going for. Something
to shake the world awake to the reality of what’s happening. Something to snap
us out of the brainwashed and distracted stupor of western dystopia and turn
our gaze to Gaza.
The sounds stay with you more than
the sights. The sound of his gentle, youthful, Michael Cera-like voice as he
walked toward the embassy. The sound of the round metal container he stored the
accelerant in getting louder as it rolls toward the camera.
The sound of Bushnell saying “Free
Palestine,, then screaming it, then switching to wordless screams when the pain
became too overwhelming, then forcing out one more “Free Palestine” before
losing his words for good.
The sound of the cop screaming at
him to get on the ground over and over again. The sound of a first responder
telling police to stop pointing guns at Bushnell’s burning body and go get fire
extinguishers.
He remained standing for an
unbelievable amount of time while he was burning. I don’t know where he got the
strength to do it. He remained standing long after he’d stopped vocalizing.
Bushnell was taken to the hospital,
where independent reporter Talia Jane reports that he has died. It was about as
horrific a death as a human being can experience, and it was designed to be.
Shortly before his final act in this
world, Bushnell posted the following message on Facebook:
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during
slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was
committing genocide?’
“The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Aaron Bushnell has provided his own
answer to this challenge. We’re all providing our own right now.
I would never do what Bushnell did,
and I would never recommend anyone else does either. That said, I also can’t
deny that his action is having its intended effect: drawing attention to the
horrors that are happening in Gaza.
I know this is true because
everywhere I see Aaron Bushnell being discussed online I see a massive deluge
of pro-Israel trolls frantically swarming the comments in a mad rush to
manipulate the narrative. They all understand how destructive it is to U.S. and
Israeli information interests for people to be seeing an international news
story about a member of the U.S. Air Force self-immolating on camera while
screaming “Free Palestine”, and they are doing everything they can to mitigate
that damage.
As I write this, there are with
absolute certainty people digging through Bushnell’s history searching for dirt
that can be spun as evidence that he was a bad person, that he was mentally
ill, that he was steered astray by pro-Palestine activists and dissident media
— whatever they can make stick. If they find something, literally anything, the
smearmeisters and propagandists will run with it as far as they can.
That’s what they’re choosing to do
at this point in history. That’s what they would have done during slavery, or
the Jim Crow south, or apartheid. That’s what they’re doing while their country
commits genocide right now. People are showing what they would have done with
their response to Gaza, and they’re showing what they would have done with
their response to the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell.
I’m not going to link to the video
here; watching it is a personal decision on which you should probably do your
own legwork to make sure it’s really what you want. Whether you watch it or
not, it happened, just like the incineration of Gaza is happening right now. We
each own our personal response to that reality. This is who we are.
Why Would Anyone Kill
Themselves to Stop a War?
A photo shows the portrait of Norman Morrison at the Vietnam-USA Friendship Society in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Six years ago in 2018, after
returning from a Veterans For Peace trip to Vietnam, I wrote an article called
“Why Would Anyone Kill One’s Self In an Attempt to Stop A War?”
Now, six years later, in the past
three months, two people in the United States have taken or risked taking their
own lives in an attempt to change U.S. policies on Palestine and call for a
cease-fire and stop U.S. funding to the State of Israel that would be used to
kill in the Israeli genocide of Gaza. An yet unidentified woman, wrapped in a
Palestinian flag, set herself on fire in front of the Israeli consulate in
Atlanta, Georgia, on December 1, 2023. Three months later authorities have yet
to release the name of the woman. Her condition was unknown as of mid-December.
This week, on Sunday, February 25,
2024, active duty U.S. Air Force member Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire at
the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., while he was stating “Free Palestine
and stop the genocide.” Bushnell died from his injuries.
As I mentioned in the article in
2018, many in U.S. admire young men and women who join the military and profess
to be willing to give up their lives for whatever the U.S. politicians or
government decide is best for another country—“freedom and democracy” for those
who don’t have the U.S. version of it, or overthrowing self-rule that is not
compatible with the U.S. administration’s view. Actual U.S. national security
seldom has anything to do with U.S. invasions and occupations of other
countries.
But, what about a private citizen
giving up his or her life to try to stop the politicians or government from
deciding what is best for other countries? Could a “mere” citizen be so
concerned about politicians’ or government actions that she or he is willing to
die to bring public attention to those actions?
One well-known and several
little-known actions of private citizens from five decades ago provide us with
the answers.
While on a Veterans for Peace trip
to Vietnam in 2014 and while on another VFP delegation in March 2018, our
delegation saw the iconic photo of a well-known Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc
who set himself on fire in June1963 on a busy street in Saigon to protest the
Diem regime’s crackdown on Buddhists during the early days of the American war
on Vietnam. That photo is seared into our collective memories.
The photos show hundreds of monks
surrounding the square to keep the police out so that Quang Duc could complete
his sacrifice. The self-immolation became a turning point in the Buddhist
crisis and a pivotal act in the collapse of the Diem regime in the early days
of the American war on Vietnam.
But, did you know that several
Americans also set themselves on fire to attempt to end U.S. military actions
during those turbulent war years in the 1960s?
I didn’t, until our VFP delegation
saw the portraits displayed of five Americans who gave their lives to protest
the American war on Vietnam, among other international persons who are revered
in Vietnamese history, at the Vietnam-USA Friendship Society in Hanoi. Though
these American peace persons have fallen into oblivion in their own nation,
they are well-known martyrs in Vietnam, 50 years later.
Our 2014 delegation of 17—six
Vietnam veterans, three Vietnam-era vets, one Iraq-era vet, and seven civilian
peace activists—with four Veterans for Peace members who live in Vietnam, met
with members of the Vietnam-USA Friendship Society at their headquarters in
Hanoi. I returned to Vietnam in March 2018 with another Veterans for Peace
delegation. After seeing one particular portrait again—that of Norman
Morrison—I decided to write about these Americans who were willing to end their
own lives in an attempt to stop the American war on the Vietnamese people.
What distinguished these Americans
to the Vietnamese was that, as American soldiers were killing Vietnamese, there
were American citizens who ended their own lives in order to try to bring the
terror of invasion and occupation for Vietnamese citizens to the American
public through the horror of their own deaths.
The first person in the United
States to die of self-immolation in opposition to the war on Vietnam was
82-year-old Quaker Alice Herz who lived in Detroit, Michigan. She set herself
on fire on a Detroit street on March 16, 1965. Before she died of her burns 10
days later, Alice said she set herself on fire to protest “the arms race and a
president using his high office to wipe out small nations.”
Six months later on November 2,
1965, Norman Morrison, a 31-year-old Quaker from Baltimore, a father of three
young children, died of self-immolation at the Pentagon. Morrison felt that
traditional protests against the war had done little to end the war and decided
that setting himself on fire at the Pentagon might mobilize enough people to
force the United States government to abandon its involvement in Vietnam.
Morrison’s choice to self-immolate was particularly symbolic in that it
followed President Lyndon Johnson’s controversial decision to authorize the use
of napalm in Vietnam, a burning gel that sticks to the skin and melts the
flesh.
Apparently, unbeknownst to Morrison,
he chose to set himself on fire beneath the Pentagon window of then-Secretary
of Defense Robert McNamara.
Thirty years later in his 1995
memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy in Lessons of Vietnam, McNamara remembered
Morrison’s death:
Antiwar protests had been sporadic and limited up to this time and had not
compelled attention. Then came the afternoon of November 2, 1965. At twilight
that day, a young Quaker named Norman R. Morrison, father of three and an
officer of the Stony Run Friends Meeting in Baltimore, burned himself to death
within 40 feet of my Pentagon window. Morrison’s death was a tragedy not only
for his family but also for me in the country. It was an outcry against the
killing that was destroying the lives of so many Vietnamese and American youth.
I reacted to the horror of his action by bottling up my emotions and
avoided talking about them with anyone—even with my family. I knew (his wife)
Marge and our three children shared many of Morrison’s feelings about the war.
And I believed I understood and shared some of his thoughts. The episode
created tension at home that only deepened as the criticism of the war
continued to grow.
Before his memoir In Retrospect was
published, in a 1992 article in Newsweek, McNamara had listed people or events
that had had an impact on his questioning of the war. One of those
events,McNamara identified as “the death of a young Quaker.”
One week after Norman Morrison’s
death, Roger LaPorte, 22, a Catholic Worker, became the third war protester to
take his own life. He died of burns suffered through self-immolation on
November 9, 1965 on the United Nations Plaza in New York City. He left a note
that read, “I am against war, all wars. I did this as a religious act.”
The three protest deaths in 1965
mobilized the anti-war community to begin weekly vigils at the White House and
Congress. And every week, Quakers were arrested on the steps of the Capitol as
they read the names of the American dead, according to David Hartsough, one of
the delegates on our 2014 VFP trip.
Hartsough, who participated in
anti-war vigils 50 years earlier, described how they convinced some members of
Congress to join them. Rep. George Brown (D-Calif.) became the first member of
Congress to do so. After the Quakers were arrested and jailed for reading the
names of the war dead, Brown would continue to read the names, enjoying
congressional immunity from arrest.qz
Two years later, on October 15,
1967, Florence Beaumont, a 56-year-old Unitarian mother of two, set herself on
fire in front of the Federal Building in Los Angeles. Her husband George later
said, “Florence had a deep feeling against the slaughter in Vietnam… She was a
perfectly normal, dedicated person, and felt she had to do this just like those
who burned themselves in Vietnam. The barbarous napalm that burns the bodies of
the Vietnamese children has seared the souls of all who, like Florence Beaumont,
do not have ice water for blood, stones for hearts. The match that Florence
used to touch off her gasoline-soaked clothing has lighted a fire that will not
go out—ever—a fire under us complacent, smug fat cats so damned secure in our
ivory towers 9,000 miles from exploding napalm, and THAT, we are sure, is the
purpose of her act.”
Three years later, on May 10, 1970,
23-year-old George Winne, Jr., son of a Navy captain and a student at the
University of California, San Diego, set himself on fire on the university’s
Revelle Plaza next to a sign that said “In God’s name, end this war.”
Winne’s death came just six days
after the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of Kent State University
student protesters, killing four and wounding nine, during the largest wave of
protests in the history of American higher education.
At our 2014 meeting at the
Vietnam-USA Friendship Society office in Hanoi, David Hartsough presented Held
in the Light, a book written by Ann Morrison, the widow of Norman Morrison, to
Ambassador Chin, a retired Vietnamese ambassador to the United Nations and now
an official of the Society. Hartsough also read a letter from Ann Morrison to
the people of Vietnam.
Ambassador Chin responded by telling
the group that the acts of Norman Morrison and other Americans in ending their
lives are well remembered by the people of Vietnam. He added that every
Vietnamese school child learns a song and poem written by Vietnamese poet Tố Hữu called “Emily, My
Child” dedicated to the young daughter that Morrison was holding only moments
before he set himself on fire at the Pentagon. The poem reminds Emily that her
father died because he felt he had to object in the most visible way to the deaths
of Vietnamese children at the hands of the United States government.
Sparking Revolutions
In other parts of the world, people
have ended their lives to bring attention to special issues. The Arab Spring
began on December 17, 2010 with a 26-year-old street Tunisian vendor named
Mohamed Bouazizi setting himself on fire after a policewoman confiscated his
food street vending cart. He was the only breadwinner for his family and had to
frequently bribe police in order to operate his cart.
His death sparked citizens
throughout the Middle East to challenge their repressive governments. Some
administrations were forced from power by the citizens, including Tunisian
President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled with an iron fist for 23 years.
Or Being Ignored as Irrational Acts
In the United States, acts of
conscience such as taking one’s own life for an issue of extraordinary
importance to the individual are viewed as irrational and the government and
media minimize their importance.
For this generation, while thousands
of U.S. citizens are arrested and many serve time in county jails or federal
prisons for protesting U.S. government policies, in April, 2015, young Leo
Thornton joined a small but important number of women and men who have chosen
to publicly end their lives in hopes of bringing the attention of the American
public to change specific U.S policies.
On April 13, 2015, Leo Thornton, 22
years old, committed suicide by gun on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol. He
had tied to his wrist a placard that read “Tax the 1%.” Did his act of
conscience have any effect on Washington—the White House or the U.S. Congress?
Unfortunately, not.
The following week, the
Republican-led House of Representatives passed legislation that would eliminate
the estate tax applying only to the top 1% of estates. And no mention of Leo
Thornton, and his decision to end his life over inequitable taxation, appeared
in the media to remind us that he ended his life in opposition to another piece
of favorable legislation for the rich.
Then years ago, in October 2013,
64-year-old Vietnam veteran John Constantino set himself on fire on the
Washington, D.C. National Mall—again for something he believed in. An
eyewitness to Constantino’s death said Constantino spoke about “voter rights” or
“voting rights.” Another witness said he gave a “sharp salute” toward the
Capitol before he lit himself on fire. A neighbor who was contacted by a local
reporter said Constantino believed the government “doesn’t look out for us and
they don’t care about anything but their own pockets.”
The media didn’t investigate any
further into the rationale for Constantino’s taking his own life in a public
place in the nation’s capital.
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