One day the street where Bushnell set himself on fire will bear his name;
For his moral courage (Al Jazeera)
Aaron Bushnell's self-sacrifice was ultimately a spiritual act, one that radically defines good and evil, and calls us to resistance.
Aaron Bushnell, when he put his cell phone on the ground to prepare a live broadcast, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., leading to his death in an incident of peaceful violence against extremist evil.
As an active-duty member of the US Air Force, he was part of the vast machinery perpetuating the ongoing genocide in Gaza, no less morally reprehensible than the German soldiers, technocrats, engineers, scientists and bureaucrats who outfitted the Nazi Holocaust machine.
This was something he could no longer accept.
He died to cleanse our sins.
“I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” he said calmly in his video, walking to the embassy gate.
“I am about to engage in extreme protest action.”
But compared to what people were suffering in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it is not extreme at all.
“This is what our ruling class has decided is normal.”
Condemn state violence
Young men and women join the army for many reasons, but hunger, bombing, and the killing of women and children are usually not among them.
Shouldn't, in a just world, the American fleet break the Israeli blockade of Gaza to provide food, shelter and medicine?
Shouldn't American warplanes enforce a no-fly zone over Gaza?
To stop indiscriminate bombing?
Shouldn't Israel be issued an ultimatum to withdraw its forces from Gaza?
Shouldn't arms shipments and billions in military and intelligence aid to Israel be halted?
Shouldn't those who commit genocide, as well as those who support genocide, be held accountable?
These simple questions are the ones that Bushnell's death forces us to confront.
“Many of us like to ask ourselves,” he posted shortly before his suicide, “What would I do if I lived during slavery? The Jim Crow South? Or segregation? What would I do if my country committed genocide? The answer is: You do.” , now".
Coalition forces intervened in northern Iraq in 1991 to protect the Kurds, following the First Gulf War.
The suffering of the Kurds was widespread, but dwarfed;
Because of the genocide in Gaza.
A no-fly zone was imposed for the Iraqi Air Force.
The Iraqi army was expelled from the northern Kurdish regions.
Humanitarian aid saved Kurds from hunger, infectious disease, and death.
But that was - again - another war.
Genocide is evil when carried out by our enemies.
It is defended and sustained when implemented by our allies.
Walter Benjamin - whose friends Fritz Heinle and Rika Seligsson committed suicide in 1914 - speaks;
Protesting German militarism and World War I – in his essay “Criticism of Violence”, about acts of violence carried out by individuals confronting extreme evil.
Any action that defies radical evil breaks the law in the name of justice.
It affirms the sovereignty and dignity of the individual.
It condemns coercive state violence.
It entails the desire to die.
Benjamin called these extreme acts of resistance “spiritual violence.”
“It is only for the desperate,” Benjamin writes, “that we are given hope.”
Bushnell extinguished the candle of his life in the same way that the lives of thousands of Palestinians, including children, have been extinguished.
We can watch him burn to death.
This is what it looks like.
This is what is happening to the Palestinians because of us.
Political message
The image of Bushnell's self-immolation — like that of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc in Vietnam in 1963, or that of Mohamed Bouazizi, a young fruit seller in Tunisia, in 2010 — is a powerful political message.
It wakes the viewer from his slumber.
It forces the viewer to question assumptions.
It begs the viewer to act.
He is standing on a political stage, or perhaps performing religious rituals, in their most powerful form.
The Buddhist monk, Thích Nhất Hạnh said about self-sacrifice: "To express one's will by burning oneself, therefore, is not to commit an act of destruction, but to perform a constructive act, that is, to suffer and die for the sake of the suicide's people."
If Bushnell was willing to die, he would repeatedly shout: "Freedom for Palestine!"
When it burned, something must be terribly wrong.
These individual self-sacrifices often become rallying points for mass opposition.
They can ignite revolutionary unrest, as they did in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria.
Bouazizi, who was upset that local authorities had confiscated his goods and produce, did not intend to start a revolution.
But the petty and humiliating injustices he endured under Ben Ali's corrupt regime resonated with an abused public.
If he could die, they could take to the streets.
These actions are sacrificial births.
They herald something new.
They are the complete rejection, in their most dramatic form, of prevailing conventions and systems of power.
It's designed to be horrific.
They're supposed to be shocked.
Burning to death is one of the most horrific ways to die.
Self-sacrifice comes from the Latin stem immolāre, to sprinkle with salted flour when offering a dedicated victim for sacrifice.
Self-sacrifice, like Bushnell's, links the sacred and the profane through the sacrificial means of death.
But going to this extreme requires what theologian Reinhold Niebuhr calls “a sublime madness of the spirit.”
He notes that "nothing but such madness would do battle with malignant power and spiritual evil in high places."
This madness is dangerous, but necessary when confronting radical evil;
Because without it, “the truth is obscured.”
Niebuhr warns that liberalism “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, let alone fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world off its beaten paths. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an effective force in history.”
This intense protest – this “sublime madness” – has been a powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressed throughout history.
About 160 self-immolations in Tibet since 2009 to protest Chinese occupation are seen as religious rituals, acts declaring victims' independence from state control.
Self-sacrifice calls us to a different way of being.
These victims become martyrs.
Memory betrayal
Resistance communities, even if secular, are bound together by the sacrifices of martyrs.
Only apostates betray their memory.
The martyr, through his example of self-sacrifice, weakens and breaks the ties and coercive power of the state.
The martyr represents a complete rejection of the status quo.
This is why all countries seek to discredit the martyr, or turn the martyr into a non-human.
They know and fear the power of the martyr, even in death.
In 1965, Daniel Ellsberg witnessed a 22-year-old anti-war activist, Norman Morrison, douse himself with kerosene and set himself on fire—fires fired 10 feet in the air—outside Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's office at the Pentagon, to protest the Vietnam War.
Ellsberg cited self-immolation, along with nationwide anti-war protests, as one of the factors that prompted him to release the Pentagon Papers.
The radical Catholic priest, Daniel Berrigan, after traveling to North Vietnam with a peace delegation during the war, visited Ronald Brazee's hospital room.
Brazzi was a high school student who doused himself with kerosene in downtown Syracuse, New York;
To protest the war.
“He was still living a month later,” Berrigan wrote.
"I managed to reach him."
I smelled burning flesh, and I understood again what I had seen in North Vietnam.
The boy was dying in agony, his body like a hunk of meat thrown on the grill.
He died shortly afterwards.
I felt like my senses were invaded in a new way.
I understood the power of death in the modern world.
I knew I had to speak out and act against death;
Because this boy's death was multiplied a thousandfold in the land of burning children.
So I went to Catonsville;
Because I went to Hanoi."
In Catonsville, Maryland Berrigan and eight other activists, known as the Catonsville Nine, stormed City Hall on May 17, 1968. They took 378 government files and burned them with homemade napalm in the parking lot.
Berrigan was sentenced to three years in federal prison.
Sirens
I was in Prague in 1989 for the Velvet Revolution.
I attended the commemoration of the self-immolation of a 20-year-old university student named Jan Balach.
Ballach stood on the steps outside the National Theater in Wenceslas Square in 1969, doused himself with gasoline, and set himself on fire.
He died of his injuries three days later.
He left behind a note saying: This action is the only way left to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which took place five months ago.
His funeral procession was broken up by the police.
When repeated candlelight vigils were held at his grave in Ulsani Cemetery, the Communist authorities, determined to eradicate his memory, dismantled his body, burned it and delivered the ashes to his mother.
During the winter of 1989, posters bearing Balach's face covered the walls of Prague.
His funeral, two decades earlier, was suppressed as the ultimate act of resistance against the Soviets and the pro-Soviet regime installed after the overthrow of Aleksandar Dubcek.
Thousands of people marched to Red Army Soldiers' Square, renaming it Jan-Palach Square.
he won.
One day, if Israel's apartheid state is dismantled, the street where Bushnell set himself on fire will bear his name.
He will be honored, like Ballach;
For his moral courage.
The Palestinians, betrayed by most of the world, already view him as a hero.
Because of him, it will be impossible to demonize us all.
Sublime violence terrorizes the corrupt and questionable ruling class.
It exposes their corruption.
It shows that not everyone is paralyzed by fear.
It is a siren call to fight radical evil.
This is what Bushnell meant.
His sacrifice speaks to the good side of ourselves.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.