"i will no longer be complicit in genocide"

notes on aaron bushnell's martyrdom

Image by Anna Moneymaker via Truthout

Content warning: discussions of violent death and suicide by self-immolation.

I first learned about U.S. airman Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation in front of the Israeli embassy early in the morning of February 26th, when I stepped out of the shower and picked up my phone to quickly peruse the roundup of local news that I receive every day in my email inbox. At the beginning of the newsletter, sandwiched between a paragraph on the shuttering of a beloved local news outlet and a story about a local man suing the D.C. lottery, was the blurb:

Man Self-Immolates Outside Israeli Embassy

An active duty U.S. airman is in critical condition after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy on Sunday afternoon. The man said he would “no longer be complicit in genocide” and shouted “free Palestine” during what he described as an “extreme act of protest.”

Clicking the attached link brought me to a New York Times story, which quickly informed me on the details of what had happened—the 25-year-old Bushnell, an active duty member of the United States Air Force, had used his cell phone to livestream himself walking up to the front gate of the Israeli embassy in Northwest Washington, dousing himself in a clear liquid from a water bottle, and lighting himself on fire. The self-immolation was, in Bushnell’s own words, an “extreme act of protest” against the Israeli government’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

Shortly after reading that first article, I logged into Twitter, where terms relating to the fatal protest were already occupying the top several spots on the ‘trending topics’ page. There, I learned more about what transpired on Sunday afternoon outside the Israeli embassy—while Bushnell stood there burning, repeatedly screaming out the words “Free Palestine” as the flames engulfed his body, a police officer on the scene had pulled a gun and pointed it at him, ordering him to “get down.” The officer had kept the gun pointed at Bushnell even as he collapsed onto the ground, ignoring his colleague’s cries of “I don’t need guns; I need fire extinguishers!” Bushnell died in the hospital.

For the rest of the morning, I couldn’t get the thought of Bushnell’s self-immolation out of my head. Though it was several hours before I was able to bring myself to look at the footage—and even then, I could only bear to watch the blurred version—I’d still seen an image from the video, from the moment just as the flames were beginning to encircle Bushnell, circulating on Twitter. That image—of this man standing tall in his Air Force fatigues, his fingers curled into fists and his arms cast out defiantly on either side of him—stuck with me, haunting me. Even now, I can see it when I close my eyes.

Finally, in the afternoon, I mustered up the stomach to actually view the video itself, which I found on the Twitter page of the independent journalist who broke the story. Pulling it up on my laptop, I watched in horror as the events I’d read about in more articles and tweets than I could count played out on my screen. I watched as Bushnell walked up to the embassy, explaining in a calm and even tone how “compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers,” the “extreme act of protest” he was about to engage in was “not extreme at all.” I watched as he set the phone down on the ground and stood several feet away from it, opening a water bottle and dumping its contents out onto his head. And I watched as he produced a lighter, stooped down, and, as simply and methodically as if he was tying his shoes, set himself alight. It was at this point that a blurred rectangle appeared over his figure, behind which I could hear “Free Palestine” being screamed out over and over again.

By the time Bushnell had shouted the words for the fourth or fifth time, I had to click away. The torment in his voice, echoing out from behind the blurred box that the reporter who shared the video had added to cover his burning body, was simply too much for me to handle. It was all I could do not to be sick as I listened to his words slur together, garbled and distorted by an anguish too horrible to even imagine. And yet, even through the screams, I could still make out what Bushnell was saying, the unmistakable words that lingered on his lips even as he collapsed: “Free Palestine. Free Palestine. Free Palestine.”

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It’s difficult to imagine a death more horrific than being burned alive. There is, after all, a reason why the phrase ‘burned at the stake’ has come to serve as a metaphor for the harshest and most grotesque punishment imaginable, why so many religious traditions throughout human history have conceived of Hell as a place where the souls of the damned are condemned to burn for all of eternity. What, then, does it mean to light oneself on fire as a form of protest? What does it mean to actively choose such a fate, to willingly consign oneself to such a torturous end in service of one’s ideals? Is self-immolation an act of defiance, or of desperation?

Some might say that the decision to take such extreme measures can only be the product of insanity. Only someone who has already lost touch with reality, we are told, would choose to do something so terrible, so drastic. The validity of the protest has nothing to do with it—if anything, the fact that someone so unstable would do such a thing for a cause is taken as evidence that perhaps the legitimacy of the cause itself ought to be called into question. Certainly, this has been the case with Aaron Bushnell. Within hours of the news spreading, members of the Twitter commentariat—everyone from pearl-clutching liberals to rabid right-wingers—had begun scrambling to paint Bushnell’s self-immolation not as an act of political protest, but as a depoliticized question of mental health and suicide prevention. Activists who have posted in honor of Bushnell’s memory have been condemned as a ‘death cult’ and accused of ‘glorifying suicide,’ simply because they sought to honor Bushnell for what he was—a martyr for the cause of Palestinian liberation.

In a quote given to the author of a 2012 essay in the New Yorker, however, Washington, D.C.-based scholar Timothy Dickinson offers an alternative perspective—that self-immolation is not an act of insanity, but rather “a terrible act of reason.” Death by fire, Dickinson explains,

is the most dreaded of all forms of death…the sight of someone setting themselves on fire is simultaneously an assertion of intolerability and, frankly, of moral superiority. You say ‘I would never have the guts to do that. It’s not that he’s trying to tell me something, but that he’s commanding me.’

Dickinson’s words, which began circulating on Twitter in the hours after Bushnell’s death, resonated with me when I read them. I’m sure that, in the days and weeks to come, the media will bring us more information, each detail more intimate than the last, about the man who set himself on fire to protest the war in Gaza—his relationships, his family life, and, yes, his mental health. It’s eminently possible—though far from guaranteed—that sooner or later, it will be revealed that Bushnell did, in fact, struggle with mental illness, that his friends and loved ones had expressed concerns about his safety and well-being which had tragically gone unheeded. It’s possible, too, that even more alarming facts may eventually come to light—a criminal background, perhaps, or a history of violence. And it’s almost certain that whatever does get revealed about Bushnell’s past will be used to discredit not only his “extreme act of protest,” but also the cause of Palestinian liberation in service of which he carried it out. Anyone who praises Bushnell’s self-sacrifice as an act of heroism, or honors him as a martyr, will be accused—as they already have been—of glorifying suicide and encouraging extremism.

When all is said and done, however, none of this actually matters. It doesn’t matter what Bushnell said or did or believed in the past. It doesn’t matter whether he was depressed, or schizophrenic, or bipolar. All that matters is what he did on the afternoon of February 25th, and why he did it. However extreme Bushnell’s actions were, there can be no doubt about the rightness of his cause, or the moral clarity underpinning his decision to self-immolate—a decision which situates him as part of a long history of people who have resorted to self-immolation as the ultimate form of protest. There can be no doubt about the unwavering conviction, the measured calmness in his voice as he explained to the camera:

I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people are 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.

That last sentence—this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal—says it all. Watching Bushnell’s video from the comfort of our homes and cars and offices, we in the imperial West—we who have never had to know the horrors of war and genocide, we who have never had to dig the bodies of our loved ones out from the rubble of our bombed-out homes—may find the manner of Bushnell’s death shocking. But for the millions of people living under genocidal bombardment in Gaza, his fiery end is already their ‘normal.’ How many Gazans have died engulfed in flames in the last five months, screaming as loudly as Bushnell did, with no one to bear witness to their agony? How many Gazans have watched their parents, their children, their friends, their lovers burn alive, their bodies ignited not by an accelerant poured from a water bottle, but from white phosphorus bombs supplied by the United States and launched from Israeli artillery positions? How many more will there be?

There is no indictment of a system more damning than the death of someone who felt that ending their life in protest of that system would be preferable to remaining complicit in it. The armchair psychologists who dismiss Bushnell’s actions as the product of some unspecified ‘mental illness,’ rather than an act of legitimate and heroic protest, reveal their fundamental cruelty in their refusal to even consider the possibility that these two things may coexist—as if those whom our society has deemed to be ‘mentally ill’ have no agency or capacity to understand and oppose injustice when they see it. As the writer and culture critic

rayne fisher-quann

eloquently put it on Twitter:

psychiatry pathologizes action as sane or insane depending on how it relates to the interests of power — in the American imagination it’s illness to choose to die to protest the violence of war, and perfectly sane to choose to die in service of the violence of war.

Many commentators have already pointed out the ways in which Bushnell’s death, and the response to it, highlights the interconnectedness of numerous structures of violence and oppression, beyond just the immediate genocide in Gaza. The fact that the first response by an agent of the state to seeing a man light himself on fire was to draw a gun and keep it pointed at him, even as his burning body collapsed onto the ground, underscores the grotesque violence that underpins the police system as an institution of state power. The fact that Bushnell—despite apparently being a committed anarchist who was deeply involved in mutual aid and community care—was an active member of the United States military, who was in uniform at the time of his death, underscores the sheer enormity and hegemonic power of American empire. The fact that the mainstream response to Bushnell’s act of protest has been to pathologize and invalidate it, rather than to engage in good faith with the reasons he himself laid out for why he did what he did, underscores the extent to which the superficially neutral discourse of ‘mental health’ has been used by America’s ruling class as a tool to silence and neutralize those who speak out against injustice (a tactic with a long and shameful history in this country—see, for example, the weaponization of schizophrenia as a so-called ‘protest psychosis’ against Black people who were involved in the civil rights and Black Power movements). And above all, Bushnell’s death underscores the urgent need for us to recognize and resist these structures as part of the same struggle for collective liberation.

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The more I learned about Bushnell—particularly as more information came to light about our shared anarchist politics—the more I found myself reminded of another instance in recent memory of someone whose righteous outrage at injustice and oppression drove them to take similarly drastic measures. On July 13, 2019—amid a resurgence of national outrage over the federal government’s barbaric policies of migrant detention and family separation—a 68-year-old man named Willem Van Spronsen attacked a privately-run migrant detention facility in Tacoma, Washington with a rifle and incendiary devices, throwing firebombs at vehicles and buildings. Police responded with gunfire, and Van Spronsen was killed.

From the outset, it was clear that Van Spronsen’s attack was a suicide mission. There was no way that one man, armed with just a home-built gun and a few firebombs, would ever be able to actually breach the detention facility or free those imprisoned inside. A manifesto that Van Spronsen sent to his friends shortly before the attack reveals that he was keenly aware of this fact—that his actions, like Bushnell’s, were intended above all else as “an extreme act of protest.” In the manifesto, he wrote:

Detention camps are an abomination.

I’m not standing by.

I really shouldn’t have to say any more than this.

I set aside my broken heart and I heal the only way I know how—by being useful.

I efficiently compartmentalize my pain…

And I joyfully go about this work.

(To those burdened with the wreckage from my actions, I hope that you will make the best use of that burden.)

To my comrades:

I regret that I will miss the rest of the revolution.

Thank you for the honor of having me in your midst.

Willem Van Spronsen, like Aaron Bushnell, was a hero and a martyr for the cause of liberation. And as we work to make sense of Bushnell’s actions outside the Israeli embassy, as we work to push back against the anesthetizing narratives that seek to strip him of his agency and his protest of its meaning, we would do well to remember Van Spronsen’s words: To those burdened with the wreckage from my actions, I hope that you will make the best use of that burden.

We are all burdened with the wreckage from Bushnell’s actions, and we all have a responsibility to make the best use of that burden. That means honoring Bushnell’s memory, and the memory of every Palestinian who has been martyred for the cause of liberation. It means carrying his spirit forward with us, in the streets and in our hearts, as we renew our calls for ceasefire and for liberation. And it means fighting like hell, never wavering and never resting, until Palestine is free.

Rest in power, Aaron Bushnell. May you not have died in vain.

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culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer, essayist, and cultural critic Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new essays in your inbox: