Aaron Bushnell's Noble Sacrifice
If suicide is considered a cry for help, Bushnell's plea to save the Palestinian people is a million cries.
On Sunday, a 25-year-old USAF engineer named Aaron Bushnell, dressed in his USAF combat fatigues,walked to the front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC. Bushnell proceeded to set up a livestream on the gaming platform Twitch, where he spoke the following words:
I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m 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.
Bushnell proceeded to put down his phone, doused himself in lighter fluid, and set himself ablaze as he shouted the words, “Free Palestine!”
When we discuss suicide in Western society, it tends to revolve around trying to dissuade the person from doing so. Typically, our understanding of the act is that it is something that desperate or deeply depressed people do because they cannot deal with their issues or get the care they need. Extremist Islamic sects view suicide for jihad as a glorious act, and some areas of Eastern societies like Japan believe suicide to be a noble ending when one has behaved ignobly or has been defeated but cannot admit to that defeat.
In the case of Aaron Bushnell, though, there is a component that we are reluctant to entertain, that of injustice so great, a crime so atrocious, that the person committing the act believes there is no other way to draw the attention of the government than to die in the most appallingly painful and public manner possible. It takes bravery to commit such an act, and Bushnell was preceded some sixty years ago in this by a Vietnamese monk named Thích Quảng Đức, who protested the South Vietnamese government’s oppression of Buddhist monks in the early years of the Vietnam War by doing the same as Bushnell.
Sadly, much of the coverage in the 48 hours after it occurred took the form of feigned ignorance. Multiple articles stated, “It was unclear as to why Bushnell took his own life,” when it was completely fucking obvious why he did it. Given the current state of the media landscape, though, I think this is not the fault of the reporters, most of whom are younger and understand that the job of telling the truth matters more than the false god of balance. The fault lies with their editors, who came of age during a time of a grotesque, obsessive media focused on trivialities and then cowed by the Bush administration after 9/11 from doing insightful reporting.
Those editors, as we’ve seen in coverage of false moral panics ginned up by professional troll Chris Rufo, or in coverage of neo-Nazis after Trump’s 2016 election win, or in their current false equivalencies between Donald Trump’s multiple criminal indictments and Joe Biden’s age, are simply unsuited for the seriousness that this moment demands. Time and again, they absolutely fail the public by not examining the motivations behind actions, and treating everything as a “Who can really tell” story where the truth cannot be discerned and both sides of any issue are right. It’s been 72 hours since Bushnell crumpled in a smoking heap after his sacrifice, and this is what search results yield.
The ADL has quietly transformed over the past few years under the terrible leadership of Jonathan Greenblatt from a group truly concerned about anti-Semitism to one that acts as a cheerleader for Israel’s actions, no matter how heinous, and has helped launder the grotesque lie that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic (which would come as a great surprise to Israelis themselves!). That lie takes shape in this screenshot, where the top news result in a Google search for “Aaron Bushnell” comes from an advocacy group who is diametrically opposed to the principles Bushnell held. The fact that the media is not pushing back on incidents like this speaks to the unfit nature of the editors at other news publications. When truth is suppressed through ignorance, incompetence, or direct action, the public suffers.
It is up to us to make sure Aaron Bushnell did not die in vain. I did a small part yesterday by voting uncommitted in the presidential primary. I do another small part by writing this words today. Gaza ceasefire now.