As a writer, knowing when words fail me is something I have to carry through every moment, whether I’m trying to unfurl a truth, expose a lie, or simply sitting still with my feelings. But especially in moments like those that come after witnessing an American airman self-immolating to protest the Zionist occupation of Palestine. The video, particularly the sound of Aaron Bushnell forcing his body to repeatedly yell “Free Palestine!” until it physically couldn’t any longer, shifted something within me. And sitting in silence afterwards felt like the only natural thing.
Shutting the fuck up and truly turning inward is often necessary when clarity is needed. When the time came to write, whether I knew that my words would connect with anyone or not, I still had to get them down here.
Whatever words one may be holding onto, a time like this demands a question of us: What do any of us know of sacrifice?
Aaron Bushnell knew that presenting himself the way he did, using the exact words he did, embracing and living his truth even though his heart was surely racing, live streaming the whole thing, sticking through the brutal seconds where the lighter didn’t work and cops began to bear down on him, stating clearly that Palestine must be free and that he could no longer be complicit in genocide, were all necessary if his actions were to change something within us.
What does it mean that a white man self-immolating in full military uniform with a thoughtful and measured preamble was what it took to get this many people talking about it? As though the flames that consumed him lit a way in all this darkness.
Western media begrudgingly reported on his death in the kind of context-starved way propagandists have perfected. Bushnell spoke and acted with clarity and purpose, as martyrs often do, and corporate journalists still actively misinterpreted his decision. The political class could hardly be bothered to speak on it, but surely they can hear the screaming. Aaron’s. People’s in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Haiti, and West Papua. Africans’, pleading for rescue in the Mediterranean. That of those fleeing violence and climate annihilation only to find themselves indefinitely detained amidst a new nightmare in the US. Yours and mine and that of millions within these American borders.
They just won’t be moved by anything like decency or half-measures. And certainly not by shame. In Bushnell’s video, the responding officer drawing his weapon on the man’s burning body, no longer capable of standing, dying, is a solid encapsulation of the cowardice and heartlessness of our enemy.
Anyone making a sacrifice like his is taking on the suffering of us all, as we struggle together to escape this burning house we’ve been crammed into. If we are truly living in the Pyrocene, we must account for the psychic and physical tolls of an incendiary anger and discontent this profound. Turning millions of acres of forest into ash for the sake of capital. Palestinian children burned by Israel with white phosphorus with impunity. A genuinely young life ended with the aim of trying to get killers and thieves to end their genocidal projects.
The loss of the plants, animals, and humans that are being burned and are yet to be consumed by the fires is still worth fighting to prevent.
Aaron Bushnell should still be here. The same way precious, 6-year-old Hind Rajab and her family should be. And Trayvon Martin, whose recent birthday reminds us of how he was so full of both potential and his parent’s love before his murder. Breonna Taylor should be sharing her radiant smile with her family. Refaat Alareer should still be teaching, cracking jokes, and inspiring people around the world. Nex Benedict should be able to dream of and live out their future, full of love and joy.
And on and on throughout history for the great many taken from us for the sake of maintaining the death cult’s violent, capitalist way of life. Whether our dead set out in life aiming for their deaths to carry on a message of love and justice or not, they are still with us. From the revolutionaries we lift up and aspire to think and live like, to the martyrs whose names we’ll never know. This includes our elders, who have fought for us and lived full and radical lives. And when our children are martyred, on down to the tiniest infant, our bond with and love for them is even stronger.
In no uncertain terms, the fierce love self-immolating martyrs have shown throughout history, by sacrificing their lives in such a way, is born of the deepest possible conviction a person can have. We would all benefit from holding ourselves to their standard.
On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi of Tunisia self-immolated after not only having his food cart confiscated by police (which he’d plunged himself into debt to secure), but also being beaten and humiliated after the fact. He set himself on fire as an undeniable statement rejecting the abuse. His act of sacrifice was witnessed by a crowd and the local press, and quickly spread online. The Arab Spring would take hold shortly after, with Bouazizi succumbing to his wounds on January 4, 2011.
On December 10, 2011, Cedrick Nianza of Congo self-immolated to protest the long-running genocide and displacement of millions of people in the DRC. He shouted “Congo na nga, Congo na nga” (“My Congo, my Congo”) as he burned. He would die days later.
For perspective on how long the resource-rich, African nation’s people, heavily exploited by the so-called developed world, have lived under siege by internal forces, neighboring states such as Uganda and Rwanda, and malevolent actors such as France, the US, and Israel, an as yet unidentified man self-immolated more recently on November 8, 2023. In a video posted to social media, he held a sign which read “Stop the genocide in Congo.” He pushed away those who attempted to put out the fire, collapsing and later dying.
In the martyrdom of these people, and in that of the resistance forces fighting and dying against their occupiers and annihilators in Palestine and throughout the world, we witness an often fatal rejection of “what the ruling class has decided will be normal,” in Bushnell’s words during his final moments. The aim is to build a world where people no longer have to make this sacrifice and can live freely and fully. To fully abolish the normalcy of the hell on earth that the ruling class has created.
Thích Nhất Hạnh’s letter to Dr. King in June of 1965 stated plainly that self-immolation is not suicide (the press then, as now, claimed as much): “The Vietnamese monk, by burning himself, say with all his strengh [sic] and determination that he can endure the greatest of sufferings to protect his people. But why does he have to burn himself to death? The difference between burning oneself and burning oneself to death is only a difference in degree, not in nature. A man who burns himself too much must die. The importance is not to take one’s life, but to burn. What he really aims at is the expression of his will and determination, not death.
“In the Buddhist belief, life is not confined to a period of 60 or 80 or 100 years: life is eternal. Life is not confined to this body: life is universal. To express will by burning oneself, therefore, is not to commit an act of destruction but to perform an act of construction, i.e., to suffer and to die for the sake of one’s people. This is not suicide…”
In recent days we’ve seen a good number of important people (journalists, academics, politicians, the usual) say that we shouldn’t honor or celebrate Aaron Bushnell, or anyone who martyrs themselves the way he did, because people with suicidal ideation need treatment, not that sort of attention.
I think one of the worst things about Americans, along with being unabashed rule-following jerks, is the sheer pride in being dead wrong. I’m gonna name right now that these people don’t give a damn about anyone living in crisis of any sort.
Any time those with power want to prove a point in support of empire and the white supremacy and capitalism at its core, they run their mouths about mental illness as though they care and want to make a change. Meanwhile more people who are truly victimized by systems of dominance, stigmatization, and exploitation get pushed further toward the margins by the negligence and violence of our society.
I’ve had thoughts of killing myself for most of my life. I wrote about it in-depth a few years ago here. If you’ve had thoughts of harming or killing yourself, you’re not alone, and this place is better with you here. They don’t make it easy to see that it can get better, but I’m always here to remind you that it can and does.
In my lowest moments, self-immolation was never a thought as far as how I wanted to end my life due to whatever was causing me pain. So many people live with some form of suicidal ideation, and it can be a truly alienating existence, especially in a barbaric, individualistic, and capitalist country like the US. So there is truly no need to connect this reality with that of the martyr’s self-sacrifice.
Any time someone makes the choice to die in this fashion, I’m forced to think about my own end and what I want to contribute to freeing people both while I’m here and when I’m gone.
I believe introspection is vital to actions large and small that we must all commit to individually and collectively. We know something is seriously wrong with the world as it is. We’ve likely known for years, decades even. Yet what is the texture of our grief? Is the pain it causes worth holding onto? How much longer will our fears stand in the way of the action required to free us?
Suffocating flames climb up your chest and neck each day under our current systems. Survival mode is the only normal a lot of us know. Is today the day you finally drown? How can one be expected to fight when we can hardly breathe? The best way seems to be together, and in spite of how we’re told we shouldn’t care about something happening to our neighbors or to those in another country entirely.
Take note of how settler states pathologize resistance against those who maim, steal from, starve, and kill us and our comrades. Dissent as disease, to hear them tell it. Mental illness is increasingly criminalized, and the ruling class has a vested interest in aligning any sort of fight for liberation with those who they deem punishable and disposable. If Bushnell had died in service of the imperial violence the US military inflicts on the world with all its might, these worms would be calling him a hero. Sane.
Truly brave people resisting these violent ass regimes here and throughout the world, moving with love, determination, and purpose, have long found themselves criticized, imprisoned, and killed by those ruled by the American (and neocolonial) need to make everything about us and what we want.
And for the question of who is sane, what if the ways in which each of us are broken down, taken apart, and reconfigured to make us useful to patriarchal, white supremacist capitalism are what’s needed to piece this world back together? I don’t think the so-called sane approach has any use in putting right a world made indecent and grotesque by people who mock our sacrifices and willfully misinterpret our deeply incendiary love for each other.
Like Bernie Mac said, Fuck ‘em!
None of us want to live in vain. Of course.
The biggest losers you’ve ever met claim that Bushnell will be forgotten. Maybe he will be for people who hang on Joe Biden’s every (dying) word. But Hamas, the PFLP, and Yemenis actively fighting against Zionist genocide have all expressed gratitude for his solidarity. It must be a truly spiritual connection to be as segregated from the world as Palestinian people have been for decades, yet know that people across an ocean are willing to die to express love for them and other oppressed people.
We owe it to those who have given their lives to fight with every part of us. We owe them our imaginations as well as our bodies. It will take all of us to free all of us.
What are we working towards? Especially if you’ve been told anything is possible if you work hard enough and play by their rules. Only to have your heart, dreams, and livelihood smashed and stepped on. And to witness how casually and often the state goes about deserting, torturing, starving, and killing both its own people and those deemed disposable globally. I personally don’t want us to go on to our dying days still concerning ourselves with meetings, emails, debt, celebrities, blind personal ambition, and the like while our comrades near and far are being disappeared and slaughtered.
An expansion and diversification of tactics is needed, here in the US especially. And not just regarding the matter of fighting with the Palestinian people for their liberation, but for all the things we’ve been fighting for here and globally. Bickering online and even face to face about who can say Rest In Power, talking about elections, engaging with disingenuous “allies” who tell Sudanese people experiencing genocide that anti-Blackness is not an issue for them, arguing over the effectiveness of sacrificing yourself in the name of justice using deadly fire, trying to change systems from within, and all the other games we were playing 5-10 years ago ain’t gonna cut it.
Writing and calling representatives endlessly, millions marching around the world, voting in the “most important election(s) of our lifetimes.” And it’s still just been years of the ruling class telling us to go shit in a hat and mail it to our mothers. We’re supposed to simply bear the weight of empire and be thankful for the privilege of dying in their so-called first world. As people set themselves on fire to demand an end to violence and oppression.
I’d no sooner debate with someone over the effectiveness of this form of resistance than I would argue over the fact of gravity. I’m done fussing with counterinsurgents over what is. These people don’t have shit to tell us about courage, selflessness, or what’s right. And no one whose definition of martyrdom would fit in around Capitol Hill circa March 2003 is worth debating the concept with.
The Quran states: “The martyrs are of five kinds: One who dies of plague; one who dies of disease of his belly; the drowned; one who dies under the debris (of construction, etc), and one who dies while fighting in the way of Allah."
Given Israel’s barbaric violence in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria in just these past few months, which has left at least 30,000 people dead and many more starving, imprisoned, injured, and sick, we would do well to honor those martyred under these definitions, regardless of our faith.
Two months ago, an al-Qassam martyr fighting Zionists, captured on the IOF drone footage above, had the resolve while dying to lie in prostration, or sujūd, praying in his final moments and becoming a symbol of resolve and conviction around the world for those in solidarity with the Palestinian people. We are often unable to conceptualize this level of hopefulness in death in this country.
The Quran (2:154) states: “Do not say regarding those who are slain in the path of God that they are dead; rather they are alive but you are not aware.”
The Arabic shaheed, denoting a martyr, means witness. In the west, there will always be critics with no understanding of martyrdom’s role in Islam. There’s been plenty of debate over the meaning of martyrdom in the cursed western marketplace of ideas, as bombs rain down on starving and displaced people during the multiple genocides underway globally.
When others have self-immolated to protest, be it against climate change, police murders, wars, or any other violence or injustice, our society here in the US works hard to plunge the act into a vacuum, in an attempt to extinguish the fire of the martyr’s conviction.
When a Black pro-Palestine protester self-immolated in front of the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta in December of 2023, police didn’t release a name, gender, or identity, despite obtaining a search warrant for the person’s home. And the media didn’t press them to. Lest we be reminded of how far people are willing to go to end the occupational violence of fascist states such as the US and Israel.
In the case of Aaron Bushnell, it’s not been as easy to vanish him as with others who’ve self-immolated because of his ideology and connection with the military, made clear in the video he streamed and posts that have emerged since his death. His status as a white American member of the US Air Force surely bolstered the image of his burning body. Whether he was intentional in that aspect of his actions can certainly be discussed, but how much can it matter now? He’s gone. “I will no longer be complicit in genocide” was a concrete statement for him in those final moments. He created a will beforehand stipulating that his life savings go to a Palestinian children’s relief fund. His neighbor is to take care of his cat.
If we’re going to fight, like really fight, we must take his sacrifice and build with it to struggle towards an end to all genocidal occupations.
Nothing about Aaron Bushnell’s actions was more violent or extreme than what Israel has inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere in recent months and over many decades. Or than what the US has done to exploited and marginalized people since its inception. He even said as much in his video.
Even with all the misery and death we’ve witnessed, almost all of us who are relatively safe and comfortable have been shielded from the sight of flesh made flames by US-supplied bombs, missiles, and white phosphorus in Occupied Palestine, in countries throughout the African continent destabilized by capitalist, white supremacist western forces, in proxy wars with old state foes as in Ukraine, and throughout the American coalition’s vicious assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq.
Most people in the US, especially our cowardly journalists and politicians, could never relate to the type of love the martyr holds in their heart. They lack the range, conviction, and compassion. For people living under siege, being displaced, and otherwise victimized by fascist states and actors, knowing that someone in the imperial core loves them deeply enough to make a sacrifice such as this is true solidarity, no matter what pundits or right-wing professors want us to believe about mental illness or their damn acceptable forms of protest.
The growing global resistance to western hegemony, along with Aaron Bushnell’s and others’ fierce acts of love, should have us thinking more deeply about and taking the actions that will be required of us, sooner rather than later, to remake this world into something less deadly and more loving.
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