The horror of it is beyond my capacity to describe. On Sunday afternoon, a US air force airman named Aaron Bushnell doused himself in gasoline outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC and lit himself on fire. His phone was propped on the ground nearby, livestreaming to Twitch. “I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” Bushnell said. “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.” Then he set fire to his body and screamed, “Free Palestine.” Bushnell died at a nearby hospital some nine hours later. He was 25.
Bushnell’s political self-killing has opened a rupture in American political discourse, dividing even those with a commitment to the Palestinian cause and a fervent opposition to US aid to Israel. Bushnell’s slow and violent death, the terrifying spectacle of it and its brutal irreversibility, have proved profoundly disturbing to many. There have been wild speculations about his mental health. (“Who but an insane person would do such a thing?” some wonder; as if this question could not be asked of Israel’s war itself.) And there have been, too, fervent calls for caution, for reporters and commentators to write about the act in ways that will not encourage others to follow Bushnell’s lead.
At the same time, there have been some in the pro-Palestine camp who have expressed a humble admiration for Bushnell’s act, revering not only his clarity of principle and self-sacrifice but also the drama and severity of his act, something that seems, finally, appropriate to the scale of their outrage on behalf of Gaza’s nearly 30,000 dead. Disturbingly, neither Bushnell’s admirers nor his critics seem to share my own conviction: that a person of such profound commitment and depth of feeling could be much more useful to the world alive than dead.
I do not pretend to know the state of Bushnell’s mental health, to be able to parse the degree to which his political commitments may have mixed with other struggles to produce his self-killing. That is a question we will never be able to answer. Perhaps more importantly, it feels like the wrong question to ask, a way to avoid confrontation with the stated meaning of Bushnell’s self-immolation: that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza, one that is only possible with US money and US support, and that this moral catastrophe implicates all Americans in complicity. This is a serious proposition; one need not condone killing oneself in order to believe that it is worth taking seriously.
Acts of self-immolation are rare, but they have a clear intent: to use a grotesque display of self-sacrifice to draw the public’s attention to an issue, to force them into moral witness. This was the intent of the most famous self-immolation suicide protester, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, who set himself on fire in Saigon in June of 1963 to protest against the treatment of Buddhists by the Catholic-run government. And in America, it was the aim of Norman Morrison, the most famous of several Vietnam war-era self-immolators in the United States, who set himself on fire outside the Pentagon, directly beneath the office of the defense secretary Robert McNamara. These people become vivid symbols of their struggles, their deaths acting as indictments of the political systems that oppress and fail them.
The grim truth is that self-immolation is making something of a revival as a leftwing protest tactic in the United States. David Buckel, an environmental activist, self-immolated in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in protest of the climate crisis in 2018. Another climate activist, Wynn Bruce, took his own life in the same manner on the steps of the US supreme court in 2022. Nor is Bushnell the first protester to self-immolate in protest of Israel’s war on Gaza: a woman set herself on fire outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta in December; police say that a Palestinian flag was found at the scene.
The revival of this tactic might be best understood as a product of our sclerotic political system, one which has long seemed impervious to less gruesome acts of protest. The self-immolation of the Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in December 2010 prompted the Arab Spring and opened a decade of resurgent leftwing political activism, one that included such American social movements as Occupy Wall Street, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and a new infusion of energy into the labor movement. But more than a decade on, these protest movements have achieved few substantial gains. The Democratic party has moved marginally to the left, but remains unable to enact policy and is beholden to an overstretched coalition; neither racial justice, nor the climate crisis, nor economic inequality have received the sustained attention of the ruling class. Under such circumstances, political despair is inevitable, and a sense of the futility of existing avenues of dissent is not unreasonable. Maybe these are the conditions that make something so terrible as a protest suicide seem useful.
The horrible question, now, is whether such a horrible sacrifice will actually affect policy, or whether it will be calmly assimilated into the status quo. Self-immolations always make a moral statement; it is unclear whether they make a material difference.
America is no stranger to political violence. But usually, it comes from the right. Mass shootings are routinely carried out in public in America by men with far-right political agendas, who massacre church worshippers, grocery shoppers or high school students in the service of a cause; the death toll from these explicitly political atrocities has been assimilated into our social fabric, hardly registered as assaults made on behalf of a movement. Meanwhile, far-right militias, from the polo-wearing Proud Boys to the masked and khakied Patriot Front, hold parades meant to intimidate their political enemies and the populations they consider undesirable. Sometimes, they threaten or beat people; sometimes, they surround state capitols with guns on display. Once, they stormed the Capitol. Rightwing political violence is likely to shape the 2024 election, and barring the emergence of a dramatically different political settlement, it will be a feature of American life for the foreseeable future.
But the left, by contrast, is a much less violent group. There was incidental property violence at Occupy and during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests; every now and then, during the Trump administration, some black-clad anarchists would show up at a Nazi rally and throw a punch. But this violence is sporadic, not programmatic; it is neither a primary feature nor an end of the American left. Self-immolations are an exception: a kind of violence the left commits. But these, too, are different from rightwing violence in one morally crucial respect: those who commit self-immolation do not kill anyone but themselves.
Why has the left not produced more political violence? You would think that the more violent side would be the more desperate side – the ones who are always losing. Perhaps the gap is simply because conservatives are so heavily armed.
But I also like to think that violence is often not compatible with leftwing projects – which are, after all, about human value and dignity, about principle and repair, about a better future. However foreclosed the possibilities seem, however hopeless the struggle for justice may appear, there remains a possibility for a better world so long as those of us committed to one remain here on earth, struggling. It is our loss that Aaron Bushnell is no longer here to struggle with us.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist.
In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
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