If Aaron Bushnell is a Political Martyr, Be Clear What His Politics Actually Were
Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old U.S. Air Force service member, livestreamed his self-immolation outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., on 25 February. Bushnell filmed himself walking towards them Embassy, saying he would “no longer be complicit in genocide” and was going to engage in an “extreme act of protest” on this basis. Bushnell, dressed in his military uniform, then doused himself in gasoline and lit himself ablaze, screaming, “Free Palestine”, intermittently for about half-a-minute, before he fell down. Bushnell died the next day.
As is always the way now, a lot of toxic, Twitter-based Discourse ensued. The first round was objections to his supporters using “rest in power”, since this is apparently a black-exclusive phrase and Bushnell was white. Then there comparisons to Thich Quang Duc, the Buddhist monk who burned himself alive in South Vietnam in June 1963. Many seemed to be under the impression Quang Duc was protesting the American effort to stop the Soviets colonising South Vietnam. In reality, Quang Duc was protesting perceived official anti-Buddhist discrimination by the government of Ngo Dinh Diem, a stern Roman Catholic.
By far the most intense dispute has been whether Bushnell was disturbed or mentally ill. To the “pro-Palestine” set, this is a terrible calumny against a brave man by liberals, centrists, and other political detritus whose concern for comfort blinds them to the fact some humans hold beliefs so sincerely they are willing to die for them.
The central exhibit here is a tweet by Mark Joseph Stern, the Slate writer, which said: “I strongly oppose valorizing any form of suicide as a noble, principled, or legitimate form of political protest. People suffering mental illness deserve empathy and respect, but it is wildly irresponsible to praise them for using a political justification to take their own life.”
What Stern said is an anodyne statement of compassion and prudence. It is well-known that there is a contagious aspect to suicide—even fictional representations of suicide can lead to spikes in suicides and suicide attempts—and suicide is also often an impulsive act. This is why guidelines for reporting on suicide stress that the story should not be given undue prominence, should not be sensationally headlined or repeated unnecessarily, and perhaps above all should not be presented as a “constructive solution to problems”.
Yet Stern was met with a storm of outrage, including from one Twitter user who felt Stern had paid insufficient attention to the statement of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)—one of the most blood-soaked factions of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)—which hailed Bushnell’s “sacrifice” as an “honourable” deed worthy of a medal.
If the invitation to accept Bushnell as a political martyr is to be accepted, then it is important to be clear what his political cause actually was. For an idea of Bushnell’s politics, we can examine his Reddit posts since the 7 October pogrom by Iran/HAMAS in Israel.
Shortly after the pogrom, Bushnell wrote:
[I]f imperial powers declare a people irrelevant and send military powers to expel them from their land, and then I come and move into one of their houses behind the protection of the IDF [Israel Defence Forces], I don’t get to claim it’s a violation of my human rights if some of those people come and kick me back out of that house or throw a Molotov at it or kidnap me. I decided to make their home my home … I decided to become a citizen of a state that is built on an active genocide. My so-called “human rights” can’t override those of the people in am colonizing.
“There are no ‘civilians’ or tourists who have no part in the oppression of Palestine”, Bushnell declared around the same time.
Reiterating his point that all Israelis are fair game for kidnapping and murder, Bushnell said in a post in the same time-period, referring to the Lefty, pro-peace Israelis at the Nova music festival who were the first target of the HAMAS rampage, “those people’s fun … was specifically built on Palestinian suffering. There are no innocent civilians in settler colonialism. Being a settler is inherently violent.”
“Imagine going to a music event within sight of a giant concentration camp wall where millions of people have been corralled to make room for your music festival”, Bushnell wrote in another post. “No decent human being would be able to enjoy such an event”. Elsewhere, Bushnell decried those “clutching their pearls over [the attack on] ‘a music festival’,” again stating that none of the targets were “innocent” because the event was “happening just three miles from Gaza … Can you or I really say that indigenous people are wrong for retaliating against colonizers who are rubbing their domination in their face?”
The mention of the “music event within sight of a giant concentration camp” is clearly an allusion to the infamous photographs of Germans happily picnicking while a death camp operates in the background during the Holocaust, and Bushnell is explicit in intending this comparison, saying HAMAS—referred to as “an anti-colonial resistance organisation”—is:
fighting against the closest thing this world currently actually has to the Nazis. Israel is a white supremacist, ethnonationalist, settler-colonial apartheid state. … It has no right to exist. It constantly attacks the Palestinian people to gain more lebensraum for its own people, who come from primarily white imperialist nations to settle there. It has to constantly engage in aggression against the Palestinian people, because it is fundamentally a colonial imposition on the land, and all of the land it controls belongs to native people.
The ludicrousness of calling Jews interlopers in the Land of Israel to one side, this verbiage—of Israel as a “colonial imposition” that is racist and “apartheid” and just like the Nazis, if not worse—is drawn is almost word-for-word from the Soviet “anti-Zionist” active measures of the 1970s, the same foundation that underlies the current political warfare being waged against Israel in the international courts.
Bushnell protested another commenter who compared HAMAS to the Nazis, by saying that the Nazis “wanted to wipe out all Jews”, where HAMAS at most is “only a threat to the Israeli people”. Bushnell rejects this idea, too, but adds: “Even if it [HAMAS being a threat to all Israelis] were the truth, that wouldn’t be genocidal, but actually perfectly reasonable, as Israelis are settler-colonizers illegally occupying Palestinian land. Violence against people who are invading your home is self-defense and is even protected by international law”.
Bushnell simply did not believe Israelis had any right to defend their lives: “There is something distinctly, insidiously white about the monopolization and weaponization of oppression. Phrases like ‘Jews are the only people that aren’t allowed to defend themselves’ are so sneakily white supremacist.”
Many of Bushnell’s other post showed a minor obsession with how awful white people are, in the manner so frequently seen in American race discourse, and he had exported this framework to the Holy Land, as can be seen with his reference above to Israelis coming “from primarily white imperialist nations”—news, no doubt, to the half-or-more of Israelis who descend from the Mizrahi Jews expelled from the Arab States in the 1940s and 1950s.
Bushnell self-defined as a libertarian anarchist, which led him into squabbles with Marxist-Leninists, particularly the doctrinaire ones devoted to the “line” of their party or sect. When Communist totalitarianism ran up against American democracy, however, Bushnell had no doubt which side he was on, describing the Cold War as “a polite term for massive global US aggression” and warmly defended the Soviet attempt to conquer South Korea as a reasonable defensive response to the U.S. “suppressing the anti-colonial organizations” on the Peninsula. Bushnell’s conspiracy theories about American elections being a mirage “dictated” by the “ruling class” and his edgy-atheist-teenager attacks on Christianity were of a piece with this worldview.
We are left, then, with a straight choice. Either, we mourn the loss of a troubled young man, a human tragedy of the kind that is all-too-common at the present time, or we accept that Aaron Bushnell died trying to further a grisly political program that includes support for HAMAS, the massacre of Jewish civilians, and the destruction of Israel.
The thing that sticks out to me is the degree to which the valorization of racial self-loathing in Occidentals is now leading not just to the support of terrible policies (as such policies have been supported for most of living memory, most notably with the "decolonization" of Africa and Asia, which both objectively regressed every nation said decolonization touched, and which in most cases replaced the Western white colonizers with far worse Eastern white colonizers, when they weren't being replaced with Chinese ones, or corrupt, cruel, and incompetent native rulers), but has now even inspired a grizzly suicide, whose sole stated purpose is to promote the murder of millions of strangers half a world away simply because --some-- of said strangers have Western-European ancestry, and dared to live as a free people in the Orient.
Regardless of his mental state, Aaron Bushnell died for the glory of evil. Chris Benoit had a more admirable suicide. At least he killed himself to put an end to his crimes, rather than to help others commit countless more. The fanatical anti-white racism of the revolitioneer crowd needs a stake driven through its heart. It needed it yesterday.