By Daviemoo
The immediacy of watching a US service member douse himself in gasoline & lighting himself on fire over aiding genocide is a stark reminder that some would sooner die than be part of the horrors our nations inflict on other civilians the world over, and it should make us ask questions about how invested in continuing our imperial legacy we truly are. The flames are a light which allows us to scrutinise our tangential roles in the actions of our nation and to allow us to introspect one vital question: is this us?
It takes a lot to bother me. I grew up in the days where people would send you a link claiming it was YouTube when it was actually a gore video. I used to want to be a pathologist, so dead bodies and gore just don’t impact on me that much and most of all, once you’ve sat in a room and watched your loved one slowly die in front of you, racked with pain you cannot prevent and losing all dignity, you are touched by a horror nothing else can really exceed. So the fact that I can still hear Aaron Bushnell screaming “Free Palestine” as fire engulfs his body should let you know how harrowing it was to see. Nor did I see it purposefully: I didn’t know what I was watching until a few seconds into the video.
My concern is that the message is being lost amid peoples’ predictable reactions to the idiotic policemen who pointed their guns at a man who was already dead.
Bushnell sacrificed his life because he’d rather have lit himself on fire than help his nation flatten Palestinian homes, starve more Palestinian babies, shoot more unarmed Palestinian civilians as they walk up the street waving white flags. Many across the internet are stating that nobody of sound mind would self immolate, ignoring the disturbingly rich history of self immolation as an extreme form of protest. One of the most important images in all of human history is of a monk self immolating to protest the mistreatment of Buddhists under Catholicism and its control of their state. Perhaps it does take insanity to do so- one would then argue that whatever drives you to that point may be the true issue and it is this which needs to be dealt with- but as always, people trained to ignorance will stare at the effect before the cause.
But Bushnell was clear in his preamble that he wanted to make this point; that whatever he did to himself, Palestinians are suffering more.
Of course many across the internet have had a visceral reaction to this, declaring that now it’s gone too far. Now a US service member has died burning in front of a foreign embassy suddenly some distant line we didn’t know existed has been crossed.
I wonder if they’ve somehow been insulated from the images coming from Gaza every day.
Particular images that have stuck with me: a father carrying his very small child’s body down a road thronged by exhausted people forced to flee their homes. He begs the camera to explain how his tiny three year old child was hamas, why he deserved to die this way.
Rows of feet stuck out from under a collapsed building, the bodies flattened by falling rubble. One set of toes is painted a light red colour. The rest are small- children’s feet.
Body parts in the street being gathered up in plastic bags so people have something to bury, whole roads painted red with blood, a small, legless body hanging from a wall.
These are images that long preceded Bushnell’s act, and they should not be less horrifying. But for some reason, the image of a white man in military regalia burning is more horrifying than the bodies of brown children. People have had access to all of the atrocities being perpetrated and yet they ignore, they rationalise, they dehumanise.
People across the spectrum of western media and politics have equivocated loudly that the horrors being foisted upon those in Palestine are deserved because of October 7th- a horrendous act that should not have happened. But the constancy of the false equation behind “I understand why this happened” and “I condone it” prevents any actual helpful discussion from coming about.
I think October 7th was horrendous. I think the article I read about Palestinians dying in the West Bank on October 6th was horrendous. I think the siege of Gaza was and is horrendous. I think what Nazis did- and do- to jewish people is evil, and I think what Israel is doing to Palestinians is evil too.
It’s confusing to watch people feign an inability to juggle these ideas as though they contradict. It’s also confusing to watch these western media personalities give monstrous talks on television that in my view legitimise the acts “the other side” commits.
Watching Julia Hartley-Brewer say she doesn’t like the sound of ethnic cleansing but perhaps Palestinians should be encouraged to go elsewhere… Imagine being so debased as to make that statement and believe that you are a decent human, and to be confused as to why the people you’re talking about might viscerally hate you. No doubt if 1.1 million Palestinians were resettled to Julia’s hometown she’d be furious.
Watching western leaders mumble and stumble and equivocate on violence is unreal. These are the people I’m meant to put my safety and my life into the hands of? The people who seem to believe the easiest solution is to explode people? People who are seemingly incapable of understanding that if you mercilessly oppress people they might just attack back, people who pretend the response is the crime and not the preceding oppression? If I wanted stupid people as leaders I’d… well, have voted for them.
As a queer person, watching our bodies be elevated as human shields against criticism against decimation of the region… You think it’s a binary choice of us as rainbow people or them? Especially in the face of the anti queer uprisings across the west: the lesson at present seems to be, be glad you’re not a faggot in Palestine because they’d kill you, we just want to make sure you can’t marry who you want, adopt children, be open publicly about your life, be safe at home… Apparently there’s an acceptable, nice, sanitised level of Western homophobia we should wear like a blanket because in other regions people have it worse.
If we went to Palestine right now we wouldn’t die because we’re queer- we’d die because the entire region is being destroyed with bombs provided by our leaders.
Does it mean I’m ok with the mistreatment of queer people? No. Does it mean I think everyone deserves death indiscriminate? Also no. Queer bodies die just the same, and that’s what we’re condoning right now. I also don’t think queer life has a premium over non-queer life. We’re all alive, we all deserve to live and if we transgress with violence against others because of their ethnicity, sexuality, gender, religion- then we deserve punishment. But bombing and bullets are not punishment. They are execution, and it’s okay for people not to want to take part in that.
I don’t understand how people can make statements like the ones we’ve seen: “they’re all rats, inhuman, evil, they’re all terrorists, all involved, nobody is innocent”- and be surprised when we’re met with violence, in the same way that when civil rights movements have gotten violent people have been shocked, as though it’s all safe chats about who can do what where based on some imagined human contract that leans the way of a few humans and away from many others and not the dispassionate discussion about which humans have supremacy over others.
The idea that hamas are good is ridiculous- I’ve read about human rights abuses under hamas. But this isn’t about placating them, it’s about destroying the reason behind their necessitation- and that’s not in the cards for Palestinians. They can’t self liberate when you’re shelling them every day. It’s up to them to decide who runs their state and if they don’t need to be overlooked by people pushing for a radical agenda because the agenda doesn’t make sense because equality is theirs to have, why would they vote for it?
Denying that is the reason for this violence, whether you want to accept that or not. And again we have to state: understanding, accepting the rationale is not condoning. There is nuance here people constantly shirk in order to offer offence instead of answers.
Of course people will disingenuously read this as “capitulate to terrorism” because simplistics is the defence of the purposely ignorant. This isn’t about capitulation to extremism, it is about an honest assessment of the situation. The Israeli state does not have the right to obliterate civilians to make themselves feel safe. If the price of civilian safety on one side is civilian slaughter on the other, is it not natural to understand that that situation is not sustainable or ethical?
Capitulation is not what’s on the cards- a human assessment of basic ethics, unburdened by religion or skin hue bias, points that violence will be reciprocated always and that intervention is required by those not under the heady influence of ideology- religious or secular. This isn’t about who supports gay people or where genealogy originates, it’s about human life and it’s innate value, a value that should not be denoted by where you were born, your skin, the language you learn- and right now, it is.
Bushnell’s sacrifice is meant to elevate the plight of Palestinian people who are starving, dying of wounds and sickness, or of being obliterated by weapons our taxes are paying for. It’s meant to show you the visceral horror of what is being perpetrated in our names, with our silent assent. In the UK people beadily eye the gauzy distance, knowing that somewhere within a general election looms, and whilst we wait for that election, Palestinians die.
In the US, democrats condemn in the strongest terms and do nothing as president Biden gears up to send more weapons and money to the region, hailing Israel as a true democracy in the Middle East when Israel defies democracy not only by having a vastly unpopular prime minister and a hard right cabinet who was implemented because of successive failed elections and deals cut to form government, but simply by being a theocracy- you cannot have democracy under a religious framework because already there are terms to access the society- following the state’s religion. Of course, secular jewish people who simply relate to their ethnicity exist in the region and yet still must observe practice; it’s hard to have democracy in a secular nation, never mind one that compels religion as the price for equity.
Most of all though, the violence that’s been done to the region is legitimising, whether we like it or not, recompense down the line.
If you think the west has seen terror before, imagine what happens when people whose entire lives, generations, families, businesses, homes, loved ones are evaporated before their eyes as overly painted glass eyed TV presenters wax lyrical on where they should be caged or if it’s ok to have wiped their families out are roaming the world. Cause, again, will go ignored because the effect will be civilian casualties as the Sunaks, the Starmers, the Bidens, the Trumps, the politicians, the political chat show hosts put their hands on their chests and condemn violence in the strongest terms, safe from the violence they condone and even stir- but those terms neatly cutting out their role in its creation, skirting around the acknowledgement: when you teach a man to fish, he feeds himself. When you teach your country that a man is evil because he was born an Arab in an Arab nation, how can you be surprised when the horrors your speech normalises against his people come back to you in the form of violence?
Aaron Bushnell would rather have set himself on fire and died, screaming for the freedom of a people being mercilessly slaughtered because of state sponsored oppression than continue to be complicit. It is truly terrible that he felt this was an option, and worse still that people are sanitising it, ignoring it and finding ways to dodge acknowledgement. And whilst I hope more people don’t come to the dark conclusion that this is the only way to be heard and to remove ourselves from complicity, I fear we’re merely at the threshold of what these atrocities will prompt in people.
Remember Aaron Bushnell as a man who died for his convictions, remember what that sacrifice was about- a reluctance to bloody his hands- and remember that this is what people are being driven to to escape complicity in this violence. Whilst it’s a useful symbol to look at the police officers pointing guns at the burnt corpse of a decent man and understand that it typifies our western body politic all too well, do not forget the message he was writing with his own lifeblood: that innocent people are suffering all day every day because of a tangled web of events that precede most of us, but which can only be brought to a halt by our visceral, unending cries for an end to it.
Politically Enraged 