133 Comments

1. Aaron Bushnell's body hadn't finished dying before Israel apologists started frantically scouring the man's social media and history to find or manufacture any dirt to smear him with. This is most instructive. The concern trolls are especially ghoulish and cynical.

2. Funny how Obama and HRC lionized persons who killed themselves, when they did so for causes that the US Empire approves of. For some mystifying reason, nobody called those people "racists" or "mentally ill" on the basis of an internet diagnosis.

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Finster you show up at all the cool places! Taibbi, Chris Hedges. Cheers.

I thank Chris for honoring Aaron's sacrifice and you for adding context. The soldier pointing his pistol fervently at Aaron's burning corpse was one of the most US Empire and/or Idiocracy things I've ever seen.

And my three cats want Jenny Stokes to take her comment and stuff it.

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founding

Feral, it’s not Netanyahu, but Nutanyahu.

BTW, Feral, it’s also not “the US Empire”, as you write, but “The Quiet American” EMPIRE.

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founding

William Robinson’s [UCSD] “Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity” IMHO is one of the seminal works in diagnosing “The Quiet American” duopoly Empire, under this facade of something that ‘sure ain’t democracy’ — when stronger exposures should certainly be exposed:

LOVE

OVER

VIOLENT

EMPIRE

“AMUSING

OURSELVES

TO DEATH”

N. Postman

LIVE FREE

FROM EMPIRE

OR DIE

A. MacDonald

INEQUALITY

CAUSED BY

BILLIONAIRE

BASTARDS

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Mar 1·edited Mar 1

Yeah Feral and all these self professed Christians believe their sky fairy sacrificed his only son, (and of course the sky fairy has to be He), with the son willingly complying with that sacrifice, to atone for the sins of the people. Yet they've worshipped him for over 2,000 years.

Go figure.

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Dave, there are certainly a great number of fairies in the sky, and some have been away with them and been scared out of their wits, after which they don’t “have their wits about them”.

But let’s not get confused between folklore, the lore of folk, and belief in a divine mind which is at the origin of matter. The concept of God transcends itself from the very beginning, and for this reason it is said that God must not have a name, and no image must be made of God, no idol; and also of Jesus that “without a parable he spoke not unto them.” To my knowledge he spoke of himself only as the Son of Man. Yet even this is a concession to speaking in terms we can understand. A divine being which transmits its will through the luminiferous ether into matter does not have “kids” but may be in a spiritual union with a Christlike material person, while each keeps its own nature.

My brother sent me something today which you might find edifying:

“With regard to the aforementioned Christianity, I have realised that God is in every day, in every moment, in the life of each other person, in each animal, and in the nature around me; that God is life, and that within that life there are moral laws and there is the potential to love and so live according to the god of life, and to touch and express divinity, or to ignore that word of God, written in each atom of life. I realise some people will need to use a structured and ancient religion to search for this divinity and morality, with, in Christianity, Jesus being the required personification of love, but for me it is evident everywhere. Is this pantheism? Possibly. The above are just musings, to maybe engender discussion, but not meant to cause controversy.”

It may be that God sustains the universe from moment to moment, that we are a thought in the mind of God, and that if he were to desist for a moment from thinking it, all would cease. Except for the lingering memory, enfolded, implicit, to say the same thing, into the fabric of conscious space-time, of your great critique of Christianity, which might persist for a further two thousand years.

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Roland,

I loved reading what you had to say and what your brother wrote to you.

(Sigh)…..You must have such an amazing and lovely family…..

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Additionally, ad hominum attacks are the weakest form of argument. Pathetic.

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What are you talking about? What a load of crap, totally uncalled for. Now your posts are suspect.

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Nice to see my friend in all the Left Places : )

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I'm not a leftist. Nor am I a rightist. I see ideology as a short-circuit to critical thinking.

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Same. I don’t align to any ideology, unless the Bill of Rights and basic human decency and freedom qualifies as such.

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Well Feral.............I have never seen critical thinking on your comments.

Talk to your cats more.

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Not sure what caused you to lash out like that, but whatever.

Cats, as a rule, do not do ideology.

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According to DemocracyNow, Aaron left a will several days before, giving his cat to a neighbor. This is way up high morally. https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/28/aaron_bushnell_self_immolation_gaza_protest

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Hardly sounds like a crazy person lashing out irrationally, now, does it?

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You have not met my wayward cat Zappa.!

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Rev. Chris, thank you so very much for preserving and cherishing the names of all these astonishing heroes who paid the ultimate price in sacrificing their lives for the Greater Good.

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We - collectively - are all complicit in genocide....EXCEPT for Aaron Bushnell...where are the "good Americans"? I know people.... good people (i.e., NONfascist) who refuse to confront the genocide, Israel's depravity...they turn their heads, their ears. They will not engage with me...I am grieving....alone.

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You are NOT alone.

There are a huge percent of people who feel the same way.

The sadness is overwhelming.

Thank you Chris and I only hope the people will take up the cry from Aaron and do something.

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Hello my friend Jenny.

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Hello dear Landru.

Be safe.

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You are not alone. All of ours lives have been changed by this Genocide. We can not wait for governments or the worthless u.n. to save the Palestinian People. WE have to save them by standing together against Genocide Joe.

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It is normally quite acceptable to grieve for and defend the persecuted (per Chris’ excellent summary). But not in this case, because the persecutors have acceded to a permanent victim class themselves.

People on the left are deeply conflicted — who to defend? People on the right are conflicted for different reasons. Congress is totally in the pocket of outside globalist forces.

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No one here is conflicted other than yourself, make no mistake about that. Genocide in all the ways possible. Vote NO on Genocide Joe.

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It feels lonely, but you are by no means alone. We are many and they are few. We will win, though it's may be rough getting to the goal line.

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If the U.N. is "useless" it almost entirely because of Amerikas' veto. They block anything and everything that might constrain the Power and reach of the Empire

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Biden is the Trump in the UN.

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That may be true of these days, but Amerika has used that veto many times before Biden ascended to the throne.

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I wonder how the USAF and the Pentagon will deal with this. Will they give him a posthumous dishonorable discharge, and send his family a bill for the uniform that he died wearing? Or, simply wipe his name and record from their databases, to "prove" that he never existed?

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Did we hear: "Thoughts and prayers" from Biden?

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Not me. Did anyone hear him say anything on this matter? If he ever speaks, it will probably occur only if he is forced to issue a comment. And, if what he says in intelligible to English-speakers, it will almost certainly be a disjointed sermonette on how "We are working hard to tackle the grave problem of mental illness in America", with all context in reference to Aaron Bushnell, or the event, deleted.

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WHO is running the American Empire? Zionists.

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WHO have got their greedy fingers on everything they can possibly get, that's for sure.

You can call me Bill. I sign the checks.

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This could be the start of another revolution similar to the one the U.S. had in the late 1960's and 1970's to protest the Vietnam War. One can only hope.

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🤞🤞🤞🤞....yes. PLEASE. How can I enlist?

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🤞🤞🤞🤞....yes. PLEASE. How can I enlist?

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It feels a lot like early 1968 to me.

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I hope so. Maybe enough people will decide that enough is enough and start standing up for change. The U.S. certainly needs it if they are to remain a democracy. I will continue to do my part to influence that with my podcast and posts like these.

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Aaron's sacrifice moved me to rethink a collaboration with someone affiliated with an insanely, dangerous Zionist publication. I decided I couldn't participate in enriching that publication and stepped away. A small move by me but perhaps thousands of others were also inspired.

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Every good act is it's own justification. Thanks for yours.

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These are the acts that make change. I have done the same, a small act however, an act.

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Thank you Chris. When I saw the brief report on TV, I thought Aaron Bushnell must have been mentally ill. Yes I had the Standard American Response that the media wanted me to have. Your article opened my eyes.

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Independent Media is the only way to be informed against the propaganda.

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MSM has barely reported it, the day it happened or the day after. Word has it that a woman in Georgia did the same! The state censorship won't release her name or if she is alive or dead! The Winston Smiths of the world will be rammed down Orwell's memory Hole, by the armies of O'Brien's running the US and Israel!

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See https://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfos0060/immolation.pdf Dying Without Killing: Self-Immolations, 1963–2002 by sociologist Michael Biggs

It seems likely that this act of self-immolation will have required some identification with a sense of guilt and even if Aaron might not have been personally guilty, in some way he internalised American complicity in the Israeli genocide on the way to transforming it into a hoped-for collective expiation.

There must also have been an enormous amount of moral anger. The particular tragedy here was that it was turned in upon the self. Others would certainly express a similar anger, or rage, outwards in violent acts directed at others.

I can only speculate that such a person must have imagined, or hoped at some level, that his extreme, and extremely shocking, act would mobilise and concentrate such horror amongst the perpetrators and enablers of the genocide that it would somehow force them to confront their own guilt through omission and commission, and bring about an end to the slaughter.

To watch the video, the sight and sound (as he screamed 'Free Palestine' through the pain) faces spectators with the horror of what they'd hitherto been only half-experiencing whilst trying to suppress its impact; as if to say, 'This has shocked you:  now do something about it.'

But others can dismiss it.  As I suppose the psychopathic government in Israel can dismiss it:   after all, Israelis have been dismissing equal and even greater suffering for 75 years while the world watched and permitted it; what's one 25 year old emotional blackmailer disillusioned with his US army service?  And the Americans, with a legacy of racism and their own supremacist exceptionalism, what's it to them?  Just another futile gesture by some oversensitive snowflake who'd somehow managed to sneak through the military selection interviews.

But the thing moiders my thoughts and conscience.  What kind of person feels the perpetration of a wickedness so much that he, or she, doesn't turn the anger of it into some voluntary and heroic outward expression, for instance the way some Just Stop Oil protesters have undertaken highly dangerous actions such as climbing with life-threatening danger up high gantries over motorways, or stepping out into fast traffic on a motorway carrying banners to save life on Earth from the impending climate catastrophe; or elsewhere at other times, those who stood with suicidal courage in front of invading army tanks.

I might want to argue that dangerous, heroic actions directed outwards onto the world, always risking personal death, are more likely to bring about major change in that world than an act which superficially in itself might appear to amount to nothing more than simply another casualty in an ongoing genocide. And yet I think I might be wrong, for it feels, deep down, as if there's something -- *something* -- profoundly different, almost archetypal, about this kind of anger mobilised inwards against the self as an act of sacrifice, some kind of transcendent transfiguration.  Perhaps such an act, done publicly, even as it destroys the person performing it, creates the opportunity to summon up the very best of those witnessing it. It destroys apathy, indifference, complacency and awakens the slumbering conscience to action.

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The act also exposes the censorship of the Gaza story since Western media only cover it from the Israeli side -- both physically and editorially. Aaron was demanding to be heard. So he went around legacy media.

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Do you think our failed state lacks a capacity to dehumanize every American human being into herd animal status, as the immolation of Aaron Bushnell may well suggest?

Perhaps Bushnell could not tolerate a criminal state that essentially has made shields of us all by compelling that we tax paying herd animals pay a genocide tax, and in the process becoming complicit with Israel’s blitzkrieg style of genocide, while ensuring our non stampeding in response, while Netanyahu’s Chief “Final Solution” Collaborator expects his herd to put him in the White House again, having set them up as targets for the heart-murdered children of the future who will adjust/harmonize the genocidal extermination of their bothers and sisters parents and kin folk with the from-violence-comes-violence tools of terror, thus justifying the Netanyahus of the future to keep the craft of genocide alive, handy and active as has done the failed state from its inception.

Perhaps Bushnell could not tolerate the satanic radical evil nightmare Hell and curse of the failed state, nor being a part of it. Until the tax paying American herd animals suffer deep agonizing grief and feel what Bushnell felt, they will be incapable of stampeding out of their herd animal corral and will quietly, in silence, herd themselves together, as the fate of herd animals compels, toward their slaughter administered their herders.

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Mar 1·edited Mar 1

Brian, if Bushnell had turned his anger on other people would that have any less a tragedy? I guess one more mass shooting might have gotten more media coverage and no shortage of "thought and prayers".

I do agree that it is a tragedy that Aaron found it necessary to take such an extreme measure. Because nothing else has worked so far.

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You 'enlist' by vocalizing your discontent with Gaza policies. If there is a protest march prepping for a rally nearby, you volunteer to join. Volunteer to make signs for said protest marches. Myself, I will be preaching as much as I can with my podcast against these attrocities and hypocrisy of western governments who allowed this in the first place. I started back in November and I continue. This weeks edition of The Village Oak Tree was devoted to American imperialism and the extradition of Julian Assange. Next week, I will return again to the Gaza debacle. The more we push, the more we bring attention to world leaders that this all wrong on so many levels. More to the point, how are some conflicts more morally superior than others. Why is decimating tens of thousands of Palestinians okay, when other conflicts are dealt with sanctions and politcal fury? Follow the money as always.

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Thank you for this, Chris. People need to know Bushnell's story. In cases such as these, the first draft of history is often, unfortunately, the only draft. There are others like Bushnell who have been forgotten - Alice Herz, Florence Beaumont, and others. I offer some of their stories here: https://weirdcatastrophe.substack.com/p/the-self-immolations-of-climate-activists

And for Aaron Bushnell: https://www.salon.com/2024/02/28/the-self-immolation-of-aaron-bushnell-should-serve-as-a-wake-up-call-for-the-military/

May he not have died in vain. Free Palestine.

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Remember his name. Remember the name of all the other brave men and women who made this ultimate sacrifice. And for their sakes, for our own sakes and for the sake of all the Palestinians speak up! We will not be silenced. Thank you Chris for your eloquence and humanity.

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What a salve to read someone who has walked the walk speak about morality, about the divine. We are asked to sacrifice by a tiny diseased cabal that has never sacrificed anything for anyone. Bushnell inverted this, taking it to a new level--reflecting the system's evil in himself, and then purging it by fire.

He burned himself all the way clean. His spirit was already clean, to have been able to do this.

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The public self-immolation of 30-year-old Gregory D. Levey, the third American known to have burned himself to death in apparent protest of United States policy in thePersianGulf.

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/20/us/amherst-journal-candles-in-the-snow-honor-suffering.html

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I am so relieved and pleased that you have treated his act with the seriousness it deserved. You, being younger, probably do not have the Buddhist monks who protested the Vietnam war in the same fashion engraved In your memory, but I do. I am so grateful that you have written Aaron Bushnell the epitaph he deserved.

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Chris is not as young as he looks🙂. He is a cohort in every way of those of us from the Vietnam era

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I am so glad that I am a paying subscriber. You are a hero.

This situation is so terrible; I started studying it Oct 7. Norman Finkelstein was my first youtube educator. Then I found you; you are always there to inform with the horrible facts. I hate Israel now; I believe they crave being hated.

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Judith. I understand your hatred but until you learn that your own Govt. (and that of many others) are owned by Zionists you need to do some research.

Take a look at Multimillionaires/corporations listed on Forbes?

At the same time you have to be able to distinguish Israelis and Zionists.

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Jenny this is the kind of crap opinion that allows the Zionists to scream “antisemitism!!!” and get away with murder. THE US GOVERNMENT IS OWNED BY ITS OWN GREED AND LUST FOR POWER, which at the moment aligns with others. If it wasn’t Israhell it would be another. Do you have relatives in the Middle East? I have blood on the ground all over in every aspect of most countries. This simpleton opinion IF ZIONISTS OWN AND CONTROL EVERYTHING IS NOT HELPFUL.

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Benadine is it not helpful to learn and know what is going on?

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If the government in the USA is "owned" by Zionists.....what? That's ridiculous.

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Look it up. AIPAC

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIPAC

Revolting. Not surprised. With my experiences in NYC in "situations" regarding $$...I won't go into details...13 times: screwed.

there is no difference between the Zionists and the "nice" Israelis. Except power, which the "nice" Israelis do not have.

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