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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Required reading if you want to fully understand Bushnell's extraordinary heroism.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.