“My name is Aaron Bushnell"

“My name is Aaron Bushnell. I'm an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I'm 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."

Aaron Bushnell, 25, decided that for him, the world shall not go on and chose to act upon that. For two million people in Gaza, time has stopped and only death and destruction prevail. Bushnell acknowledges the extreme nature of his act, contrasting it with the unimaginable suffering that the people of Palestine are subjected to and concludes that what he is about to do “is not extreme at all”.

The legacies of pain that the US empire enforces every second are distributed unequally. Bushnell says to the world, my pain is no more important than the pain that you inflict on the people of Palestine. In an ultimate act of solidarity, he takes on a disruptive & life-ending mission, self-immolating in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC and screaming for a Free Palestine.

There is nothing after Gaza, only versions of pretend normalcy that Empire generates for us everyday. Apart from the airstrikes, which are the classic course of action that the IDF adopts in its “self-defense” offenses, death and ways of killing in Gaza since the 7th of October increasingly become megalomaniac and manic, yet very systematic methods of world-ending, erasure and annihilation. Israel has extraordinary capacities to murder and to engrave its actions in the minds and psyches of the world, like scenes from a film that has no other intention but to disturb us until we cannot but look away. On the other hand, many people around the world continue to reach the threshold of how much they can see and look away. There are immense distances between the people of the world, and the bodies of Palestinians in Gaza, and the events that bring about their death. Intentional acts of solidarity and protest must seek to minimize this distance, not so that we all empathize until we have no other choice but to kill ourselves. But so that we understand, that the lives that we live, every day we wake up, are lived in a world designed by entities that have configured life in a way that those who live it, must do so at the expense of the lives of others. Our comfort, safety, and ability to go on with our days, is ensured because others, distances away, and all over the world, perish. In his final reckoning, Aaron Bushnell, like many others throughout history, reaches his capacity to see and look away. While Western media choses to call his act a “suicide due to mental illness”, what he did is the result of the shrinking distance between him, an active-duty air force member, and his target. Seeing so much, knowing the exact number of miles between an army aircraft and a residential building where innocents live, how can one not be compelled to self-annihilate, relinquishing absolutely all ability to perceive? 

Self-immolation, an act of protest and resistance, is a practice of refusal as well. Aaron Bushnell has refused to be coerced into complicity because of the zero-sum modus operandi of world systems. He refuses to witness a genocide at any distance, to wake up the next day proceeding as if nothing has taken place. He refuses to live, and to participate in the life-making and the perpetuity of supremacist nations and systems, at the expense of Gazans. What is perceived as  an isolated and extreme incident where one man kills himself in front of humanity, is an invitation for those whose actions have the ability to materially disrupt apparatuses by radically and materially changing their operation. It is a call to imagine praxes of refusal, that aim at ending and halting genocidal structures. It is no longer a matter of discourse or narrative, it is a matter of what millions who are put in the driving seat of genocide, whether directly or indirectly, have the capacity to do, when seemingly the capacity and intent of Israel to persevere in killing, is eternal.