The Self-immolation which largely went unnoticed
A despondent father lit himself on fire to protest family court a decade ago, but his name isn't mentioned nearly as frequently as Aaron Bushnell.
These days there is a debate on the validity of self-immolation- lighting yourself on fire-as a form of protest.
On Sunday February 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC to protest the war in Gaza.
His act of suicide is either a brave act of protest or the lunatic act of a mentally deranged person: depending entirely on your position on this war.
Here’s what the media which treats him as a hero thinks.
The public response was jarring: Early reactions were normal, shock, and horror. But then I began getting flooded by people badgering me to post the video (many of the demands callously just wanted gore), some accusing me of suppressing news I broke to repress a movement. One person called me a “Deep State piece of shit” for not immediately posting the video, and then called me a “hack” for providing only a blurred version — the most I could ethically do, and even that was a step further than any major media outlet. The flood carried to emails, where people made all sorts of claims about why they needed the video. Multiple people claimed to be students working on a paper, which makes no sense. Friendly queries unanswered turned into follow-up insults. I removed my email from my Twitter bio and the cascade slowed to a trickle.
Provocative news stories always bring out the crazy, as people cope with difficult reality by writing more comforting fiction and opportunistic figures try to profit from that need for answers. Conspiracies swirled about the incident, some accusing me of involvement, of filming it and lying about the livestream, or claiming that the incident was fake. I wish it was fake! I wish a young man with the world ahead of him was not dead, that his family and friends were not heartbroken and traumatized, that Sunday, Feb. 25, 2024, was a boring day where nothing happened.
Amid this flurry, I was receiving DMs and emails from reporters requesting the footage to verify it, requiring me to sift through the muck to make sure I didn’t miss any. I probably did. Before the Twitch channel was taken down, I sent the link to a reporter at The New York Times to verify the authenticity of the incident and my reporting. They did not cite me in their reporting, probably for the best. CBS, CNN, Al Jazeera, and other outlets requested as well. I spent hours writing the same email: It’s unclear if his family has been notified. The footage can’t be released yet because he says his name at the start, and that is also unconfirmed. The ignition begins at 1:29. If you do not need to watch the remainder, I strongly advise you stop there. WeTransfer incoming.
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Critics eager to denigrate Bushnell’s action claim Bushnell’s self-immolation will inspire “copycats,” inaccurately dismissing the most extreme form of political protest as just suicide. They insist, detached from reality, that those in mourning are “glorifying suicide.” That “no one will remember” his protest, which “does nothing” and is merely a result of “mental illness.” These are voices who have panned pro-Palestine protests, crowing their absurd claims that sitting in the road to call for a cease-fire is “terrorism” and opposing mass death is “antisemitic.” It’s almost laughably ignorant, seemingly desperate to delegitimize Bushnell’s action and, in so doing, the overall movement for which he did it. Liberatory movements are never so shallow as to be guided by the lazy dismissals from selfish detractors, and the Palestinian liberation movement is no exception. It’s plainly absurd to suggest Bushnell will inspire more people to burn themselves alive: The political framework he contributed to is driven by a desire to improve social well-being. The communities that surround that framework are simply heartbroken by this loss. The denigrations-as-distraction are just more of the same marginal white noise that has always hovered around the pro-Palestine movement.
Here is how pro-Israeli press covered it.
I make no confident claims about Bushnell’s mental health, though I would wonder about what would drive a person in his particular set of circumstances to pick this specific form of protest. I lack the necessary expertise to diagnose him. I never met him, much less examined him. But I have no doubt that his viral demise and the subsequent celebration of his final acts will be seen and remembered by people who are mentally unwell or struggling with suicidal tendencies.
What I would say with confidence is that the discourse surrounding his death says many things about our society, none of them positive. Bushnell’s views on Israel’s war on Hamas are not my own, but I wouldn’t reach a different conclusion if he was a pro-life activist who set himself ablaze outside an abortion clinic and whose last words were “Protect the unborn.” No one is alive today because that young man is dead.
Instead, it is evident we don’t attach sufficient value to human life, even when the loss of human life is the matter under debate. That this would be an act of first resort justified by comfortable and privileged people, some cloaked in anonymity but many others quite prominent, is a sad commentary. Yet it is not surprising in a climate where celebrities downplay Hamas’s atrocities or politicians imply that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza.
We live in an age of war, terrorism, torture, abortion, euthanasia—and sophisticated apologetics for all of the above from the commanding heights.
Self-immolation is not new; it goes back to the BC era.
One especially notorious act of self-immolation was by Thích Quảng Đức who was protesting the treatment of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government in 1963.
These acts have had varied success in history. The self-immolation of a Tunisian business owner led to the downfall of the country’s leader and the Arab Spring.
In December 2010, Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire outside a government building to protest poor economic conditions and corruption.
Demonstrations broke out across the country, and Tunisia's longtime President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was forced out of office about a month later. The unrest in Tunisia sparked other protests across the Arab world.
At least one act of self-immolation went largely unnoticed- in part because the subject matter was one the media had no appetite for.
That’s what I want to talk about in this post.
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