On Sunday (25/02), 25 year old Aaron Bushnell, a serving member of the US Air Force, engaged in one of the most extreme acts of protest possible- self-immolation (that’s the less forward way of saying, he burned himself alive)…

‘Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?”
The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.’

Emailing several left-leaning websites, Aaron alerted people to his “highly disturbing” final act on Sunday morning.

“Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people,” read the email.

And that he did…

Walking towards the Israeli embassy in Washington at 1pm on Sunday the 25th February, Bushnell live streamed the whole thing.

‘My name is Aaron Bushnell, I am 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’s last words (screams) of ‘free Palestine’ (as well as screams from the police, ‘get on the ground’) will be etched into the minds of all those who watched the video. The quote ‘I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire’ coming to mind…

Us VS them, they just don’t care.

‘I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers.’

When cries are falling on deaf ears, sometimes it takes screams to get people to listen.

Written about in the media as though he were mentally ill, the headline of the first article I clicked on about Aaron read:

‘Airman who set self on fire grew up on religious compound, had anarchist past.’

‘Bushnell was raised in a religious compound. Former students called it a “charismatic sect” and alleged that it “created an environment of control, intimidation and humiliation that fostered and inflicted enduring harm on its students’, the article goes on to say.

What relevance does this have to anything?

Painting the picture of a troubled past to suggest what, exactly? That this was just a bit of young adulthood angst?

Trying to determine, ‘what could cause someone to do such a drastic thing?!’, as though to live through a genocide isn’t (more than) enough of a reason…

I would suggest that it is the people who are complicit in the genocide who are mentally ill, for how could any ‘well’ human being sit by and watch what is happening to innocent Palestinians and do nothing?
It’s inhumane.

When our world leaders refuse to so much as open their mouths to call for a ceasefire in fear of losing votes, Sunak and Starma navigating a genocide with the same party politics tactics they used to navigate Brexit, meanwhile people are sacrificing themselves, a 25 year old with his whole life ahead of him setting himself alight because of the injustice of it all, dying in the name of social justice, we realise just how fucked up society really is…

With the power hungry elite doing whatever it takes to stay at the top, the people at the bottom do whatever it takes just to get the people at the top to so much as look at them…

‘Will you look at us when we’re dying?’
‘Yes, we’ll look at your burning body through the barrel of a gun’,
shouting ‘on the ground’, like you’ve ever been anywhere but…

Our world leaders can add Aaron Bushnell’s name to the 29,000 Palestinian lives they have, already, been complicit in the eradication of. With so much blood on their hands, how do they get to sleep at night?

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Aaron Bushnell:

Remember his name,
not ‘mentally ill’, as is the picture the media are trying to paint
but arguably the most sane amongst a culture that refuses to call a genocide by its name.

FREE PALESTINE.

don’t let Bushnell’s death be in vain.

FREE PALESTINE.