Image of the Week #2: Self-Immolation, by Adam Lehrer

What to make of someone who lights himself aflame to protest Israel?

I did not need to wait until Friday this week. When someone douses themselves in flammable liquid before torching themselves to a crisp, the image of the week has been decided for you. Aaron Bushnell: what to make of you?

To the extent that it matters, I do not support Israel’s leveling of Gaza. I do not support our government’s nearly limitless support of the onslaught. It’s hard for me to imagine actually rooting for such a one-sided bloodbath unfolding during my own lifetime, and the Zionist members of the media who do so sound either bought and paid for or completely fucking insane. Sometimes retarded.

The American left’s hysterical devotion to the Palestinian cause, however, feels like middle class larp. Why? Well, for one, everything the American left does feels like a larp. But more than that, I’ve been under the belief that revolution was supposed to emerge from the alignment of a group or class’s aligned self-interest. I suppose ol’ Marx made it even simpler than that: an antagonism between those who own and those who work. But American leftists are perfectly comfortable. They work from home. They tweet. They rack up debt on credit cards. They ask dad for rent money. They stream for hours, and hours, and hours. Leftists get worked up about two things: student debt (which they have tons of) and minorities. In 2020, they burned cities to a crisp to protest the death of George Floyd. In. 2024, they’re lighting THEMSELVES on fire to protest Israel’s bombardment of Gaza! What will be next?

I’m not going to argue that what 25-year-old Air Force servicemen Aaron Bushnell did to himself on Feb 25 was meaningless. Obviously, such an act had an impact. The video is, indeed, harrowing. Bushnell walks the streets of DC talking into his iPhone camera: “I am about to engage in an act of extreme protest.”

He wasn’t kidding. Moments later, Bushnell is completely engulfed in flames and screaming “FREE PALESTINE!” To his credit, he doesn’t immediately stop, drop and roll and scream for help. He endures what can only be assumed to be utter, extreme pain.

But to what end? Certainly, it didn’t take other leftists long to attempt to martyr the young man: “Bushnell’s death is a tragic event and an indictment of all the governments and political tendencies responsible for the slaughter,” wrote Jacob Cross for WSWS.

Even some amongst the dissident right couldn’t help but concur with the left about Bushnell’s courage, many of them pointing to the much historicized seppuku of Yukio Mishima who plunged a sword into his own gut after failing to restore the Japanese Empire.

Mishima was indeed a great artist. His seppuku indeed is a great performance art work. But, Mishima was also an idiot. Suicide is never honorable. It is a slap in the face to all those who care about you and a waste of your own potential. Of your own breath. Of the one life you will ever have the opportunity to live. There is no grandiosity in ripping yourself from the mortal coil.

Bushnell’s self-immolation still differs greatly from Mishima’s seppuku because it emerged from the now, when we are buried in the algorithms of our own madnesses. We are all unstable, cunt hairs and clicks away from psychosis. We have all had the morbid fantasy, imagining what our own funerals would look like. Does anyone really believe that Bushnell never once thought: “I wonder what people will post about me?” No one believes that the US government’s hand will be forced into ceasing the support of Israeli military by the young man’s brutal death. Instead, he died for clicks. His memory will live on in the languid halls of perpetual discourse.

Kristeva said that periods that witness the downfalls of religious and political idols are “particularly favorable” to black moods. But what about a period in which all religious and political idols are falling at once and rapidly? Bushnell’s act is one of desperation masquerading as protest. A “sublime self-deception that interprets weakness as freedom” – Nietzsche said that one.

We should feel the tragedy of Aaron Bushnell, just as we feel the tragedy of all death. But our mourning should be directed at the fact that our society is simmering with sadness so deep, and that our fellow man is so fucking lost. To die for a foreign conflict you have no control over is no kind of death at all. There is honor and dignity in fighting for what you believe, to the death. There is none to be found in merely dying.

Be well.