Who Will Remember Aaron Bushnell?

Some words about the American martyrs

On February 25th, 2024 a uniformed active duty US Air Force member named Aaron Bushnell stood outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC and self immolated. With his last words he shouted “Free Palestine.” 

It wasn’t the type of thing you expect to see in America, this country where everybody has their hand in your pocket. This is the land of wage theft and mysterious charges on your debit card that you have to spend two hours on hold to get refunded. When you hear somebody burnt themselves to death here your natural question is “what’s their angle?”

So what was Aaron Bushnell’s angle? I was at a party with some crypto currency speculators and one of them brought him up.

“The girls really like him. He should’ve set it up so he could’ve burned everything but his dick, he’d be getting serious pussy right now.” 

Indeed.

Showing that this sentiment extends from low brow to high brow a profile in the prestigious New York magazine also couldn’t avoid speculating about how much or how little pussy Bushnell got (“friends don’t believe he ever dated or slept with another person.”) 

When you read that Aaron Bushnell was mentally ill it is important to remember what mental sanity is considered in the United States. A mentally sane person here knows that your worth is measured by your ability to get money and pussy. We made a nation out of the tagline to Scarface. In this country there are no selfless acts and nothing is more confusing than when you actually see one. Why would you do anything that doesn’t get you paid or laid? You must have a mental illness.

Most people you meet here buy into one or both of two theories that purport to explain all human behavior. The first is the economics 101 lesson that humans are self-interested “rational actors” who seek above all to maximize their own individual profit. The second is a crude evopsych view that asserts the only reason any man has ever done anything was to get some pussy. Hannibal crossed the alps to get some pussy, Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine to get some pussy, Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel…well in his case to get some dick.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that Aaron Bushnell is mocked and treated as mentally ill. What he did cannot be explained by the frameworks most people in America use to understand most people in America. 

The problem is there isn’t any evidence that Aaron Bushnell suffered from mental illness. He did subscribe to the political philosophy of anarchism and while I consider that to be a mental disorder it is not actually listed in the DSM-5. You can read Bushnell’s will and Reddit posts and whether you agree with him or not you can easily follow and comprehend his logic. Compare that to the rambling manifesto left behind by the actually mentally ill individual who self immolated outside the Trump trial, where he among other things asserts that The Simpsons is part of an organized crime conspiracy.

So if mental illness doesn’t explain it why then would somebody commit suicide for a political statement? Well we can quote the man himself. 

"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." -Aaron Bushnell

Aaron Bushnell was 25 years old. He had his whole life ahead of him and there were plenty of other protest stunts he could’ve pulled if his goal was to get clout, money, or pussy off the suffering of Palestine. He truly believed that what he termed “an extreme act of protest” was what was required to break the complacency of the US public towards our government’s extermination campaign. I’m 35 now. With his actions a man a decade younger than me shamed me for my cynicism and selfishness. 

Aaron Bushnell and I believed many of the same things. Namely that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, that it could not continue without US support, that this is the worst crime of the 21st century, and that somebody should do something about it. Who that somebody should be is where we diverged. 

For me, life since October 7th has continued much as before. I met a girl, got my heart broken. I go to parties. If I drink a lot I’ll start talking about Gaza. Five Sapporos and I’ll be hectoring people who agree with me about the horrors being done in our name. I’m not sure what this has accomplished.

Mentally I’ve felt a constant pull between frustration at my inability to stop this and a nagging feeling that to write or speak about anything else in this moment would be moral capitulation. Bushnell asked us to consider “what would I do if my country was committing genocide?” In my case it turns out the answer is I would post about it. 

I would make a bunch of angry posts about how I’m against the genocide and how I wish my government would stop doing the genocide. I’d make jokes about how the wife of the Senator who supports the genocide had a bunch of men run a train on her when he was in the hospital for depression. 

Then I’d go to work the next day.

I’d donate some money but keep enough that I could still make rent next month and have savings. I want to buy a house eventually after all. Sure my tax dollars are arming the Israeli Einsatzgruppen but it’s Friday and there’s karaoke in Bushwick so I’m gonna run up a $60 bar tab, strike out twice and throw up the next morning. 

“What would I do if my country was committing genocide?” Aaron Bushnell answered that question differently.

And that’s exactly why all those wish casting posts from Israel supporters about how quickly he’ll be forgotten miss the mark. What we’re watching in Gaza is not the news story of the week, it’s history. It’s the history that will one day be taught to bored school children. A history where survivors will share and re-share the worst moments of their lives in a desperate attempt to impart the moral lesson on the next generation that we’ve shown we couldn’t learn the last time. Never again, but this time we mean it. 

There was an article in the Guardian last month that didn’t attract much notice. Alexander Smith, a contractor for USAID, had prepared an internal presentation on child and maternal mortality among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. For doing so his presentation was canceled and he was fired.

This story exemplifies the studied ignorance you see everywhere in the United States today. Nobody wants to know how many people have actually died in Gaza since October 7th. To the point where trying to assemble some data on those deaths can cost you your career.

The United Nations is not trying to compile a death toll. USAID, and other arms of the US government, are actively purging people who might try to compile a death toll. There are nonprofit orgs, such as Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, that have released a few estimates. But the primary source of data we have on deaths in Gaza comes from the Gaza Ministry of Health which, as every journalist is instructed to remind us, is controlled by Hamas.

As of this writing the Gaza Ministry of Health says that 37,718 identified victims have been killed by the Israelis. Euro-Med puts the number at 42,510 as of April 2024.

Deep down we all know the real number is higher. Much higher. It could be astronomically higher. There is a pit in my stomach when I think about it. As mass slaughter becomes background noise to life in the west it warps all of our humanity in ways we can’t imagine. 

Entire bloodlines of Palestinians are being exterminated. One day there will be a hangover from all this murder. People will wake up and ask “why” and on that day even those who support what’s being done will retreat behind the buck passing rhetoric of “how could we, collectively all of us together, have allowed this to happen?”

How will Americans be thought of on that day? We’ll be thought of the exact same way as the Germans were after 1945. Where were the good Germans? Where were the good Americans? Were there any?

Daniel Goldhagen became a best selling author with his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which asserts that ordinary Germans were not merely passive observers to the Holocaust but enthusiastic participants in it. What is the rebuttal people reach for when confronted with the argument that the Germans were a deeply evil race and nation, perhaps an irredeemable one? They reach for the names of the martyrs. 

Sophie Scholl was a 21 year old student at the University of Munich. She knew the risks of distributing anti war literature and she chose to do it anyway. For this she was beheaded. Franz Jägerstätter was an Austrian farmer who, when conscripted, refused to pledge a loyalty oath to Adolf Hitler. Despite being given many opportunities to compromise on this he refused to relent and was also beheaded. 

In their time both were mocked and thought stupid or mentally ill for what they did. ‘Keep your head down you fool, the war will be over soon.’ The Austrian municipality Franz Jägerstätter was born in refused to pay out a pension to his widow until 1950. Now they have a plaque to him there and Terrence Malick made a movie about his bravery. The rewards for doing the right thing don’t usually arrive with express shipping. 

For Americans our Sophie Scholl is Rachel Corrie, the 23 year old activist murdered by an Israeli bulldozer for obstructing the demolition of Palestinian homes. Our Franz Jägerstätter is Aaron Bushnell. When people ask if all the Americans were evil their names will be the ones that redeem the rest of us, whether we ask for that redemption or not. Whether we deserve it or not. This is what martyrdom means. 

Just to underline it here, the United States is arming and funding this genocide. It could not continue without the participation of our government and the passivity of our population. That makes all of us responsible. 

The analogy between the German martyrs and the American ones isn’t perfect. It is true that unlike the Germans we Americans don’t have to fear for our lives when speaking out. This only enhances the cowardice of those Americans who are still remaining silent to protect their careers. Yeah your writing job on Jimmy Fallon is really worth keeping your mouth shut about 15,000 dead children you scum on my shoe.

But there’s another important difference between the German martyrs and the American ones. Americans can still stop this. 

None of us have to do as much as Aaron Bushnell and Rachel Corrie did. But all of us have to do more than what we’re currently doing. That’s what we owe them because they didn’t die to be a balm for our guilty consciences. 

They died to free Palestine.