Aaron Bushnell, an anarchist and active-duty U.S. Air Force airman set themselves on fire Sunday to protest Israel’s war on Gaza. Bushnell, 25, has made a massive international impact by professing that they would “no longer be complicit in genocide.” They shouted “Free Palestine!” as they burned to death in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington.
The outpouring of love for Aaron and the deep appreciation by resistance groups for their pricincipled and heartbreaking action has also been met by countless attempts to rebrand their intentions for shallow political motives. In this post we have brought together snippets of Aaron expressing themselves in their own words and links to online posts that include more of their perspectives.
In this way we seek to honor Aaron, their intentions, and the views they had been contributing to the movement already for many years.
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Aaron wrote in a final social media post:
“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.”
From Aaron’s will:
“I am sorry to my brother and my friends for leaving you like this. Of course, if I was truly sorry, I wouldn’t be doing it. But the machine demands blood. None of this is fair.”
“I wish for my remains to be cremated. I do not wish for my ashes to be scattered or my remains to be buried as my body does not belong anywhere in this world. If a time comes when Palestinians regain control of their land, and if the people native to the land would be open to the possibility, I would love for my ashes to be scattered in a free Palestine.”
From posts as acebush1 on reddit:
On the r/Airforce subreddit, a user asked veterans whether, in hindsight, they would still choose to join the military. Acebush1 answered, “Absolutely not.”
“I have been complicit in the violent domination of the world,” they said, “and I will never get the blood off my hands.”
In June 2023, acebush1 wrote, “I’m sticking it out to the end of my contract as I didn’t realize what a huge mistake it was until I was more than halfway through, and I only have a year left at this point. However it is a regret I will carry the rest of my life.”
In one, they denounce Israel as a “settler colonialist apartheid state,” and explain that there are no Israeli “civilians” because the entire country is engaged in oppression. They say in the apartheid post that they “work for the air force and would also have no right to complain about violent resistance against my actions.”
In response to a post that questions, What does whiteness mean to you?:
“Tldr at the bottomSo, overall your thesis is that “the title is intentionally provocative and thus leads to provocation for good and for ill” and that this is the cause of the angsty “wOn’t SOmEbodY ThINK Of tHE oPtIcs” response on the original post.This is essentially respectability politics, with all of its fallacies. It posits that the way that advocates and educators (often marginalized people speaking about their own oppression, as in this case) talk about social issues determines whether people listen or are reactionary, which is at best only a very tiny bit true. This leads to tone policing as happened here, where (usually) white people (side note: my phone doesn’t like typing “white people” and other politically charged phrases and it really annoys me) respond to (usually) BIPOC speaking about their own oppression by saying they really would like to listen if only the BIPOC in question would be more polite or make their message a little easier on white ears.Your comments try very hard to make this argument sound reasonable and in doing so lay bare its irrationality. From the beginning of your comment, you argue:
I think the issue is that the title doesn’t come across as being against whiteness as a concept, but rather anti-white people.At the risk of stating the obvious, the title said “whiteness”, not “white people”. So we’re starting from a place of saying that people misread the title, but blaming that on the title.Also another thing that should be pushed back against in this extremely white framing caused by the extremely white response to this video, is the implicit assertion that white people need to be protected from anti-white-people sentiment. The worst possibility here being propped up as a legitimate fear that needs to be assuaged, is that an oppressed group of people might have callous attitudes towards their oppressors. Like, that’s it. That’s the bogeyman in the room here. A tough look for so-called anarchists. Anyway, back to critiquing your argument…The best suggestion you can come up with is changing “anti-whiteness” to “abolish whiteness”, or “whiteness” to “the myth of whiteness” or not using the “is good, actually” meme because somehow that is what’s making people misinterpret the word “whiteness”. These are very subtle variations that do not change the meaning of the title. They state the same thing slightly differently. But somehow these slight word variations are what’s responsible for the backlash to the video. Even if we accept that slightly optimized wordplay may have circumvented white people’s insecurities better, the central problem still remains white people’s insecurities. To blame the Black person (again, my phone doesn’t want to type this 😡😤) who made the video as responsible for white people’s reactionary reaction because they failed to be a master manipulator in titling their video is fundamentally wrong.The reason your comment on this post is so upsetting to me is because this post is a perfect opportunity to talk about and work on that white insecurity. The OP framed the issue very generously, openly, and emphatically, while still centering the conversation around whiteness. This is something I thought anarchists would be hungry to engage in. But instead, your comment shoots to the top, immediately and explicitly re-centering the conversation around the wording of the title of the video. Just like happened on the original post.I realized while writing this that this conversation is very analogous to the “from the River to the sea” discourse. Most anarchists wouldn’t (I hope) blame that slogan for causing zionist backlash because it fails to go out of its way to reassure colonizers that they would be safe in a free Palestine. That’s absurd. Anyone hearing that phrase and thinking it means Jewish genocide (FUCKING PHONE) is misinterpreting it because of other massive issues inherent to themselves from the broader society, not anything inherent to the slogan. Maybe a differently worded slogan would cause less backlash. Maybe. (Probably not, that’s not how reactionism works.) but it would do so by avoiding the problem, which is zionist fragility.TL;DR: failing to assuage white insecurities is not the cause of white insecurities. Whiteness needs to be abolished and trying to appease people who choose to identify their personhood with whiteness is an endlessly losing battle. To re-center conversations intended to criticize whiteness around nit-picking the tone of anti-whiteness is to get in the way of the solution and be part of the problem.
“Hey so I am not Palestinian an am in no position to endorse or condemn Hamas’ actions. That being said, neither are most people, and there are a lot of very confidently ignorant opinions being thrown around.There are no Israeli “civilians” or tourists who have no part in the oppression of Palestine. That idea doesn’t make any sense and betrays a lack of understanding of what the oppression of Palestine even is. Israel is a settler colonialist apartheid state. All of its residents or their immediate forebears have moved there specifically to settle on stolen land. Land whose people are being cornered and cleansed just a few miles away, or right next door in the case of the West Bank. There are no Israelis without the genocide of the Palestinian people.To bring this into stark relief, there is the example of the music festival which the liberal states and media have made such a point of clutching their pearls over. “A music festival! How could it get more innocent than a music festival!?” That music festival was happening just three miles from Gaza, within site of the border wall. Imagine a similar event happening in the early days of the colonization of North America. Can you or I really say that Indigenous people are wrong for retaliating against colonizers who are rubbing their domination in their face?”
“Yes they do. They are the only ones in a position to determine the ethics of their liberation. They are the only ones experiencing their own genocide; they are the only ones who know its gravity and its nuances and can weigh it against the cost of different liberation tactics.‘Human rights’ is a wonderfully squishy term made up by liberal imperial powers, but I’ll try to break this one down.If human rights are universal, then one person or group’s human rights cannot impede another person or group’s human rights. I have a life and body deserving of dignity and respect. One could say I have a ‘right’ to bodily safety. But if I put my hand in your face, I don’t get to claim a ‘right’ to bodily protection. Your own right to protect your own body means that it becomes up to you how to protect your face at that point. If my hand gets slapped, that is not a violation of my right to bodily protection because I chose to put my body in a position where it was violating someone else’s. Just so, if imperial powers declare a people irrelevant and send military powers to expel them from their land, and then I come and move into one of their houses behind the protection of the IDF, I don’t get to claim it’s a violation of my human rights if some of those people come and kick me back out of that house or throw a molotov at it or kidnap me. I decided to position myself in violation of someone else’s human rights. I decided to make their home my home and call it ‘mY rIgHt tO sElf dEterMiNatiOn’. I decided to become a citizen of a state that is built on an active genocide. My so-called “human rights” can’t override those of the people I am colonizing.
In their final video: “My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active-duty member of the US 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.”
More of Aarn’s words can be found at:
https://archive.ph/wHK3t
https://web.archive.org/web/20240227053435/https://old.reddit.com/user/acebush1
https://archive.is/8vgvy
https://archive.is/1kMms