At 10:54am on Sunday, Aaron Bushnell wrote the following post on his Facebook,
“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.”
He linked his Twitch channel, LillyAnarKitty. It had a two word description, Free Palestine, and no previously recorded videos. He changed the privacy settings on this post to Public. Two hours later, he began live-streaming his self-immolation.
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.
He douses himself in accelerant from a metal bottle. You hear him take a deep, steadying breath. “Free Palestine,” he declares calmly. He tosses the bottle. Off screen, some unseen agent of the State asks, “Hi sir, can I help you?” Aaron reaches to ignite himself.
The lighter is slow to spark.
Is it windy? Is he shaking? Did he use an old lighter rummaged from the bottom of some junk drawer, a lighter borrowed from a friend — is it running low on fuel? Is God giving Aaron another moment to pause, consider the cost — a chance to go home? The metal bottle is heard rolling, louder and louder, an ominous timekeeper.
The flame catches.
“Free Palestine,” in the same calm, steady voice.
Then, “FREE PALESTINE!”
Over and over, til words are no longer possible and agony replaces language.
He remains standing for an unimaginable amount of time. Even then, after a moment of screams, I think I hear Aaron choke out one final, barely decipherable free palestine. It’s clouded by the shrill commands of useless cops and the roar of engulfing flames. I’m unsure.
What I am sure of: Aaron is a hero.
Aaron Bushnell is among the most brave and most sane in this sick, dying empire. He has asked each of us, What would you do if your country was committing genocide?
The answer is, you’re doing it.
Right now.
In the coming days, if we hear about Aaron at all, it will largely not be congruent with the honor he is due.
Weak, sad, unimaginative, & utterly boring cynics will claim he died in vain. During this moment, they have decided what they will do during a genocide is critique the actions of our martyrs and revolutionaries. Right now, they whisper but it won’t change anything. Right now, this is who they will choose to be.
We must resist their doom and despair. “Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” We will admonish them and invite them into their own power. This is who we can choose to be.
More sinister, the corporate shills of media and imperial narrative will say Aaron was disturbed. Insane. They are soulless, spineless, bloodless. They do not esteem virtue, if they even possess a mental category for it. To these ghouls, morality is not in touch with reality.
In their defense, this is the logical outcome of capitalism.
I cannot stop thinking about Aaron Bushnell.
Because of Aaron, I cannot stop thinking about John Brown.
I’m a product of South Carolina public schools, and while I imagine that most of what is taught about Captain John Brown across this nation is incomplete — I can only guess that my instruction was even more dismal.
I wasn’t paying attention in many of my history classes as a youngster, but words that come to mind: traitor, crazy, violent, fanatic, terrorist. The textbook image of John Brown was from the mural Tragic Prelude. Bound Bible in one hand, Beecher’s Bible in the other, larger than life, face full of prophetic rage.
Tragic Prelude refers to Bleeding Kansas.
The mural’s artist gave an interview in 1939, “I wanted to paint him as a fanatic, for John Brown was a fanatic. He had the wild zeal of the extremist, the fanatic for his cause—and we had the Civil War, with its untold misery. My grandfather, for instance, died of his wound received in the war. It is the fanatics, the people who insist on going to extremes who cause wars. The cast masses don’t want war—it never brings them any good. What a pity the differences that caused the Civil War were not settled peacefully and amicably.”
Oh, how america loves her mealy-mouthed amicability, her justiceless peace, her compromise with fascists, her condemnation of pure, undefiled religion. It should come as no surprise that this is an interview with an american ‘artist’ in a year as dark — yet clear — as 1939. For white america, the tragic prelude to the Civil War was Bleeding Kansas, not the kidnapping, rape, murder, and enslavement of over 12.5 million Africans. My God.
The Good Captain went to his death because he dared to defend the oppressed, especially from the vantage point that his privileges afforded him. The cruelty and fragility of whiteness will not tolerate race traitors.
While awaiting his execution, The Captain wrote to someone called “E.B.” confessing,
I do not feel conscious of guilt in taking up arms; and had it been in behalf of the rich and powerful, the intelligent, the great (as men count greatness), or those who form enactments to suit themselves and corrupt others, or some of their friends, that I interfered, suffered, sacrificed, and fell, it would have been doing very well. But enough of this.
These words ring through my mind as I think of Aaron.
Aaron was a 25-year-old soldier. Our society would have been happy to call him a hero if he took his orders from the imperial beast, shipped off to some foreign land, and killed. If this had been his fate, he would have been doing very well. Because Aaron defended the oppressed, they murmur in vain and crazy.
In 1881 Frederick Douglass delivered a speech at Storer College in Harper’s Ferry. In the crowd was Andrew H. Hunter — the enslaver and prosecutor who secured The Captain’s conviction. Douglass asked,
But the question is, Did John Brown fail? He certainly did fail to get out of Harpers Ferry before being beaten down by United States soldiers; he did fail to save his own life, and to lead a liberating army into the mountains of Virginia. But he did not go to Harpers Ferry to save his life.
The true question is, Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? And to this I answer ten thousand times, No! No man fails, or can fail, who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause. No man, who in his hour of extremest need, when on his way to meet an ignominious death, could so forget himself as to stop and kiss a little child, one of the hated race for whom he was about to die, could by any possibility fail.
Did John Brown fail? Ask Henry A. Wise in whose house less than two years after, a school for the emancipated slaves was taught.
Did John Brown fail? Ask James M. Mason, the author of the inhuman fugitive slave bill, who was cooped up in Fort Warren, as a traitor less than two years from the time that he stood over the prostrate body of John Brown.
Did John Brown fail? Ask Clement C. Vallandingham, one other of the inquisitorial party; for he too went down in the tremendous whirlpool created by the powerful hand of this bold invader. If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places and men for which this honor is claimed, we shall find that not Carolina, but Virginia, not Fort Sumter, but Harpers Ferry, and the arsenal, not Col. Anderson, but John Brown, began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic. Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises.
When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone - the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union - and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown's, the lost cause of the century.
John Brown’s cause was not lost. He did not fail.
We have the power to make history. We have the power to end the tyranny of empire and racial capitalism. We can deliver the final blow to the death cults that rule us. We can build a better world from the rubble.
W.E.B. Du Bois asks in his biography of The Captain,
“Was John Brown simply an episode, or was he an eternal truth?
And if a truth, how speaks that truth to-day?”
The Captain’s spirit speaks through our young airman’s flaming heart & burning charge:
What would I do if my country was committing genocide?
The answer is, you’re doing it.
Right now.
I cannot stop thinking about Aaron Bushnell.
I cannot stop thinking about the people of Gaza.
There are so many ways to get involved in this moment.
If you are feeling powerless and disconnected, I am happy to help connect you to actions in your area (or remote). Please reach out.
If you’ve yet to take action, if you’ve yet to even speak out, it isn’t too late. You can take the next step for the people of Gaza right now.
Right now.