Encomium for an American Hero

We are all Aaron Bushnell

Last Sunday afternoon at 1 p.m., while many American Christians were enjoying a leisurely lunch after their Sunday church service, USAF Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell, in what he expressly called an act of “extreme protest,” immolated himself at the gate of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. This was the first such self-immolation to be recorded and posted in real time on the Internet, making it impossible for even the mainstream media to ignore. Our “lamestream” media were beside themselves to blunt the airman’s message to America: virtually all the earliest headlines omitted his stated cause of protest, the patent Israeli genocide in Gaza, to make it seem as though the proximity of his death to the Israeli embassy were a matter of happenstance. USA Today was a notable exception. Right here is the first question Americans ought to be asking: how is it that the MSM is incapable of reporting the obvious intent of this fortitudious dissenter? Why must they refract everything to blunt criticism of clear Israeli war crime?

Interestingly, Airman Bushnell was not the first American to self-immolate in front of Israeli diplomatic offices , though he apparently is the first to die in the process. In early December a similar attempt was made by another protester outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta, Georgia but the flames were extinguished in time to save this valiant protester’s life by a security guard who received burn wounds in the process. In this case, the police not only would not release the protester’s name, but even his or her gender! This led to the following mangled BBC headline: “Protester sets themself (sic) on fire outside Israel consulate in Atlanta, Georgia.” Themself? Is this the King’s english, BBC? But once again we see this same imperative by the “reporter” Bernd Debusmann, Jr., to allow the Zionists to have the last word on the event. Quoth the Israeli consul general: “It is tragic to see the hate and incitement toward Israel expressed in such a horrific way...”¹ Yes, this anonymous protester’s pure love for the Palestinian victims of Israeli aggression must be transmogrified into hatred for Israel before the BBC “journalist’s” assignment is complete. Hasbara is job one.

Though this earlier protester was effectively reduced to a non-person by the connivance of the police and the media, about Aaron Bushnell we know more, though you have to really dig to find it. He was apparently from a very (Christian) religious family. This formative influence is important in understanding how acutely Airman Bushnell, who had volunteered time with the San Antonio Care Collective to help the city’s homeless population,² experienced the cognitive dissonance between his Christian values and his oath to the Constitution, and Israels’s genocidal operation in Palestine in which the US Air Force is playing an active role. After all, the billions of dollars worth of lethal weaponry has to be flown in tranches of daily delivery to the “Jewish State” in order for the genocide to continue. The degree to which Aaron was personally involved in this perfidious operation we may never know, but the fact that the USAF of which he was an active member, and whose orders he was duty bound to follow, may have been more than enough reason for him to keenly feel his complicity. In any case, these were his words: “I will no longer be complicit in genocide.”

Now it’s true that neither Christianity nor Islam countenances the taking of one’s own life; on the other hand, both glorify martyrdom. Let’s look further at this issue to see how it played out for our American hero: No one that I’ve ever met would condemn an individual whose medical condition was such that every day was filled with endless, unbearable and intractable pain, and who then went on to end his or her own life. Life is, after all, a gift...and when any gift becomes a curse, we naturally discard it. Is moral pain really all that different? For someone with a sensitive conscience, a case can be made that it is no different. Physical pain and moral agony are capable of representing the same level of crisis to a sensitive soul. It had clearly dawned on Airman Bushnell that as opposed to the noble calling he may have at first understood the Air Force to represent, he had in fact been implicated in an ongoing crime against humanity under military auspices. The enormity of this truthful awareness must have weighed on him heavily. Now, it is the clear purpose of the modern American military to numb conscientious feeling in its conscripts. Boot camp is the quintessential exercise in this black art, but that “stick” is then reinforced by many “carrots” in the military career that ensues. That this whole business is an abomination is beside the point: we still await the fullness of the Kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness, and this insult to our humanity remains a detestable institution in our midst. Aaron Bushnell was just one of countless thousands of its victims. However, its black magic did not penetrate him as they would have liked, despite the fact that he was at the top of his class in basic training, and he retained a Christian moral sensibility that enabled him to see his own military activity and involvement from a critical moral perspective. This led to a crisis of cognitive dissonance. He had to choose, as do we all in moments of moral crisis, and choose he did.

Ah, critics may argue, but he could have filed for conscientious objection, could he not? Yes, that option was certainly open to him, though there is no guarantee this effort would have succeeded. The problem here is that conscientious objector status is available to those, even already in the military service, who conscientiously object to all killing. This is probably not something that Airman Bushnell could have honestly maintained. After all, he has joined the Air Force knowing that its ultimate mission was to be able deliver deadly force to an enemy. I can only surmise here, but it is reasonable to suppose that he was ok with that so long as the “enemy” meant the bad guys, and we were the good guys. But what it seems Aaron had discovered was that things were actually the other way around, we are the bad guys now, and we are aiding and abetting even worse guys in their genocide of innocent civilians. This growing realization must have horrified this conscientious Christian. The more he thought about it, the clearer it became. The truth of the matter was undeniable. So he weighed his options, and it must have seemed to him that by sacrificing his own life in the way that he ultimately did was the one way to make lemonade out of the lemon of his moral dilemma. Please note that he did not see the ultimate source of his problem as the United States government, or he’d have done his deed in front of the White House or the Capitol. The US government is clearly a willing conspirator in this genocidal project, but the real source of the evil, as the astute airman had ferreted out, was the Zionist State of Israel, and that’s why its embassy, from which this evil metastasizes, was his target of choice. By the sacrifice of his life in such a sensational fashion, it must have seemed to him that he could draw attention to the genocidal nature of the current US policy manipulated by Zionist influence, arouse his somnolent fellow citizens, atone for his own complicity (however unwitting), and put an end to his own moral agony.

All of this is not to suggest that Aaron Bushnell’s action was the best of all possible moral choices, but nor is it to deny that possibility, at least from his perspective. His ultimate act of solidarity with the innocent victims of US/Israeli genocide in Palestine has had significant impact, and one that we may hope will grow if we keep his memory alive. Self-sacrifice is at the heart of the Christian ethic, and no one can deny that Airman Bushnell engaged in a supreme act of self-sacrifice. He has raised the bar for the rest of us who understand how high the stakes are, and that Gaza is the moral compass of the world,

Let each of us consider for himself or herself, until Palestine is truly free, Aaron’s own published reflections in his last post on Facebook before offering his life on the altar of humanity:

“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.”

1https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67597395

2https://inews.co.uk/news/world/aaron-bushnell-air-force-palestine-2928258