"This is What Our Ruling Class Has Decided Will be Normal"

Reflections on Martyrdom, Words, Slaughter, and Revolution

Yesterday, a National "Public” Radio News broadcaster said that "30,000 people have died so far in the fighting in Gaza." How demented. How pathetic. How absurd. Try “30,000 human beings, most of them women and children, have so far been slaughtered in the one-sided US-Israel genocidal crucifixion of Gaza."

Words matter. It was never really “the Vietnam War,” it was actually “the US War on Vietnam” or, better, “the US-imperialist crucifixion of Southeast Asia.” It was never “the Iraq War,” it was “the criminal imperialist US invasion and occupation of Iraq.” It’s NOT “the Israel-Hamas War,” or (to use the “P”BS’s term now) “War in the Holy Land,” it’s “the one-sided US-Israel Crucifixion of Gaza.”

Two days ago, a Canadian friend informed me that Aaron Bushnell was not the first American to self-immolate in protest against US funding, equipping, and protecting of the genocide in Gaza. It also happened outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta, Georgia, last December 2nd. According to the Associated Press, “A Palestinian flag found at the scene was part of the protest, Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum said at a news conference. He added that investigators did not believe there was any connection to terrorism and none of the consular staff was ever in danger.”

Um, there was a connection to terrorism: the protester was making a stark statement against the terror of US-backed genocide.

Self-immolation has a long history as a political form of protest of unjust oppression. Wikipedia reports that:

“The Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam saw the persecution of the country's majority religion under the administration of Catholic president Ngô Đình Diệm. Several Buddhist monks, including the most famous case of Thích Quảng Đức, immolated themselves in protest. The example set by self-immolators in the mid 20th century inspired numerous similar acts between 1963 and 1971, most of which occurred in Asia and the United States in conjunction with protests opposing the Vietnam War. Researchers counted almost 100 self-immolations covered by The New York Times and The Times…On March 18, 1965, an 82-year-old woman named Alice Herz set herself on fire in Detroit, Michigan. Before she died of her burns ten days later, Alice said she set herself on fire to protest “the arms race and a president using his high office to wipe out small nations.”On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, an anti-war activist, doused himself in kerosene and set himself on fire below the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara at the Pentagon, to protest United States involvement in the Vietnam War.

On Friday, November 3, 2006, musician Malachi Ritscher self-immolated on the side of the Kennedy Expressway near downtown Chicago during morning rush hour. In a letter published on his website he made clear his choice to take his own life was an act of political protest, writing, "if I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world."

On 14 April 2018, David Buckel self-immolated in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Shortly before lighting himself on fire he sent an email to several news outlets which included the statement: "Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result—my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves."

Wynn Bruce, a climate activist from Boulder, Colorado self-immolated on the steps of the Supreme Court of the United States on Earth Day, 22 April 2022. On 28 March 2022, he made a Facebook post stating: "This is not humor. It is all about breathing," followed by "Clean air matters."

Speaking of terrorism, genocide, and slaughter, Judeo-fascist Israel inflicted the “Flour Massacre” last Thursday. At least 112 Palestinians were murdered and more than 750 wounded when Israeli troops opened fire on masses trying to get food southwest of Gaza City. As Al Jazeera reported:

“The incident unfolded at about 04:30 local time on Thursday, when people congregated at Harun al-Rashid Street in Gaza, where aid trucks carrying flour were believed to be on the way.

A convoy of aid trucks passed through the checkpoint, heading north, as people started gathering in large groups. According to the Israeli military, a convoy of 31 trucks entered Gaza but nearly 20 entered the north on Monday and Tuesday. 

As people gathered in large groups waiting for much-needed aid, they were shot at by all kinds of military equipment, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reported from Rafah. According to a report by the Associated Press, people pulled boxes of flour and canned goods off the trucks.

After the first round of shooting stopped, people returned to the trucks, only for the soldiers to open fire once more.

‘After opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies,’ Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul said, reporting from the scene…Israeli forces conducted a massacre by firing on a crowd of people who were waiting to collect desperately needed food aid. According to Al Jazeera’s Mahmoud, the more he spoke to people, ‘the clearer it became they felt it was a trap, an ambush’.

‘We had come here to get our hands on some aid. I had been waiting since noon yesterday.  At about 4:30 in the early morning trucks started to trickle in. The Israelis just opened random fire on us as if it was a trap. Once we approached the aid trucks, the Israeli tanks and warplanes started firing on us,’ a witness at the scene told Al Jazeera. …The stampede happened as a result of Israeli firing and that the trucks also rolled over wounded people, adding to the death toll. Al Jazeera has verified that donkey carts were used to take people to hospital because no ambulances could reach the area.

‘We were going to bring flour … then Israeli snipers shot at us,’ another person in the area told Al Jazeera. ‘They shot me in the leg. I’m unable to stand up,’ he added.”

The establishment capitalist-imperialist New York Times has a perfectly neutral phrase for the ZioNazi Flour Massacre: “the convoy disaster.”

Back to Aaron Bushnell. These were his last words:

“I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands od their colonizers, it is not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. Free Palestine, Free Palestine, Free Palestine.”

The Palestinian Youth Movement released the following statement on Bushnell’s act:

‘On February 25th, 2024, Aaron Bushnell, a 25 year old active duty member of the US military, self-immolated outside the Zionist embassy in Washington, D.C. Aaron lit himself ablaze in protest of the United States’ ongoing complicity in the genocide on Gaza. In making the most extreme sacrifice a human being can in support of a moral cause — his own life — Aaron sent a message on behalf of the masses of the US and of the world, that people of conscience everywhere will refuse complicity in the unfolding genocide against the Palestinian people until our last breath.

While US media is already spinning the story as one of a mentally ill, troubled youth, Aaron’s own message in the seconds prior to his act demonstrate the moral clarity and foresight with which he pondered and ultimately decided upon his act. Aaron is now the second person to self-immolate in protest of the US-backed genocide on Gaza, the first being a woman in Atlanta who lit herself on fire outside the Zionist consulate in Atlanta, Georgia.

There is perhaps no metaphor more powerful for US empire than the response of police at the scene. Instead of running to put out the flames with fire extinguishers and save Aaron’s life, cops drew their weapons and pointed them directly at Aaron as he stood burning to death. What threat did the police see in a young man on fire, incapable of doing anything but shouting “Free Palestine” until the pain prevented him from shouting any longer? They saw something alien to them, alien to the logic and machinery of US empire: self-sacrifice for a cause greater than one’s own life.

The word for martyr in Arabic, “shaheed,” translates to “witness,” or one whose final moment in life is as a witness to injustice. Aaron Bushnell is a martyr, whose final moment was spent in the heat of one naked, unflinching truth: the moral conscience of every human being, from the belly of the beast to the farthest reaches of the Earth, demands immediate attention and action to end the horrors before us. Let Aaron’s words and last act burn brightly in our conscience, let it propel us, let it move us to continue struggling for a Free Palestine, now and until the hour of liberation.’

(My friend Lawrence Hamilton wrote me that “N‘P’R said they couldn’t verify the motivation for Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation. Our mainstream media are like the character Squealer the pig in Orwell’s Animal Farm.”)

On 17 December 2010, the fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself ablaze to protest corruption and authoritarian rule. His martyrdom sparked the Arab Spring, the regional protest movement against corruption and authoritarian across the Arab World. Bushnell’s martyrdom ought to spark an anti-imperialist American Spring — a mass movement not only to protest US policy in Israel but to overthrow the capitalist-imperialist system behind that policy.

Please note Bushnell’s line: “this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” Indeed, and this is the case across the board. The US American ruling class decided that many terrible things should be considered “normal,” including the escalating destruction of livable ecology, the rising threat of nuclear war, the closing of the border to millions of people whose lives have been ruined by US capitalism-imperialism in Latin America, the feeding of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian bodies into a lethal meat grinder, the massive and deadly arming of much of the US populace, the rise of a giant domestic US racist police and mass incarceration state, the takeover of numerous US states by Christian white nationalism, and the takeover of one of the nation’s two viable capitalist political parties and quite possibly the whole US political structure and society by fascism, the potential end of previously normative US bourgeois electoral, parliamentary, and rule of law democracy, for example.

Here is an exchange I recently had with a comrade on social media:

Jacob: “From a comrade. I concur: ‘If you tell me my choice is between supporting genocide or having a dictator, I guess I'm gonna have a dictator.’ Clarification, I don't mean vote for Trump, but if the only way to stop him is to support genocide, I ain't stopping him.”

Street: “Jacob, I will not vote for Genocide Joe in November, just to be clear, but this statement is dumb for two reasons:

(1). The sentiments of fash Trump and his fash party and base are actually more genocidal towards Gaza, Arabs, and Muslims than are those of Biden and the despicable Dems. A second Trump administration would if anything be more committed to helping Israel inflict collective punishment on the Palestinians.

(2). Enough with this ballot-fetishizing electoral nonsense. F the system that gives you the pathetic “democratic choice” between Genocide Joe and an Orange Dictator. Seriously. Choose socialist revolution. Let's rephrase as follows: “If you tell me the choice is between capitalism-imperialism on the road to fascism and socialist revolution on the path to communism then my choice is clear: R. E. V. O. L. U. T. I. O. N.”

*Note to readers: my promised next essay on and against Lesser Evil Voting (LEV) for Genocide Joe Biden (and on how to LEV if you must) will (it turns out) be available today at CounterPunch+ (I observe a one month delay here for pieces previously published there. On the positive side, it is not an especially time sensitive piece. At the same time, think about subscrbing to CP+. They publish some smart radical writers.)