On Sunday, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force, live-streamed himself walking up to the gates of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., and announced that he was going to engage in an act of protest intended to end what he saw as his complicity in the “genocide” of Palestinians. Bushnell then doused himself in accelerant and set himself on fire. He shouted, “Free Palestine!” as he became engulfed in flames, and then he began to scream. He died of his injuries that night.
The video, which was removed by the streaming network Twitch for violating its policies, is extremely disturbing. Even when watching a heavily blurred out version of the video on X, I alternated between crying and averting my eyes.
Bushnell’s death has sparked a fierce debate online, with some people describing his death as ipso facto proof that he was “mentally ill,” and a subset of them rejecting the very idea that a suicidal action could ever constitute a “legitimate form of protest.” Bushnell’s actions, according to this view, should not be seen as a political gesture, but only as a “cry for help.”
As horrifying and heart-breaking as Bushnell’s death was, he called it a protest, and we ought not dismiss that.
Most of these comments appear well intentioned. Even as reporting on Bushnell’s past comes out, we can never fully ascertain the state of his mind in his final days and moments, and whether he was experiencing some kind of acute mental health problems that warranted medical treatment. And given that Bushnell’s death by suicide could inspire copycat actions, there’s a concern, one that I share, that others distressed by the Israel-Hamas war or other global issues might take their lives, too.
But as horrifying and heart-breaking as Bushnell’s death was, he called it a protest, and we ought not dismiss that. To do so would mean dismissing the more than 1,000-year-history of self-immolation as an extreme form…
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