Follow this authorShadi Hamid's opinions
Follow
What made one act noble and another unhinged? How do we judge what is reasonable and what isn’t? Unlike Bouazizi, who was reacting to the confiscation of his goods and police abuse, Bushnell appears to have thought carefully about his actions, alerting news outlets to his impending protest hours before. As he doused himself, he acknowledged the “extreme” nature of what he was about to do. And indeed it was. As the philosopher Michael Cholbi dryly notes in his book on suicide, “killing oneself is hard.” The vast majority of attempts fail. Self-immolation, in contrast, has a fatality rate of more than 70 percent, according to one study.
Bushnell’s politics were extreme. Many if not most of us would find his various views, which he posted regularly on Reddit, to be absurd, silly and reprehensible. He dabbled in the kind of dorm-room Fanonism that saw the world through the simplified lens of colonized and colonizer. He believed that it wasn’t his place, as an American White man of privilege, to question how Palestinians and other oppressed groups respond to their oppression, even if it means resorting to violence.
Advertisement
For some of Bushnell’s detractors, this privilege was a source of irritation in the other direction. One critic pointed out that where Bouazizi was protesting his own government, the 25-year-old Bushnell was concerning himself with a “distant ethno-religious conflict.” He had no familial connection to the region. Why should he feel so intensely about other people’s problems?
This gets at a fundamental divide over how Americans interpret the war in Gaza. It’s not just another foreign conflict in which tens of thousands have been killed. It’s not “distant.” The United States is Israel’s chief military patron, providing the emergency weapons and supplies needed to prosecute its war. What’s more, the U.S. Air Force has provided intelligence for offensive targeting in Israel’s massive aerial bombardment of Gaza. The United States is directly implicated in a way that it isn’t in other conflicts.
Bushnell didn’t perceive the conflict as distant. He said:
Advertisement
“I’m an active duty member of the United States 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.”
One doesn’t have to like Bushnell’s reasoning — or his use of the term “genocide” — to comprehend his perspective. To understand is not to justify. To cite a relatively frivolous analogy, the political philosopher Santiago Ramos recently noted that “To explain why your uncle voted Trump in 2020 is not the same as voting for Trump yourself.” To think in this way requires what the author Robert Wright calls “cognitive empathy,” a conscious effort to adopt the perspective of other people, even people you think are bad.
Based on the information we have, rather than speculation about a dead man’s mental state, Bushnell was increasingly despairing of the United States’ role in a war that has killed some 30,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children. An exhaustive Washington Post investigation concluded that Israel’s war in Gaza has been one of the most destructive — possibly the most destructive — of the 21st century so far: Israel has “destroy[ed] more buildings, in far less time, than were destroyed during the Syrian regime’s battle for Aleppo from 2013 to 2016 and the U.S.-led campaign to defeat the Islamic State in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria, in 2017.”
It might be unreasonable or even crazy to think of doing what Bushnell did, but it is not unreasonable that Bushnell — and millions of other Americans — have felt a growing sense of powerlessness over their government’s facilitating the mass killing of a largely defenseless people. That, too, is unreasonable. It is worse than unreasonable.
Share Comments
Popular opinions articles
HAND CURATED
- Opinion|Women are divorcing — and finally finding happinessFebruary 28, 2024Opinion|Women are divorcing — and finally finding happinessFebruary 28, 2024
- Opinion|NRA vanquished: Tish James triumphs again over right-wing huckstersFebruary 27, 2024Opinion|NRA vanquished: Tish James triumphs again over right-wing huckstersFebruary 27, 2024
- Opinion|Why an ex-congressman is living in a ‘safe house’ from TrumpFebruary 27, 2024Opinion|Why an ex-congressman is living in a ‘safe house’ from TrumpFebruary 27, 2024
View 3 more stories Sign up
Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force, lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in D.C. He died from his wounds hours later.
We are a divided country, not least over the war in Gaza. And so it seems unavoidable that we would look at the same facts — a man burning while shouting “Free Palestine” — and interpret them in very different ways. Some of the early reactions to Bushnell’s suicide were dismissive, even indignant. Why would he do something so silly — or crazy?
Michael Starr of the Jerusalem Post attributed the suicide protest to a “state of hysteria,” while journalist Mark Joseph Stern patronizingly intoned that “people suffering mental illness deserve empathy and respect, but it is wildly irresponsible to praise them for using a political justification to take their own life.” Mental illness was assumed without evidence.
The rush to pathologize Bushnell’s act suggests a double standard. After a Tunisian street vendor, Mohammed Bouazizi, self-immolated on Dec. 17, 2011 — the start of the Arab Spring — I don’t recall anyone wondering whether he was mentally ill. President Barack Obama hailed him as a hero, comparing him to America’s own Boston Tea Party patriots and civil rights icon Rosa Parks. We knew little of Bouazizi’s political views or his family life, and few cared to ask. His death was rarely described as a suicide in Western media. After all, his cause was just, and it became more just because of the revolutions it spawned.
What made one act noble and another unhinged? How do we judge what is reasonable and what isn’t? Unlike Bouazizi, who was reacting to the confiscation of his goods and police abuse, Bushnell appears to have thought carefully about his actions, alerting news outlets to his impending protest hours before. As he doused himself, he acknowledged the “extreme” nature of what he was about to do. And indeed it was. As the philosopher Michael Cholbi dryly notes in his book on suicide, “killing oneself is hard.” The vast majority of attempts fail. Self-immolation, in contrast, has a fatality rate of more than 70 percent, according to one study.
Bushnell’s politics were extreme. Many if not most of us would find his various views, which he posted regularly on Reddit, to be absurd, silly and reprehensible. He dabbled in the kind of dorm-room Fanonism that saw the world through the simplified lens of colonized and colonizer. He believed that it wasn’t his place, as an American White man of privilege, to question how Palestinians and other oppressed groups respond to their oppression, even if it means resorting to violence.
For some of Bushnell’s detractors, this privilege was a source of irritation in the other direction. One critic pointed out that where Bouazizi was protesting his own government, the 25-year-old Bushnell was concerning himself with a “distant ethno-religious conflict.” He had no familial connection to the region. Why should he feel so intensely about other people’s problems?
This gets at a fundamental divide over how Americans interpret the war in Gaza. It’s not just another foreign conflict in which tens of thousands have been killed. It’s not “distant.” The United States is Israel’s chief military patron, providing the emergency weapons and supplies needed to prosecute its war. What’s more, the U.S. Air Force has provided intelligence for offensive targeting in Israel’s massive aerial bombardment of Gaza. The United States is directly implicated in a way that it isn’t in other conflicts.
Bushnell didn’t perceive the conflict as distant. He said:
“I’m an active duty member of the United States 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.”
One doesn’t have to like Bushnell’s reasoning — or his use of the term “genocide” — to comprehend his perspective. To understand is not to justify. To cite a relatively frivolous analogy, the political philosopher Santiago Ramos recently noted that “To explain why your uncle voted Trump in 2020 is not the same as voting for Trump yourself.” To think in this way requires what the author Robert Wright calls “cognitive empathy,” a conscious effort to adopt the perspective of other people, even people you think are bad.
Based on the information we have, rather than speculation about a dead man’s mental state, Bushnell was increasingly despairing of the United States’ role in a war that has killed some 30,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children. An exhaustive Washington Post investigation concluded that Israel’s war in Gaza has been one of the most destructive — possibly the most destructive — of the 21st century so far: Israel has “destroy[ed] more buildings, in far less time, than were destroyed during the Syrian regime’s battle for Aleppo from 2013 to 2016 and the U.S.-led campaign to defeat the Islamic State in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria, in 2017.”
It might be unreasonable or even crazy to think of doing what Bushnell did, but it is not unreasonable that Bushnell — and millions of other Americans — have felt a growing sense of powerlessness over their government’s facilitating the mass killing of a largely defenseless people. That, too, is unreasonable. It is worse than unreasonable.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
