Bushnell and Martyrdom

“You are not obligated to finish the work, nor are you free to abandon it” - The Talmud

A quick note on my language here. It is unclear to me in what way Senior Airman Bushnell would have liked to be referred, and my inclination with someone who went by “Lilly” online, who said to online friends that they would like to transition and live as a woman if they could but who was not out in the physical world is to use the neutral pronoun they. I will be saying “Bushnell” and “they” throughout this as I find it uncomfortable to gender them one way or the other against the experience that their real life friends had of them or against what evidence suggests may have been their closeted gender identity. Beyond this note I will not be discussing Bushnell’s gender identity.

On February 25th 2024, Senior Airman Bushnell streamed live to twitch as they recited a prepared statement and then set themself on fire outside of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC. Their statement went:
“My name is Aaron Bushnell, I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force and 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 of their colonizers, it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

And then as they burned they repeatedly screamed “FREE PALESTINE”. In a moment of almost real-life dramatic irony the officer outside the embassy started training his service weapon on Bushnell as they burned. Someone can be heard in the archived video saying to the officer “I don’t need guns I need a fire extinguisher.”

I don’t need guns I need a fire extinguisher

Bushnell was extensively eulogised in the Crimethinc article Memoirs of Aaron Bushnell which collected testimonies of them from friends, comrades and fellow organisers. In their will, which is quoted a little in the article, Bushnell wrote:

"I am sorry to my brother and my friends for leaving you like this. Of course, if I was truly sorry, I wouldn't be doing it. But the machine demands blood. None of this is fair [...] 

I wish for my remains to be cremated. I do not wish for my ashes to be scattered or my remains to be buried as my body does not belong anywhere in this world. If a time comes when Palestinians regain control of their land, and if the people native to the land would be open to the possibility, I would love for my ashes to be scattered in a free Palestine."

So today I am thinking about the finer points of the construction of this “extreme act of protest”. I think this is a conversation that we need to have because Bushnell was one of us. Their account records show they were a part of the discord communities of lots of leftist content creators, they were an organiser involved in mutual aid groups, and their protest was entirely informed by politics that are, to put a fine point on it, our politics. They wanted to read a poem by Anansi’s Library when they burned their uniform when their plan was to leave the Air Force.

The unsettling thing for me, however, is thinking about how exactly their protest does fit into our politics, given what our politics are about - namely care, and growing together, and being here for the people who need us.

The Crimethinc article talks about them reading Braiding Sweetgrass:

“Once, Aaron and I were having a discussion, a political one about the ethics of eating and producing meat. As a former vegan, I had many takes, as did he. At one point, the conversation got to plants and Aaron expressed that he thought of plants as nothing more than biological machines completely devoid of life or at least the essence that makes something morally valuable and worth protecting, like sentient animals. I was honestly very shocked. I told him he was wrong, in more words than that, and told him to read Braiding Sweetgrass, kind of in the way you tell people to read books but never actually expect them to. Our conversation seemed to weigh heavy on him, it came up a few more times over the following weeks. On his drive up to Ohio, he listened to Braiding Sweetgrass and he was texting me about it. He really, really liked it. I think it reshaped some of his worldview.”

And when I think about that I think about the gentleness and beauty of a book like Braiding Sweetgrass and the violence and desperation of self-immolation, and I feel a tension that I’d like to resolve. I think the intense clarity with which they communicated everything that they put out about their principles leaves us no room to believe that what they did was not based on their principles. We should not be looking at Bushnell’s mental health, because the odd thing about self immolation is how despite being an act of protest that typically (ideally?) involves suicide, it is not an act borne out of a desire to die.

I feel compelled to write about what Bushnell did for many reasons, but I can’t ignore the evidence that shows that they were a viewer, stream chatter and patreon supporter of mine. I am not here to criticise Bushnell’s protest - what they did was principled and brave, and sometimes when I see things like the Israeli state using drones playing the sounds of screaming children to lure Palestinians to be shot to death, I feel a kind of deep shame and self loathing for living within the imperialist machine that does things like that, that makes self immolation as an act of desperate protest make sense. However, I feel a responsibility to interrogate where actions like this fit into my politics because if anyone said to me that they were planning to do what Bushnell did I would tell them they absolutely should not.

To that end, the following essay is a discussion of the ways in which we martyr ourselves for our beliefs and why we do it, whether it makes sense according to the beliefs that we are trying to express in these actions, and what the alternatives are when we feel desperate, furious, and ashamed.

Lots of people have now written about self-immolation and its history. Margaret Killjoy has an excellent piece titled In The Land of Burning Children that I recommend reading. I don’t want to talk about self-immolation though, at least at first - I want to talk about martyrdom. Bushnell has been honoured as a martyr in Yemen and Palestine, and the reactionary presses have conflated this with the position of leftists as part of their eternal marrying of islamophobic and anti-leftist propaganda.

I don’t know if the word “martyr” has a place in my politics, and reading about Bushnell reading Braiding Sweetgrass makes me wonder if they would have approved of the word themself, though I obviously can’t possibly know. That discomfort and that misalignment is what I want to consider and I keep coming back to Braiding Sweetgrass because it’s a book about the subjectivity of plants, effectively arguing for the way that the ecological relationships of plants to animals and humans constitutes a more complex existence than just a sort of biological machine. Parts of the book explore these ideas via indigenous etiologies and mythology, showing how (as the subtitle of the book puts it) "Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants" intersect. The book wants to show us that we don't just have to treat plants as units of productivity, but that the nature of the interwoven relationships in ecosystems is complex enough as to teach us new ideas about the world and our place in it. 

One chapter describes a study that one of the author’s students carried out on sweetgrass and harvesting methods, investigating whether the indigenous method that claimed a more respectful and mutualistic approach was in fact less detrimental to the ongoing growth than the other style of ripping up clumps of grass with the soil and the roots. What she found, surprisingly, was that both methods were about equal, but that in her control patches where no grass had been harvested at all, the sweetgrass actually fared worse and grew back less densely next time compared to the harvested patches. The grass and the harvesters were actually in a symbiotic and mutualistic relationship that eludes the kind of logic that we apply when we think about “harvesting” plants. Do the plants have brains, minds, thoughts? No, not in any apparent way - but do they have knowledge that we can learn and that we frequently overlook in the way that we treat them? Yes, I think that’s apparent. I don’t think it’s very hard from there to understand this animist perspective that sees plants as having a subjectivity or a spirit. This is why this book and its presence in Bushnell’s world comes back to me in this question, because it feels tricky to reconcile with total self-annihilation.

There are many different ways in which people engage in self-sacrifice, so let’s pick over a few of them with comparable elements to Bushnell’s self-immolation. Starting in a realm of similar politics and values, a very common form of self-sacrifice is what we call activist burnout. I am not trying to be glib by drawing a line between self immolation and the phenomenon that we call burnout. If it was called “activist sad brain” that would be a little more rhetorically comfortable, but we call it burnout because you, like a candle or a match, get burned out and used up and then you are gone. What generally happens in activist burnout I think is best conveyed in a little parable they once told in an episode of Fargo - I’ve checked and it appears to be from this episode originally, despite the prevalence of older folkloric parables and riddles throughout the show. So here’s Fargo’s Parable of the Rich Man.

There was once a rich man who cared a lot, and he opened the newspaper one day and saw all the atrocities going on in the world. “I have money!” he says, “I can help!” so he gives his money to good causes, until it’s all gone. But he sees that this doesn’t help enough, there is still suffering in the world. So he goes to the doctor and asks to donate a kidney. He is healthy, the operation is a success, someone who needs a kidney gets his kidney, but he isn’t happy - there is still suffering in the world. So he goes back to the doctor and he says “I want to give my other kidney, but not just my other kidney. I want to give my heart but not just my heart. I want to give my lungs but not just my lungs. I want to give it all away.” The doctor of course refuses to help him in this act of suicide, but the man signs himself up as an organ donor, gets in a tub of ice and gives away the last thing he can - his life. Unfortunately, as we can all observe, there is still suffering in the world.

Activists throw themselves into everything they can possibly do to help all the time, filling their schedules with organising meetings and demos and actions and marches and more meetings and one-to-one catch ups in their communities and more meetings and little things they can do to help and, let’s be real, more meetings, and they get exhausted in a way that it takes a really long time to bounce back from. There are more reasons for this than just wanting to “give it all away” of course. Organisations need people who are capable and dedicated and when they show up and show that they’re determined to keep showing up, they get worn down by attrition. A social dynamic saps all their energy through a thousand little decisions where people who need something from them connect with their eagerness to help until they simply have no capacity or energy to do anything at all. Burnout is recognised as one of the biggest problems in activist life and activists are either aware of it as a constant threat or simply perpetually defeated by it.

There is a drive I could speculate on to throw yourself into activism in a way that pulls you out of yourself too. I know a lot of people experience this but I’m saying “speculate” anyway because it’s not like I have hard data to say this is what causes all burnout. I just know that in 12 step programs people whose lives are a colossal fucking mess are directed to help and support each other to get them out of their heads and focused on other people, and I think anyone who’s been around activists can see some of the same stuff going on at least some of the time. It’s not just a desire to end the grief of the world that makes you martyr yourself in activist burnout, but the almost addictive dissociative urge to have something to do that you know is helping, you know is good, you know is simple, and you know will fill your time. I’ve personally seen this lead people to final burnouts where the magic trick stops working, using your time to help others runs you ragged and then you’re left with yourself in a worse way than when you started and you don’t know what you’re going to do but you definitely aren’t going to return to activism - after all, look where it got you.

If you put this together with all the people who the overcommitted activist has let down by burning out, the social and emotional fallout is immense. I have friends who are doing incredible work in organisations right now and the people around them want them to take leadership positions, but they absolutely shouldn’t - what those people want is for the person who is the best at activism to lead everyone else to be better at it, but they and everyone else and the organisation will be best served by all learning how to be more effective and how to support and restore each other. If an organisation promotes their paragon activist to an executive role, they suddenly have no paragon activists and one really stressed executive member who’s trying to do everything and chair the committee, but if they can pull it off they could have twenty paragon activists supporting each other in a sustainable way and whoever is actually good at admin chairing the committee.

I think activist burnout has an interesting relationship to the idea of martyrdom because in a christian culture a martyr is almost always a saint, a holy person, a person who can do and has done no wrong. I don’t mean to come down too hard on people who exhaust themselves in organising here but I don’t think many of them would disagree with me that there is also present a desire to be a miraculous person, maybe the person who did just enough, who gave exactly the right thing, the last kidney that ever needed to be transplanted to end all suffering.

I don’t think that Bushnell thought what they did would end the genocide in Palestine. In fact, it’s right there in their will: “If a day ever comes [that Palestine is free].” I think, once again, it’s best for us to take them at pretty much face value when they say “this is what the ruling class has decided will be normal.”

Another striking contrast recently presented itself in the form of another self-immolation, this time outside Donald Trump’s trial in Manhattan. 37 year old Max Azzarello doused himself in accelerant, threw pamphlets espousing his heavily conspiracy theory inspired beliefs around him and then lit himself on fire. Shortly afterwards, a manifesto written by Azzarello was widely circulated online to be picked over by the world.

It would be unhelpful to call the beliefs outlined in Azzarello’s manifesto gibberish. Instead I want to emphasise how they fall into the classic motivated reasoning of conspiracy theories where the contour of something real is being described but the need to threat-simplify and find the solely culpable party or parties ruins any attempt at coherent interpretation. In some ways it is a lot better than a lot of conspiracism - rather than a teeny tiny cabal of like, 7 or 8 bad men who need to be stopped, Azzarello seems to have actually believed in some kind of ruling class whose actions are driven by greed and whose ambitions span the globe. He flies icarus-like close to the superheated ball of the truth but the gravity of his emotional reasoning pulls him down over and over. 

Cryptocurrency is our first planetary multi-trillion-dollar Ponzi scheme? I mean, like, yeah? No? Yeah nah yeah nah yeah… If we get really simplistic about it, it’s not wholly wrong or unfair to call cryptocurrency one big scam. The March 2023 bank failures were all intentional? Well what is he pointing at here? He’s looking at the way that people who were already rich made even more money off people who weren’t losing everything in bank collapses, but then he applies a teleological understanding - if they have power and they got a positive outcome, it must have been their intention the whole time.

And so on and so on like this.

Azzarello’s manifesto eerily mimics Bushnell’s final words in at least one place, stating “To my friends and family, witnesses and first responders, I deeply apologize for inflicting this pain upon you. But I assure you it is a drop in the bucket compared to what our government intends to inflict.”, an obvious parallel to “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 colonisers, it’s not extreme at all” but the difference is also glaring. Bushnell is describing the ongoing genocide, and Azzarello is describing a speculative eschatological new world order apocalypse, a grand conspiracy that very nearly describes the shape if not the particulars of power in the world that is coming to bear soon, any day now. Bushnell is looking at the horrors that we can all see unfolding right in front of us in real time - prophecy is simply unnecessary.

This is, of course, because conspiracism is the materialism of the desperate and uninformed. The emotional logic of conspiracists sometimes constitutes a breakneck sprint towards the conclusions that the marathon of learning what is actually going on in the world bring you to just the same, but to follow my metaphor through: the sprint overshoots the finish line, trips over itself and crashes in a sweaty heap.

The glaring difference that Bushnell’s analysis was based in fact and Azzarello’s in fact-adjacent-fiction can even be observed in Bushnell’s words. “This is what the ruling class has decided will be normal.” They were right. They knew that someone setting themself on fire in public wouldn’t stop the genocide of Palestinians, for one because it had already been done by an activist in Atlanta in December for the same reasons and it hadn’t stopped then. They knew that two people setting themselves on fire wouldn’t stop the genocide. They were stating it plainly: “This is what the ruling class has decided will be normal” and Azzarello proved their point. At the same time, Azzarello’s statement of intent about his own self-immolation revealed a completely different interpretation of the action, just as did his explanation of his beliefs. His manifesto stated “Because these words are true, this is an act of revolution.”

Azzarello was actively seeking martyrdom. His self-immolation was explicitly framed as something that would kick off a revolution, a fight for a just world in his name. Bushnell died in a demonstration of the belief that the people who shape our society simply don’t care if someone sets themself on fire in front of everyone - this is martyrdom in the sense that it is someone dying for what they believe in, but not sought after as martyrdom. Azzarello provides a near perfect negative image by seeking martyrdom in the name of a righteous revolution that can’t happen because its material analysis is based on the idea that The Simpsons is brainwashing you. 

For a final contrast, I’d like to use the widely criticised tactic among climate activists with organisations like Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil of getting themselves arrested. This too is evidently self-sacrificing. Getting arrested sucks shit. Since we’re playing in the space of self-sacrifice and martyrdom though, I want to ask how much the shitsucking nature of getting arrested is the point of this tactic. The stated logic of the tactic is that the state must engage with the climate protests if its criminal justice system is clogged up with people getting themselves arrested in climate protests. Additionally, defendants are given an opportunity to ask the jury, the judge and all present to consider if they really did anything wrong - to weigh their actions against the seriousness of climate collapse. Tactically - strategically - operationally - we can suggest this also enters this moral judgement into law as precedent.

The shaky axiom of this construction however, also ties back to martyrdom - the first and last step here is all about being witnessed. Whether it’s the state, the media, “the people”, the criminal justice system, some kind of big other is witnessing and weighing your actions, and the effectiveness of this tactic rests with the moral soundness of the witness. It is para-religious already, getting arrested as an act of prayer because getting arrested sucks shit and so the complaint, the belief, the message, the faith must be heard and it must be taken seriously. If enough people get themselves arrested Mr. Gubbermint will stop pressing the “Keep Doing Climate Change” button and start pressing the “Stop Climate Change” button.

Bushnell’s protest of course also relied on being witnessed as self-immolation always must, and undeniably burning to death sucks shit a lot more than getting arrested, so here the compare appears quite trivial and the contrast actually a little more problematic. Bushnell, however, wasn’t just relying on being witnessed by the ruling class, the state, the big other who holds all the cards and can make all the difference. They knew they would be witnessed and then ignored by the same petty stupid God to which liberal climate activists are performing little martyrdoms, and they knew that the ruling class wasn’t the only one watching.

As an aside, maybe here you might feel I’m being a little unfair to liberal climate activists. They too, we could posit, know that they are being ignored by politicians and are hoping that their arrests will drive public awareness and an increased urgency for action by all of us, not just the government. I don’t know what to say to this except that I’ve talked with people in these organisations and when it is put to them over and over that their actions will be ignored and the result will be popular revolution against the class that is murdering the planet, they look at me blankly like Westworld characters who’ve seen something from outside cowboy reality and then keep talking about reforming capitalism to be sustainable.

Bushnell’s protest brought the violence of what is happening in Palestine uncomfortably close. Their humanity and its loss, their life and its destruction, their commitment and their pain were placed in front of us in a way that insists we recognise the deep injustice of the world we live in. I’m sure many of the same elements who find it easy to sleep at night ignoring the screams of Palestinian children found it a believable and comfortable explanation to just call Bushnell mentally ill, but their callousness is also part of the point. I think in a sense it rings so true to say that Bushnell’s protest was principled and brave and that no more people need to do what they did because it was also so well communicated. The people who refused to witness it made the only move they could in response and turned away from the person burning to death, and in doing so they played the part Bushnell knew they would in the protest, and we all saw that how little they care about the lives of distant others is indistinguishable from the value they also place on our lives.

The concept of a martyr sits uncomfortably perhaps because of ways it interplays with sainthood, with the idea of a perfect person who has never erred and never faltered, but taken at the straightforward level that a martyr is a person who dies for their beliefs we should reject this implicit perfection. After all “I will no longer be complicit in genocide” speaks directly to the idea that up until now they have been complicit. They were a person, and that’s enough.

Braiding Sweetgrass comes back around to me in writing this again and again, and I think about this line from it “You can smell it before you see it, a sweetgrass meadow on a summer day. The scent flickers on the breeze, you sniff like a dog on a scent and then it’s gone, replaced by the boggy tang of wet ground. And then it’s back, the sweet vanilla fragrance, beckoning.” The subjectivities of all living things and their complex interplays feels like this - the ineffable underpinning presence you can feel when you find people living in respect and mutuality with each other and with their environment - the feeling you get when you see people living their values. You can smell it almost, and then it’s gone, and then it’s back.

Bushnell’s self-immolation was founded in the understanding of relative subjectivities. Everyone who talks about Bushnell wants to interrogate their perspective in one way or another, be it their mental health, their politics, their radicalism, their gender identity, their hope or despair about the world - and the opposite would be folly, right? They weren’t a robot, they didn’t make decisions based on cold inhuman calculus. “None of this is fair” is a powerful argument, but an obviously emotional one. I don’t think we can talk about Bushnell without interrogating their subjectivity because that was the point they were making. They were a real thinking, hoping, dreaming person, and so was every Palestinian who has died, and so was every victim of imperialist violence, and so am I and so are you, and we have to learn to live like that’s true.