Aaron Bushnell and the geopolitics of individual resistance

Aaron Bushnell has ensured that the United States will no longer be able to appropriate individual actions of resistance for their foreign policy narratives, with their hypocrisy unchallenged.

The United States has historically appropriated the moral power of acts of individual resistance from around the world to drive forward its own foreign policy. With the general prevalence of American exceptionalism — the idea that the United States is uniquely virtuous — in foreign policy narratives, these acts of appropriation have rarely been questioned. The self immolation of Aaron Bushnell, a 25 year old active duty member of the US Air Force, has changed this.

On February 25, Bushnell immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy at Washington D.C. to protest the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In a livestream, he described what he was about to do as an extreme act of protest:

“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 colonisers, it's not extreme at all – this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal…I will no longer be complicit to genocide”.

In many ways, Bushnell’s actions fit into a long history of self immolation as a form of anti-colonial resistance. In 1963, a 73 year old Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, immolated himself in Ho Chi Minh City to protest the South Vietnamese government’s treatment of monks. At least five other monks immolated themselves in South Vietnam in the months that followed. The International Campaign for Tibet estimates that 159 Tibetans in China and Tibet have self immolated since 2009 to protest Chinese rule. A further 10 Tibetans have self immolated in exile, including Tibetan teenager Dorjee Tsering who self immolated in Dehradun in 2016. When we move beyond the idea of immolation and to the broader idea of non-violent resistance and giving ones own life for liberation, Bushnell’s actions arguably constitute a fair example of Gandhi’s idea of “satyagraha” or truth force - a commitment to telling the truth to the world no matter what the physical cost.

The United States has historically used such individual acts of moral resistance to further their own agenda. When Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit vendor in Tunisia, self immolated to protest an arbitrary government action against him, sparking the Arab Spring, President Barack Obama likened his actions to those of the founding fathers of America and Rosa Parks. Bouazizi’s actions, Obama said, spoke to a longing for freedom in people from “the relentless tyranny of governments that deny their citizens dignity”. In 2016, US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton held up a picture of Dorjee Tsering while speaking in Minnesota and met his family on a trip to India.

Even when such protest is targeted against governments propped up by the United States, the distance and identity of the protestors have effectively distracted the American public from the oppressiveness of their own foreign policy. Thich Quang Duc for example was written about in the western media admiringly as “the Burning Monk”, and the Malcom Browne photograph of him sitting immobile as flames engulfed his body both suggested just enough oriental mysticism to distract from the root cause of his protest - an oppressive American puppet regime.

Aaron Bushnell however, as a serving member of the US military, challenges American narratives in a unique way. Decades of American soft power pushes have focussed on describing the United States military as a force for “good” in world affairs. It is not a coincidence that the name of almost every American military operation on foreign soil contains either the word “liberation” or the word “freedom”. The US never invades, after all — it only liberates. Even ostensibly anti-war thinking in American popular culture — Oliver Stone’s critically acclaimed 1986 film Platoon is an excellent example— focus disproportionately on the feelings of American soldiers and not on the harm being caused by those soldiers or a larger critique of American military interventions.

This inward absorption of the American public (both pro and anti-war) has been critical for their foreign policy. Keeping anti-war discussions to the financial cost of war or to the physical and psychological impact of war on American soldiers, has allowed generations of Americans to comfortably sidestep the shattering exercise of taking moral accountability for the extreme violence unleashed overseas by their government. Aaron Bushnell has broken this framework. He saw himself neither as a heroic American soldier nor a troubled American soldier. He saw himself as a soldier complicit in genocide, and decided to say so. And in doing so, Bushnell has asked his fellow Americans to hold up the mirror they hold to the rest of the world to themselves. Whether they do so or not, remains to be seen.

While the US has been quick to glorify self immolation when conducted against regimes they disapprove of, they’ve been harsh when the same lens is turned inwards. In 1965, a white American pacifist, and father of three, Norman Morrison, immolated himself in front of the Pentagon, holding his baby daughter (she was completely unharmed). Morrison’s wife released a statement explaining his actions as his way of protesting against the US government’s deep military involvement in Vietnam. Like Bushnell, the Morrisons had spent months trying different ways of protesting their government's actions in Vietnam, including withholding their taxes and lobbying with local politicians to no avail. Unlike Thich Quang Duc however, Morrison was painted by some sections of the American media as insane. Research scholars have since pointed out how Morrison’s everyday idiosyncrasies were magnified in the media and his preoccupation with the war in Vietnam was deemed unnatural and “un-American” by a press that had not yet fully revealed the extent of the involvement of the US military in Vietnam.

Similar narratives have been constructed with respect to Bushnell since his self immolation. His estranged parents have been given multiple platforms to term their son mentally unwell. Other commentators have insisted that speaking of Bushnell’s actions glorifies or encourages suicide. And yet, this time, these narratives have not taken hold. Bushnell’s actions, coming as they do, after months of daily visuals of the horrors being perpetrated in Gaza, together with his clear moral articulation of his case, make it difficult for him to be dismissed or discredited outright. Photographs of Bushnell have since been used in Free Palestine protests around the world. In the West, vigils have been held for Bushnell in multiple cities. Air Force colleagues of Bushnell’s have protested in their uniforms to honour Bushnell, and veterans holding a “Free Palestine” sign have burned their uniforms in solidarity.

American protestors of conscience are often honoured by the people whose causes they take up and forgotten at home. North Vietnam, for example, released a postage stamp to commemorate Norman Morrison and named a street after him. Racheal Corrie, the young American peace activist crushed by an Israeli bulldozer trying to save a Palestinian home, has a street named after her in Ramallah, but is barely remembered in the US. It’s difficult to say with certainty as to whether Aaron Bushnell will be remembered differently, but it is clear that after the genocide in Gaza, and Bushnell’s actions, the United States will no longer be able to appropriate individual actions of resistance, with their hypocrisy unchallenged.

On a final note, Bushnell’s death was a tragedy, which no-one, including Bushnell, would want repeated. But a world that could dismantle some of the structures of oppression that Bushnell found intolerable would be a better place by far, for all of us.