“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’
“The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Aaron Bushnell couldn't live in a society that actively supported a deliberate genocide. He no doubt could not satisfy his conscience by engaging in symbolic protests. It wasn't going to be enough for him to sign a petition or write a letter to those people who are probably [given the nature of the US political system] only pretending to represent his interests. I am going to speculate that he felt his entire culture, the values it espoused, the expressions of joy of its artists and entertainers, the longings of its musicians and poets, the everyday diversions of the individuals living within it, ... all were tainted by their passivity in the face of this cruel, racist, murderous, sadistic, evil genocide.
Genocide is as bad as it gets. Wiping out an entire people, men, women and children, as an act of deliberate policy, generally in order to steal what they possessed, or out of sheer racist hatred, is about the worst thing a culture can do. After that, who cares about who got what award for making a film? Who cares about your freedom to wear whatever clothes you want to? Who cares about which sports team wins a championship? Who cares about your promotion? Who cares about your current political leader expressing his support for some other people ostensibly fighting for freedom and democracy against some other alleged evil oppressor?
Aaron Bushnell recognized the enormity of the crime that his country was engaged in and, since he knew he was powerless to stop it through traditional protest, he decided that he could no longer live in it.
While reading about Bushnell's act I've occasionally come across idiotic comments from anonymous persons condemning him and deriding him as being mentally ill. As if a society engaged in genocide isn't hideously sick! At the start of this current round of Israeli barbarism I recall reading the comments of some comfortable North American "progressives," ... the sort who are still going to vote for "Genocide Joe Biden" because "Hitler-lite" is supposedly less evil than "Regular Hitler" ... who condemned Hamas and the Palestinians for resorting to violence. What shrivelled souls!
I disagree with genuine non-violent activists but I respect the courage of their convictions when they put their bodies on the line and endure the brutality of the front-line goons of the oligarchy without retaliating. But some person sitting at their computer lazily expressing their lazy opinion received from their unremarkable learning and their unoriginal thinking about how violence is "bad" and it makes one no better than the abuser, such a person fills me with contempt.
It's most likely they've had no experience dealing with what Palestinians in Gaza, or campesinos in El Salvador, or Tamils in Sri Lanka, had endured. It's also clear that they've probably never in the slightest grasped the enormity of the injustices and cruelties of what activists have decided to dedicate their lives to combat, and that is what makes them capable of their repulsive smugness and condescension.
Part of me is worried that I'm starting to make this about myself. But what I'm trying to accomplish here is that I think I understand very much where Aaron Bushnell was coming from. For the moment at least, I'm still alive, and I can communicate something of the feeling of overwhelming despair that Mr. Bushnell felt when he looked at his society in the weeks before he took his life.
For example: Jon Stewart recently returned to "The Daily Show." I didn't actually care. But then I read an article somewhere about how liberals were spitting mad that he was criticizing Joe Biden and the Democrats on the grounds of Biden's obvious mental incapacity. There was a link to the YouTube video of Stewart's monologue and so I decided to check it out, to see what the liberals were upset about. I watched it to the point where Stewart begins to deride Biden's description of Netanyahu's genocidal rampage as "over the top." Stewart joked that that was akin to his mother's complaints about the half-time show at the Super Bowl. The audience started laughing as Stewart continued with the clip but I was already moving to pause it and click away. Because I'm tired of people like us goddamned LAUGHING about stuff we should be enraged about.
I said (about fifteen years ago) how unproductive I thought it was for "The Daily Show" to be continuing to make jokes about the Iraq War. At first, you know, I thought that Stewart and his team's skewering the bush II idiots with satire was subversive and worthwhile. But after five years and over a million deaths later, it just seemed that the audience was laughing at the Iraqis' expense. And now, in 2023, if you really consider the swath of destruction from Afghanistan, where unknown numbers are probably starving to death as Biden stole the country's money to punish the Taliban for defeating his puppet-government of rapists and druglords, before he made food prices shoot through the roof by fomenting a war between Russia and Ukraine, all the way across Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Gaza to Libya, where NATO overthrew Gaddafi and turned the most prosperous nation in North Africa to a failed-state presided over by racist jihadists, ... for those idiots are still be making jokes is obscene.
I think I'll quote from Seraj Assi's article at Jacobin for a more eloquent expression of the significance of Aaron Bushnell's brave sacrifice:
Lighting oneself on fire is not a tactic that anyone who is of sound frame of mind would choose to employ lightly. It is an action borne of desperation, of the feeling that no other tactics, from writing and calling elected officials to attending protests to engaging in civil disobedience, have any ability to hasten the end of the stream of horrors we have seen in Gaza since October. Bushnell’s action was extreme, but many among us can surely relate to his feelings of hopelessness, rage, and heartbreak engendered by watching ethnic cleansing live on our social media platforms, then witnessing precious few elected officials — including within the Democratic Party — summon the courage to demand an end to such gruesome violence.
Bushnell died so that Gaza may live. He died for a free Palestine, and to remind us that many Americans stand against Israel’s occupation, apartheid, and siege of Gaza, and its decades-long oppression of the Palestinian people. His death should serve as a call for action — an urgent plea to do everything we can to stop the unending atrocities in Gaza carried out with US public money and US public officials’ approval, to ensure that no one ever feels compelled to take their own life in such a grisly protest again.
Shortly before his death, Aaron posted the following message online: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
We often praise those who are willing to die for a noble cause or to defend the ones they love. Some of us find it easier to praise those who die fighting an enemy; for instance, a soldier fighting other soldiers, or a father saving his family from an attacker, or a bystander intervening when someone else's life is endangered by a maniac. But Aaron Bushnell was fighting apathy and callousness and selfishness. I can't find it in me to criticize his action. Instead, I condemn the culture, the society, the system, the rancid individuals who made him think he had no other choice.
No comments:
Post a Comment