The livestream in which Aaron Bushnell sets himself ablaze is as horrific as it is compelling.
The calm and reasoned Aaron speaking to the camera, explaining calmly and
articulately what he was doing as he walked up to the Israeli embassy and then
proceeded to dowse himself in highly flammable liquid, then lighting himself
on fire as he shouted “Free Palestine!”, is a shock to one’s mind, as it ought to
be, and those unmoved may need the further looking into: psychopathy, racist fascism, from where do such inhuman dispositions and behaviors towards this tragedy come?
Those who are familiar with the social movements in the United States, particularly the anti-war protests against the Vietnam War, images of the Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk, Thích Quảng Đức, who self-immolated in an act of defiance, viscerally comes to mind while processing Bushnell’s self-emolation and the present protests against Israel's ongoing genocide.
The military foreign involvement of the so-called United States in myriad conflict zones replete with war crimes and human rights violations is as dangerous as it has ever been (the Doomsday Clock is still 90 seconds to midnight, the closest to omnicidal annihilation that it has ever been). The U.S. support for the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the arming of the apartheid state of Israel, and the sole United Nations Security Council’s opposition to a ceasefire in Gaza, yet again illustrates that the U.S. is a rogue, failed state.
If these commitments (genocide in Palestine; unrestrained military confrontation with Russia in Ukraine; military provocations towards China, all of these provocations being towards nuclear armed states) are not reversed and corrected for human rights, international law, and simple human decency, the trajectory is unconscionably towards nuclear holocaust and omnicide.
Nearing the Presidential election, it is clear that the two candidates of the left and right hands of the single business party (the so-called United States is a single party state) are dangerously inadequate: either a geriatric, genocidal, right-wing reactionary, or a treasonous and fascist psychopath. Things are beginning to look a little bit too much like the Nitzschean-level decadence that was one of the indicators of the looming collapse of the 'Holy' Roman Empire. Great harbingers these.
