Thoughts on Aaron Bushnell, Suicide & Sacrifice

Yesterday a US air-force member, Aaron Bushnell, self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. This is an excerpt from his final statements:

“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.”

Recently I’ve been increasingly urgently interested in relationship between Values and Actions. If you truly believe that the world confronts you with forms of injustice that you find morally intolerable, what do you do about it? What is the rational limit of the actions you take to correct it? …And if you don’t take action up to those limits, does that imply that the Values you profess are not in fact values that you truly hold?

These questions can be asked regardless of one’s opinion about the status of the war in Gaza. What are the limits of what one should do, when one is as radically committed to the wellbeing of others as one is to oneself?

Self-immolation is a form of altruistic suicide which goes back to the ancient world, often in the context of Hinduism and Buddhism. The Indian philosopher Kalanos is reported to have burned himself alive in front of the advancing army of Alexander the Great.

In modern Western associations it may be most readily associated with the Vietnamese Buddhist Thích Quảng Đức in protest of the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese. This is the picture of which John F Kennedy said “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”

This quote brings up one of the crucial aspects of this act — how effective is it? Is it still possible for One Picture to have the effect it had 60 years ago — or has the technological acceleration of the reproducible image made that effect impossible? Have we become too cynical to attach meaning even to the self-immolation of a US service member? Will even THIS ultimate act be either A) suppressed by the media and not talked about, or B) rejected as being the result of some kind of reactionary insanity, a performative gesture rooted in mental illness, instead of being regarded as an extreme but spiritually grounded act of sacrifice?

Is this suicide or is this sacrifice? This question is broached in a 1965 article by Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker called Suicide or Sacrifice, written in response to the self-immolation of Roger Allen Laporte, a 22-year old American associated with the Catholic Worker movement, in protest of the the war in Vietnam.

If you consider this particular act irrational and ineffective — are there circumstances where it would be rational and effective?

If one accepts as true that of the 30,000 Palestinians who have been killed in the war in Gaza, more than 20,000 of them are non-combatant women and children, and that the country one serves is directly complicit in that killing — and if one has committed oneself to the idea that quantitatively the life of one is in some meaningful way in service to the well-being of the many — if one had in fact joined the armed services in the first place as dictated by precisely such a connection of justice — is that act irrational? And how does our answer to that depend on what results from the act? …

And if you think this was the wrong thing to do — is there any situation in which you think it would be right?

And if there is no situation where altruistic suicide as a form of protest is sanctionable and effective — what radical actions that we’re not doing ARE sanctionable and effective — what would it look like if we committed ourselves faithfully to the actions that are “right” — if we were committed to peace and justice to the extreme degree that many of our Ultimate Values — our faiths and or secular moral commitments — would have us profess?

I don’t have the answers to these questions personally, but I want to ask them in a way that honors the memory of this person. I have no window into the psychology of Aaron Bushnell, but I have no reason to assume that he did not think through these same things before doing what he believed was right, according the the radical nature of his convictions.

Without knowing myself what’s right in every case, I’ll say of Aaron Bushnell what Dorothy Day said at the end of her article about Laporte — May perpetual light shine upon him and may he rest in peace.