Update 2/27, 0820 EST: Disgracefully, this was the headline of a story at the Washington Post on Bushnell: "Airman who set self on fire grew up on religious compound, had anarchist past." It appears Bushnell grew up in a Christian society in Orleans on Cape Cod, that he joined the Air Force in 2020, served as a cyber defense ops specialist in Texas, and was interested in U.S. history, socialism, and anarchism. The Washington Post article is at pains to portray him as being raised by a weird, possibly abusive, Christian cult while putting a heavy stress on his interest in anarchism. He also liked cats and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, so you just know he was a misfit. In all seriousness, Bushnell seems to me to have been an unusually principled and sensitive man who acted out of strong moral conviction.
The only thing even remotely surprising about the Washington Post's "disgraceful" headline about Senior Airman Bushnell's self-immolation is that You seem to be surprised by it, Bill.
Given the track record of the WaPo's ~ and the entire print, electronic [radio and television], and digital MSM's ~ hearty, uncompromised endorsement of virtually everything the United States has done in the realm of Foreign Affairs and War since 9/11, what's the surprise and where is the "disgrace"?
Marketing and selling this government's actions around the Planet since 9/12 is the primary, designated Function and Purpose of America's MSM pundits and propagandists; and it has been and is doing a Great job of keeping American Hearts and Minds comfortably numb ~ if not totally oblivious ~ to extended, protracted conflicts in places many ~ if not most ~ Americans can not find on a map of the world.
And the American Peoples have gone right along with Everything that their elected politicians, entrenched civilian and military bureaucrats, and anointed political appointees have jammed down their throats.
When the American People are required to start actually paying for what they have let their government get away with for these past 22+ years, it is going to get very, Very Ugly.
The truly bizarre part of this story is the dumb-ass cop pointing a gun on a burning person and screaming at him to get down on the ground. The monumental stupidity of such an act boggles the mind. Anyone that stupid should never be allowed to carry a badge, much less a gun.
Bushnell could not have stated his motives more clearly. It is absolutely pathetic that any news organization could label his horrific end as an "apparent protest." I'm left pondering the New Testament statement, "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." May Bushnell's death not be in vain.
As noted elsewhere, it apparently wasn't against the war itself that the immolation/ self sacrifice was directed, but rather at the repression of Buddhists by the government. Still, most of us saw it at the time in the context of the war and I think it did, along with photos of the point-blank murder of a VC prisoner, and of the naked girl running with others from the napalm bombing of their homes, and of the unloaded body bags of American soldiers, lead to a major shift in the American psyche.
The security establishment learned, unfortunately, that they had to control all information flows so today there's a scarcity of any honest reporting and almost none in those legacy media that most Americans follow.
Wasn't there a self-immolation outside the Pentagon office of Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War? I understand that it affected McNamara greatly. Significantly, because it is so unusual among the powerful, McNamara felt remorse for his participation in the Vietnam War.
Tolstoy wrote a book, "The Kingdom of God is Within You" in which he made the case that there could be no war without the willing participation of individuals as soldiers. War could be stopped if no one could be found to fight, but history has shown us that young men, the age of Bushnell or younger, are eager to fight and with no understanding of the context of the war being fought. This is only more proof that we are emotionally driven creatures, with reason tagging along far behind usually employed to rationalize emotion.
What inspires awe in what Bushnell did is his acceptance of responsibility. Here is this low ranking member off the armed forces (and as such a representative of government) taking his life to protest what he cannot stop and did not start, while the Commander in Chief who has had the power to stop the carnage, and repeatedly has refused to do so mouths empty words. He is an empty suit.
One man with no power, takes responsibility by sacrificing his life.
One man, all powerful, refuses his responsibility and permits unending horror by his inaction while expecting our votes to keep him in power.
We know of another individual who we are told sacrificed his life not just for a group, but for all mankind and the powerful story still resonates. Yet Bushnell's case is remarkable for being different from that of Jesus. Jesus was not complicit with something wrong, but simply "went around doing good" and went to his death an innocent. Bushnell was complicit as part of an agency, the US government, undeniably doing wrong, and took it upon himself to divorce himself from it in the most powerful way possible.
I was never in the military and I certainly would not salute Joe Biden, but I readily salute Aaron Bushnell, an individual who fully felt his responsibility. That is something that the rest of us keep out of mind because we would find it unbearable. So did he, but he acted on it.
Thank you for covering this sad event, Bill. The Aaron Bushnell story gets conveniently buried by corporate news (CNN, ABC, FOXNEWS) unless I intentionally search for the article. I learned about it from Caitlin Johnstone's and your writing in Substack. This is the kind of action - as uncomfortable as it is to watch - that people need to acknowledge in order to shake themselves out of the world of constant distraction that our culture places us in. The world of "but - Trump" and "blue no matter who". The world that wants us to "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain". Anything to divert people's attention from the US Support for a horror show genocide by Israel and instead to give people pause to ask, why does the US have over 1000 bases around the globe? And why does a police force respond with guns drawn and drop-to-the-ground commands during such a situation rather than trying to rescue Mr. Bushnell? Rest in power, Aaron Bushnell. You tried.
WHEN I FIRST READ THIS ORWELL QUOTE I DIDN'T UNDERSTAND IT. TODAY I DO, AND THAT FRIGHTENS ME Is Truth Being Destroyed By Propaganda? by Jon Miltimore / The Take 022824
George Orwell (1903-1950) once wrote that "history stopped" in 1936.
Truth after that point was drowned out by state propaganda. It was a phenomenon that clearly terrified him.
"I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed.
“I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.
“I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.”
When I first read this quote, which comes from his 1943 essay “Looking back on the Spanish War,” I didn't have any idea what Orwell was talking about.
Today, I understand exactly what he was talking about. And that terrifies me.
I spend too much time thinking about this. It really does shatter me. Right to the core.
There are a lot of levels to this and it affects me in a personal way.
My son was a Marine. He was 23 and died by suicide in a violent way. Of course mental illness is involved, but James and Aaron are so much more than that. They had good hearts. Reading about Aaron's connection to religion didn't surprise me. James was the same and he felt like he had disappointed God.
One of the last texts I got from him, which I still have, he talked about Donald Trump and how someone had to stop him, and he knew a way but it wasn't going to be easy. I guess he meant from the next realm because that's where he went. He thought this was all the Matrix anyway. None of it was real, so it really didn't matter. Death wasn't real.
After almost 8 years, I'm still bawling my eyes out trying to speak these words here. I've cried my eyes out for the loss of this poor boy, and his mother, and I know he didn't die in vain. Of course the people against this war in Gaza, war ON Gaza, will see his sacrifice as meaningful. Important. I just wish those who are for this appalling genocide of humans will understand just what happened here.
On another note, I just want to thank Bill for having this place for everyone to speak out. There are a lot of intelligent people here that I feel are making a difference in some way also. Words have power. Free Palestine.
This isn't some Jim Jones cult, as some Zionists are saying. It looks like an ecumenical offshoot of Benedictine-style Roman Catholicism or Anglicanism. IOW, sort of like monks, which might help explain how Bushnell had the spirit to do what he did. Chances are our Aaron was deeply devout, and I mean that in a good way.
When push comes to shove in terms of religion and Ultimate Questions, I'm agnostic, and arrogant enough to believe that if I don't know then nobody else does, either, but I have a deep respect for religious people who try to practice what they preach.
No practice is more real than what Aaron Bushnell did.
A friend sent me a Wa. Post article which paints the airman as a religious nut of sorts, having been raised in a religious commune. The Post doesn't overdo it, but it does make the point that his commune was committed to Jesus. Nothing in the article describes anything about the treatment of Palestinians or the behaviors of Israeli occupiers over a multi generation period or what daily life was like in the "open air concentration camp" or anything at all about what life has been like for the past few weeks. I hope people may start to notice that our media only attacks those who show extraordinary love and sacrifice toward those being bombed, starved and tortured in every possible way, yet have nothing critical to say of the hundreds of young men who have done the same thing out of hate and blood lust. I speak of those who who have gone off to join Ukraine's Nazi battalions in the hope they can kill Russians they have been taught to hate by our mendacious MSM for the past few generations.
This was the second act of self-immolation to protest the Israeli genocide. In December, a woman did the same outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta. I had never heard of that incident before today, though apparently there were a number of reports immediately after the incident. The MSM news never touched it beyond brief mention, if that - where was Rachel Maddow, the avatar of journalism, with her followup and incisive comments? That's right, it wasn't Trump, Trump, Trump.
I wish I could I could say I was surprised, but even in major metro areas, the local news (broadcast or what remains of the print media) is even more abysmal than the national MSM. Strip away the "leads if bleeds" stories, the weather, and sports - all that's left is more sports.
It was not the war per se which led to the monks' self-immolation; but rather the repression by the VietNam government (i.e., the gov't of Ngo Dinh Diem, which the U.S. had of course supported because of its anti-communist commitment).
So I have been informed! I was just a kid and didn't know those finer points. However there was an American who self immolated in protest of the Vietnam war in 1965. his name was Morrison. So maybe that is more in line with what Aaron has just done.
I don't know if this article will open for you (I subscribe to the magazine), but check out this quote, the article is about self immolation and war protests, and mentioning Vietnam:
<<But, did you know that several Americans also set themselves on fire to attempt to end U.S. military actions during those turbulent war years in the 1960s?
I didn’t, until our VFP delegation saw the portraits displayed of five Americans who gave their lives to protest the American war on Viet Nam, among other international persons who are revered in Vietnamese history, at the Vietnam-USA Friendship Society in Hanoi. Though these American peace persons have fallen into oblivion in their own nation, they are well known martyrs in Viet Nam, fifty years later>>
Also covert action magazine is a really good publication, I just found out about it maybe a year ago.
Thanks for the link. Will read it shortly. I, too had possibly forgotten about Americans who also sacrificed themselves in the effort to draw attention to the immorality of that war. It was an interesting if challenging / disturbing time. I recall that when we (one of my brothers and I) were marching against the war (in the Bronx, where I was at the time a student), we were both exhilarated and encouraged by the tens of thousands with whom we were marching, as well as by the occasional candles held in solidarity from apartment windows. Yet public opinion was divided and we also encountered plenty of nasty people throwing nasty things down to protest the protesters. Yet the tide had already begun turning in favor of peace.
I highly recommend this article by Ann Wright on the history of people setting themselves on fire to protest war
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/02/26/why-would-anyone-kill-ones-self-in-an-attempt-to-stop-a-war/
Update 2/27, 0820 EST: Disgracefully, this was the headline of a story at the Washington Post on Bushnell: "Airman who set self on fire grew up on religious compound, had anarchist past." It appears Bushnell grew up in a Christian society in Orleans on Cape Cod, that he joined the Air Force in 2020, served as a cyber defense ops specialist in Texas, and was interested in U.S. history, socialism, and anarchism. The Washington Post article is at pains to portray him as being raised by a weird, possibly abusive, Christian cult while putting a heavy stress on his interest in anarchism. He also liked cats and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, so you just know he was a misfit. In all seriousness, Bushnell seems to me to have been an unusually principled and sensitive man who acted out of strong moral conviction.
The only thing even remotely surprising about the Washington Post's "disgraceful" headline about Senior Airman Bushnell's self-immolation is that You seem to be surprised by it, Bill.
Given the track record of the WaPo's ~ and the entire print, electronic [radio and television], and digital MSM's ~ hearty, uncompromised endorsement of virtually everything the United States has done in the realm of Foreign Affairs and War since 9/11, what's the surprise and where is the "disgrace"?
Marketing and selling this government's actions around the Planet since 9/12 is the primary, designated Function and Purpose of America's MSM pundits and propagandists; and it has been and is doing a Great job of keeping American Hearts and Minds comfortably numb ~ if not totally oblivious ~ to extended, protracted conflicts in places many ~ if not most ~ Americans can not find on a map of the world.
And the American Peoples have gone right along with Everything that their elected politicians, entrenched civilian and military bureaucrats, and anointed political appointees have jammed down their throats.
When the American People are required to start actually paying for what they have let their government get away with for these past 22+ years, it is going to get very, Very Ugly.
True. My idealism is always getting slapped upside the head by cold brutal truths. Yet my naïveté persists.
Like my Colonel back in Army Inspector General days frequently put it: "HOPE is not a method."
Follow this link for a decent CNN report on Bushnell's death and its intent:
https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1762212568398278893
The truly bizarre part of this story is the dumb-ass cop pointing a gun on a burning person and screaming at him to get down on the ground. The monumental stupidity of such an act boggles the mind. Anyone that stupid should never be allowed to carry a badge, much less a gun.
Not surprisingly, I'm not the only one to notice the bias in MSM coverage. I saw this right after I wrote and posted my article: https://twitter.com/LeeCamp/status/1762169241875186019
Bushnell could not have stated his motives more clearly. It is absolutely pathetic that any news organization could label his horrific end as an "apparent protest." I'm left pondering the New Testament statement, "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." May Bushnell's death not be in vain.
Thankfully, others have also done their part to try to break through the attempts to muffle the voice of this martyr for peace and justice. And we learn from some that Aaron was one of a number who've tried to wake up their society to the inhumanity which is enabled by our silence and willingness to 'go along to get along'. See, e.g. : https://husseini.substack.com/p/ignoring-immolators-lulls-the-society?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=201840&post_id=142048637&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=b7kag&open=false&utm_medium=email .
I won't watch the video to which he links as I am already reeling from the grief that attends to the reason for it.
Thanks for the link, Roger.
As noted elsewhere, it apparently wasn't against the war itself that the immolation/ self sacrifice was directed, but rather at the repression of Buddhists by the government. Still, most of us saw it at the time in the context of the war and I think it did, along with photos of the point-blank murder of a VC prisoner, and of the naked girl running with others from the napalm bombing of their homes, and of the unloaded body bags of American soldiers, lead to a major shift in the American psyche.
The security establishment learned, unfortunately, that they had to control all information flows so today there's a scarcity of any honest reporting and almost none in those legacy media that most Americans follow.
A Brave man. I mourn his Passing..!
Wasn't there a self-immolation outside the Pentagon office of Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War? I understand that it affected McNamara greatly. Significantly, because it is so unusual among the powerful, McNamara felt remorse for his participation in the Vietnam War.
Tolstoy wrote a book, "The Kingdom of God is Within You" in which he made the case that there could be no war without the willing participation of individuals as soldiers. War could be stopped if no one could be found to fight, but history has shown us that young men, the age of Bushnell or younger, are eager to fight and with no understanding of the context of the war being fought. This is only more proof that we are emotionally driven creatures, with reason tagging along far behind usually employed to rationalize emotion.
What inspires awe in what Bushnell did is his acceptance of responsibility. Here is this low ranking member off the armed forces (and as such a representative of government) taking his life to protest what he cannot stop and did not start, while the Commander in Chief who has had the power to stop the carnage, and repeatedly has refused to do so mouths empty words. He is an empty suit.
One man with no power, takes responsibility by sacrificing his life.
One man, all powerful, refuses his responsibility and permits unending horror by his inaction while expecting our votes to keep him in power.
We know of another individual who we are told sacrificed his life not just for a group, but for all mankind and the powerful story still resonates. Yet Bushnell's case is remarkable for being different from that of Jesus. Jesus was not complicit with something wrong, but simply "went around doing good" and went to his death an innocent. Bushnell was complicit as part of an agency, the US government, undeniably doing wrong, and took it upon himself to divorce himself from it in the most powerful way possible.
I was never in the military and I certainly would not salute Joe Biden, but I readily salute Aaron Bushnell, an individual who fully felt his responsibility. That is something that the rest of us keep out of mind because we would find it unbearable. So did he, but he acted on it.
Thank you for covering this sad event, Bill. The Aaron Bushnell story gets conveniently buried by corporate news (CNN, ABC, FOXNEWS) unless I intentionally search for the article. I learned about it from Caitlin Johnstone's and your writing in Substack. This is the kind of action - as uncomfortable as it is to watch - that people need to acknowledge in order to shake themselves out of the world of constant distraction that our culture places us in. The world of "but - Trump" and "blue no matter who". The world that wants us to "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain". Anything to divert people's attention from the US Support for a horror show genocide by Israel and instead to give people pause to ask, why does the US have over 1000 bases around the globe? And why does a police force respond with guns drawn and drop-to-the-ground commands during such a situation rather than trying to rescue Mr. Bushnell? Rest in power, Aaron Bushnell. You tried.
WHEN I FIRST READ THIS ORWELL QUOTE I DIDN'T UNDERSTAND IT. TODAY I DO, AND THAT FRIGHTENS ME Is Truth Being Destroyed By Propaganda? by Jon Miltimore / The Take 022824
George Orwell (1903-1950) once wrote that "history stopped" in 1936.
Truth after that point was drowned out by state propaganda. It was a phenomenon that clearly terrified him.
"I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed.
“I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.
“I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.”
When I first read this quote, which comes from his 1943 essay “Looking back on the Spanish War,” I didn't have any idea what Orwell was talking about.
Today, I understand exactly what he was talking about. And that terrifies me.
Source: https://jjmilt.substack.com/p/when-i-first-read-this-orwell-quote
Truth. What is truth? So said Pontius Pilate when replying to Jesus.
"Truth" is what powerful people say it is.
I spend too much time thinking about this. It really does shatter me. Right to the core.
There are a lot of levels to this and it affects me in a personal way.
My son was a Marine. He was 23 and died by suicide in a violent way. Of course mental illness is involved, but James and Aaron are so much more than that. They had good hearts. Reading about Aaron's connection to religion didn't surprise me. James was the same and he felt like he had disappointed God.
One of the last texts I got from him, which I still have, he talked about Donald Trump and how someone had to stop him, and he knew a way but it wasn't going to be easy. I guess he meant from the next realm because that's where he went. He thought this was all the Matrix anyway. None of it was real, so it really didn't matter. Death wasn't real.
After almost 8 years, I'm still bawling my eyes out trying to speak these words here. I've cried my eyes out for the loss of this poor boy, and his mother, and I know he didn't die in vain. Of course the people against this war in Gaza, war ON Gaza, will see his sacrifice as meaningful. Important. I just wish those who are for this appalling genocide of humans will understand just what happened here.
On another note, I just want to thank Bill for having this place for everyone to speak out. There are a lot of intelligent people here that I feel are making a difference in some way also. Words have power. Free Palestine.
Thanks, Vicki, for sharing your thoughts and story here. The photo magnet of James is still on our microwave in our kitchen.
You're a good friend. Xo
Aaron Bushnell was a member of the Community of Jesus on Cape Cod. This is their "About" page:
https://communityofjesus.org/about/
This isn't some Jim Jones cult, as some Zionists are saying. It looks like an ecumenical offshoot of Benedictine-style Roman Catholicism or Anglicanism. IOW, sort of like monks, which might help explain how Bushnell had the spirit to do what he did. Chances are our Aaron was deeply devout, and I mean that in a good way.
When push comes to shove in terms of religion and Ultimate Questions, I'm agnostic, and arrogant enough to believe that if I don't know then nobody else does, either, but I have a deep respect for religious people who try to practice what they preach.
No practice is more real than what Aaron Bushnell did.
Thanks for the link, OB. I agree.
What would we do without our dear news media? Maybe become a functioning nation again.
A friend sent me a Wa. Post article which paints the airman as a religious nut of sorts, having been raised in a religious commune. The Post doesn't overdo it, but it does make the point that his commune was committed to Jesus. Nothing in the article describes anything about the treatment of Palestinians or the behaviors of Israeli occupiers over a multi generation period or what daily life was like in the "open air concentration camp" or anything at all about what life has been like for the past few weeks. I hope people may start to notice that our media only attacks those who show extraordinary love and sacrifice toward those being bombed, starved and tortured in every possible way, yet have nothing critical to say of the hundreds of young men who have done the same thing out of hate and blood lust. I speak of those who who have gone off to join Ukraine's Nazi battalions in the hope they can kill Russians they have been taught to hate by our mendacious MSM for the past few generations.
How dare a Christian act like a true Christian!
This was the second act of self-immolation to protest the Israeli genocide. In December, a woman did the same outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta. I had never heard of that incident before today, though apparently there were a number of reports immediately after the incident. The MSM news never touched it beyond brief mention, if that - where was Rachel Maddow, the avatar of journalism, with her followup and incisive comments? That's right, it wasn't Trump, Trump, Trump.
Damn I live an hour outside of Atlanta and I never heard of that!!!
I wish I could I could say I was surprised, but even in major metro areas, the local news (broadcast or what remains of the print media) is even more abysmal than the national MSM. Strip away the "leads if bleeds" stories, the weather, and sports - all that's left is more sports.
I'm old enough to remember the self-immolation of monks in Vietnam, in protest of the war. Will we never learn? I think not.
It was not the war per se which led to the monks' self-immolation; but rather the repression by the VietNam government (i.e., the gov't of Ngo Dinh Diem, which the U.S. had of course supported because of its anti-communist commitment).
So I have been informed! I was just a kid and didn't know those finer points. However there was an American who self immolated in protest of the Vietnam war in 1965. his name was Morrison. So maybe that is more in line with what Aaron has just done.
Regardless, it is all heartbreaking
I, too, was pretty young... still in my teens. And also had too, for a long time connected that protest with the war itself.
I don't know if this article will open for you (I subscribe to the magazine), but check out this quote, the article is about self immolation and war protests, and mentioning Vietnam:
<<But, did you know that several Americans also set themselves on fire to attempt to end U.S. military actions during those turbulent war years in the 1960s?
I didn’t, until our VFP delegation saw the portraits displayed of five Americans who gave their lives to protest the American war on Viet Nam, among other international persons who are revered in Vietnamese history, at the Vietnam-USA Friendship Society in Hanoi. Though these American peace persons have fallen into oblivion in their own nation, they are well known martyrs in Viet Nam, fifty years later>>
Also covert action magazine is a really good publication, I just found out about it maybe a year ago.
From https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/02/26/why-would-anyone-kill-ones-self-in-an-attempt-to-stop-a-war/
Thanks for the link. Will read it shortly. I, too had possibly forgotten about Americans who also sacrificed themselves in the effort to draw attention to the immorality of that war. It was an interesting if challenging / disturbing time. I recall that when we (one of my brothers and I) were marching against the war (in the Bronx, where I was at the time a student), we were both exhilarated and encouraged by the tens of thousands with whom we were marching, as well as by the occasional candles held in solidarity from apartment windows. Yet public opinion was divided and we also encountered plenty of nasty people throwing nasty things down to protest the protesters. Yet the tide had already begun turning in favor of peace.