01/03/2024
A friend and mentor once advised me, "You're coming to a point in your life when you've made the decision that you're willing to die for the revolution. But it's much more important, and challenging, that you live for the revolution".
Aaron Bushnell sacrificed his life as one more punctuation point in a horror story; one more frontal assault against a levy of indifference and callousness that holds a river of blood in its channel. Knowing that we live in a world where the life of a Palestinian is worth very little to those in power, he looked at the pyre which our government has helped to stoke, upon which the children of Gaza are being thrown, and he hurled himself onto it. He threw himself, a white American, onto it and let them know that if they are going to burn Palestinian children, then men like him will burn as well.
This is not a glorification; it is not an endorsement, and least of all an incitement. This is a eulogy.
Who can say that Aaron's self immolation did anything? Is a government that is willing to blast ordnance into an open air prison for months on end, going to be moved by the death of one airman? Is the US military, whose entire existence relies on them treating enlisted men as disposable to the mission, going to turn back because one airman burned to death at his own hands? How many soldiers did they allow to be burned to death by IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan without bringing the soldiers home? How many veterans die of su***de each day while the VA system fails to help them? The death of a soldier is not particularly noteworthy to those in power; their power is mortared in blood. But, Aaron's death was not merely the taking of his own life. It was the reclamation of his voice, the reassertion of the agency and moral autonomy that one surrenders when one puts on the uniform. The death of a soldier's blind obedience, more than the death of his body, frightens the masters of war. That is why he has to be called mentally ill, because he acted out of step with a world order which declares itself as sane and dissent as pathological. That is why the media is highlighting his being an anarchist- which he was, and we are proud to call him our fellow, but we know that the media is trying to use this to discredit him to those for whom anarchism means terror and bombs. To most of the world, it is states and their armies who bring bombing and terror. Ask a Palestinian. Aaron died specifically to not be complicit in that.
As a musician, I struggle with the moral weight of writings songs of commemoration for fallen revolutionaries. It is important to remember sacrifices which people make, and to not let their struggles die in silence and darkness. But it is also important to build a revolutionary culture of life, and to avoid the culture of martyrdom, of death worship, or of purifying violence. Even the best meaning commemoration of self-sacrifice can help play into such cultures, and I have done more than my share of writing songs for martyred freedom fighters. I fear- no, I know- that I will have more to write before my own life is (hopefully many years from now) over. It no longer gives me pride to write those songs; it is the work of digging the graves of one's friends.
So I do not want to celebrate Aaron Bushnell's death and his final, fiery act of defiance. I wish he were still here, still resisting alongside us, still doing the work of his life. When I think of Aaron Bushnell, I am not going to think of his final agonizing moments, but of the many long hours he spent alleviating the agony of others. That, ultimately, was the goal of his final action. May we build a world where none can say it was in vain.
